runningscared | Entries tagged with amazon prime

Movie: ThanksKilling (2009), directed by Jordan Downey

Ran: 7.03 miles, 9’37”/mile, 01:07:43 (slow recovery run)

You rolled your eyes at Halloween on Halloween… You gazed in heavy-lidded ennui at Friday the 13th on Friday the 13th… But nothing could prepare you for the shocking lack of creative initiative that is… ThanksKilling on Thanksgiving: (Pilgrim) Hat Trick! Yes, folks, if you thought I was going to come up with something original or clever to watch after forcing down Field Roast en croûte, Parker House rolls, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, roasted rainbow carrots with shiitake mushrooms and Brussels sprouts, Thanksgiving vegan slurry (comprising stuffing, macaroni and cheese, cranberries, and mushroom gravy), and butterscotch cinnamon pie with a ginger snap crust, you’re even dozier than I was, and I was in a carb coma so deep it was impractical to measure it in fathoms.

And yet, somehow I still dragged my carcass onto the treadmill and got seven miles under my straining belt. How, you ask? Well, I can’t be certain, but I suspect the fundamental badness of ThanksKilling should claim at least partial credit for keeping me in a perpetual state of disbelief as to just what the hell I was looking at. When I read the description on Amazon Prime—“a homicidal turkey axes off college kids during Thanksgiving break”—I knew I wasn’t exactly in for a Kurosawa marathon. But what I was not prepared for was that the aforementioned homicidal turkey TALKS. Indeed, he swears a blue streak and cracks dumb one-liners. It’s a whole thing.

Let’s break down ThanksKilling like my digestive tract is breaking down all those starches into simple sugars to make my pancreas freak out: it starts, simply enough, with naked pilgrim boobs. The historical-times pilgrim lady to whom they belong is running from a demonic turkey, who kills her with a tomahawk. Cut to the present day, and five college students—two or three of whom probably shouldn’t have graduated middle school—are carpooling back to their home town for Thanksgiving. But the car breaks down, so they have to camp out for the night, which is when Darren (“the nerd”) tells them the campfire story of a demonic turkey summoned forth by Native American magic to kill as many white people as possible every 500-odd years. That seems like a really long time between vengeance-slaughters, but far be it from me to question the wisdom of the ancients.

You will be gobsmacked to learn, I am sure, that tonight is the night of the turkey’s semimillennial rampage, and from that point on, ThanksKilling has all the typical elements of your standard homicidal talking turkey story: turkey taunts kids in the woods; turkey shoots guy in the head and steals his car; turkey murders kids’ parents; turkey rapes college girl before breaking her neck; turkey fools local sheriff by wearing Groucho glasses; turkey cuts off sheriff’s face and wears it as an impenetrable disguise; etc. etc. etc. In other words, no big surprises. Meanwhile, our remaining carpool heroes are working to crack the secret to killing the invincible magic turkey, there’s a subplot with a hermit with a shotgun who wants to avenge the death of his dog, and, predictably enough, a convenient container of radioactive waste figures heavily in the climax.

ThanksKilling was thrown together for a few thousand bucks by literal college kids, and it shows: the acting is basically college students reading lines, the script is full of running JonBenét Ramsey gags and references to ghost-riding the whip, and the effects are scraped together from whatever they could find at Family Dollar—the exception being the turkey puppet, which is actually pretty dope. ThanksKilling isn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen—not by a LONG shot—but it’s among the worst I’ve watched since starting this whole Running Scared nonsense, which is saying something. And therein lies a dilemma, and an updated Zen koan: if a film is bad in the woods and nobody is around to watch it, does it still suck? Or, more to the point, if a film is bad on purpose and everybody expects and wants it to be, is it still a bad film?

So while I acknowledge that ThanksKilling is probably an objectively worse movie than, say, Can’t Take It Back (which I gave my lowest rating to date), intent matters, as does budget and general access to resources. Furthermore, ThanksKilling was honestly better than the other lowest-rated movie, Verotika, which not only made less narrative sense and had about equally poor acting, effects, and general production value, but also clearly TRIED TO BE GOOD and, worse yet, thought it had succeeded.

To bottom-line it for you, though, I wouldn’t expect many people to think ThanksKilling is fun to watch unless they’re dedicated schlock fans or either stoned or too full of gravy and pie to change the channel. Am I glad I watched it? Sure. Will I watch it again? Probably not, but never say never.

Will I watch the sequel? Tune in next Thanksgiving to find out.

feeling: full

Movie: You Can't Kill Stephen King (2012), directed by Ronnie Khalil, Monroe Mann, Jorge Valdés-Iga

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.37 miles, 9’27”/mile, 01:09:39 (slow recovery run)

Rule Number 1: always be wary of films with more than one director. Oh, sure, there are exceptions, like some of the Wachowski sisters’ movies, and also anything directed by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont—don’t bother arguing with me because that is a HILL I WILL HAPPILY DIE ON. But generally speaking, a movie having multiple directors is a red flag that might indicate a lack of focus or authorial voice. And that’s why I wish I’d done my due diligence before watching You Can’t Kill Stephen King.

What can I say? I was in a rush to choose, I was in the mood for something a little lighthearted and goofy after the dreadalanche that was Are We Not Cats, and YCKSK seemed like it might hit the spot. I expected a self-aware spoof that parodied the tropes of the genre and specifically brought horror icon Stephen King into the mix to set it apart in a pretty crowded space. (I should clarify: I thought King and his work would feature heavily in the plot. I don’t mean I expected the actual factual Stephen King to appear in this movie; he does not, although that would have been nifty, and might have been a saving grace if done well.)

While I like Stephen King, most people wouldn’t consider me a fan. I’ve read maybe a half-dozen of his novels, a few of his short story collections, and his excellent book on writing. I’ve watched, and mostly enjoyed, a bunch of movies adapted from his stuff. But I’m definitely not one of those people who have memorized every detail of the man’s life and enormous body of work—which is in some sense a bummer, since those are likely the only people to get much out of the slogfest that is YCKSK.

It begins with mild promise, setting itself up as the expected spoof: there’s an underwear-clad co-ed running screaming through the woods until she takes a shovel to the face, Looney-Tunes-style instead of horror-flick-style. After the title card, the characters are introduced with onscreen captions revealing their horror stereotypes, such as “shell-shocked Iraq veteran” and “creepy virgin” and “attention whore.” These six friends are driving to a lake in Maine for some speedboating and cavorting in bikinis, but Ronnie—the aforementioned creepy virgin—is only tagging along because he’s stalking his personal hero Stephen King, who he’s heard lives at the lake they’re visiting.

However, the townspeople are transparently anxious to convince them that Mr. King doesn’t live there after all. And after an interminable wakeboarding montage (what is with all the wakeboarding I’ve been seeing in horror movies lately? Jeez, at least in the Friday the 13th remake it was topless), “token black friend” Lamont gets his throat slit while refueling the minivan at a gas station. The local cops inform the rest of the group that Lamont was killed by a wolf, but they have their doubts—especially when Lamont’s severed head shows up on a stake outside their window and they start getting picked off one by one. Monroe notices that the murders all resemble deaths in Stephen King stories, so they hatch a plan to catch the killer by exploiting that fact.

It’s not much of a plot, but YCKSK has some positive qualities, to be sure. For one thing, for an indie flick that didn’t have studio cash to burn, it looks better than you’d expect, and kudos to the cinematographer, because a couple of the shots were downright gorgeous. The cast, too, turned in performances that weren’t exactly Oscar-caliber, but they were slightly better than I usually see in movies of this pay grade.

Unfortunately, that’s about all I can list in the asset column. YCKSK isn’t remotely scary, and only barely even tries to be funny after the first 15 minutes. (When it does try, it rarely succeeds.) That’s one of the things that’s so off-putting: for a movie that sets itself up as a comedy, it’s all over the map, tonally speaking. Once the first body hits the ground, YCKSK goes full slasher-whodunit and contains less humor than a lot of straight-up horror movies sprinkle in as comic relief… but there sure is a lot of heavy drama about “Iraq veteran” Monroe’s PTSD and the strain it puts on his relationship with Lori, the on-again-off-again love of his life. The movie couldn’t make up its mind whether it should be a comedy, a horror movie, or a romance drama. Gee, it’s almost like it had three different directors or something.

Add to that the fact that Ronnie edges out Jar Jar Binks near the top of my Most Annoying Movie Characters list and that the film spends an hour building up to the shocking revelation which is ALREADY IN THE DANG TITLE, and, well, maybe give this one a miss. The possible exception might be if, unlike me, you happen to be a slavering Stephen King devotee. You may well enjoy spotting the zillion little references to his books, but even the casual King fan will pretty much just say, “oh, the mom and son in the diner are named Wendy and Danny like in The Shining, neat” and leave it at that. Use your judgement.

(Incidentally, a corollary to Rule Number 1: if two of the directors are also the lead actors, hoooo boy.)

feeling: blecch

Movie: Night of the Demons (1988), directed by Kevin S. Tenney

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.26 miles, 9’04”/mile, 01:05:48 (recovery run)

Hands up, who here was an ’80s teen? Thinking about the first time I read Stephen King got me woolgathering about those long-lost high school years. Well, if you ever feel like watching a horror flick that’s especially representative of 1988, there’s really only one perfect choice. Take it from a guy who WAS a high school senior in that benighted year: nothing screams 1988 quite so loudly or bewilderingly as Night of the Demons. It is the distillation of 1988’s essential salts in horror movie form.

