Jacob's Ladder (2019 remake)

 

Jacob’s Ladder (remake) (2019)

Dir. David M. Rosenthal

Written by Jeff Buhler, Sarah Thorpe, “story by” Jake Wade Wall, Jeff Buhler, based on a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin

Starring Michael Ealy, Jesse Williams, Nicole Beharie

 

 

Since the original JACOB'S LADDER is one of my very favorite horror movies of all time, I can't say I approached this (loose) remake with a lot of optimism; more like morbid curiosity. Unfortunately it doesn't even offer much to be morbidly curious about. It's not bad so much as it fails to ever be even a little good, and the ways in which it fails to be good are mostly pretty boring. It's rarely outright incompetent, but at the same time there's just no evidence whatsoever that anybody involved wanted to be here or had any clear idea why it would be worth telling this story other than to ride the coattails of a more famous movie which still isn't even that famous.

 

That is, anyway, the only reason I can think of that this would be called JACOB’s LADDER. It vaguely echoes some plot elements of the original –the titular Jacob (Michael Ealy, MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA) is an American soldier back home after a foreign war (Afghanistan rather than Vietnam) and gets mixed up with an experimental drug that leads him into a paranoid, hallucinatory journey. Similar enough that you’d probably notice, but not specific enough that they’d have to worry about lawsuits if they just ripped it off. But let’s be honest here, it’s not like someone came up with a brilliant story and just later realized it kind of superficially resembled the scenario for a cult flick from 1990. Obviously somebody picked up the rights to the remake, grabbed some gigging writer (Jeff Buhler, already responsible for THE GRUDGE REMAKE [2020] and PET SEMETARY REMAKE and the screenplay for MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN and THE PRODIGY and recently STUDIO 666) and said “write a story we can title JACOB’S LADDER so that a small percentage of people will watch it thinking it’s the good version, and a handful of horror die-hards will check it out due to a sense of morbid curiosity.” And then when they needed re-writes and the original guy didn’t want to bother, they handed it to a personal trainer or niece or somebody that the producer knew (Sarah Thorpe, no other credits) and just said “try and cut out the stuff that sounds expensive.”

 

This is not the type of scenario that one could reasonably expect to produce great art. But it could still probably be better than this. Mostly the movie as a whole is just sort of drab and pointless, but I guess the script is maybe weak enough to qualify as outright bad, although in a bland way rather than an exotic one. The story itself is built around a pretty tepid mindfuck (and pretty nonsensical should you be inclined to try and ask pissy questions like "wait, if that's what was happening, what have I been watching up til now?") though at least it's a different mindfuck than the original. (I said "different," not "better" although I'll readily admit that the twist in the original is the worst thing about it). The fact that it's very stupid is a problem for a movie this relentlessly dour, but the bigger problem is more fundamental: it fails to ever establish a convincing baseline reality --starting with Jacob and his wife’s (Nicole Beharie, SHAME) pristine, antiseptic home with its demure, compliant newborn (!) who cries exactly once and never while anyone is sleeping-- which renders its later attempts at surrealism a dismal nonstarter. Can't disrupt reality if I never for one second believe in these characters even at their status quo.

 

And it doesn't get more convincing as the situation escalates. Early on, Jacob watches as his brother Isaac (Jesse Williams, CABIN IN THE WOODS --yes, their names are Jacob and Isaac) dies in front of him. Years later, Isaac turns up alive, apparently within walking distance of Jacob's house! And Jacob's response is... mild surprise and annoyance? He basically just drops him off at his house and goes about his business. At no point does he or his wife freak out or seem to find this shocking and inexplicable and demanding of answers. He mumbles something that the paperwork must have gotten mixed up and that's that. And Ealy (who I consider to be a terrific actor, but obviously needed a little more direction here) doesn't help matters with his disappointingly tepid performance. Very quickly, this guy is experiencing totally insane shit, and his reaction never seems to rise above "mildly perturbed." I'm sorry, but putting a five-o'clock shadow on Michael Ealy does not make him look tormented, it just makes him look hotter. And he's already borderline too hot to take seriously in the first place.

 

So yeah, it's a bad script, but it's at least committed to its dumb twist, and could, maybe, have been salvaged by some real directorial flair. But if any director was going to be able to pull that off, David M. Rosenthal --who must be a real charming guy, considering how often in his career he's been able to pull amazingly overqualified casts for completely anonymous DTV genre fare-- ain't the one to do it. The original JACOB'S LADDER is a masterclass in gritty, nightmare-fueled paranoia; this has a perfunctory sort of visual slickness that makes it feel like a gloomy car commercial, and the best it can manage in the nightmare department is that lame thing where someone's face will suddenly distort into a SCREAM mask and they’ll shout "boo!" (a trick I was already mocking as shamelessly unimaginative back when DEAD BIRDS did it like a thousand years ago). Creating a paranoid thriller is all about using the tools of cinema to create a heightened, anxious mental state, and this is just utterly, woefully unable to do it, instead drifting between hacky jump-scare scenes and languid, clunky backstory which is so rigidly built to service the goofy twist that the movie can barely even pretend to be a straight horror movie. Its problem isn't really that it's a lunkheaded cash-in trading on the good name of a classic; it's that it's just kind of boring.

