Rabid (1977)

Good to know. Thank you, movie.

We start out with a woman and a man riding a motorcycle - rather fast - through some nice scenery of wood and fields.

Cut to a medical corporation - a bunch of high-ups are discussing a new kind of plastic surgery.

Cut back to the couple on the motorcycle - and there's a big car trying to turn around their SUV, stuck on the road.

This

+

This


=

This


turning into

This (Yes, there's a person inside)

Luckily, someone sees the accident happen, and the ambulance is called quickly. The guy only has a broken hand and some other minor injuries, but the woman... she burned, and needs to have major surgery. She's rushed to a hospital where the medical corporation guys were discussing earlier - about a new kind of plastic surgery...

As the woman is badly injured, they use the new, radical plastical surgery technique. Taking skin from her upper leg, they created grafts from that skin, going back to something akin to stem-cell-research.

2 Months later... the woman is still not conscious.

One night thought, she wakes up screaming and flailing around. A guy comes to check for her, and she insists he stays as he wants to call the doctor... and complains that she is so cold and he is so warm. She hugs him... and he starts to scream, and blood starts to flow from under his arm. And she... she seems... excited.




Our female protagonist escapes from the hospital one night and chances upon a stable with lifestock in it. She hugs one of the animals, and ...something appears to happen. She seems to receive ...something, but it makes her sick and she throws up. Blood.

The story rolls on from that point - a typical Cronenberg movie. His visual style is arresting, as usual, the changes of focus, the simple, crisp pictures, the lingering shots... everything we know to expect from the Master. Yes, I adore Cronenberg far too much, just like Stuart Gordon and a few other directors.

Basically, Rabid is a movie about blood, changes in blood and changes in people. Physical and mental changes. Rose (our protagonist) is undergoing changes of a definitely weird nature - the skin graft on her arm grew into a penis-like feeding spike. It basically works like a vampiric feeding-device, like fangs or a sort of short tentacle to tear into people and suck their blood.
In turn, people who get... uhm... fed off by Rose turn into bloodthirsty, living vampire-beings. As the incidents spread, the media and police suspect rabies infecting the people involved. They have no idea that what they are facing is people changing into blood-feeding creatures, and that the cause is nothing but a young woman... that has changed in a grotesque, vampiric way (but without all the modern, 21st century vampire-"coolness" attached to it). Rose is a rather plain woman, has no special powers.




The "infected", on the other hand, degenerate more and more the longer they live, especially without nourishment. Some look like zombies.




Rose continues her spree through the US, feeding and infecting people with whatever it is that changed her into what she is now.

The pain of our protagonist is palpable in several scenes, as Need consumes her and she can't/doesn't feed on the human blood she needs.




Soon, the epidemic of infected people is getting out of hand. Martial Law is established, as it has turned out that the victims of the "rabies" are immune to medical intervention. Shooting them is as good as capturing them, because they will fall into a coma shortly after arrest (and being kept from feeding) and die soon. Surely it's more humane to shoot them before they reach this state?




It's amazingly brutal for a Cronenberg movie - compared to his other movies, there are lots of kills, some just for the sake of shedding more artificial blood (which looks remarkably realistic at times, and at times like pink goo). Kudos for that.

Te camera is outstanding, as is the editing. The use of body language and lighting and shadow are also professional - Cronenberg shows what he can do once again.

An atmospheric movie I can only recommend. Earns my stamp of approval.



8/10 ways of suffering because of something one doesn't understand

Mind Ripper aka The Outpost aka The Hills Have Eyes III (1995)

The Government Created Him. Now They Must Destroy Him.

Yay! Thanks to the fine folks over at Bloody Disgusting, I can finally watch the movie I've always wanted to watch again since I first caught it on TV about 12 years ago. This piece of work is called Mind Ripper aka The Outpost aka The Hillls Have Eyes III. It fails as an installment of The Hills Have Eyes, it fails as a Wes Craven output (then again, what were we expecting - he is only ....."presenting" the thing)... but it works as a nifteh, funny movie that I am deeply nostalgic for.