It’s got the big hair. It’s got the Valley Girl makeup. It’s got a Token Black Guy and a Token Asian Girl. It’s got unconvincing stunt doubles and multiple dudes crashing through windows. It’s got Dead Kennedys stickers on a battery-powered boom box and a dumb jock wearing an anarchy sign on his back for some reason. It’s got terrible off-color one-liners and cringeworthy “teen talk” dialogue. It’s got a guy with a cheesy Tony Danza Who’s the Boss? accent, which is especially hilarious whenever he says Angela’s name.

Speaking of Angela, it’s got a goth cheesecake dance routine to a Bauhaus song in an abandoned funeral parlor. It’s got scream queen Leanna Quigley, in what I’m pretty sure is the first role I ever saw her play, if you don’t count her uncredited appearance as one of the mannequins in Tourist Trap. And almost every girl in the movie gets at least some level of nude at some point in Night of the Demons—even the strait-laced goody-two-shoes who does charity work and prays all night. Despite that, it’s got the requisite simple-minded morality in which only the chaste might be spared.

It’s got a simple-minded plot, to match: ten (!) teens break into Hull House, a long-defunct funeral parlor, to have a Halloween party (read: get drunk and screw each other in coffins). Hull House, constructed on a patch of “evil land,” has stood empty ever since its last occupants all mysteriously killed each other one night, so hey, what better place to hold a seance? The teens unknowingly awaken a demonic presence in the basement (like ya do), and one by one they end up possessed and killing and maiming themselves and others in between—or during—slutty-goth choreography and uncomfortable coffin sex. Can any of them survive until dawn? That’s pretty much it, and the whole movie is the standard exercise in seeing who dies and how, but it’s more entertaining than most movies that follow the formula.

It’s got special effects that are actually pretty special. Night of the Demons is the sort of movie that I suspect would have relied heavily on terrible CGI had it been made ten years later, but lucky for us, in the mid-to-late-’80s practical effects were still the only viable game in town, and they’re done quite well here. In addition to competent gore, burns, and possessed-by-a-demon makeup throughout, there are a few standouts: a nicely done dismemberment; a superb shot of eyeballs bursting; and a unique and inexplicable scene with Ms. Quigley I like to refer to as “is that a lipstick in your left breast or are you just happy to see me?”

That last factor alone makes Night of the Demons required viewing in my book. Sure, its characterizations are paper-thin and the film relies heavily on stereotypes to differentiate between its TEN characters, but hey, ya gotta get that body count up, right? Taken as a whole, Night of the Demons is an enjoyable frolic through the psychic traumas of the late ’80s and you should absolutely watch it for a glimpse into the special blend of eleven herbs ’n’ pathologies that plagued our collective consciousness at the time. And also for naked girls. And dismemberments.

feeling: nostalgic

Movie: Hatchet (2006), directed by Adam Green

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 6.00 miles, 9’21”/mile, 00:56:08 (short recovery run)

Welp, I did it again: I ran too many consecutive nights outside on the pavement (this time, six) and jangled m’bones around a bit more than the ol’ joints could handle. I now have a much more visceral understanding of the term “bone jelly,” but I regret nothing! We had a warm snap, and I couldn’t countenance wasting November nights in the mid-50s what with Pandemic Winter about to chain me to my treadmill for months to come. Trust me—I ran on a treadmill literally every single night of June, and if I see an opportunity to put off spending another month that way, you better believe I’m going to risk it.

On the plus side, while I’m recovering from a few mild overtraining injuries, at least I get to sink my eye-teeth into a handful of scary movies while I do my recuperative penance jogs on the Never-Ending Belt. For my first night back in, I opted for Hatchet, Adam Green’s 2006 love letter to the classic slashers of the early ’80s. I saw it once or twice nearer to when it came out, and I remember having experienced an odd mix of disappointment and delight, though I was fuzzy on the details. I’m pleased to report that I apparently haven’t changed much across the intervening years, because I still find Hatchet to be a flawed but ultimately gleeful caper that’s earned the love it gets from genre fans.

The plot is easy-access but not so simple your brain slides off it: Ben and Marcus are in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but Ben is still smarting from a breakup and not in a partying mood. Marcus reluctantly agrees to leave the festivities and accompany Ben on a haunted swamp tour. When the unqualified tour guide sinks their boat and one of the group is injured by a gator, their night goes from bad to worse. And when local sorta-dead hatchet-to-the-face murderbot Victor Crowley shows up and starts literally tearing members of the stranded tour group to pieces, well, that’s maybe rock-bottom. Does Marybeth, Ben’s new tour-crush and local bad-ass, know enough about Crowley that they can use to survive?

I gotta say, if you’re a particular kind of horror fan, there is LOTS to like about Hatchet: inventive deaths, two metric tons of gore lovingly rendered sans CGI, cameos by horror icons Robert “Freddy” England and Tony “Candyman” Todd, and palpable love for the genre just spraying all over the place as if from a severed artery. Clearly Adam Green made the movie he always wanted to see. Add to that a genuinely funny script in which the humor isn’t the entrée but a really great side dish, and Hatchet is already better than the average slasher flick.

On top of that, I have to give Hatchet some extra credit points for two extremely personal reasons, to wit: 1) Adam Green is a local boy and saw fit to outfit Ben in a Newbury Comics t-shirt, and seeing the Tooth Face logo always makes me smile; and 2) somehow I had forgotten that Mercedes McNab is in this! Yup, Harmony from Buffy plays Misty, a character who, like Harmony, is extremely dumb, but unlike Harmony, is also frequently topless. So if you want to see Alternate Timeline Harmony in which she left Sunnydale before the whole vampire apocalypse thing and wound up doing the equivalent of Girls Gone Wild videos, this is your chance.

That said, Hatchet is far from perfect: sometimes the frat-boy humor wears a little thin, and while I appreciate the characters all being given at least enough backstory to keep them from being just axe-fodder, I kind of feel that it was both not enough about the main characters to make me really care about them and too much about everyone else so the story took a while to get moving. Also, while I understand that it’s an homage to a formula, that doesn’t mean seeing yet another instance of said formula isn’t at least a little wearing. Meanwhile, Hatchet isn’t actually very scary. Partly that’s because we’ve all seen this stuff a zillion times before—the unkillable loner who rips interlopers to shreds—but it’s also because the jump scares just rely on loud sounds and Victor Crowley himself is pretty uninspiring as a franchise Big Bad. He’s little more than a repackaged and transplanted Jason Voorhees minus the hockey mask.

And yet, Hatchet is ultimately more than its shortcomings might imply. I may be reading too much into it, but all the bro humor and gratuitous nudity seems self-parodic, or at least self-aware. It’s not just mindlessly checking items off a list; you can really sense how much fun people had putting this together. So I think of Hatchet less as a scary movie and more as a celebration of scary movies, the kind of flick that will entertain horror fans and make them smile, cheer, and groan, if not necessarily scream.

Sadly, Amazon Prime has only the R-rated version of Hatchet and its sequels available for streaming, which runs counter to the franchise’s whole point of bathing in the craziest excesses of the gore-soaked ’80s, but unless you’ve seen the uncut version, trust me: you’re not going to come away from the R-rated print thinking “well, that seemed restrained.” If you like slashers and somehow missed Hatchet the first time around, give it a go. Despite its missteps, it delivers what Newbury Comics’s slogan promises: “a wicked good time.”

feeling: wicked

Movie: The Rage (2007), directed by Robert Kurtzman

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 8.03 miles, 9’09”/mile, 01:13:36 (long recovery run)

Oh man, where to start with The Rage? I came across it while browsing for something a little more off the beaten path, and said to myself, “Oh, hey! I saw that like ten years ago! That’s the movie about… um…” To my consternation, I found I couldn’t remember anything about The Rage except that it was yet another zombie-virus flick and that it starred Erin Brown. Granted, my memory ain’t what it used to be (and what it used to be wasn’t all that great), but I find the fact that I watched this movie and was unable to recall anything about it to be somewhat alarming. So I gave it a spin.

Well, it turns out that my worries about early-onset dementia are likely unfounded, and that my brain simply repressed any memory of this movie as a self-protective measure. In short, it’s not good.

The Rage begins in a remote cabin in the woods, which a demented Russian scientist named Dr. Vasilienko has turned into a grungy lab of horrors. He’s got a cage of shambling zombies eating a little girl in the background while he’s busy at work cutting open the skulls of a couple of (still-living) unfortunate victims and infecting them with his homegrown Rage virus, which both turns people into crazed cannibals and causes massive rapid deformities—you know, standard mad scientist stuff. Unfortunately, Things Go Wrong™ and a Rage-infected test subject escapes into the woods… but not before infecting Vasilienko himself.

From there, it writes itself: the test subject kills a couple of people having sex in a car and then manages to get himself eaten by vultures, who themselves hulk out and also gain the ability to infect people with Rage by (of course) projectile-vomiting on them. Said vultures then attack an uncle who’s fishing with his niece and nephew; after taking a stream of bird-yench straight in the face, he winds up eating the girl’s vulture-mangled corpse and killing the boy before getting splattered over the road by an RV full of bickering nu-metal fans who spent the night taking drugs and having three-ways. (A tale as old as time; it’s pretty much Beowulf but with slightly more group sex.)

Anyway, the nu-metal fans do their best to fend off attacks by Rage Vultures and the survivors flee through the woods… right into Vasilienko’s Science-’n’-Murder Shack. They’re captured and treated to—and I swear I am not making this up—a pond-ripple wipe to an extended sepia-toned flashback in which Vasilienko narrates his entire backstory. Apparently he cured cancer, but it was all covered up by Big Pharma and now he’s trying to infect the country with Rage and hold the antidote hostage until his brilliance is acknowledged (like ya do). Will the last few survivors escape Dr. Vasilienko and his band of Raged-out zombies to save humanity? More importantly, do you care?