 

Props for the scene near the end where he has sex with the Angel of Death, though. If the whole thing were that eccentric and melodramatic, we might actually have something here.

The Secret of Sinchanee

The Secret Of Sinchanee (2021)

Dir. and written by Steven Grayhm

Starring Steven Grayhm, Tamara Austin, Nate Boyer

 

I watched THE SECRET OF SINCHANEE as a Hail-Mary style random Tubi pick, based entirely on "hey, looks like there's some kind of monster or a giant bird or something on the poster." I knew nothing about it, had no reason to assume it was good, and much reason to assume it was probably garbage. Inadvisable, certainly; self-destructive, probably. But it is the kind of utter recklessness which is my legal right during Half-O-Ween, that magical time of the year when you can watch stuff you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole even in October.

And despite the consistent level of shocking doggerel that I post about here, there are movies even I wouldn’t bother with, and this would normally be one of them. It belongs to a broad category of about nine hundred million indie horror flicks which were seemingly released direct to the internet without a word starting in the late ‘naughts. They all look reasonably professional --mostly since cameras and sound equipment have evolved so much that it doesn't take a tremendous amount of skill to shoot a movie which looks basically competent-- they all have perfectly professional acting…* and not one of them has anything even the least bit interesting in it. Unlike the raucous, anything-goes zero-budget hokum of yesteryear, they feel respectable and responsible and crisply professional, movies that were made at the behest of career councilors, rather than fevered nightmares forced onto the screen by delusion madmen with delusions of grandeur. All of them, I assume, were cranked out by the self-reinforcing cycle whereby streaming services require content --a volume business wherein it doesn't particularly matter what content-- and consequently there's always money available for a first-time filmmaker looking to pad their resume to crank out a bland, mercenary horror flick about whatever, just to prove they can handle bringing a shoot in on time and under budget, and hopefully use it as a springboard to move on to more interesting things. You sell the result to Netflix or Tubi or somebody who buys 'em in bulk, sight-unseen, then they slap a generic title like THE UNDERNEATH or DEMON HOUSE or something on the cover along with a gloomy-looking picture of a scared lady cowering in an all-grey abandoned house, and presto, chango, content has been created. An algorithm has been fed. And there it is popping up when you search for "horror" on Tubi, adding quantity but no actual value to your lengthy selection process. Unless, of course, you take the plunge and just click anyway, at which point, well, you can't say they didn't warn you.

THE SECRET OF SINCHANEE doesn't exactly buck the stereotype, but it does feel at least a little more committed than I was expecting. Far from a mercenary effort to churn out content, it's almost a vanity project, a showpiece for producer-writer-director-star Steven Grayhm ("Russ -- Party Boy" in WHITE CHICKS), one of those longtime working actors who has had a perfectly successful 20-year career without ever quite hitting the big times. The surprise here is that his big Orson Welles moment reveals him to be a more-than-capable director, producing something with an unflashy but effective atmosphere, generally strong performances, and steady, intentional pace. It has an old-fashioned vibe, a serious-minded movie for adults without being pretentious or insisting it's about anything other than the pleasure of a good spooky story. With its snowy New England milieu (the lived-in, real-world locations help immensely to give it some weight and texture) and stately, slow-burning paranoid vibe, it kind of reminds me of a low-concept X-Files monster-of-the-week episode, which I consider a good thing. Or of the recent, grievously under-valued THE EMPTY MAN.

Unfortunately, the sturdy direction ends up being in service of a script that never takes off. The plot is one of those simultaneously undernourished and overbuilt things which can be summed up in a single sentence, or summed up in five paragraphs, and nothing in-between will quite work. Suffice to say, then, that it’s about this dude Will Stark (Grayhm, solid enough in a role which mostly just requires him to silently look uneasy) who is forced to move into his recently-deceased fathers’ house, and quickly begins to get mind whammy’d by the sinister forces which were also presumably behind a horrific tragedy from his youth. Grayhm approaches this bedrock-simple setup with a bizarre, almost lackadaisical indirectness, however. The movie maintains a holding pattern, circling becoming a possession movie without actually doing it, for a surprisingly long time, and in the process drawing in two detective characters (Tamara Austin [The Walking Dead] and Nate Boyer [former Seattle Seahawk and US Army Green Beret, DEN OF THEIVES]—both doing unusually fine work to make their characters feels worth investing in), who have a complicated, somewhat resentful relationship but still manage to work together while they gradually, um… It’s a little hard to explain from here. There’s like, this whole thing where someone Will used to know as a child has been murdered, and for some reason the detectives think Will is the killer and he acts sort of suspicious even though we know he’s innocent (unless he isn’t and it’s just not very clear?) and it all relates to this cult who worship an ancient American Indian spirit of death, except that actually they’re the descendants of colonial Satan-worshippers, and they want to kill the last members of a magical (and fictional**) Indian tribe called the Sinchanee, who are described as “a peaceful mixed-race tribe discovered to have a unique immunity to diseases brought to the new world” who were “liberated” when “at the turn of the 18th century, French and Native forces attacked an English Settlement at Deerfield, Massachusetts.” For some reason, this resulted in a situation where “for years, locals have reported unusual paranormal phenomena that to this day…. remain unexplained.” And that scans because everyone keeps getting haunted by this evil little ballerina girl, except that I think she’s Will’s sister who was horribly murdered when he was a child? And also there’s an evil mirror? And a haunted piano?

