The Ritual (2017)

The Ritual (2017)

Dir. David Bruckner

Written by Joe Barton, based on the book by Adam Nevill

Starring Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali, Robert James-Collier, Sam Troughton

            THE SIGNAL is a 2014 American science fiction thriller directed by William Euban and starring Brenton Thwaites and Laurence Fish… no wait, that’s not it, what I meant to say is THE SIGNAL is a 1998 road-trip dramedy about life on an American Indian reservation based on the stories of Sherman Alexi… wait, no, that’s, that’s SMOKE SIGNALS. What I’m actually thinking about is 2007’s horror-anthology THE SIGNAL, which found rookie directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry taking turns directing vignettes centering on the aftermath of a mysterious television signal which drives most of the population insane. If you are confused, I don’t blame you. This is why you give your movies original names, people.

            Anyway, THE SIGNAL (2007) was one of the most intense, effective modern horror movies I had seen in a good long time back when it came out, and I was really jazzed to see what each of the three directors would follow it up with. But it turned out to be a long wait. Gentry did a series of MTV movies called My Super Sweet Psycho 16 which sounded terrible and I never bothered with, Bush did some movie called THE RECONSTRUCTION OF WILLIAM ZERO in 2014 which I’m just now learning about as I’m writing this, and the dopey James Franco ghost/heist mash-up THE VAULT in 2017. And Bruckner, who did the obvious standout vignette in THE SIGNAL, did… almost nothing. A couple short films and anthology segments, but so little of note that I ended up forgetting all about him. And then, without any hype or anything, whammo, suddenly THE RITUAL is on Netflix.

            THE RITUAL is a 1977 survival/horror flick starring Hal Holbrook and... wait no, actually I mean THE RITUAL is a 2002 Tales From The Crypt movie with Jennifer Grey and Craig Sheffe… no no, scratch that, it’s a 2002 Filipino thriller, or.. Wait, wait, actually it’s a surrealistic 2015 Russian-German co-production, or… goddamn it, this is why you give your movies original names, people! There are well over 100 movies and TV shows with that name or a similar derivation of it listed on IMDB. And I bet none of those other ones ends with (mild spoiler?) a Scandinavian demigod that lives in a moose’s face (more on that later). I refuse to believe the makers of this movie thought the fact that a ritual happens was the most noteworthy thing here.

            (There were two movies named SOLO in 2018 alone. The cheap irony alone should have been enough to scare one of them off).

            Anyway, 2017’s THE RITUAL is Bruckner’s first-ever full-length directorial gig, and if it lacks the breathless ferocity of his segment in THE SIGNAL, it’s still an unusually strong and vivid little exercise, sticking comfortably to tried-and-true horror formula but providing enough texture and imagination to make it distinct. Considering Netflix’s extraordinary, almost unbelievable track record of taking exciting directors and facilitating turgid disappointments (Kim Jee-Woon, Duncan Jones, Jeremy Saulnier, Jonas Åkerlund, Martin Zandvliet, Adam Wingard and David Mackenzie are all among its victims), just having this come out pretty good seems almost like a miracle.

            The premise is simple enough: four old friends get together for a hiking trip in Sweden in the wake of the death of a fifth friend, who was fatally beaten during a random robbery while one of them (Luke, played by Rafe Spall, ANONYMOUS) watched helplessly (if it had been Steven Seagal in there, this movie would have gone in a very different direction). That’s already a pretty grim reason for a get-together, and the austere Swedish wilderness ain’t exactly lightening the mood, so there’s some tension brewing not very deep below the surface. Petulant, whiny loudmouth Dom (Sam Troughton AVP: ALIEN VS. PREDATOR) openly blames Luke for the tragedy, and while Phil (Arsher Ali, FOUR LIONS) and Hutch (Robert James-Collier, Downton Abby) seem to have more ambiguous feelings, it’s not exactly a cheery woodland jaunt even before they find a gutted elk hanging from a tree and a bunch of BLAIR WITCH style hanging totems.

For quite a long time, that’s what the movie offers: an emotionally fraught journey with four grieving men who aren’t in the habit of expressing themselves very openly, wandering through a strange, nebulously threatening wilderness. But it gradually, almost imperceptibly, migrates from drama to survival thriller to horror movie with a remarkable steady seamlessness, mostly through a deft control of tone and a mercilessly steady escalation of new and more explicit perils. This task is aided immeasurably by the excellent atmospheric photography of cinematographer Andrew Shulkind (THE VAULT), which does a phenomenal job of capturing exactly what’s so irresistibly scary about the woods at night, and also, a few vitally important times, what’s so comfortingly beautiful about nature during the day.