Clearly I didn’t, since I saw all this ten years ago and didn’t remember any of it. While I’m a big fan of Ms. Brown (the erstwhile Misty Mundae), that wasn’t enough to get me invested in a script with, effectively, zero characters in it other than the mad doctor, whose story we aren’t told until the movie is almost over, and which is pretty hackneyed anyway. So yeah, don’t expect The Rage to deliver anything close to a satisfying narrative.

If, however, all you’re looking for is a whole lotta splatter, buddy, you have come to the right place. That opening scene alone is a total gorefest free-for-all, and it pales in comparison to the final reel. I thought the start-at-110%-end-at-150% approach felt familiar, and it turns out that The Rage was directed by Robert Kurtzman, the guy who directed Wishmaster. That film followed a very similar curve, with the side-effects-laden parties from hell at the beginning and end. Notably, Andrew Divoff stars in both movies as well, here as Vasilienko, there as the djinn. I initially thought Vasilienko had a bad Russian accent, but Divoff is actually Russian; apparently terrible melodramatic dialogue will make even real Russian accents sound fake.

The practical special effects are really compelling, which is perhaps no surprise, since Kurtzman is first and foremost an effects wonk. However, every time the movie uses CGI, the results range from simply bad to downright appalling. The worst is the excrement fountain in the final battle, which I would say “looked like crap,” but of course the point is that it didn’t. At all. I will say, however, that at least the CGI vultures seem considerably less-awful if you’ve seen Birdemic. (“Birdemic: The Movie That Makes a Z-Grade Zombie Flick From Three Years Earlier Seem Like a Frickin’ LucasFilm Production!”)

So that’s that: gorehounds may get a kick out of The Rage, but don’t expect anything more, even if you’re an Erin Brown fan (though she does get to kick some zombie butt in the final battle). I’m actually a little curious about the script, because the movie starts out maybe taking itself seriously and is just bad, but I get the distinct feeling that at some point everyone just kind of gave up and let it collapse into a total self-parody with cheesy one-liners and gimmicky zombie boss-fights. Or maybe it’s just really uneven and was always meant to be that way. Who knows? Not me—and if I did, apparently I’d forget soon enough anyway.

feeling: blah

Movie: Lace Crater (2016), directed by Harrison Atkins

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.08 miles, 9’27”/mile, 01:06:58 (careful recovery run)

So I’m slightly injured, I think—I’ve got some pain in the ball of my left foot, and inflammation of the hip flexors, which I put down to four consecutive nightly runs outside on the pavement for 7-8 miles each. I think I just pushed things a little too hard and now my body is yelling at me for it. So for now, I guess I’m back on the treadmill for slow and gentle runs until things start healing up a bit, which is a drag, but since the ol’ mortal coil has apparently betrayed me, this seems to be the perfect excuse to trot out some slow-moving body horror like Lace Crater, which I found while poking around through the back alleys of Amazon Prime’s horror section. You know, where the weird stuff hangs out.

And Lace Crater certainly qualifies as at least a little weird in my book. Maybe not for the first act, which I found a bit hard to get through; I’m not generally a fan of the mumblecore thing, and the first 20-30 minutes of Lace Crater is yet another exercise in watching a vague clot of twenty-somethings who are ostensibly (if not necessarily demonstrably) friends as they go off to spend a weekend together somewhere. There they have the obligatory inarticulate and banal conversations which somehow get even less interesting when they get stoned. However, things get considerably less dull when Ruth—who is fresh out of a breakup and looking to hook up with Andrew who is ALSO fresh out of a breakup and seems like he’d be into it until he abruptly leaves their molly-soaked cuddle pile and makes her doubt her attractiveness and self-worth because these twenty-somethings are so very, very high school—goes back to her room and bangs a ghost.

I mean, there’s more to it than that, such as some of the best foreplay sweet nothings ever committed to digital storage. (“Do you defecate?” Ruth asks Michael the Burlap-Covered Ghost; bestill my fluttering heart.) But honestly, the conversation between Ruth and Michael is the only interesting one in the movie, so I’m gratified that the participants were rewarded with a little spontaneous across-the-Great-Divide bow-chicka-bow-bow. The problem is, the next day Michael is gone and Ruth doesn’t feel so hot. She throws up on the car ride home, which might be a hangover, and keeps waking up covered in a thick coating of slime, which… probably isn’t. She’s also hallucinating and experiencing weird space-outs and time skips, and her doctor thinks she may have picked up a very rare sexually transmitted infection which he ominously declines to name. (Give it to her straight, doc—is it Spectral Herpes, or a dose of the Ectoplasmic Clap?)

It’d have to be a pretty dang rare STI indeed, because I’m thinking back to health class and I don’t recall one that causes your skin to peel off like you had the world’s worst sunburn and also makes you projectile-vomit mysterious black liquid, but, granted, it was a long time ago. Anyway, Ruth’s physical form and mental health deteriorate rapidly, as her friends shun her either for allegedly sleeping with Andrew when omiGAWD-I-wanted-to-sleep-with-Andrew, or just for being Spectral-Herpes-gross, or both. Even her ex has a new girlfriend, so she’s driven back to the coach house that Michael haunts; can she find happiness, or at least closure, with her wraith-with-benefits?

With a narrative like that, it could have been a straight-up gross-out horror movie, but Lace Crater aspires to more than that. Having seen that it’s devoid of both lace and craters, I can confirm that its unusual and opaque title is definitely evocative and not literal, which might indicate to you that the whole film has a heavy film-school-final-project vibe to it. This is Harrison Atkins’s first and only feature, and he leans in on the surrealism pretty hard, which can get tired really fast when it’s done poorly. The good news is, I think it’s done quite well here, and everything is lent a welcome cohesion by virtue of a terrific performance by Lindsay Burdge as Ruth, as well as a suitably haunting (I know, I know) soundtrack.

If you aren’t big on the arthouse aesthetic and you like plot-driven movies with unambiguous endings, you should steer clear of this one. I have my own personally satisfying interpretation of everything that happens and what it means, so Lace Crater doesn’t leave one completely at sea, but as Burlap Michael tells us straight out, “you don’t get the answers. The answers never come.” Unless, of course, you bring your own.

Oh, and if you get frisky with a ghost, make sure to use protection.

feeling: staring into the abyss

Movie: Spider Baby (1967), directed by Jack Hill

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.54 miles, 9’13”/mile, 01:09:33 (recovery run)

All right, I confess: I’ve been staring at a blank screen for ages because I had practically no idea how to start writing about the cinematic paradox known—among other titles—as Cannibal Orgy, Attack of the Liver Eaters, and, eventually, Spider Baby. Eventually, though, I decided that was okay, since it’s pretty clear that the film’s creators didn’t have much idea about the best way to start it, either (or, evidently enough, what to name it). So let’s start at the very, very beginning and see where that gets us, even if it’s only to the asylum.

See, I knew Spider Baby by reputation to be a horror classic with some pretty dark themes, so I was not at all prepared for its completely bonkers opening credits sequence, complete with smiling cartoon versions of the characters that look like refugees from a black-and-white Rocky and Bullwinkle Halloween special. Its typeface is pure ’60s and straight out of some Doris Day feature, and yet even Please Don’t Eat the Daisies was in color. And what about the theme song, which is about as terrifying as the "Monster Mash"? Is anybody supposed to be scared when Lon Chaney Jr. oh-so-spookily informs us that “Frankenstein, Dracula, and even the mummy are sure to end up in somebody’s tummy”?

So, two minutes in we’re already totally at sea, and now there’s a clean-cut Dick Van Dyke type (who is, in fact, not wearing an ascot, though later you’d swear in court he was) telling us about the Merrye Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that sends descendants of Ebeneezer Merrye spiraling into mental regression to a “pre-human condition of savagery and cannibalism,” and now we’re going to be privy to the story of “that fateful day” when the Merrye Syndrome was eliminated once and for all. Fair enough. Let’s flash back to a hapless delivery man nervously entering the Merrye Estate grounds through a big, scary iron gate while what passed for foreboding music makes us wonder if maybe we accidentally sat down to an episode of The Munsters. No one answers his knocking, so he pokes his head in through an open window…

…At which point he is immediately slashed to death by a pretty young girl swinging two big ol’ butcher knives. AND WE’RE OFF!

The girl is Virginia Merrye, the Spider Baby of the title (well, one of the titles), who has regressed enough that she enjoys “playing spider” by catching people in her web and stinging them to death. Her disapproving sister, Elizabeth, is similarly childish due to the ravages of the Merrye Syndrome. Their older (and, hence, regressed-beyond-speech) brother is Ralph. And rounding out this fun little family is their caretaker, Bruno, who was once their father’s loyal chauffeur, but who now hides the dark secret of the Merrye clan away from the world—a task which includes feeding the cannibal aunts and uncles shackled up in the basement.

