Wednesday, December 13, 2017

October 2017 Highlights Part 7 - Grand Finale: My Top Ten Horror

          And here we are, barely two weeks from Christmas, at the end of my October journey. I have begun compiling my top 25 movies for the year list already, and that is going to be a difficult endeavor to finish. More than a few movies from this top ten list are going to overlap on my top 25, making me bite my lip a little about doing this list at all. It is, however, already compiled, so I need to get on with it. First, however, a few honorable mentions of traditional material I watched or heard outside of the thread as well as a little bum trip I needed to get off my chest. This is likely to be a bit short and hopefully not too anticlimactic, but I do not plan to do full reviews for each movie. Still, I would hope that anyone reading this seeks out these movies and gives them a chance. Also, I offer these selection in no ranking order because it is too difficult for me to pick favorites. I will, however, be speaking briefly about the ten movies I watched in October that stuck with me.

Part 7 - Honorable Mentions and My Top Ten Horror Viewings of 2017


Honorable Mention: The Phil Hendrie Show – Halloween 1999 Show

          The Phil Hendrie Show was an influential talk radio program for me in my early 20s. My junior college government professor got me hate-listening to Rush Limbaugh in 1997, and I used to tune in to his show every day on the way to school. This was my first real experience with being a dedicated follower of someone whose opinions I believed to be detestable, and it was a strange new world for me to be in a class of mostly conservative students and a fiercely liberal teacher. Rush Limbaugh is a media entertainer, and don't ever let anyone tell you different. Apparently, this is one of the greatest insults you can say about him considering that a high member of the RNC was forced to apologize for saying it, so I point it out every chance I get. His liberal hurricane hoax conspiracy was a big one, and, as much as I don't like to speak ill of other people, he is a hypocrite, a man of no integrity, and makes a living inciting bigotry and ignorance from his audience. People like Phil Hendrie and Howard Stern, however, taught me that I should give the average talk radio listener a little more credit, especially since I was one, and that any performer, even a political radio pundit, only presents a fraction of themselves to their audience. Nevertheless, Rush Limbaugh is a media entertainer. Rush Limbaugh is a media entertainer. Sometimes I chant it before bed at night. I did not stay with Rush for too long, but it helped a little to be angry at him rather than to be angry at everything else that was going on in my life at the time. I may not have continued to browse through the talk stations if not for that experience, so I consider it a positive. 

          In February 2001, my brother almost cut his finger off with a collector's replica sword, and I found Coast to Coast with Art Bell while sitting in the car after midnight and waiting for him to get some stitches. (Our mother was in there with him the entire time. I did not just leave him alone in the emergency room by himself. Geez, I'm not that heartless. Anyway, he was fifteen years old at the time and could have handled it alone.) I had not ventured back into talk radio since I cast off Rush, but I was curious and bored. The topic of the night was ghost stories. I was hooked. I started to fiddle around with the AM station dials a lot more after that just to see what else might be out there besides Country music and far-right bullshit. Unfortunately, that is most of AM radio in Texas, but a few months later, in April, I ran across something different while driving home from college. It was Phil Hendrie talking to a guest about boycotting Chinese restaurants in California as protest to the Chinese government for refusing to return a downed US plane and its pilots. I was so pissed off at this moron, a guy by the name of Chris Norton, I almost had road rage on the drive home. I had no idea what was really going on, and Phil was so talented that hundreds of callers were just as clueless throughout the life of his show. I fell for the “brand” hook, line and sinker, and it took me a few days (and a spoiler promotional ad for the local station about schizophrenia as well as a killer Art Bell parody about a Lipton Cup of Soup conspiracy) to get “up to speed” with how his show worked: Phil and Chris were the same person. Phil played the part of every call-in guest to his show, a collection of thirty different voices and impressions, and he did it so flawlessly with as many as four characters at a time that first-time listeners like myself were upset and offended enough to call in and argue with a fake person. I almost called in that first time. I did not, but I wanted to. I wanted to try to reason with Chris, but you could not reason with Phil’s guests. I listened to many callers try and fail. You could not reason with Phil. That was the joke. You were the joke. There was always some outlandish and hilariously ridiculous response to anything you had to say, and the sad part is that it is how a lot of arguments take place on social media today. I have seen all of Phil’s bigots, morons, corrupt businessmen, fallen religious icons, gated community soccer moms, political advocates, disgraceful journalists, media entertainers, and elitist upper-class characters come to life, and I am sad to say I laughed a lot harder when they were not real. I used to collect radio shows from Napster and the 5-day RealAudio archives, and eventually I got a Backstage Pass subscription to Phil’s website that gave me access to years of material prior to my first show experience. I pretty much stopped listening to music radio and talk radio altogether and listened to Phil and Art Bell and other fun talk shows I could find. I consider Phil’s absolute best years to be his shows from 1997-2001. He remains a solid comedian, impressionist, history buff, and master of the social experiment. He has been imitated by several talented comedians (Crank Yankers, The Jamie Kennedy X-periment) and some not-so-talented hacks (Glenn Beck), but none of them ever came close to what Phil does. 