I honestly have no idea what’s up with any of that, and it’s the main problem with the film: it’s well-directed and well-acted, but this story is a complete mess, cluttered up beyond belief with characters it doesn’t need (the two detective characters contribute literally nothing to the plot, are not even present at the climax, and everything in the movie would have worked out exactly the same if they had not been there) and a jumbled backstory it is completely incapable of making use of (despite the four impenetrable paragraphs of explanatory text at the start of the movie, which are then basically reiterated verbatim by another character in the final act, none of the stuff about the Sinchanee being invulnerable to smallpox or an 18th-century French-and-Indian raid or a secret pagan cult actually end up mattering all that much. There is definitely a cult hanging around, I guess, but I was never clear on exactly what their deal was or why they would want to possess this one dude instead of just killing him. And it never ends up meaningfully altering the basic possession narrative at work here anyway. It would pretty much be exactly the same story if he was just haunted by the ghost of his crazy dad or something. Although at least the masks are pretty boss. Might get back into organized religion if they started handing out badass skull-faced masks on major holidays.).

 And even if you can get past all the clutter, it kind of bungles the structure, puttering about, skirting the edges of a possession story and framing it as a mystery for so long you keep assuming there's gotta be some kind of twist -- but there isn't, it's all bedrock-standard possession stuff, it’s just bedrock-standard possession stuff buried in a haphazard pile of all sorts of mostly irrelevant bric-à-brac, none of which adds enough texture to be worth it. For a while it seems kind of interesting to have two parallel stories, one about this nice guy getting haunted, and the other about the detectives who wrongly think he's a killer, but you'd need them to eventually intersect for that to have any kind of payoff, and since that doesn't really happen, it's all for naught. Instead the whole thing just feels fatty and dawdling, floundering around and throwing out characters and worldbuilding without a clear idea of how any of it could be constructively woven together into a satisfying narrative. It sort of feels like it was originally meant to be a TV mini-series --complete with all the meandering subplots and side characters and time-wasting that format entails in this current cultural moment-- all edited down into one way over-burdened movie, but also not edited down quite enough, because the flippin' thing is damn near two hours long. And there's just not enough payoff here, in terms of whammy or in terms of simple imagination, to justify 115 extremely unhurried minutes.

Still, it’s trying, and for a good half of the movie --when it was still unclear that all this was going absolutely nowhere interesting-- I was pretty into it. If it’s a swing and a miss, at least there was a swing, and that's about the best case scenario for a Tubi blind watch, so I'm inclined to be generous.  

And speaking of generosity, the movie ends with text saying it's part of a project to employ veterans and their families? So even if doesn't land as a horror classic, at least it succeeds as a New Deal-esque WPA project. Homies gettin' paid and all that. Maybe that's the real Secret of Sinchanee?

*One of the great mysteries of our time is the utter vanishment from this earth of that great 80's and 90's style bad acting that was full of enthusiastically alien line readings and brisk energetic nonsense. What happened? Where did it go? Did the dour seriousness of the torture-porn years just kill off our capacity for frivolous artifice? Is this the next step in human evolution, that we're just all gloomy and sober all the time?

** Grayhm is descended from the Weskarini Algonquin on his father's side, according to IMDB, so I'll try not to get too weirded out about his making up a new tribe who are vaguely implied to be magic, I guess? Anyway, at least they're the good guys, and the colonialists are the bad guys, or so the dialogue says although none of that ever really plays out in the story itself.

The Night Brings Charlie

The Night Brings Charlie (1990)

Dir. Tom Logan

Written by Bruce Carson

Starring Kerry Knight, Aimie Tenaglia, Joe Fishback, Monica Simmons, David Carr, “and Chuck Whitings as Charlie”

Let us pause, friends, to consider the beauty of simple things. A pint of stout on brisk Fall evening. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE. No matter what changes in this crazy topsy-turvy world, some things will always stay the same; pure, simple, uncomplicated. I mean, hell, I just like saying it: THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE. It’s the kind of phrase you can tinker with the emphasis to create new subtle layers of meaning. The Night... Brings Charlie. The Night Brings... Charlie. The Night Brings Charlie. It’s like a haiku.

Now, if this was just another 80’s slasher, I wouldn’t bother to tell you it was simple and pure and old fashioned as momma’s apple pie, you would just assume it was, and you would be right. But THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE isn’t an 80’s slasher. It’s from fucking 1990. And it’s not like it was shot in 1986 and sat unreleased for years or something. This is 1990 through and through, and you can even tell from the ugly, overlit photography. I don’t know specifically what happened, but sometime between sundown on December 31st, 1989 and sunrise on January 1, 1990, the knowledge of how to light a film so it doesn’t look like the inside of a Wal-Mart vanished collectively from human memory, and remained gone for almost a full 20 years. Even in Italy! It was a dark time for film (or, actually, an overlit time).