Unfortunately for the Merryes, their idyllic and murderous seclusion is about to end, because the delivery man was bringing a letter announcing the imminent arrival of a couple of distant cousins, “Aunt” Emily and “Uncle” Peter. Emily wants to slap the kids in an asylum and claim the sizable Merrye estate herself, so when she and Peter turn up with a lawyer and his assistant in tow, Bruno needs to find some way to keep the family skeletons—both figurative and literal—in the closet. But it won’t be easy, because the interlopers insist on staying the night in the mansion, and those Merrye kids are awfully rambunctious…

I’m still not sure whether I liked Spider Baby despite its tonal schizophrenia or because of it. I was reminded a little bit of Arsenic and Old Lace, which plays unrepentant serial killers for laughs in a romantic comedy, but that was very clearly intentional, whereas Spider Baby could just as easily be the result of a weird combination of blind luck and blinding ineptitude. It definitely pushes the boundaries a bit considering it was filmed in 1964, though; in addition to violent murders committed by mentally deficient minors, there are also explicit mentions of cannibalism, and thinly-veiled references to incest and rape. Wrap all that up in an early ’60s sitcom aesthetic and what we’re left with is a horror film that is unquestionably far ahead of its time, but also somehow feels way, way behind it.

Whether that’s a problem or not is left as an exercise for the viewer. Besides, Spider Baby did give us Sid Haig, and that was a gift that kept on giving. And I would be lying if I said that the acting overall wasn’t pretty solid—I’ve seen plenty of movies in which the best (well, “least awful”) performance was worse than the worst one in Spider Baby. Among the speaking roles, Jill Banner is the standout as Virginia; apparently she was only 17 when the movie was shot, but she really nailed it.

So is there a vein of genius running through all this? I honestly couldn’t say. Sometimes I feel that people are just reading into it what they want to see, but every so often I have to wonder if this deformed celluloid monster was intentionally architected and just beyond the reach of my puny mortal comprehension. There’s no doubt that Spider Baby is beloved by a vocal sub-sect of horror fans, and I do suspect it was influential (the dynamics of the family dinner with the outsiders reminded me a lot of the dinner scene to come in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for example). For all its flaws, the one thing I can say with certainty is that I don’t regret having watched it. Heck, I wouldn’t mind seeing it again, if only for the cerebral whiplash.

feeling: nonplussed

Movie: He’s Out There (2018), directed by Quinn Lasher

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.26 miles, 8’54”/mile, 01:04:34 (recovery run)

Oh boy, what do I do with He’s Out There? I doubt I ever would have thought to watch it at all, except it happened to be on Pluto TV’s horror channel while I was doing other things and I got sucked in after missing the first twenty minutes. So I checked, and Amazon Prime had it available, which meant not only could I see it from the beginning during my nightly run, but I could also watch it without being interrupted by commercials urging me to “climb aboard the Trump train” every seven minutes. (The movie’s plenty scary enough already, thank you very much.) But I have a polar ambivalence about how to rate it, because while He’s Out There does a whole bunch of stuff badly, it does a few key things very, very well.

On its face, He’s Out There appears to be yet another generic slasher film with yet another masked maniac preying on yet another helpless group of victims stranded in the woods. This time the prey are Laura and her two young daughters Kayla and Maddie, who have gone up to their lake house for one last late-season weekend away; Laura’s husband Shawn will be driving up alone after his business meeting, and expects to arrive later that night. The gate is unlocked for Laura by a local named Owen (we are never told his full name, but I suspect it’s “Owen Exposition”), who casually mentions that the house’s previous owners had a kid who vanished in the woods, and they took it real hard so they sold the place and moved away.

It’s not long before creepy stuff starts happening. The kids find a secret tea party in the woods, Maddie winds up poisoned and vomiting, there are scary noises and an unknown presence in the house, and pretty soon Laura sees a masked guy waving from the driveway. Shawn still hasn’t arrived, and Laura needs to get Maddie to a doctor, but of course Masked Guy has disabled the car (in a more exciting manner than usual, I might add), so the terrified family tries to hole up and wait for Dad to show up and save the day. You can probably guess how that turns out, so it’s up to Laura and the kids to survive until morning.

Like I said, there’s a lot to dislike about He’s Out There beyond the generic title. Its undersaturated palette jives with my personal aesthetic, but it makes the film look like it wants to be a Zack Snyder movie. Its plot relies on numerous conveniences of the laziest slasher writing—the psychic killer, the teleporting killer, Owen Exposition, the Guy Showing Up to Save You Who Is Immediately Eviscerated, the Other Guy Showing Up to Save You Who Immediately Has His Arms Ripped Off, etc.—and also has more holes in it than a camp counselor on Saturday the 14th, especially in the last 15 minutes or so. And yet, despite relying heavily on slasher tropes, the movie doesn’t really succeed as a traditional slasher, because how high of a body count can you rack up when there are only six characters total? (Well, seven, if you count a store clerk with a single line who is nowhere near the action.)

Some people are also going to be irked that we never learn the killer’s whole backstory or motivation, but I think I’m mostly okay with that; it’s less satisfying narratively but probably more effective from a horror perspective. I mean, Black Christmas is a classic BECAUSE we never get the whole deal on the killer, not in spite of it. But I honestly don’t know how to feel about the killer in He’s Out There going the Michael Myers “silent but deadly” route for the entire first part of the movie and then suddenly getting an extended monologue in the third reel. It’s like seeing Jason Voorhees suddenly burst into a lesser-known Cole Porter song about heads on sticks.

Here’s the main thing, though: He’s Out There actually scared me. If you’re the right sort of viewer, it digs into some pretty raw nerves: kids being hurt because you failed to protect them, kids being terrorized while you’re powerless to help them, kids witnessing the brutal death of their parents. Most of the credit should probably go to the performers, because Yvonne Strahovski really nails it as the mom who has to lie to her kids and tell them everything’s going to be okay when she knows nothing will ever be okay again. And real-life sisters Anna and Abigail Pniowsky are perfect as Kayla and Maddie; their behaviors and reactions to the horrors befalling them are so authentic it burns.

I should mention that a lot of viewers seem to have a problem with the girls being “annoying,” but take it from the full-time primary caregiver of a daughter since her birth: those kids are just acting like actual kids. And my experience is not limited to parenthood, either; I was also an in-class kindergarten helper and a Girl Scout Leader from Brownies up through 8th grade, and our Brownie troop of two dozen girls at one point included THREE sets of twins. So yeah, I think I have a pretty well-informed opinion when I say that the sisters in He’s Out There acted pretty much exactly as I think most sisters that age would behave in their unbearable situation, and it’s tough to watch in exactly the way it should be.

So there you go: if you’re looking for a by-the-numbers slasher flick with a lot of gore and body parts piled to the heavens, this isn’t the movie for you. Likewise, if you dislike kids or find them irritating, you’re going to find He’s Out There both formulaic AND annoying. But if you’re a parent, or you like kids, or you have enough empathy to imagine what it would be like to be, say, seven years old and rely on your parents for safety and security only to sense their own mortal terror or witness their helpless demise at the hands of the Bogeyman, well… pleasant nightmares.

feeling: ambivalent

Movie: Wishmaster (1997), directed by Robert Kurtzman

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.05 miles, 8’51”/mile, 01:02:25 (recovery run)

Seeing as I was still sort of mired in late-’90s nostalgia (trust me, it beats living in 2020), I figured I’d revisit another title, but this time maybe one that wasn’t one of the umpteen Scream-inspired teen slashers of the era. Nothing against messy and mysterious serial killers stalking oddly attractive-yet-mature-looking high school “kids,” but that spiel can wear thin after a while. I wanted something a little more monster-y, a bit more special-effects-y; a little less Hollywood and a lot more Horror-fan. So what else but Wishmaster to the rescue? I mean, come on, there are like a half-dozen big names in horror attached to this flick, from Wes Craven executive-producing to Robert Englund in a major role all the way down to a cameo in a drug store by special effects legend Tom Savini. Clearly Wishmaster was made for people who like scary movies.

So what do horror fans get for tuning in? Well, for starters, how about an expository intro narrated by none other than Phantasm’s Tall Man himself, Angus Scrimm? He obligingly informs us that Djinn aren’t happy-go-lucky genies, but rather nasty-ass DEMONS trying to take over our world by granting “Monkey’s Paw” wishes to the hapless humans who wake them: “Fear one thing in all there is: fear the Djinn. BOY.” Then we get to see the whole “be careful what you wish for” dynamic in play, as the Djinn of the title wreaks havoc at the 12th-century shindig of a Persian emperor in an orgy of the best (or, at least, most excessive and gratuitous) special effects 1997 had to offer. But before the Djinn can grant the third wish that will doom mankind, the court sorcerer magically binds him into a pretty red gem that may or may not be a cherry Ring Pop.

Cut to the Present Day of 23 years ago! You know it’s 1997 because everybody’s smoking and only a few people have cell phones. A priceless antique statue is being unloaded from a ship when a drunk crane operator drops the crate on Sam Raimi’s brother Ted, destroying both the statue and Ted’s chances of ever escaping his big brother’s shadow. But what’s this? Inside the statue was hidden the ~~Ring Pop~~ fire opal that houses the Djinn, which is promptly stolen by a dock worker and pawned. The pawn shop owner takes it to be appraised, and that’s how it winds up in the hands of Our Heroine, Alex, a Feisty ’90s Woman who smokes like everyone else but doesn’t have a cell phone. She is, however, an expert on gems, but even she’s never seen anything like this, so she takes it to her lovestruck scientist buddy Josh Friendzone, who zaps it with a laser and frees the Djinn while Alex is off imparting Chekhov’s Zen Basketball Wisdom to the girls’ team she coaches.