This brings us to his three-hour show from October 29, 1999, a show I have to listen to every October. Instead of telling ghost stories, Phil dug into the real horrors of the world: true crime files. Specifically, he told the stories of Albert Fish, Henry Lee Lucas, and Ottis Toole, and he told some of the most disturbing stories in such a way that you laugh and cringe at the same time. In his first hour, “filling in” for Phil, the epitome of loud radio DJ’s and Phil's most obnoxious-sounding character, Vic Prell, told the story of Albert Fish, hyping the horrible story of child murder and self-abuse with upbeat music and obnoxious delivery. Eventually, Phil “called in” to chastise Vic for his terrible routine, throwing him out and taking the show back. For the remainder of the hour, Phil tried to tell listeners about Henry Lee Lucas, yelling at his intern, the brain-damaged simpleton Bud Dickman, to put on some spooky music. It all fell apart when Phil found out that cartoon theme songs and Christmas music were playing the entire time he was talking about serial killers.

The comedy came to a dead halt in the second hour when Phil talked about Ottis Toole, despite a few interruptions from Bud Dickman, and Phil read some chilling interview material of Toole’s own words about his childhood and his confession that he murdered Adam Walsh. The truth is far more disturbing than a horror movie, and this story gets to me every time. If it did not get to me every time, then I would think something is wrong with me. There are times, I feel, when we need to subject ourselves to some gruesome truths in the world. Although there is a bit of a detachment from reality, I think this is one major reason that draws me to horror movies. In the third hour, it was back to comedy and “reality” as Phil brought on frequent guest Don “The Suicide Case” Parsley to talk about how triggered he was to see Jack-O-Lanterns on Halloween because it is a waste of food. With so many starving people in the world, Don claimed that he could hear the pumpkins screaming as they were being carved.

Phil’s worldview and brand of humor still make me laugh and inspire me to think, and he is one reason I joined Twitter eight years ago. Most of my earliest tweets were either in response to or quoting his show. His character of Coach Vernon Dozier was my favorite of the bunch, and he felt like a mirror image of the kind of person I could be if I lost all sense of my morality and decency. He was like listening to my own evil alter ego. Those were good times. This Halloween 1999 show is a morbid example of Phil's satirical work and not appropriate for all audiences, nor is it a proper example of a typical Phil Hendrie show. I recommend it nonetheless to horror and true crime fans alike.