A group of three (3) scientists find a wounded young man in the middle of the American desert (well... some American desert). They inject him with a curious, uhm, injection - and soon after, the doctor who developed the. uhm, injected stuff leaves the project, as he is not okay with the way the other scientists are treating the subject.

Funnily enough, as coincidences go, on the day of leaving for his holidays with his family, the good doctor receives a phone call informing him about difficulties with the subject... his former subject.

Luckily, the movie is fast: 20 minutes into the movie, we already get our explanation for what what happened when. The military tried, as usual, to create a super-human soldier* by means of scientists**. Actually, they injected the guy they found with some sort of virus... which is now running wild in the subject, changing and transforming him.

...into something that leaves eyes behind.

In the meantime, we get some characterisation through father-son-interaction. Teenagers were allowed to smoke back then, and parents were allowed to get a little louder with their kids.




Cut to annoying daughter of scientist with her even more stupid and annoying boyfriend. "I want to pleasure you forever..." - we all know where that leads ***




For some reason I cannot fathom yet, the dysfunctional semi-family is heading towards the military headquarters - in which the three scientist/military-guys (and gal) are making a desperate run from something they can't understand. Whilst the family is happily walking into the former nuclear testing facility.




A former nuclear testing facility owned by some nice company named GenTec. I tend to inherently trust companies with names like GenTec. They can only have the best of humanity on their minds, surely? They wouldn't ever give in to scientific curiousity... or lucrative offers of high sums of money for more practical experiments. Surely not.




Gods, watching this movie is a pure delight. The camera is at times abysmally bad, very simple and... uhm... old. It's a cheap 90s B-movie in the tradition of 80s B-movies. It screams DTV-release with every fibre of its being. But I love it dearly. I just liked it when I accidentally caught it on TV more than a decade ago, and occasionally remembered it fondly. But now, I love it.




This is happening to the infected man's mouth, for example. In case you can't realise what it is, it's a tooth/claw at the end of a long, tentacle-like, penis-like thing that the mutated soldier can shoot out of his mouth - to feed on other people's "minds" (we freely assume he includes "brains" in that rather broad and metaphysical concept).

They also had computers back in those days when I was but a wee little babe.

Inevitably, the group splits up, because, you know, you're safer in small, uncoordinated groups when in some creepy, apparently deserted surroundings that shouldn't be deserted.

At the beginning of the third act, we get the explanation for all the weird stuff that has been going on on the defunct military base.




The thing that makes this movie special is the mutant/monster - "Thor" (TransHuman Organism). He has a background story, he even has character and a personality. He is changing, and he doesn't know what is changing in him or into what he is changing... and it causes him pain. We get a little twist here, one that makes Thor even more tragic than he already is... and then he loses himself in desperate rage.




Cut to our rag-tag group of heroes, off to save the day. With brains. Because they figured out that our anti-hero needs brains... or rather, certain parts of them.




We get some 15 minutes of filler "plot" (brother-sister-bonding, talks about dad, a useless dream sequence, drama, guilt etc.) before things really start again. Our refugees need to find the kids' father's hand, because only his hand is authorised for the main door (?)

One thing: This movie has far too many survivors. Far. Too. Many. Survivors. On the other hand, it has a nifteh monster that I've liked for the past 12 years.




Plus, I approve of monster-rape (one of the reasons why Evil Dead is such an endearing movie).

I mean... this movie just has it all. A nifty monster with character background, Lance Henriksen, death by monster, death by electricity, 80s visions of computers... far too many survivors... Still, a mightily entertaining flick. And I don't just say that out of pure nostalgia. I actually enjoyed watching this flick, even though the death-count is below acceptable.



6.75/10 sudden onsets of baldness. I love this movie.




*Black Science. Remember?




** Scientists are always working for governments and secret organisations and believe in Evil(TM).

*** Tcha. Better luck next time, mate. We got fooled with that.

Bleeders aka Hemoglobin (1997)

Ah... H.P. Lovecraft.

I admit it, I am easy to please in some regards. Movies based on stories by HPL are one such thing. No matter how abysmally bad it is, I will see it and to some degree enjoy it. Bleeders aka Hemoglobin is based on the story "The Lurking Fear"... and indeed, it's not entirely off the mark.