What follows is a lot of Alex trying to Nancy Drew the Mystery of the Exploding Ring Pop while the Djinn steals a human face and tries to locate his awakener Alex in order to grant her three wishes and unleash hell on earth. As you can imagine, this entails the Djinn granting a whole lot of ill-advised wishes to random people he meets, because the studio put “Be Careful What You Wish For” on the movie poster so now they have to beat that theme INTO THE FREAKIN’ GROUND—which means you get to see Tony “Candyman” Todd as an ill-fated bouncer and Kane “Beefiest Jason” Hodder as a security guard who gets turned into bad CGI glass and shattered, so hey. Eventually Alex and the Djinn meet face to face, there’s a bunch of Hellraiser-y chaos as he tries to get her to make three wishes and doom the planet, and Alex finds herself in a bit of a pickle—will Zen Basketball Wisdom save the day?

All snark aside, I have a soft spot for this flick, which I’ve seen many times over the past quarter-century or so. While watching it I get the sense that everyone involved was having fun; somehow it feels about equal parts labor of love and cynical cash grab, and that works for me. I mean, it’s not like we can say we shouldn’t have expected a horror movie about djinns by then, right? Once Leprechaun made back like triple its budget in its opening weekend, strip-mining cultural mythologies for scary ideas was going to be a trend and of course they’d get around to djinns sooner or later.

There’s also something endearing about a movie whose prime directive was apparently MOAR SPECIAL EFFECTS, because it was made at a time when the divide between good and bad effects was especially wide, and the vast chasm is fully on display here. Many of the practical effects are killer, but some are definitely Buffy-era TV-budget dude-in-a-rubber-suit quality. Meanwhile, some of the digital effects hold up surprisingly well after nearly a quarter century, while others… don’t. At all. Whether you laugh or cringe will probably depend on how drunk you are.

Wishmaster wears its imperfections proudly. It has a decent premise that gives rise to a promising plot—which then yields to the movie’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, oh-heck-throw-in-the-sink-too, actually-you-know-what-add-three-more-sinks-just-in-case philosophy and accordingly falls down at the end, painting itself into a corner so tight only a time travel paradox can fix it with a weirdly happy ending. Even though it’s tantamount to the “it was all a dream!” gambit, somehow you feel sort of okay with that, because you feel like the movie is okay with that. Actually, Wishmaster seems like it feels that way about everything. And what’s more ’90s than a personal affirmation?

3.0/5.0 bloody severed feet

feeling: nostalgic

Movie: Silent Hill (2006), directed by Christophe Gans

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.33 miles, 8’56”/mile, 01:05:28 (recovery run)

So for the first time since the pandemic hit, I actually ran outside two nights in a row. Imagine that! Partly I did it because the weather was cooperating (yayyyyy fall!), and partly it was because I was experiencing that delicious paradoxical mix of cabin-fever claustrophobia and empty-nest loneliness that is 110% my life these days. But mostly, if I’m honest, it’s because the West Coast is on fire and so many people don’t have the option to run outside, because the outdoor air is akin to what comes out of the tailpipe of a poorly-tuned 1971 Ford Pinto. Seems a shame not to breathe the air while I have some.

Two nights of real running on real pavement took their toll on my very real skeleton, however, and so a gentle recovery run on the treadmill while snuggled up to the ever-reliable boob tube was in order. But what to watch? Well, sometimes you just want the big-budget Hollywood version of horror, the big names and E-ticket effects that are maybe just a little too slick to really be scary, but you admire the effort, anyway. Or at least the expense. So I cued up Silent Hill, a perfect choice because it’s a video game adaptation with CGI effects galore. It’s two, two, TWO new-millennium trends for the price of one!

Full disclosure: I haven’t played the game Silent Hill, since I never had a system that would run it, so I can’t speak to the film’s qualities as an adaptation. As a movie in its own right, though, I enjoyed it. The plot is a little… extra, though it starts out simply enough: Rose’s adopted daughter Sharon keeps almost hurting herself while sleepwalking, and frequently screams “SILENT HILL!!” when being awoken. Rose discovers that there is a ghost town named Silent Hill and decides to take Sharon there to see if they can figure out what’s causing this dangerous behavior. Silent Hill has had a perpetual coal fire burning beneath it for the past 30 years, so the roads don’t go there anymore, but Rose finds the old turnoff from the highway and crosses the bridge into town. She swerves to avoid a child in the road and crashes into an embankment; when she comes to, Sharon is gone, there’s a creepy fog everywhere, ashes are falling from the sky, and Rose sets off in hopes of finding Sharon—and some answers.

Of course, that’s when messed-up things start happening, like getting attacked by dozens of weird grey humanoid thingies, and occasionally spotting a little girl who isn’t Sharon but sure looks like her, and talking to a homeless woman who seems to think Rose’s locket has a picture of her own missing daughter in it. Soon enough, Cybill the Ass-Kicking Bike Cop catches up, and, after fighting off an armless grey acid-spitting nightmare, eventually teams up with Sharon, who has herself been following clues and has pulled a key out of a corpse’s mouth, been accosted by miners, and run from a swarm of enormous cockroaches with teeny human faces. (There’s a lot going on. It’s almost like everything’s happening in a video game or something.)

Anyway, LONG story short(er), they fend off attacks from a huge pyramid-headed guy with a Japanese Video Game Sword (you know, the ones bigger than people?), follow more clues to the town’s hotel, and wind up meeting up with the witch-burning religious kooks who have been around since before the town was founded. They send Rose into the basement, which is full of nasty things but also the key to the whole mystery of Sharon’s origin and odd behavior. And wouldn’t you know it? The cult is still up to their witch-burnin’ ways, and it’s up to Rose to save Sharon and just maybe visit vengeance upon the flock in an orgy of airborne carnage straight out of Hellraiser.

So yeah, it’s a lot, but I did enjoy the low-key puzzle aspect of it all, and the story kept me engaged. Silent Hill is not without its flaws, however. Some plot points seem forced, such as Rose speeding away from the cops when she hasn’t yet broken any law; Sharon’s sleepwalking issues have been going on for years, so what’s so urgent that she’ll attempt to evade the police in a high-speed chase to get to the town RIGHT NOW? And the movie is over two hours long, so some of the interminably long sequences of Rose exploring the town felt unnecessary, as did nearly the entire subplot of Rose’s husband Chris trying (unsuccessfully) to track down his wife and child or solve the mystery of Silent Hill—what exposition we get out of that could easily be delivered in a less tortuous manner.

I feel it’s also worth mentioning that Radha Mitchell, who plays Rose, spends a lot of time running in this flick, and I wish I had her speed and form. (And she was running in BOOTS, for Pete’s sake.) On the fright front, Silent Hill does indeed have some genuinely scary moments—the Freaky Nurse-Things™ leap immediately to mind, and maybe the tortured-to-death janitor hauling himself out of the bathroom stall and creeping around while still bound up in barbed wire. Oh, and this movie has probably the single most effective CGI “watch someone’s whole skin get torn off her body in one fell swoop” effect I’ve ever seen, so, there’s that. Although, in hindsight, given the state of the West Coast, the scariest part might well be the fires that never stop burning and the constant rain of ashes from the sky…

Silent Hill is an enjoyable couple of hours packed to the brim with STUFF, and I suspect you won’t enjoy it as much if you’re not paying attention, so save it for a night when you want a story to follow. If you were disappointed by the dozen-or-so OTHER video game movies of the 2000s, this one just might work for you.

feeling: fine

Movie: Darlin’ (2019), directed by Pollyanna McIntosh

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 10.34 miles, 8’42”/mile, 01:30:04 (long run)

Okay, so I kinda screwed up on this one. I was browsing around through various services looking for something that might serve as an antidote of sorts to having done back-to-back “worst movies of all time” that also both just so happened to wallow in degrees of misogyny ranging from “definitely icky” (the death-by-worm-rape scene in Galaxy of Terror) to “flat-out holocaust” (literally dang near everything in Bloodsucking Freaks). When I happened upon another unknown-to-me title in Amazon Prime’s horror section that was written by, directed by, and starring a woman, I figured that might be just the ticket—after all, that’s how I found Braid, which was just the sort of thing I needed. And that’s how I came to watch Darlin’ during a ten-mile run.

I need to clarify: when I say I screwed up, I don’t mean that I didn’t like Darlin’, because I did. A lot. However, I didn’t realize until after the fact that Darlin’ is a direct sequel to Lucky McKee’s The Woman, which, to my great shame, I have not yet seen. And apparently The Woman is itself a sequel to Offspring, which I have also not yet seen. So I have some catching up to do. But maybe that’s a blessing in disguise? Because I can honestly report that Darlin’ worked just fine for me as a standalone film. Sure, it was confusing at points that I’m sure would have been a lot clearer had I seen its predecessor, but in some sense I wonder if not having every i dotted and t crossed might even have enriched the experience.

The broad strokes: when a young feral woman emerges from the woods and is struck by an ambulance, she is admitted to a Catholic hospital, where she is viewed by the bishop as the ultimate PR vehicle—if this snarling, ferocious heathen can be rehabilitated as a God-fearing model citizen at his affiliated group home for girls, then perhaps the church won’t shut down the home as they have been threatening to do. So the girl—she was wearing a bracelet that spells out DARLIN—is relocated to St. Philomena’s, where she begins her re-education/indoctrination into the Catholic faith (once the bishop has all the staged “before” footage of Darlin’ all dirtied up and snarling, that is). But Darlin’ has a secret, and so does the bishop—well, except this is a Catholic institution, so maybe his is more of a “secret”—and meanwhile, another feral woman has picked up Darlin’s scent and is leaving a trail of partially eaten corpses in her wake.