This matters a great deal for civilization, and it certainly serves to ensure that THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE stays far away from any possibility of being the kind of primal, amygdala-punishing, adrenaline-soaked crucible that defines the slasher genre at its best. But somehow I don’t think that was really what the makers of THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE were shooting for anyway. I started to form this theory right around the four-minute mark, when Charlie’s first victim is discovered (by the way, Charlie gets his first kill within a minute of the credits ending; The Night may bring Charlie, but he shows up ready to work) and the paper-deliverer who finds the body looks directly into the camera and screams like this:

And so, within the first five minutes of screentime, THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE tells us what it’s all about: being a simple, straightforward goofy slasher with no ambitions whatsoever other than to chop up as many horny teens as possible and maybe have one crazy twist just so you don’t get too comfortable. It knows the score, it knows you know the score, it merely wants to sing the old song one more time with feeling. This is what CHARLIE sets out to do, and this is what it accomplishes, in a sleek hour and fifteen minutes (and considering director Tom Logan's other 1990 movie was the unbearable SHAKMA, these otherwise modest goals seem altogether audacious in context). If you would like that, you would probably like this. 

The details make it pretty funny, and sometimes even intentionally so. There’s a minor Shelley-esque character who jumps out of the bushes to scare his friends literally the day after their mutual friend was beheaded. There’s a merry mixup where a group of girlfriends decide to go spend the night in the killer’s evil abandoned hideout, but then they all call each other at the last minute and flake out, only they can’t get in touch with their one friend but figure what the hell, she’ll figure it out when she gets there alone in the dead of night. And most notably, there’s a sequence where the killer stalks one of those young women who like to shower at night on the ground floor of their home with all the windows (including a window which is actually inside the shower!) wide open. Granted, all that sounds pretty standard and easy to relate to, but the funny part is that she’s drinking a Pepsi from a can in the shower (Pepsi: the official drink of shower murder victims!) and she spills it and the pepsi spirals down the drain like in PSYCHO. It’s pretty amusing to see what at least appears to be a completely earnest Hitchcock homage in THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE, but obviously it would be better if she were drinking chocolate syrup. If you think that would strain credulity, you obviously drink a lot more Pepsi in the shower than I do.

As you can tell from the title, there’s not really a lot of doubt as who the perpetrator is; we know that it’s a heavily-built guy wearing overalls and a burlap sack over his head with goggles, who kills people with tree pruning tools. Coincidentally, there happens to be this guy around town who works as a tree pruner, and he’s a heavily-built fellow who wears overalls and a burlap sack over his head with goggles on the job, which would not be especially noteworthy except that due to a hideous disfigurement (a “terrible chainsaw accident” is mentioned) he wears the same get-up off the clock as well. And he arrived in town right about the same time as the murders started. Also, his name is Charlie, and the name of the movie, which I never miss an opportunity to restate, is THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE. So I’m thinking this is probably the guy. The night is when he kills people, but now that I think about it, he’s also around during the day, and he dresses exactly the same. During the day, though, he’s able to direct his violent, psychotic rage towards plantlife, so I guess the title works.

Charlie’s not exactly an instant icon as a killer, but his vigorous approach (he likes to remove his victims’ heads as souvenirs) and distinctive headgear ensure he has what it takes to get the job done. But even the most iconic killer is nothing without some victims, so THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE brings us Jenny Parker (Aimee Tenaglia [here spelled “Aimie” for some reason] ASYLUM OF TERROR), a rebellious young teenager who just wants to party so goddam much that even the threat of a rampaging serial killer who just decapitated one of her friends not two minutes after they parted company can keep her from immediately scheduling a slumber party. This comes as something of an unhappy turn of events for her straight-laced sister (Monica Simmons, [no other credits] putting in some commendable effort at keeping the “spoilsport goody-two-shoes” sister grounded enough to be tolerable) and her dad (Joe Fishback, the as-near-as-I-can-tell-never-released-on-video LANI-LOA) who happens to be the town coroner. Jenny, who, in point of fact, does not seem very much to want to remain alive, will ultimately walk alone to an abandoned barn in the dead of night with a serial killer on the loose, and it will be up to her sister to save her.

That’s the skeleton of our story, but mostly THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE is content to just fuck around and introduce a string of colorful random characters for Charlie to kill off, which suits me just fine. Charlie claims his first victim almost immediately, and his next by minute 15, so things are going pretty well. But Charlie’s enthusiasm for the job seems likely to prove his undoing, because he’s not exactly keeping a low profile, and cuts a pretty identifiable figure, even attracting the attention of history’s dumbest witness:

COP: “So you saw nothing else?”