This is not a thing to be overlooked; many horror movies are set in the woods, but very, very few ever seem to have a good sense of how to shoot nature in a authentic way. Everything that something like IT’S IN THE BLOOD misses about the experience of being alone in a forest is vividly present here, especially in the night scenes, where the small circle of illuminated vertical tree trunks vanishing into an endless black abyss manages to feel both claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time. It ignites something very primal in the brain, a sense of being alone and helpless and vulnerable, surrounded by inchoate malevolence lurking just beyond perception. The effect is cumulative, and the longer the movie lingers, the more it builds a powerful feeling of helpless isolation, a sense of ancient, timeless horror hovering just on the outskirts of modernity. And the safety of the familiar, predictable modern world is never excessively remote –the hikers, of course, are only a few days’ trek from civilization!—but it is always hopelessly out of reach. You get the feeling that just over a few hills, there are trendy bars and shiny impersonal office buildings, but they might as well be a world away. It adds a hint of cruel irony to the usual feelings of backwoods helplessness; they’re so close to comforting society, but it helps them not at all.

            That’s important, because for most of the film, the vibe is the real star. The actors are uniformly capable, but like HEREDITARY --and, let’s be honest, a lot of these serious, slow-burn modern horror movies-- quite a bit of time is spent on character drama which doesn’t really link up, narratively, to what ends up happening. It’s a mildly interesting (if somewhat clichéd) detail that our protagonists are dealing with the death of their friend and processing the guilt and blame about Luke’s role in it, but for how much of the movie is devoted to this plot, it doesn’t turn out to really be important at all. You could replace it with basically any standard horror movie backstory and the plot here wouldn't change in any meaningful way. The best of these modern, drama-savvy horror movies, like THE BABADOOK or THE CANAL, bridge that gap, and make the character drama an intrinsic part of the movie’s central conflict. Others, like THE INVITATION or HEREDITARY, spend a lot of time with character details which seem to run parallel to their actual point. They’re not worthless, exactly, since they make their characters richer and more interesting to watch, but they are extraneous, which, to my mind, inevitably makes the whole weaker than it could be.

In the movie’s defense, the standard flashbacks to a traumatic event are handled with slightly more imagination than usual; rather than just flashing back to footage from the opening, the haunted Luke sees his trauma physically manifest in the reality around him. So every so often he’ll turn around and there will be a couple shelves of liquor and a line of fluorescent lights sitting there in the middle of the woods. It’s a pretty neat image, and I approve. The concept may not be even remotely fresh (it’s about as standard as these things come… looking at you, DARK WAS THE NIGHT), but at least the execution is. And the movie deserves a little respect for showing a distinctly multicultural England; a couple characters are not what you would think of when you imagine “Anglo-saxon” Brits, and it goes entirely uncommented upon. It’s no cheap morality lesson, just a clear-eyed view of the modern, diverse world. Bravo. Still, for how much time gets wasted on the interpersonal drama, I’m not convinced that any of it is very insightful or well-written. In fact, the writing (by Joe Barton [iBOY] based on the novel by Adam Nevill) actually feels pretty clunky from time to time, though the actors do a splendid job of selling it naturally.

But never mind that, because the atmosphere is more than sufficient to run defense for the movie’s dithering first act (at 94 minutes it's not egregiously lengthy, but would certainly not suffer from a bit of tightening up in the first half), and well before its sense of primal doom has lost its punch the movie shifts abruptly into one of the best goddam creature features I’ve seen in years, and any little missteps from before are immediately and wholly forgiven. The creature itself is a magnificent design, utterly unique, instinctively captivating, and thoroughly disquieting. There’s enough ungulate in there to comfortably guarantee Larry Fessenden a hard-on, but it’s not quite any one thing. Its appearance and nature are revealed gradually, but by the end you get a good long look, and you’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s a bit of a hodge-podge, but it deftly and decisively avoids the modern curse of overcomplicated, over-designed visual gibberish, instead cutting a distinct and elegantly comprehensible figure (heightened by the film’s clever decision to reveal it first in silhouette). It’s this huge thing, but there’s like, something inside it, something kind of human, that you can never quite make out. A god, I guess. A Son of Loki, they say? Tom Hiddleston, you ol’ dog.