Honorable Mention (What I deliberately did not watch): Monster in the Closet

            This is the hardest part of my highlights to write this year, and I had a difficult time finding the proper place for it because of how easily it soured my mood and is likely to sour the mood of anyone else reading it. So I decided to put it here, right before the very end, so that I can get it out of my system and then move on to the highest positives with the top ten list to help myself and perhaps my audience recover from it. As October began to roll around, news began to come out of sexual harassment allegations against high-profile people such as Harvey Weinstein and Harry Knowles, and the list has been growing ever since. The spark has set off a brush fire in entertainment and politics, and there is no sign of it going away. It should not go away. It needs to remain in the spotlight. Shortly before editing this section, I read the information released today by Salma Hayek. I am a peaceful man, but I wouldn't mind being locked in a room with Harvey for a little while. Scott Weinberg, film critic and co-host of the popular 80s All Over podcast, took to Twitter to criticize (too kind a word) Knowles and became the target of Troma Entertainment founder Lloyd Kaufman. This became one of the first times I became personally involved in such a confrontation, in part because I have spoken to and follow a number of women on Twitter who have come forward to share their stories of sexual harassment and even assault. I have shared personal stories of my own as well about assault history in my own family, and it infuriated me to see Kaufman and his fan base turn Weinberg into a scapegoat under the hypocritical guise of “due process.” It easily could have been me as Weinberg because we share experiences in common on the subject, some of that survivor's guilt and that "not my story to tell" dilemma, so it felt extremely personal to me. Weinberg became the target of multiple cases of harassment on Twitter, and at least one person took it so far as to create abusive impersonation accounts of Weinberg and some of his supporters, all of which were labeled with anti-Semitic and borderline libelous statements. Kaufman claimed to be trying to prevent what he called a “Twitter lynch mob” against Harry Knowles, going so far as to suggest that the journalists and victims involved in the story were liars or should not be taken seriously because they did not speak up about their abuse sooner, and, in turn, he encouraged a Twitter “lynch mob” of his own fans against people such as Weinberg speaking out in support of the victims. Kaufman then made a faceless and Serling-esque "responsible to my audience, not for my audience" statement about how his fans knew where he stood on the issue, and then he simply vanished from sight while several of those "fans" continued their harassment.

            This is all a symptom of a bigger concern with victim-blaming right now and not something I want to spend any more time on here for this entry. I would, however, recommend doing a little research on the topic and face these stories of sexual assault allegations with all the seriousness they deserve. All the way to the top office. You know which one. The oval one with the potato sitting at the desk. I would not recommend you do what Lloyd Kaufman did, which was to remain in character as a sleazy carnival barker with a bullhorn while speaking out about a difficult and personal subject. He treated real people involved in this story like characters in one of his movies, people whose lives were fictional and not to be taken seriously, and he might as well have promoted the vitriol that resulted from his statements with the accompaniment of fake vomit and fart noises. As a result of my disappointment in the behavior of Kaufman and his Troma imprint, I crossed a traditional Halloween favorite off my watch list this year, Monster in the Closet. I didn’t burn my DVD in effigy or make any other grandiose statement, but I chose not to provide any promotion or support for Troma whatsoever this year. Maybe I will come around to it again sometime next year or another year down the line, but not this year. Probably not next year, either.

          A lot of great people were involved in this horror spoof, and they do not deserve the punishment that Troma’s poor behavior has brought upon them. Acting greats such as Stella Stevens, Henry Gibson, Claude Akins, John Carradine, and Paul Dooley come to mind, specifically. Troma has been a part of my life going back a long time, and I remember seeing many Troma movies on late night shows like USA Up All Night. Of course, Kaufman and his supporters have a “don’t let the screen door hit your ass on the way out” attitude about it, and that is their prerogative. They can shrug it off and refuse to hold themselves accountable for their behavior if they like, but I stand by my decision. I think Kaufman handled this poorly. Not only that, but I think he tried to capitalize on it by encouraging his fans to escalate it. A trashy exploitation movie producer exacerbating a situation to turn it into trashy exploitation. Go figure. It felt in poor taste on my part to have Troma as any part of my October festivities when the head of the company and some of his employees and fan base were unable to approach a subject with the seriousness it deserves. I do not know how many more years I have left on this Earth, but, frankly, I think I might be just fine if I never see another Troma movie again in the remainder of those years. Even Monster in the Closet

The Grand Finale - My Top Ten for October (in no particular order)

Note: This list may contain some spoilers, but I try to avoid anything crucial.