WITNESS: (frustrated) “How many times do I have to say it…” (suddenly, he stops and looks thoughtful). “Wait a minute… I did see… someone was watching from behind a bush... I think he was wearing a mask…. His face was covered, and he was kinda creepy. Like evil, ya know?”

Yeah, you know what son, that seems like it might have been worth mentioning.

The acting in this is uniformly horrible, but I do sort of like Joe Fishback's schlubby, grouchy Mr. Parker. He's a very New York character actor, and makes for a funny fit with the sunny, chipper LA suburbs. 

Anyway, the cops are onto Charlie so quick that we as filmgoers immediately suspect something is up. And, SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER that brings us to the one real twist here, which I am about to spoil. See, it seems like everything with Charlie is a little too cut and dry, and by minute 42, something unexpected has happened: the cops actually put two and two together and arrested Charlie. Jenny’s Dad, Mr. Parker, is hauled in to try and get a confession out of Charlie, who it turns out is an old war buddy who has returned to town on his invitation. When he comes out of the interrogation room, he hands the cops a long confession which Charlie has related to him. Well, that wraps everything up in a neat little package… [starts to walk away, then thoughtfully turns around] just one more thing:

Everyone knows Charlie can’t talk after his face got chainsawed off, you moron!

Yes, it seems that it is, in fact, harmless old Mr. Parker who has been dressing like Charlie and offing local teens, and he invited his old comrade to come back to town as a cover, with the intent of framing him. For a psycho serial killer who constructed an elaborate plan to frame his disabled fellow brother-in-arms, he turns out to be a real nice guy about it, confessing to everything and explaining that he’s just glad the madness is over. He doesn’t even get mad when the police investigator (Kerry Knight, KING’S RANSOM) starts to smugly explain how he figured out the ruse as though it took the world’s greatest detective to find the hole in the claim that a mute guy confessed to the whole thing (or maybe he’s just embarrassed that he fucked this plan up so badly in the most obvious way possible right at the last minute).

Anyway, once Mr. Parker’s got this big secret off his chest, everybody’s real friendly about it, they don’t even handcuff him or make him take off his Charlie disguise, they just have him sit in the police station waiting room while they file the necessary paperwork. But something’s not adding up here, because the movie’s still got 25 minutes to go. So as the manipulative serial murderer and the detective who could hardly fail to catch him sit chatting amiably at the police desk, Parker offhandedly mentions that he’s just glad Charlie is off the streets. The cop chides him mildly for pointing the finger at an innocent man who just happens to look and act exactly like a serial killer in every way. But what’s this? “Charlie, innocent?” Parker huffs, “hardly!” “I thought you knew the whole story! Don’t you understand? Charlie’s like me! Only worse!” Sure, I killed two people, but the real unstoppable killing machine is still out there!

The cop says nothing and looks down shamefacedly. Oh, what’s that you glorified traffic cop, you just let the guy who was obviously a serial killer walk free, with a sincere apology for wasting his time? Not feeling so much like Columbo now, are we?

Correctly realizing that the cops in this town couldn’t find a serial killer if he literally wore a mask and goggles around every day in broad daylight, Parker escapes custody (basically just by standing up and walking back outside, so now this police department has just lost two serial killers in one night. Hopefully sheriff isn’t an elected position in this town!) and hunts down Charlie at his secret barn hideout for a final showdown. It's weird that this Machiavellian serial killer gets to be the hero at the end, but since Fishback is far and away the most entertaining actor in the movie, I'm OK with it. Oh, and he’s also still dressed as Charlie, so it’s pretty funny when the two Charlies finally have to duke it out. 

END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER

Anyway, that’s the single, solitary unexpected thing that happens in the entirety of THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE, but that’s OK. I like that one little spot of weirdness for flavor, and I like that the rest of it is just one Charlie or another butchering random people with various garden tools. It particularly rises to the occasion for the climax, when a gang of never-before-seen bikers make the mistake of following Charlie back to his hideout (yes, I believe the filmmakers here might have seen FRIDAY THE 13th PART III), and he finally has cause to bring out that chainsaw you already assumed he had stashed somewhere. His lair is a barn, but for some reason the inside is bathed in eerie red light. I don’t know why that would be (maybe he’s developing film in there?) but it’s the movie’s only attempt at atmosphere, and it gives the finale a little extra punch. Charlie’s all about the little bit of extra punch. I’m not going to sit here and claim that THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE is good, or scary, or even baseline competent; in many ways, it’s uglier and cheaper and the acting is worse than the already pretty bottom-of-the-barrel BLOOD FRENZY. But it’s definitely trying harder to entertain, and that counts for a lot around these parts.