The monster is so great that it almost doesn’t matter about anything else, but it’s a nice bonus that the story works, too. Not that it’s some sweeping literary marvel or anything --it’s cliché at best, and possibly just badly written-- but that doesn’t end up mattering one iota, and in fact its sturdy simplicity helps give it a mythic, timeless quality that suits the material splendidly. It’s the perfect example of basic material executed beautifully; it’s certainly easy to imagine a version of the exact same story which feels like the most imaginatively barren slog possible,* but thanks to Bruckner’s impeccable direction, that’s categorically not the case here. The story may be simple, but the telling squeezes it for all the tension it’s worth, tightening the vice so subtly that you can’t quite put your finger on the point where things shift from inconvenient to dire; things seem bad but manageable, then worse but manageable, and then somehow everything goes to hell without anyone quite realizing what has happened.

If you haven't seen the movie, I don't want to ruin it for you, so no picture of the critter in question.

 And while all the drama may not amount to much, it does humanize the character and make them relatable. In fact, the movie reminds me of what Elil Roth once inexplicably claimed** about gialli; these characters really do make decisions that anyone might make. They’re not idiots, they don’t have some hubristical comeuppance, they just make a few bad calls which could just as easily have turned out fine, and then they’re fucked. Given that, there is a bit of that old fatalism here (in fact, it’s arguably something of an “Evil Town” story, with our characters invisibly being herded towards their own doom), but at least they’re active, doing the best they can, and in the end (spoilers) our surviving buddy is finally rewarded for it. I’m usually of the philosophy that unlikely “happy endings” are the coward’s way out, but I make an exception for horror movie protagonists who’ve really been run through the gauntlet. Let’s give this poor guy one win at the end, huh? He earned it.

All this adds up to one inescapable conclusion: THE RITUAL is a truly top-notch lost-in-the-scary-woods journey with a real humdinger of a destination, and no amount of flabby character development can take that away from it. Whatever reservations I have about the way they want to take me there, I’m 100% on board for the ride. With its sturdy construction, wild climax, and iconic creature, I think this is a rare horror flick which might just earn a cult following over time...

 ...If only it had a name anyone would be able to remember two weeks from now. Oh well, at least it’s guaranteed a long, venerable existence of being called “you know, that one where there’s a Swedish guy who lives in a moose’s head. I think it’s called THE RITE?”

* In fact, the movie almost lost every bit of goodwill it had gained from me when I read that they cut the part from the book where our heroes are tormented by the members of a satanic black metal band called “Blood Frenzy.” What the fuck were you thinking, taking something like that out? That’s so metal just reading it may have given me lead poisoning! You’re damn lucky I liked your monster, fellas. Damn lucky.

* “[In gialli] The girls are always going on some trip somewhere and they're all very smart. They all make decisions the audience would make.” -- Eli Roth, in one of the most preposterously indefensible statements ever made on a public platform by anyone other than Donald Trump.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	They Should Have Gone To Vegas. Oh well, save it for the sequel?
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a ritual, but wouldn’t HELLMOOSE been a little more descriptive?
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, actually, from the 2011 novel by Adam Nevill (to be fair to the movie, the book is also titled “The Ritual”)
SEQUEL?	None yet, but it just came out last year (it had a festival release date in 2017, but premiered on Netflix in 2018). I’d be down for more.
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	UK production, but shot in Romania
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Creature feature, Evil Cult, “Evil Town,”
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	If you wanna count this thing as an animal, sure.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Yes
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	If your friend is ever bludgeoned to death in front of you, do not, I repeat, NOT give into the urge to go sadness-hiking in a grim Scandinavian forest with your three most emotionally repressed friends.

The Signal

The Signal (2007)

Dir. and written by Jacob Bruckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry

Starring Anessa Ramsey, Sahr Ngoujah, A. J. Bowen, Justin Welborn

A signal which drives people insane is transmitted through a TV broadcast, plunging the world into chaos in this episodic apocalypse. That’s a good premise, and directors Bruckner (the first section of V/H/S) Bush (uh...THE SIGNAL) and Gentry (something called LAST GOODBYE which apparently has Faye Dunnaway and David Carradine in it) up the ante by breaking the story of what happens to the various affected characters into three sections, each with a different director and a different tone.

It’s a fun concept, but it’s thankfully not too pronounced, because the basic idea here is fun enough to work on it’s own without some anthology gimmick to muddy the waters. Basically, Mya (Anessa Ramsey) returns from a tryst with her secret lover Ben (Justin Welborn) to find that the world has seemingly gone insane. People are acting violent and crazy, including (especially) her asshole husband Lewis (A. J. Bowen, YOU’RE NEXT, HOUSE OF THE DEVIL). People start getting brutally murdered pretty much right away. While this is not very faithful to the beloved Shel Silverstein poem “If the World was Crazy,” it does create some pretty good horror moments. But things get interesting because remember, only people who saw the broadcast are crazy, so there are also sane people running around who merely seem crazy because the world has turned upside-down. Is the guy with the dozens of knives duct-taped to a baseball bat crazy, or is this a perfectly sane reaction to a crazy world? It’s a fun dynamic, especially when you add the extra Catch-22 that if you have gone crazy, you’re not gonna know it. That guy battering someone to death with a fire extinguisher? It makes perfect sense to him, and he can calmly explain to you why the demons had to be driven out with a force of healing, and get annoyed that you don’t find that an acceptable explanation.