If you noticed that summary doesn’t make Darlin’ sound much like a horror film until you get to the phrase “partially eaten corpses,” well, I noticed that, too. Presumably Amazon classified the movie as horror precisely because of said partially eaten corpses and the like, but honestly you could take all the murder and cannibalism out of this movie and tell the same story. The real horrors on Darlin’s plate are the physical, emotional, and intellectual abuses of the Church, as well as the usual body horror inseparable from the subject of pregnancy. The stabbin’s and people-eatin’s are just a garnish.

From what I gather, a lot of fans of The Woman were therefore disappointed in Darlin’ because apparently they’re very different movies? I won’t be able to weigh in until I can watch The Woman myself, but I could certainly see that; Darlin’ feels every inch a woman-written and -directed film, and it deals with women’s horrors from a woman’s perspective. So I could see it being a different take on the characters and themes from Lucky McKee’s outing. Personally, that sounds awesome to me, and I look forward to seeing The Woman so I can compare for myself.

I really admired the performances in this movie. Lauryn Canny, especially, does a stunning job as Darlin’, which is particularly impressive because she’s nonverbal for much of the film. Bryan Batt does a fine turn as the bishop with a face you really want to punch. Cooper Andrews is a big ol’ teddy bear as the nurse who first treats Darlin’ and keeps checking in with her.

One last note before I sign off: at first I had some trouble willingly suspending disbelief at the notion of a feral child learning to speak after just a few months of socialization and tutoring. However, because I hadn’t seen The Woman, I didn’t know then what I (sort of) know now from watching the trailer: that Darlin’ was a normally-speaking, normally-socialized child before regressing in the woods. I’m no expert… but my (unfortunately horror-allergic) speech pathologist girlfriend is! So I asked her whether acquiring speech as a child, losing it to years of disuse, and then relearning it is something that could happen under circumstances and timeframes like those in Darlin’, and she thinks it’s possible, though unlikely. But hey, “possible” is all I need! I’m gonna suspend that disbelief SO HARD, you guys!

feeling: suspended

Movie: Phantasm (1979), directed by Don Coscarelli

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 6.67 miles, 9’09”/mile, 01:01:02 (light run)

I wound up having kind of a crappy run tonight—no biggie, it happens, I think I just hadn’t eaten enough today—but the saving grace was that I had decided to choose an unseen classic to run to, something that I should have seen forever ago and somehow had just never gotten around to watching. How fortunate, then, that I’d settled on Phantasm.

You guys! HOW have I never seen this gem before? Let me give you the dizzying rundown from the perspective of a slightly-more-than-casual horror fan seeing this masterpiece for the first time: less than three minutes in you’ve already seen a couple gettin’ it on in a graveyard, bare breasts, and a dude stabbed to death with a dagger, so you think to yourself, okay, it’s that kind of 1979 horror flick. (Spoiler: you are wrong.)

Cut to the funeral, where the guy’s bandmates Jody and Reggie can’t believe that good ol’ Tommy “killed himself.” Jody’s 13-year-old brother Mike was kept away from the funeral because he was so traumatized by the death of their parents the previous year, but Mike’s got some abandonment issues (understandable) and follows Jody everywhere, and he’s been spying on the funeral through binoculars. Once the other mourners have departed, Mike sees the creepy undertaker lift the 500 lb. coffin from the gravesite and yeet it back into the hearse like it’s a sack of laundry. So now you think, hey, things are a little more interesting than I thought they’d be.

Next up is a scene with a psychic grandmother whose powers are apparently real enough to make things fade into and out of the physical plane of existence, so you readjust your expectations, only to have them rattled once more by a musical interlude of Jody and Reggie jamming out with guitars on the porch (the end shot of which led me to shout “IT’S CHEKHOV’S TUNING FORK!” and, reader, I was not wrong).

And then that is followed by Jody getting seduced by the same woman who killed Tommy—and if you weren’t already getting a strong Greg and Bobby Brady vibe from Jody and Mike, their wholesome “wows” upon seeing her topless will fix that—but before things get good-then-bad, Mike runs by screaming at the top of his lungs because a Jawa spooked him in the woods, so Jody gets to deliver the immortal and curiously deadpan line “What the heck? Wait here, it’s my little brother, I think he’s got some kind of a problem” with a pair of panties between his teeth.

Tonally all over the map, you say? Well buckle up, Buttercup, because we’re just gettin’ started. Mike straps a big honkin’ hunting knife to his leg and breaks into the Morningside Mortuary at night to investigate on his own, and before long is pursued by a creepy caretaker and a flying silver sphere—which eventually hits the caretaker instead, drills into his skull, and erupts a GEYSER of blood out the back. When he’s chased by the undertaker, Mike—who screamed in mortal terror when menaced by a Jawa—calmly cuts off the guy’s fingers with the knife, doesn’t even blink at the fact that his blood is yellow, and takes a still-moving finger with him as evidence as he skedaddles back home.

Back at the ranch, Jody coolly looks at the finger, which is still twitching and oozing French’s mustard (or maybe it’s Plochman’s, not sure), and deadpans, “okay, I believe you.” Then Reggie joins Team Phantasm when he sees that the finger has now turned into a gigantic flying insect that tries to kill them all. Luckily, the house has a working garbage disposal—and is also FULL OF GUNS, which come in handy when, two scenes later, the movie suddenly turns into a Dukes of Hazzard high-speed car chase and shootout. (“There’s nobody driving that mother,” says Jody; you have just seen that somebody, indeed, is driving that mother.)

I swear I did not set out to describe this entire movie scene-by-scene, but things keep getting more and more bonkers and I’m having trouble figuring out where to stop. It’s like at the beginning of every new scene, everything changes again and you feel that, okay, NOW the movie is starting.

Meanwhile, look, now Mike’s in an antique store and seeing the mortician in a vintage photograph! Guess it’s time to persuade the two young blondes running the shop to drive him home so he can warn Jody that the dude is immortal or something. If you’ve ever wanted to see three able-bodied youngsters get their asses handed to them by a Jawa while all four are squished into a classic Volkswagen Beetle, now’s your chance!

Follow that up with arguably the most nerve-wracking scene so far, in which Mike MacGyvers an escape from his bedroom by using a thumbtack, some Scotch tape, a live shotgun shell, and a hammer to blow a hole in his locked door. Eh, what could go wrong?

More gunplay, we are reminded that in the ’70s all cars explode if they run into a pole at more than 7 mph, and then Team Phantasm fights their way past a mysterious door in the mortuary to find a gleaming white room full of futuristic black barrels and the world’s biggest tuning fork (CALLED IT) that doubles as a transdimensional gateway to Tattooine—and, with a mere 17 minutes left on the clock, we finally find out that we are 100% absotively posilutely watching a science fiction movie.

And that’s where I’ll leave off, because even though the movie will pull the rug out from under you at least one more time, that’s practically a staple of the genre, and I have to leave something for you to look forward to. But if I haven’t made this clear, this movie is utterly bananas, in the best possible way.

I will say that although it appears on a lot of “Scariest Movies” lists, I didn’t find Phantasm to be scary in the slightest, but that doesn’t make me love it any less. Honestly, if a studio had cranked this out, it would have been schlocky AND soulless, and rightfully abandoned to the ashcan of time. What saves it is that it is bursting with heart. Phantasm is so clearly a labor of love you want to wrap it in a blankie and tenderly feed it muffins. The mere fact that a guy could write and direct what feels like the stanniest fanfiction of a franchise that only existed in his head makes you want to leap to your feet and cheer. That he did it on a shoestring budget and in the flippin’ ’70s—if you’re at least as ancient as I am, you know what I mean by this; if you aren’t, take my word for it, young ’un—is astounding.

So, thumbs up for this good time that I can only describe as “rollicking.” And while my expectations are suitably tempered, I do look forward to watching the four sequels.

feeling: rollicking

Movie: Braid (2018), directed by Mitzi Peirone

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.53 miles, 9’01”/mile, 01:07:56 (light run)

Full disclosure: on balance, most people would say that I read too much into things. I was a literature major (sort of), and while that alone may tell you everything you need to know, I suspect you won’t fully appreciate the depth of what I’m saying until I also disclose that I watched I Know Who Killed Me twice, because I felt there may have been something more profound going on that was just beyond my grasp. Yes, I Know Who Killed Me. The movie in which Lindsay Lohan plays a stripper who gets a couple of limbs chopped off. That one. And the reason it’s so important that I tell you this is because tonight’s light-run movie was Braid.

I didn’t know the first thing about Braid when I cued it up—I went in 100% tabula rasa on this one, and I’m glad I did. At the outset, the plot seems straightforward enough: Petula and Tilda are two young women doing some desperate living, counting up the street value of the drugs they’re about to sell, when the police come a-knockin’ and they’re forced to flee and abandon their inventory. Now they have 48 hours in which to recoup the $80,000 they owe their supplier, so they ditch New York and hop a train back to Vermont, where they plan to visit their childhood friend Daphne. Daphne has a safe full of money hidden somewhere on her crumbling estate, but she’s a little… odd. Our two fugitives think they can find the safe and abscond with the cash, provided they play Daphne’s game. They are already familiar with the rules: 1) Everyone Must Play. 2) No Outsiders Allowed. 3) Nobody Leaves.

Even these simple facts are revealed piecemeal instead of being spoonfed to us. We have to do a little work to pull it together into a story, and in hindsight, that sets the tone for when things really go off the rails, and boy do they ever. Daphne’s game is a continuation of when the girls played house as little kids: Daphne is the mom, Tilda is her daughter, and Petula is a doctor giving Tilda her checkup—except now Petula checks Tilda’s reflexes with a hard swing to the knee with a meat tenderizer. And things get progressively more violent from there.