Also I think it’s commendable that they have a character named Charlie who went crazy in Vietnam and is usually found up on ladders trimming trees, and they never make a “Charlie’s in the trees!” joke. I mean, it’s not something I’d be able to resist.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	None, oddly.
TITLE ACCURACY	Oh, 100%
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None yet, but Charlie absolutely deserves a couple of hacky DTV sequels or even a gritty reimagining by Rob Zombie.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Absolutely not.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None.
NUDITY?	Yes
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	Just in the usual slasher sense.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None.
VOYEURISM?	Yes, Charlie watches a woman shower and we get his POV. Oddly, I’m not 100% sure he actually kills her.
MORAL OF THE STORY	This town needs

Winterbeast

Winterbeast (released in 1992)

Dir and Written (and story by?) Christopher Thies

Starring Tim R. Morgan, Mike Magri, Charles Majka, Bob Harlow

            Sometime in 1986, a guy named Christopher Thies (no other credits) got together with some people, presumably his friends, and started to make a horror movie. Then they stopped. At some point in 1989, they possibly resumed for a brief period, and then they stopped again. And then years passed. And then in 1992, somebody else got ahold of the footage they’d shot and then released it like it was a real movie, under the title WINTERBEAST for what I’m sure are reasons which made perfect sense at the time.

            Well, there’s not a lot of Winter in WINTERBEAST, but at least the “beast” part checks out, because the first thing we see is some guy who appears to be a security guard but we’ll later find out is a park ranger, but we’ll also later find out this is a dream, so it’s possible that he’s actually a park ranger dreaming that he’s a security guard. Anyway, my point is, this guy’s a total beast. Check out that fly mustache:

(although sometimes, for example when the actor has clearly shaved it off in-between filming days, it looks more like this:)

             Anyhoo, either way, Beastiness confirmed. This is Ranger Bill Whitman (Tim R. Morton, WINTERBEAST), clearly the director’s most handsome friend, or at least the most handsome friend who was available weekends in both 1986 and 1989. But I suppose the title might also refer to the thing which is clearly right in front of him, but he doesn’t immediately see because he’s looking at another fellow who’s seated slightly to the right. Once he looks over, the thing he sees looks like this:

            I don’t know if that’s a beast or what, but it’s sure the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen less than 2 minutes into a horror movie. It wiggles around in its stop-motion glory for a few seconds, and then the other guy (possibly David Majka [whose real name, IMDB claims, is “David Mica” even though he has no other credits], WINTERBEAST) rips some skin off the gushing wound in his belly, and then Whitman screams, and... oh! It was just a dream, he wakes up in an undefined white space, clearly several years older. But just when you thought maybe WINTERBEAST was just fucking around, before this mustache guy can sit up and have a cup of coffee and consider the symbolic implications of this strange vision, or even reveal where he is or who he is or speak a single line of dialogue, whammo, out of the blue, there’s a little under five seconds of footage of some other guy (possibly also David “Mica” Majka?) somewhere else, with some kind of crazy muppet ripping its way out of his torso. This does not appear to be a dream, but it’s also not clear what it is or when it happened. If mustache guy is asleep, it’s probably nighttime, but the muppet-ripping is clearly a day scene. And we cut immediately from that day scene to another night scene, so it’s certainly not part of the same dream, and it’s also certainly not happening simultaneously, but that’s about all I can tell you, or will ever be able to tell you, about what the fuck is happening here.

            I have a theory, however, that the unfortunate victim of the fatal muppeting may be a man named, if the credits are to be believed, “Slappy Tello.” The reason I believe this is that in the next scene, the first to take place in any kind of clearly defined contemporary reality, we find forest Rangers Whitman and Stillman (Mike Magri, WINTERBEAST, here wearing Witness Protection sunglasses in every scene, even indoors at night) discussing a character named “Tello,” who will be referenced frequently and who appears in the credits but who will never definitively be introduced to the audience, making it likely --if far from certain-- that at least one of the two deaths we see in the first three minutes is the explanation for his disappearance.

            Or maybe not, because Ranger Bradford (Lissa Breer, WINTERBEAST), who was apparently with “Tello” when he “disappeared,” says nothing happened (despite the fact that she’s covered in blood), and that seems to satisfy Ranger Whitman’s curiosity (Ranger Stillman, for his part, seems content to peruse the ranger station’s surprisingly extensive collection of 1950’s era pornography through his ever-present cool guy shades). Content that they’ve done everything possible (nothing), and despite the fact that a man is apparently missing and there is a clearly traumatized victim of some kind of physical violence sitting in their office, Whitman and Stillman settle in for a night of small talk. Poorly-recorded community theater actors (at best) stepping on each others’ lines while sitting in underlit rooms framed in some hellish middle ground between a medium and long shot is, I admit, a pretty big part of WINTERBEAST. But it’s also kind of what you expect in an independent no-budget “American Regional Horror film” (as we now euphemistically refer to such things; see SATAN’S BLADE, for example). Some people find this sort of thing charming; most people who are not violent masochists find it absolutely stultifying. Either way, it’s par for the course. What WINTERBEAST has already done to shatter our expectations, though, is to throw two crazy gory monster scenes at us within the first minute that photographed images appear on-screen.* This establishes WINTERBEAST’s unique MO: endless scenes of mumbling nonactors stiffly reciting indecipherable nonsense, punctuated with almost completely random sequences where a cool stop-motion monster suddenly appears and eats someone we’ve never seen before and who is probably not ever going to be mentioned again.