The movie explains to us that there was a Dutch countess, Eva van Dam, who was of such a narcissistic nature that she only wished to make love to herself. Failing to be able to do that, she settled for the closest other thing: Her twin brother. And so, a love-story, fairy-tale and horrific dystopia began, lasting for hundreds of years...

Hemoglobin wants us to say hello to our main protagonist: John Strauss (as played by Roy Dupuis). He is pale, has lips that are a little bit too red, his eyes are of two different colours, he can't stand the sun for too long, he can't eat most foods, is always tired during the day, suffers from spontaneous nosebleeds and seizures as well as cramps, spasms and blackouts. It's clear from the beginning that he's not a healthy man.




Thing is, John Strauss is suffering from something that appears to be an incredibly rare genetic disease. John and his wife are traveling to an island from which John's ancestors possibly came from. There, they find some Dr. Marlowe (Rutger Hauer!)... and Dr. Marlowe doesn't come as the bearer of good news. Whilst he is examining the strange young man, the inhabitants of the island are exhuming coffins in the local burial ground - something there seems to be wrong with the ground, and they want to preserve the dead.

John and his wife (can't bother to look up the name right now) get a room at the local hotel. John has it bad - he can't stomach food, and even the mild light of dusk is too bright for his eyes. Walking around, they (well, mostly she) ask about the Strauss family - but to no avail. The people in this village aren't really willing to talk to people from outside the island.

[Insert sub-plot about necklace and burial and grave-robbery here]

Whilst John is falling asleep, his wife is visiting Dr. Marlowe, asking him if he thinks that what John has is hereditary. Dr. Marlowe mentions the Van Dams and their inbreeding habits - and shows her one of the Van Dam children.

Yes, that's formaldehyde.

Meanwhile, John is having flashbacks to... something. Somewhen. Disturbing images.

And he's hungry...

...it's night outside. And the gravedigger's daughter is out. Out in the graveyard...

It's a bit hard to type with that buzzing rhythm pulsing uncomfortably in my right side, so please bear with me. They travel to the Van Dam estate - it is empty now, as the last Van Dams died in a fire 75 years ago. An old woman is supposed to live up there, a nurse who might know more about John's disease.

Meanwhile, Dr. Marlowe is trying to make sense of John's test results, as he gets interrupted - by someone carrying the mauled body of a ...humanoid creature with him. Examining it further, the good Doctor ascertains that it appears to be human, but a hermaphrodite - a fully functional hermaphrodite, capable of replicating with itself.

Cut to John Strauss. He and his wife are surprised by an old woman who seems to recognise John. Further identification ensues, and the old woman tells him that he was the only surviving member of the Van Dam family, saved from the fire. When the talk turns to the desires and Cravings he feels, and he admit that he suffers from them but does not know what they are about, the old woman retreats fearfully, threatening both him and his wife and driving them away. Reluctantly, they leave.




In the meantime, we get one (1) child dragged into the ground through a hole.

Returning in fury, John demands of the old woman to know the truth - she couldn't have saved him from the fire because he wasn't 75 years old. It was his right to know the truth.

...and she shows him...

And the truth is... not all of the Van Dams are dead.

As a storm approaches mercilessly, the small island slowly descends into terror. John is sick and hardly able to move on his own; dark rain is cutting into the people's faces, thunder deafens human ears... and somewhere, something is crawling. Eating. Breeding. Feeding.




Dr. Marlowe discovers a group of... humanoids. Things. Mutated monstrosities of centuries of inbreeding... deformities feeding on corpses. It's the remaining family members of the Van Dams... apparently, they had been tunnelling underneath the cemetery for centuries since they disappeared from the eye of the public, feeding on corpses for generations - necrophagia and anthropophagia in general (but mostly necrophagia). Them lucky ghouls*.

Formulating an answer to John's problem in his mind, Marlowe talks to him and his wife, leaving a jar. With a Van Dam embryo in it. For John to feed on it.




After devouring the fetus, John is filled with vigour, life and power.

Then some other stuff happens. It involves a lot of screaming, hysterical people, deformed monstrosities, light, darkness, psychological terror, ...

...and then my favourite scene EVER.