I don’t want to say much more about the story beyond the setup, because in some ways the film is more about the story than a means of telling the story, if that makes any sense (or even if it doesn’t). Everything about this movie is intended to disorient you. Time flashes backward and forward. Things that happen are undone moments later. Color becomes an agent of chaos—whereas Suspiria’s colors evoke nightmare, at least you knew something was out to get you; the colors in Braid evoke “bad drug trip” and inform you that god is dead but everything’s pretty. Camera angles don’t so much ignore gravity as stab it repeatedly and devour its corpse.

I think all of this conspires to short-circuit one’s ability to process linear progression and cause and effect. I often count paces while I’m running—yes, even while watching a horror movie. It’s just the way my brain is wired to process long, repetitive tasks. (Running for an hour sounds impossible; running for a minute sixty times in a row, not so much.) That said, I found I could not count paces while running to Braid. It’s just not that kind of a movie.

But I will say this: from a visual perspective, it is breathtakingly beautiful. Every shot is composed with an attention to detail bordering on the, well, obsessive. Several of the scenes (Tilda and Petula bound together with braided hair; the three women asleep and intertwined in a bathtub; the three in frilly dresses and porcelain masks as feathers float around them) taken as a whole feel like a series of photo shoots for the world’s weirdest calendar.

One thing I do feel the need to mention is that I’ve seen a lot of reviews dinging this movie for “unrealistic” plot points, and that seems critically myopic to me. Yes, smashing in someone’s knee with a meat tenderizer will cripple them for life; yes, hitting someone in the head with a full-on swing from a baseball bat will do more than just knock them out cartoon-style for a little while. But these are not the plot holes the naysayers claim them to be—they are clues as to what’s real and what isn’t. And if that isn’t clear to you by the time disfiguring scars start miraculously disappearing, you might need a better attention span, because you almost certainly missed, for example, the Keyser Söze moment when the women are painting toward the end.

It’s hard to bottom-line a movie that has no bottom and precious few lines, but I can say that whether or not you will enjoy Braid will depend more than usual on your tastes and mood. If you like linear and unambiguous plots and are fond of telling yourself “that definitely happened,” you should stay away. If you enjoy ambiguity and mystery and don’t shy away from experimental narrative and film (and are allergic to neither challenge nor pretentiousness), you might get a lot out of Braid. And if you’re the type who lives and dies by what other people say, then Braid is either a thinker or it’s trash. Either way, it’s not an easy watch. I can tell you this, though: I’m definitely going to see it again.

feeling: hmmmm

Movie: Ginger Snaps (2000), directed by John Fawcett

Watched on: Shudder, but it’s also on Amazon Prime

Ran: 9.42 miles, 8’44”/mile, 01:22:24 (long run)

It was Long Run Night! And for longer treadmill runs I’ve found that what I really need is an old favorite, something that will engross me so the miles don’t drag on forever, but also a story that I know pretty well so that if I zone out while running and miss a line or two I won’t be lost. I settled on Ginger Snaps, which has been a solid fave-rave of mine for a couple of decades now. C’mon, Canadian goth girls and lycanthropy as a metaphor for menstruation? What’s not to love?

Brigitte and Ginger are 15-year-old sisters with a bad case of the suburbs and a preoccupation with death (which is a natural symptom of a bad case of the suburbs). When we meet them they’re shooting a photo essay of staged graphic death scenes for a school project. Soon after, Brigitte gets bullied by a normie named Trina during gym class; how should Brigitte and Ginger get revenge? Well, there’s a mysterious beast on the loose that’s been killing neighborhood dogs, so they decide to fake Trina’s dog’s death with leftover gore from their photo essay. But on the night of the caper things don’t go quite as planned: first Ginger gets her first period (bummer), and then she’s attacked and mauled by a werewolf (arguably worse), which is then splattered across the grille of a van driven by Sam, the local drug dealer. I mean, a lot is happening.

Brigitte manages to get Ginger home and finds that Ginger’s wounds already seem to be healing, which is, y’know, great and maybe not so great. Over the next few days, Ginger deals with menstrual cramps and also coarse grey hairs sprouting from her healing wounds. Oh, and she’s growing a tail. Like I said, it’s a lot. Meanwhile, her personality has been changing, too—she gets stoned with boys, seduces Trina’s jockish boyfriend, eats the next door neighbors’ dog (if you see a dog in a werewolf movie, that dog is probably not going to have a good day)… just all the kind of stuff that’s putting distance between two goth sisters who used to be so close. Brigitte enlists the help of Sam the drug dealer in hopes of finding a cure, but Ginger’s control is slipping fast. Meanwhile, mom and dad are usually pretty oblivious, but now they’re finding body parts in the yard…

What can I tell you? I love this film. I fell hard for it no more than three minutes in, when Ginger caresses her wrist with a kitchen knife before proclaiming “wrists are for girls. I'm slitting my throat.” What follows is montage of the girls’ death scene pictures, comprising one of the most beautiful and memorable opening credits sequences I know. Now seven minutes have elapsed and this flick has my heart on a chain for life.

I’ve mentioned the puberty / lycanthropy parallel, which is pervasive and some aspects are a bit subtle, like Brigitte keeping track of the days until the next full moon by using the free period-tracking calendar that came with Ginger’s first box of pads. In addition, you get some interesting sex-as-murder/murder-as-orgasm themes, as well as a soupçon of welcome feminist perspective. And mostly what makes it all work is that Ginger Snaps has three really solid female performances: Emily Perkins as Brigitte, Katharine Isabelle as Ginger, and the always-great Mimi Rogers as their mom, who really just wants what’s best for her girls, whether that’s pre-treating Ginger’s gore-soaked underwear or covering up her murders by blowing up the house.

There are only a few weak spots. One is a plot point that relies on either the longest mommy-daughter sex talk or the most efficient chest freezer ever, because corpses don’t freeze solid that fast. (Ask me how I know!™) Another is the same weak spot in pretty much every werewolf movie I’ve ever seen, which is… the werewolves. The effects aren’t super-great, but honestly, werewolf effects never are. And the last is a minor quibble, which is that after the beginning of the movie does all this bold and interesting stuff, the final 20 minutes or so is a fairly standard cat-and-mouse hunt through a dark house. But even that is done better than most; it’s genuinely tense, with some real scares.

Bottom line: this is one I come back to again and again. If you haven’t seen it, give it a whirl. And if you like it, in many ways the sequel is even better—but more on that after another run.

feeling: wolfish

Movie: Night of the Living Deb (2015), directed by Kyle Rankin

Watched on: Shudder, but it’s also on Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.04 miles, 8’52”/mile, 01:02:24 (bad-day recovery run)

So I had kind of a day, if ya know what I mean, and thus I bailed on my original plan to run long and slow over a meditative viewing of Argento’s Suspiria, because my mood would have ruined the experience. Instead I first went looking for something irredeemably violent and evil in hopes of catharsis, but after passing over a half-dozen perfectly suitable candidates without much enthusiasm, I realized what I really needed was something to make me laugh.

If you spend any time among horror fans you may encounter the occasional dude (it’s pretty much always a dude) who insists that there’s no such thing as “horror comedy,” that comedy has no place in horror because if you’re laughing you must not be scared. That seems like a sad way to go through life, but hey, it takes all kinds—and my kind just happens to like the occasional chocolate in my peanut butter and peanut butter on my chocolate. And the mix can indeed go a lot of ways; for instance, I don’t think anyone’s going to deny that Evil Dead II is both scary as hell and also achingly funny at times. But tonight’s flick is Night of the Living Deb, which is… not that.

It’s important that I make this crystal clear: NotLD is pretty much a straight-up lighthearted romantic comedy with zombies running around. It is not scary. At all. I mean, maybe if you literally never watch anything even close to horror you might be a little freaked out to see zombies lurching around and getting hit by cars and decapitated by shotgun blasts, but at no point in NotLB will you ever feel that the protagonists are in danger, nor are you supposed to. If you have a problem with that, by all means, move along.

That said, while NotLD doesn’t horrify, I still consider it to be a horror film (and I guess Shudder agrees with me). It mines much of its humor from the well-known tropes of the zombie apocalypse, so open-minded horror fans might get a few more chuckles than someone unfamiliar with the oeuvre, but I do honestly feel that anyone in the mood for a mellow romcom would enjoy this movie. You wind up with lines like “Why do you have coconut water? Is this Maine, or Gilligan’s Island?” alongside “Dude, why are you eating a foot?!”

The setup is a simple one. Deb is a super-awkward but spunky redhead—redheads in movies are either spunky or sultry… or witches, I guess—who musters enough courage to chat up Ryan (Portland, Maine’s Prettiest Man™) in a bar on Independence Day Eve. Cut to the next morning, when Deb wakes up in Ryan’s bed and doesn’t remember anything about the night before. Ryan seems just as confused but clearly feels the evening was a mistake. That might have been the end of Deb-and-Ryan (Reb? Dyan? Debby Ryan?), except, oh no! A zombie apocalypse has descended in the night! To make matters worse, it’s increasingly clear that Ryan’s tree-hugger ways clash with Deb’s down-to-earth sensibilities, but this reluctant odd couple thrust together by circumstance must work together to fend off the horde, get to Ryan’s dad’s mansion, and escape Portland with Ryan’s brother and his UH-OH, FIANCÉE in the governor’s helicopter. Oh, did I mention that Ryan’s dad’s company started the whole zombie outbreak in the first place? Hijinks ensue!