For example, in-between two scenes of excruciating mumbled nonacting, suddenly we see a woman in an unidentified cabin (not specifically credited, which seems wrong considering this nice young lady was willing to take her top off for WINTERBEAST) take her top off and stand awkwardly in the middle of the room, like you do. Then, without warning, some kind of god damned crazy 20-foot tall anthropomorphized tree lumbers out of the woods in stop motion. She looks out her window and screams, then the damned thing reaches into what is clearly not the same cabin and pulls out an adorable fabric dolly which very clearly has its shirt on, smashes it against the wall, and splits. Scene over! Cut back to grueling chit-chat. We will never know who this woman was, we will never see the tree again, and none of this will ever be explicitly mentioned. As far as we know, this may be a completely unrelated event which just coincidentally happened to involve a giant stop-motion monster, and this is just a NASHVILLE-style series of vaguely interrelated vignettes about small-town life in Winterbeastville. Something like this happens once every 10 minutes or so of this 76-minute movie, so you’ve always got a new weird monster to look forward to, even if you’ve got to slog through a punishing volume of harrowingly dull dialogue scenes to get to them.

            This seems a completely reasonable trade-off to me, but it does make describing the plot an exercise in total futility; suffice to say, Whitman gradually becomes concerned that something unsafe is happening without ever specifically coming to the conclusion that the danger is related to stop-motion monsters, and his solution to this little problem is the classic JAWS approach: close the beach. Or in this case, shut down the building alternately called “Wild Goose Lodge” or “Wild Goose Lodges,” which he inscrutably seems to think is the source of the problem, or at least that shutting it down will somehow mitigate the danger. This canny strategy is understandably greeted with a sustained level of astonished fury from “Wild Goose Lodge(s)” owner and operator, Mr. Sheldon (Bob Harlow, in what is, to the indescribable detriment of mankind, his only known film role).

            Now we need to pause for a moment and talk about Mr. Sheldon. In a one-star review on IMDB user “vertigoboy1981” complains, “the villain is a gay Jewish guy,” two assertions for which I see no textual evidence. His other complaints, “It makes no sense… they all wear flannels, the acting is so bad, there is no plot,” all check out, so I have no choice to assume he’s writing in good faith from personal experience, but at least as far as the dialogue is concerned, Sheldon is neither gay nor Jewish. But I understand his confusion, and his blind, groping search for adjectives which convey what this guy’s deal is, because he’s quite a character. Let’s have a look at what we’re dealing with here:

          

            I have absolutely no idea how to categorize someone like Mr. Sheldon, but between his wild wardrobe, his enthusiastically high-camp line readings and his general appearance of being an aged and wizened Alfred E. Neuman, I wholeheartedly support whatever it is you would call whatever it is he’s doing. He’s the solitary source of human entertainment here, and so we’re totally on his side even as it becomes increasingly clear that he’s not just a greedy capitalist objecting to an overzealous Park Ranger shutting down his livelihood on vague suspicion that there might be monsters in the woods or something, he’s definitely up to no good. Our suspicions about his possible villainy stem from a sequence wherein Sheldon, dressed in some sort of remarkable plaid suit jacket, procures the recently deceased body of Ranger Bradford, suspends it with wires into the hostess stand at his lodge (?), assembles a group of never-before seen mummified corpses, and then proceeds to put on a record and sing the entirety of a creepy children’s diddy entitled Oh Dear! What Can The Matter Be? Just in case we had any lingering doubts about this concerning but not necessarily damning behavior, he then puts on a creepy clown mask.

So, definitely he’s part of the problem and not the solution here. When Whitman and his spectacularly uncharismatic friend Charlie who I’ve put off mentioning as long as possible considering he’s basically the co-lead here (Charles Majka, WINTERBEAST**) confront him in the middle of this production, he admits that it is his intention to bring demons “through the gate” (there has been no talk of a “gate” before, and there will be none after). Whitman very reasonably asks, “but why? Why would you want to do it?” By way of explanation, Harlow flashes back to a slightly extended sequence of that guy from the beginning who has the muppet pop out of him. Then he laughs and catches on fire and his face explodes. I’m on record as being generally against bringing demons through gates, but I gotta admit I like this guy’s style.

            Anyway, it seems like this is going to solve the problem, whatever it was. Whitman and Charlie seem to think so, because in the very next scene after they’ve left the site of a daemonical musical number / head burning, they have the following conversation over the phone:

            CHARLIE (picking up the phone): “Perkins’ general store.” [seems weird he would just go back to his day job the next morning after an experience like that, but Charlie is such a profoundly dull character that I must admit it’s plausible behavior for him]

            WHITMAN: “Charlie, this is Bill.”

            CHARLIE: “Hey what’s up? How’s business up at the lodge?”

            WHITMAN: “It’s a lot slower today with the weekend over. What are you doing?”

A rare frame with no visible plaid, though a guy wearing plaid just left. By the way, keep an eye out for that mounted deer head that always seems to be looking right at the audience; he'll turn up in multiple locations and is very possibly the evil mastermind behind all the horror.