EVER.

And no, I won't tell you about it (actually, it's two scenes, but what the heck).

Bleeders aka Hemoglobin is a very atmospheric movie; a friend of mine called it "dreamy", and I think that's a word that can be employed with a good conscience when talking about this movie. It has a dream-like quality - much more so than the short story "The Lurking Fear" upon which this movie was loosely based.

If you like Lovecraftian inbreeding stories, then you should enjoy Bleeders a lot. And if you like slightly weird, character-centered movies, you should give it a go as well. I would recommend it to the vampires-crowd, but Hemoglobin isn't pretty and shiny enough for that. And I'm perfectly fine with that. Ghouls have rights, too**.

Rutger Hauer's performance is not as great as it could have been, but then again, I compare each of his performances with The Hitcher... so he naturally pales in comparison to his old self. Roy Dupuis has some really fine moments in the second act of the movie - when the film starts, I sometimes wanted to bitchslap him for being artificial, but during the second act, everything he did became fluent and natural. I now wonder if I haven't been a bit too harsh, for maybe the artificiality of the character of John Strauss is not just an accident of bad acting but an intended characterisation of the persona being incorporated.




9/10 whole new sets of senses...

*You might be wondering why I classify this as a ghoul movie, but considering my personal definition of a ghoul, it fits.

**If I ever should find myself leader of a political party, that will be my motto.

Masters of Horror Season 01 - "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road" (2005)

A young woman is driving through the night - her eyes are focused straight ahead, lost in thought, melancholic indie music is playing. She looks down at the radio in order to change the station...

...and crashes into another car.

I believe anything can happen to anyone - at any time.

Flashback - to happier times.

The young woman wakes up from her memories, dragged out of them by regaining her consciousness. Getting out of her car, she realises that the car she crashed into is empty, its doors opened - and blood is everywhere.



Someone tried to escape, obviously. Helplessly, she yells for the person who must have been in that car. And her phone doesn't work anymore either.



But it's not just the victim of the ...car accident who hears her.

You've always got to expect the unexpected... and do the unexpected.

Flashback - to happier times.



But were they really happy?

Our young woman is being hunted - hunted in a game of life and death. By ...something.




Or someone, maybe? And her past has all and nothing to do with it...

When everything else fails you... try everything.

A seriously engaging hunt. The lighting is atmospheric, the camerawork truly good for something that A) ran on TV, B) gets distributed in my video stores for more than double the money than a regular horror DVD. The whole hunt, the whole thing with the flashbacks, the whole thing with the captured guy... impressive. I could love this episode of Masters of Horror if it wasn't for the end.




Pornographic at times. At least for someone like me.




8/10 moments in which you would just love to have those damned torture tools...

The Brood (1979)

Finally. I've finally managed to watch The Brood - as you might have cunningly guessed, seeing as this is a review of the movie by yours truly (aka me, myself and the beast within*).

Let me preface this by stating that I am a big fan of David Cronenberg. Besides for Stuart Gordon and, more recently, Rob Zombie as well as Alexandre Aja and Eli Roth, he's one of the few directors/writers/producers whom I really like a lot. This also includes going to unimaginable lengths to see his movies - even though, sometimes, it may take me years to find a copy of the movies in question. Such was the case with The Brood... and after I had managed to actually find this movie last year, it of course took me more than six months to actually get around to watching it. And I have no real excuse, besides for "I have more than 1000 (one thousand) movies, I get lost sometimes"...

Just seeing this on my screen makes me happy...

David Cronenberg. A man who is as fascinated by the topic of change and transformation than I am by liminal states of transformation. If you can see the similarities (no worries, they are easy to spot even for dimwitted readers, although I severely doubt that any of my readers fall into that category), you should understand why I love the guy and his work, behind the camera as well as in front of it.




But, enough of me going all fangirl over Cronenberg and on to the movie at hand.

I doubt that many people who read these mental meanderings (and at times, rants) have never heard of the movie, but I'll sum the plot up nonetheless:

Nola Carveth is a woman who, for reasons lying in her childhood, needs to undergo an intense psychotherapy. Having had to deal with an abusive mother and a father who was too weak to defend the girl Nola against her mother, she is all screwed up in the head. Now, that is more or less the situation of a good percentage of the world's adult population... so what makes this psychotherapy different to others?