1) Cult of Chucky
           
I have followed the Chucky franchise since the beginning, so of course I was going to check this one out as soon as it became available on Netflix. Some great lines and an always-brilliant performance by Brad Dourif, and there were a few little Easter egg references in there for the keen-eared movie fan as well. I do not want to spoil any of the fun, but if you have followed any of Dourif’s career outside of the Chucky series, then you are in for some treats. This entry immediately reminded me of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and Bad Dreams with its focus on young people in a mental hospital, and Chucky’s influence on a group of people with diverse conditions made this a particularly fun outing. Chucky was not terrorizing some middle class family with two-and-a-half kids anymore; he was in a place where every one of his victims was already broken in some way, patients and doctors alike. Even a killer plastic doll has to put a little extra work into his craft to make that situation work, especially when a few of the patients think a talking inanimate object is nothing out of the ordinary. At times, other characters' psychological issues almost overshadowed Chucky's, and this entry opened a door to take the franchise back to its roots. 

2) Prince of Darkness
           
An instant favorite, and I am still not sure how this fell under my radar for so many years. I think I have mentioned that the late 1980s were not the best time for me with theatrical horror movies after my family moved to Florida in 1987. Most of those theater outings were for family-friendly movies and generally nothing above a PG rating because we went to the dollar theater frequently with my best friend and his family. His mother was a bit more on the strict side in what she allowed her children to watch. Regardless of that, I still do not know how my eye overlooked this one at the video store over the years that followed. I certainly remember the VHS cover and poster image. The names John Carpenter and Donald Pleasance alone should have made the movie jump off the shelf and into my hands… but here I am in 2017 and seeing it for the first time. I think it would have been one of my favorite movies had I seen it when it originally came out, and it is quite easily one of my favorite John Carpenter movies. Well… just about all of John Carpenter’s movies are my favorite John Carpenter movies, but this one was special. I love the concept of a secret religious sect trying to keep the literal force of evil imprisoned and the modern young minds of theoretical and applied physics trying in vain to study, measure and explain what is essentially a huge mason jar full of liquid Satan… and the cap is about to rust off. I am going to have to watch this one again very soon. I think it is one of Carpenter’s deepest films.

3) The Lure

            Easily one of the top ten movies I have seen this year. This dysfunctional family fairy tale deserved every bit of the recognition and praise it received, particularly for getting the Criterion label almost immediately after its release. It is The Little Mermaid meets Victor, Victoria meets Species, and I loved every minute of it. It was so good that I feel awful leaving this entry so short but cannot think of anything else to say except, "Go watch it." 

4) The Devil’s Backbone

          Guillermo del Toro is a master of horror, art, and film, but I have seen, sadly, a very small selection of his work. This needs to change, and The Devil's Backbone is quite possibly the best proof of that. Santi is one of the best ghosts in movie history, and this is a difficult story of suffering that almost takes too long to achieve some retribution. Greed and evil seem to win at every turn, but the spirits of the dead are there to remind us that the actions of the living eventually come back to get them.

5) Thirst

          By coincidence, the soundtrack to Thirst is playing right now in my writing mood music playlist. Scores to 1970s horror movies like this take me back to some of the best moments of my childhood, and there is a sort of pattern to the instrumental arrangements that almost puts them into their own distinct musical genre. Made-for-TV movies had soundtracks like these quite often, but you could expect a specific kind of haunting melody for theatrical features like Let's Scare Jessica to Death or Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural. For a movie like Thirst, which already was a unique and fun horror experience, the music makes it even better. I had watched Daughters of Darkness shortly before this one (which did not make the top ten but definitely deserves the mention), and it was fun to remain on a vampire theme drawing from the origins of Elizabeth Báthory rather than the standard Vlad The Impaler. The story takes itself in a direction more psychological than supernatural, but I loved it. 