            This seems a surprisingly mild reaction to what they’ve just seen.*** At first you figure hey, I guess they know what they’re doing. But they definitely don’t, because almost immediately they’re confronted by some kind of indescribable pissed-off four-armed skeleton/art piece that they describe as a “totem pole.” Stillman (largely absent from most of the film after making a strong impression early on) tries to chop it down, but it comes to life and he runs away, and nobody ever mentions it again. OK, that’s definitely less than ideal, but maybe it was an isolated incident. But then a gigantic lizard and a colossal chicken and so on show up to rampage around town, and we’re forced to admit that whatever it was with Sheldon melting didn’t turn out to be as definitive a solution as our heroes seemed to assume. You gotta take these things seriously, fellas.

In the end, after Stillman has his head bitten off by an iguana the size of a high-rise and half the town has been smashed, Whitman heads off into the woods to do... whatever is is he’s trying to do. He doesn’t offer a lot of explanation as to what he’s trying to accomplish. Whatever his plan was, though, it either goes perfectly or it doesn’t, because he’s attacked by a guy on stilts with a devil mask, who might well be the Winterbeast for all I know. Whitman is a guy who couldn’t even get a small-time hotel operator to close early after half a dozen people vanished, so it really doesn’t seem like he’s got much of a chance against this ancient Indian demon or whatever it is, but then just as things seem hopeless, that plaid-coated slab of pasty glucose Charlie shows up, and someone has the idea to shoot a flare gun at an ancient Indian mask that someone gave Charlie, apparently anticipating exactly this eventuality, and that causes the horn guy to have his face catch on fire and explode.

That didn’t work with Sheldon, but I guess it works here, because that’s the end of the movie. The two friends stagger to their feet, Whitman says, “next time, you hunt for bears!” which causes both of them to laugh uproariously, and off they go on their merry way, presumably forgetting that there’s still a giant four armed skeleton, a tree monster, a pissed-off ET, a colossal turkey, some kind of three-eyed chicken, a straight-up kaiju house-crushing lizard, a murderous zombie, and probably like five more weird stop motion things I have already forgotten still out there wreaking havoc on the town. But the movie has now reached the technical definition of feature length, and so sorting all that out will have to wait til the sequel.

            Objectively, WINTERBEAST is one of the most magnificently incompetent movies I have ever seen, and that’s really saying something. But I, for one, am not able to resist being won over by something this outlandish, especially when it sports such a menagerie of Ray Harryhausen delights, obviously lovingly crafted by… someone (the credits are awful short on details, listing no “Special Effects” credit). A typically unsourced bit of IMDB trivia claims “The totem pole monster and the skeleton head that rips out of a man's stomach are both props taken from the Dokken music video 'Burning like a Flame,'” which I can report, after suffering through nearly five minutes of Dokken, does appear to be plausible (see 3:05-3:17). But if that’s true they’ve been significantly redesigned for their big showcase here; It would be easy to just repurpose some old Dokken props as-is and call it a day, but WINTERBEAST is not gonna settle for that shit. Whatever WINTERBEAST's actual talents are, it never lacks in ambition. It knows, I think, that it’s not really going to be able to deliver on the drama, but that just inspires it to really go all-out on the whammy. To shoot for the absolute most possible weird monsters, and also quite possibly the highest volume of plaid by fabric yardage in film history. Just like mean old Mr. Sheldon, it is not good, or even sane, in the traditional sense, but dammit, I have to respect it.

* The first minute and a half of runtime are just the credits over a black background.

** Majka shares a last name with the actor credited as David Majka, but who’s real name is David Mica, according to IMDB. Don’t know what to make of that. But I do know that this Majka is the only cast member with any other IMDB credits of any kind: apparently he appeared (uncredited) in 2017’s Jack Black vehicle THE POLKA KING, ending a 25-year absence from the big screen.

***  I also don’t understand why Whitman appears to be working at the lodge now, because A) I thought he was a Park Ranger and B) didn’t he want the lodge closed? But that’s pretty low on Maslow’s hierarchy of movie nonsense. If I was willing to accept that this movie takes place in a universe where you can buy a plaid suit jacket, I can buy that Whitman has a second job as a hotel clerk.

This thing's in there, and I didn't even mention it and it's not even the best giant chicken in the movie. Listen, I think you should watch this.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	THE EVIL DEAD meets NORTHERN EXPOSURE.
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a “Winterbeast” in the credits, but I sure couldn’t tell you which one it is, or why one beast is more important than the others.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None yet, but I still have hope.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Demons/ Stop-motion monsters
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Not even a C-lister in here.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None.
NUDITY?	Yes
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Many monsters attack, but no animals
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	A zombie shows up for one scene and is never seen again
POSSESSION?	???
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None, though the implication that Sheldon is doing some kind of demon summoning.
MADNESS?	No, unless you consider wearing a clown mask and singing children’s songs to a group of dessicated corpses somehow psychologically unhealthy.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	It kinda seems like the thing at the end is transforming into something, but who knows.
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Stillman: "This backwoods bric-a-brac is nowhere in my book."