Let’s not mince words: NotLB could have been appallingly awful. It could have been a “hey, I thought of a punny title, let’s make a movie” movie. But you could say the same of Shaun of the Dead and that’s a modern classic, so who’s to judge? Well, I’ll tell you: me. I’m to judge. And while NotLD isn’t the love of my life, it’s definitely the fun acquaintance with whom I’d gladly while away an evening in the bar. Mostly this is because of Deb, who is perfectly portrayed by Maria Thayer (oh my GOD, it’s Tammi Littlenut from Strangers With Candy! Jeez I’m old). I could watch and listen to Deb all night, awkwardly spouting movie quotes and Longfellow poems. But the real key is the chemistry between Deb and Ryan—not so much romantic, but comedic. The bickering between them is perfection and there’s little I appreciate more than good characterization and snappy dialogue.

This was my second viewing of NotLD, and I regret nothing. I’ll probably watch it several times more. It would go well with Shaun of the Dead and both Zombieland movies if you were looking to do a Zombie Romcom evening, but just keep in mind that this is the romcommiest of the four.

feeling: better

Movie: The Woods (2006), directed by Lucky McKee

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.64 miles, 8’57”/mile, 01:08:23 (recovery run)

Yesterday was a weight-training day, which meant that today my legs were achy and weak—which in turn meant that tonight’s run, even more than usual, was going to have to start slow and build over the course of an hour. So what could I watch to match that dynamic?

Well, as luck would have it, some site or other had posted one of those “everything new streaming this month” articles, and what should I notice in the Prime list but The Woods? And not just any The Woods—for there are several—but the one near and dear to my heart: Lucky McKee’s long-awaited followup to his 2002 indie horror debut, May.

May remains one of my favorite horror flicks of all time (yes, I’ll be rewatching it soon enough). I anxiously awaited McKee’s sophomore effort, but it lingered in corporate purgatory for years. Once it finally surfaced in 2006 I was worried that it couldn’t possibly live up to my inflated expectations… and honestly, I was right. It’s no May. But that doesn’t mean I don’t adore it in its own right.

The Woods has a lot for me to love: McKee’s direction, of course; the tone-perfect Agnes Bruckner as our hero Heather; Patricia Clarkson as a quietly diabolical headmistress; evil murdery vines; WITCHES, WITCHES, WITCHES; and last but certainly not least, Agnes’s father portrayed by none other than genre legend Square-Jawed Bruce Campbell™. (Yes, that’s his full legal name.)

Oh, and a plot AND tone so reminiscent of Argento’s classic Suspiria—another of my all-time favorites—it doesn’t so much walk the fine line between homage and plagiarism as grind any distinction between the two into a thin, delicious paste I hereby dub “homagiarism.” (BAM! Take that, Shakespeare!) Heather is a troublesome girl who tried to burn down her house. Her parents are therefore dumping her at a secluded New England boarding school. Things are weird pretty much right off the bat, and it’s not long before Heather is balancing pencils on their tips and hearing voices from the surrounding woods. It’s clear to the viewer, if not necessarily to the student body, that this here school is run by witches.

Heather is granted a scholarship because she’s apparently aced a written test to see if she’s “gifted” (it’s basically the witchcraft edition of the Myers-Briggs test on homemade paper that STEALS YOUR BLOOD), and fifteen minutes into the film’s runtime she’s dreaming about axe murders and a fellow student she’s never met who “attempted suicide.” Soon enough other scholarship students begin disappearing in the night and are replaced in their beds by piles of leaves, which is not at all suspicious. When is it Heather’s turn? The action builds slowly, and things don’t get really frantic until the third reel, when it all comes to a head, the forest gets frisky, the witches are forced into the open, and the body count graph gets steep in a hurry.

Did I mention this all takes place in 1965? That’s right, cats and kittens: this is a groovy period piece that only enhances the feel of Heather’s utter geographical and social isolation. The costumes feel spot-on, and the film looks like the 50-year-old slides you found in a box in the crawlspace. It’s gorgeous. They play with saturation levels: a lot of the blood is undersaturated, in stark contrast to what most horror films do, while occasionally (especially in dream sequences and the like) the saturation is cranked way up to accentuate Heather’s red hair against the forest green. Bruckner’s not a natural redhead, but this film makes good use of the ol’ “redheads are witches” trope, so you can see what they were going for. (This leads to one of the movie’s only glaring anachronisms, as I’m pretty sure the term “fire-crotch” didn’t come into use until the early ‘90s. But I can forgive a lot.)

I suspect fans of genre horror might find this one too slow to hold their attention (durn kids these days!), but if you appreciate characterization and conspiracy and films that are beautiful to look at, give this one a whirl. This is one of those movies that’s definitely horror, but not necessarily one that people who dislike horror should avoid. It does occasionally and briefly get graphic, but not distastefully so, if that makes any sense. Look, if you can’t hang with watching a ‘60s-era boarding school redhead swing an axe at a bunch of tree-witches, I don’t know what else I can do for you. You may be beyond hope.

feeling: homagiarist

Movie: Walk Away (2020), directed by Jason Dean and Matthew Nash

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 8.34 miles, 8’46”/mile, 01:13:10 (recovery run)

First off, lemme just say that this is not going to be most people’s choice for a running flick. It’s slow-paced psychological horror that meanders into philosophizing. There is little to get your heart rate up. The deaths are few and not especially graphic. That said, it had a fairly original premise and a fresh approach that kept me involved for its whole 90ish-minute run time. Also, its claustrophobia hits a little too close to the home we’re all still stuck inside. That’s right, this may not be the pandemic lockdown parable we deserved, but we got it anyway.

Walk Away (2020) Here’s the elevator pitch: picture Groundhog Day but horror, and swap in a geographical trap for the temporal one. Once these five hip young things on vacation (the women do yoga! One of the guys has a man-bun! One of them is a social media addict! etc. etc. etc.) make their way to the perfect cabin in the woods, it’s not long before one of them goes wandering off in hopes of securing enough of a cellular signal to Instagram Photophast the pics she snapped of her delightful organic barbecue plate. But as soon as she ventures just a little too far from the house, she’s —wait for it—teleported into its attic.

You would think even jaded movie stereotype millennials might be more than a little freaked out by this, but these five take it oddly in stride, and even systematically plot the limits around the house and experiment with what happens when someone’s already in the attic and another is teleported. The two dudes are even thrilled to discover that the fridge is mysteriously self-restocking, meaning free beer forever. Indeed, they only really seem to start to panic when someone points out that eventually they’re going to run out of toilet paper.

And so they can’t leave, they can’t communicate with the outside world, and eventually the passage of time wears upon their souls, they get on each other’s nerves, and a shot of a squeezed-out toothpaste tube and an empty toilet paper roll signal to the viewer that, yep, someone’s gonna die. (See what I mean about the pandemic?)

I liked this more than most people, it seems. It reminded me a bit of Cube, in the sense that a bunch of regular people are stuck together in a bizarre prison beyond their comprehension and the practical and philosophical questions of who’s behind it and why are ultimately pointless. (Also in that the ending is either deep, or just hoping people think it’s deep. The jury’s still out for me.) The conceit of a place that people can’t leave because whenever they try they always find themselves back where they started is not a unique one—see Southbound, Identity, The Final Girls, etc.—but it hasn’t been run into the ground as hard as many others. I would hazard to say this is distinctly unlike any other “cabin in the woods” movie you’ve seen, and if you’re like me, you’ve seen quite a few.

Also, it’s a pretty good-looking film. There are some beautiful sun-drenched idyllic shots of the cabin and its environs, as befits a story in which it’s the perfection of the cabin that is its poison. Yes, it has a certain art-school student film vibe to it, but I don’t necessarily mean that as a put-down. It’s true that sometimes the symbolism is a little on the nose—sooooo many shots of insects dying in spider webs, sooooo many books that wink broadly at the themes, e.g. Lord of the Flies and Sartre’s No Exit (which appeared onscreen about twenty minutes after I’d commented to myself “L’infer, c’est les autres”; they really didn’t need to hit us over the head with it). But there’s an earnestness to it all that’s ultimately charming.

If you’re a typical horror fan, you may detest this. If you have a soft spot for the oddballs and the slow-burns, though (did you like Cube, or did it infuriate you?), give it a whirl. No guarantees. And if you’re going to run while watching it, don’t expect it to spur you to any speed records; save it for a recovery run.

feeling: contemplative

most recent entries

ThanksKilling (2009)
You Can't Kill Stephen King (2012)
Night of the Demons (1988)
Hatchet (2006)
The Rage (2007)
Lace Crater (2016)
Spider Baby (1967)
He’s Out There (2018)
Wishmaster (1997)
Silent Hill (2006)
Darlin’ (2019)
Phantasm (1979)
Braid (2018)
Ginger Snaps (2000)
Night of the Living Deb (2015)
The Woods (2006)
Walk Away (2020)

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welcome to my nightmare

I run literally every day, but I'm not supposed to be outside while the sun's up (for, um, reasons), and also there's a pandemic on and running in a mask sucks. On rare occasions I chance a late-night run on unlit and deserted paths, but maybe 85% of the time these days, I run on a treadmill in my living room.

Running on a treadmill for an hour is boring, though, especially day after day. My solution? Watching horror flicks. I queue up a scary movie and let the miles fly by. The speed boost of an adrenaline rush is just an added bonus. Allow me to share with you the myriad wonders of... RUNNING SCARED.

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