6) Messiah of Evil

          Speaking of the 1970s, I always say that it is hard for me to escape that decade once I pick a movie. I am surprised that there are only three movies from the 1970s on this list. This was a particular shocker for me because I always seem to think that I might have seen every 1970s zombie movie ever made. Perhaps I have. I feel like I must have seen this at some point when I was very young, but it only seemed vaguely familiar. I think this one would have been burned into my memory if I had seen it as a kid, but it did not ring the right bells. This is one of those perfect 1970s selections that shares some of the same atmospheric and haunting music as Thirst, and I watched a version of it on YouTube that had not aged well in terms of video quality. As much as I want to see a remastered version of this, there is something special about seeing it in aged broadcast television or VHS quality. Shout Factory TV's VHS Vault is a good example of how this nostalgia can enhance the experience of watching a movie by putting you in the time period in which a movie was made or in which it achieved much of its popularity and exposure. I have mentioned that I can come back to a worn-out TV recording of a movie almost as often as I would a high-quality DVD or Blu-ray, and that look of a 1980s television broadcast can put me in a real horror movie mood. The brightest brights can have a fuzzy and ghostly appearance, and the darkest darks can leave you wondering if you are sure of what is going on in a scene. I need to watch this one again and soon. 

7) Devil Times Five

          This should have been the plot to Bustin' Loose with Richard Pryor. I jumped into Devil Times Five immediately after finishing Messiah of Evil after YouTube started it up automatically, and I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did. I missed this one when it aired on TCM Underground, but it was more than worthy to be a part of that programming with the likes of Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The OtherBloody Birthday, and Alice, Sweet Alice. Evil kids and a house full of repulsive adults with so much of their own selfish baggage that most of them have mayhem and gore coming to them. And there is plenty of mayhem and gore to go around. Any time you see a fish tank of piranhas in a movie, you know they are going to be well fed. The real horror comes from how easily and nonchalantly the children commit their deeds. The sociopath, free of any emotion or facial expression, can be even more frightening in the act than the toothy maw of a howling beast, especially when the sociopath is just a child. This was why Children of the Corn got to me specifically as a kid, and the kids in Devil Times Five are believably creepy.

8) Spontaneous Combustion

          This was the final entry in my memorial marathon for Tobe Hooper, and it felt appropriate to finish it off with one that I had not seen. This is another one of those horror releases from the late 1980s and early 1990s that fell under my radar along with Prince of Darkness, and I was happy to get to it later than never. Spontaneous Combustion feels a bit like Scanners with a little bit of The Fury mixed in for good measure, and it is Brad Dourif in one of his best performances. Dourif tackles outrageous emotion, pain, and frustration with style, and he is at his most frustrated here. One of the signatures of his success as Chucky is his scream of pain, and there is no shortage of torturous screams here as his pyrokinetic powers slowly burn his body from the inside out. An underrated Tobe Hooper gem worth checking out.

9) Fade to Black

          This one almost feels biographical, all except for the serial murder part, of course, and I wish that I had gotten my hands on its soundtrack as well to mix in with my mood music for this entry. This is a poetic tale of a misfit finding the only happiness and joy in his life from the movies while slowly being pushed over the edge. Many of the feelings I share with Eric Binford are the reason I am sitting here and bothering to write any of this down. The movies can be an escape from dysfunction and an inspiration to the imagination to help one cope with difficult times. At the same time, it is something that can become an unhealthy escape that causes you to retract from a few important human needs. There is an American Psycho vibe to the story but more sympathetic. It is very difficult not to relate to him in a sense, especially if you were not a popular kid. He has a touch of arrogance about the things he knows, making him a magnet for abuse, but certain people, like the subject of his tragic romance, a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe, see through that standoffish air of superiority as a defense mechanism for his loneliness and desire for human contact. She sees so much more in him than he can see in himself that she is willing to put herself in harm's way for him, and Tim Thomerson, as a budding criminal profiler, tells the audience repeatedly that we should have sympathy for Eric and that there should be some path to redemption for him. It is an interesting take on the trope that a monster deserves human sympathy or should be brought in alive rather than put down by the angry masses. The plot takes us through highlights and parallels of classics like Kiss of Death and even King Kong, and those movies in Eric Binford's life-- in our lives-- provide not only an outlet for his emotions but also remind us of some of the very human emotions that can create monsters. 