Say hello to "psychoplasmics".

"Psychoplasmics" is a new brand of psychotherapy, as developed by Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed). The catch is that, during this form of therapy, the patient's body transforms - basically, it works like psychosomatics. Your body transforms in order to fit your mind.

Dr. Hal Raglan, psychotherapist extraordinaire...

A man who has been suffering all his life under an abusive father, abusive stepfather and lack of an understanding father figure develops disfiguring welts, and another man developed lymphatic cancer, apparently due to his intense self-hatred (good thing I'm not doing anything like that... having a weird psychotherapy, I mean...). Now, you'd think that people would be wary of something like that - I certainly wouldn't start therapy if I had to consider that there is a distinct possibility of my body going even more haywire than it already does... but alas, it was the 70s, and things were different back then.

For example, people were allowed to smoke.

Now, the thing that makes Nola different is... well. Her physical changes are a bit more ...drastic than those of other patients of the esteemed Dr. Hal Raglan.




She doesn't just show psychosomatic symptoms or more drastic physical changes, like cancer running wild through her system. No... in her case, she gives birth (if that word can be used) parthenogenetically to the titular Brood - deformed, creepy children which are telepathically linked to her subconscious. And they are attacking those who want to destroy her dreams of a happy life with her child, Candice, and her not-so-loving husband Frank.




The Brood is indeed the shape of Nola's rage... and that rage is directed against those who in any way threaten her and her dreams.

I have to admit that the script (also written by Cronenberg) is not exactly one of the most complicated ones - the movie plays out predictably, and there is no element of surprise to the kills and their order. If you are in any way familiar with horror movies, you'll sit right in front of your screen, nodding to yourself as the Brood kills its way through the people responsible for Nola's problems - and problems she has... verily so**.




There isn't that much to give away in The Brood, but nonetheless, it is a very engaging movie. Not one second did I feel any sort of boredom - which you might not have inferred from my complaint about the predictable script. This is where Cronenberg truly shines - he can take a story, give you hints how it will play out and and he will play all of it out, without any surprising twists, or big and unexpected turns of events or scares. What he does is running along with how the story is supposed to play out, showing us just enough to confirm our suspicions... and yet, it's new, engaging, interesting and at times gritty to watch.




The Brood is spectacularly low on the gory end of things - although we get four kills, all of them the same modus operandi, they are not particularly bloody and violent (then again, that might be my skewed perception of violence - I imagine being bludgeoned to death to be quite a painful and violent experience, but no matter how much I know that, the scenes just didn't register on my violence-radar). However, that doesn't matter at all - and I am a gorehound at heart.




No, what The Brood manages to do is to let us glimpse into the terror of change. Yes, recently, throughout the past years, the subgenre of body horror has risen to new heights, and Cronenberg was particularly absent from the movies that have mercilessly shown us the first-person or third-person perspective of involuntary transformation - but still, he is the undisputed master of venereal horror.




Camera and light are not exactly what I'd call great pieces of art, but they're not bad, either. Above average, yet never so obvious that they'd take away from the story that unfolds before the eyes of the viewer. And I cannot stress enough that this story is a captivating one, although we pretty much know how things are going to turn out. Although I am in no means a filmmaker, and although my contacts with the world of movie-making have only been minimal, I think I can still state confidently in my position as a writer*** that there is an art to making the already known and expected seem more than just interesting - to make that which everyone already expects into a captivating story that unfolds and doesn't lose its psychological grip.




This movie is more than just entertaining - and if you're in any way like me, you'll probably enjoy the movie just as I did.

7.5/10 mothers licking their newborn baby clean...



*A friendly nod goes to the BZFOS here.

**As I already mentioned in another review of mine (can't remember which, though), the word "verily" can be used in a great way to add emphasis to a sentence, as well as killing any sort of idiotic question as to the validity of the statement made in said sentence. But here I just use it for stylistic reasons... and, admittedly, a bit of emphasis. I just needed it.

***Yes. Indeed. I write. Now stop laughing and scroll down!