10) Raw

          If I were ranking these from least to greatest, then this one likely would get the number one spot (maybe second only to Prince of Darkness). Raw was nothing like I expected it to be. This could be because I am so well-versed in horror movies and simply did not react to it the way that many did, but there was a great deal of hype surrounding this movie that made me think entirely differently of it than what it is. I heard stories of people fainting and throwing up at screenings, and it took me back to memories of 1970s horror radio spots and 1960s William Castle films that promised physicians on site and free funeral services for anyone in the audience who died of fright.

In particular, take a moment to do a web search for the radio ads for a double feature of Blood-Spattered Bride and I Dismember Mama to get one of the best examples of what I am talking about.

This connection to word of mouth drew me to this story more than anything else, but its graphic nature, at least to me, was minimal at best. It did make me cringe once or twice, though, and that is not easy to do. Unfortunately, it seemed like some of this hype unfairly pushed some potential viewers away. Psychologically and emotionally, this was a coming of age story that is going to stick with people for a long time. I put it in the same category of movies I saw earlier this year such as When Animals Dream and Evolution (which I will discuss in my top 25 for the year). My only complaint about Raw, if I can call it a complaint, is that I had the mystery solved right away, and the ending was a confirmation rather than a shock. It does not reduce my enjoyment of any movie, but I am not easy to fool. I would recommend Raw to anyone, even someone that is not particularly a fan of horror. It is a horror movie, but it is so much more. If you do not want to seek it out because of the hype, then seek it out in spite of the hype.

Honorable Mention: Three... Extremes

          With my love for Asian film in general and a particular enjoyment of the works of these three directors, I had no doubt that I would enjoy this little horror anthology. Park Chan-wook, Fruit Chan, and Takashi Miike deliver some true horror that gets you right in the gut and then keeps cutting. I think that I might have ordered the stories differently and saved Park Chan-wook's "Cut" for last due to its intensity, but each story is its own intense horror ride. 


          And there you have it. This was a longer road than I wanted it to be, but we made it through October. It only took us until December, but we made it before Christmas. I joked that it would be Christmas before I finished, and it almost came true. Sheesh. I used to have so much more motivation to write, and I am still struggling to get it back. I wish that my free time took on a little less Fade to Black escapism than something productive, but the last several years have been a mental roller coaster. I find myself moving on to the next movie more than stopping to think about the last one these days, and I fear that my memory has failed me on a few of these movie experiences. I am not the Eric Binford I once was, and I have doubted the tenacity of my mind for trivia in recent years. Some say that stress can cause such memory issues, and it can be a bit frustrating to try to pull out a few memories that I thought would be at the front of my mind forever. I have had trouble recently remembering whether or not I saw a few movies for the first time on television or in a movie theater. My second viewings of some of those are more vivid than the first, but I never expected any of those fond memories to blur. But I digress. 

          In the coming weeks, keep an eye out for an expansion of this list as I run off my top 25 first-time movie viewings for 2017. A few of these movies will be on that list again with a little more detail about the impact they had upon me, particularly Prince of Darkness and Raw, and I am having a hard time cutting the list down to a top 50 movies list let alone a top 25. I have many good things to say about at least half the movies I have seen this year, so maybe I will take a cue from Casey Kasem and do a Top 40 countdown. Regardless, there are a lot of fun and diverse movie recommendations and highlights on the horizon. I joked that I would have the list finished sometime in July. I am taking some initiative to get started on it earlier.

No comments:

Post a Comment