Idiot box.

The first part (directed by Bruckner) is the most horror-driven, as it presents us with Mya’s perspective, stumbling upon the bloodbath of psychos and trying to figure out what to do. It’s strong enough on it’s own that it’s almost a shame that the whole movie isn’t like it; there’s a powerful sense of panic and chaos on a wide scale, even though the movie’s scope is quite limited when you stop to think about it. It’s one of the best depictions of the apocalypse I’ve seen, but the movie has other tricks up it’s sleeve, and that’s OK too. The second part (directed by Gentry) shifts to the perspective of jilted husband Lewis, clearly afflicted by “the crazy” but successfully convincing other afflicted people that both he and they are sane. While the film began with a fairly straightforward depiction, this section skews surreal, a prickly but darkly hilarious comedy of violent non-sequiturs, as the various insane people bounce off each other and try, futilely, to figure out what’s going on and what to do. Finally, the last section --and probably the least memorable, though perfectly competent--(directed by Bush) deals with Ben’s efforts to find the missing Mya. Since there’s no one else around, we can’t be sure if he’s afflicted or not, and the film offers some obligatory but enjoyable ambiguous metaphysical questions on it’s way to a final showdown.

Baseball is way more intense in the apocalypse.

The acting is pretty great across the board, way better than you can usually expect from something like this, but the movie’s secret weapon is A. J. Bowen as Lewis. I usually see the guy in nerdy loser roles, for example in YOU’RE NEXT, but he’s amazingly intimidating here, as a guy who was always an asshole but who now doesn’t have any pesky sanity to stand in the way of his more destructive side. Even so, as the segment told from his perspective makes clear, being a crazy killer isn’t easy. It’s a very complicated process of taking in some basic elements of reality and letting them percolate through a few layers of crazy before dripping out as a weird parody of rational thought. Since you don’t get to hear Lewis’ inner dialogue, you can only guess at whatever context must be in his head to have all this make sense. It’s a mordantly funny and deeply scary depiction of mental illness, and Bowen nails it.

Crazy chic

While Bowen is the best part, the whole movie is pretty great. And that’s kinda remarkable considering the complexity of what they’re trying to pull off. On what must have been a minuscule budget*, the three directors create a scary, convincing world populated by interesting characters, which shifts significantly in tone not once but three times, while still feeling like a cohesive, satisfying work. You gotta hope this is a strong signal that these three guys are going on to bigger things, and not a sign that the world is going crazy.

*$50,000!! That’s not enough to cover the damn catered lunch on a Michael Bay movie!

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2013 CHECKLIST!

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: No
• REMAKE: No
• HAMMER STUDIOS: No
• SPAGHETTI NOCTURNE: No, shot in Atlanta
• MORE (PETER) CUSHING FOR THE PUSHING? No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: No
• BOOBIES: No
• DECAPITATIONS OR DE-LIMBING: One good decapitation comes to mind.
• ENTRAILS? Not that I recall
• CULTISTS: No
• ZOMBIES: No
• VAMPIRES: No
• SLASHERS: No
• CURSES: No
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS? No
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid, tiny budget but seems fairly well-known.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

Chainsawnukah 2013 Holiday Wrap up!

Chainsawnukah Holiday Wrap-Up

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2013 CHECKLIST!

It's been a wild Chainsawnukah that took more than a month til the end of the goddam year to wind down. What have we learned? Let's break down the numbers!

LITERARY ADAPTATION: 12. I’m Not counting EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN, since it’s just “characters created by” and is in fact a sequel to another movie, not directly to the book. No Lovecraft adaptations and only one (incredibly shitty) Poe adaptation this year, a big shift from last year. Robert Bloch got the double-dip this time, with both THE SKULL and THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD, plus we got some oddness from Edogawa Ranpo (WATCHER IN THE ATTIC) M. R. James (NIGHT OF THE DEMON) Marc Randall (THE HAND) and of course Shirley “The Lottery” Jackson (THE HAUNTING). But the big winner this year was classic horror stories: Dracula (adapted into NOSFERATU and to a somewhat, ahem, looser extent LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES) and Frankenstein (CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN).

It was not just the stories, though, but rather their authors who took center stage here: Edgar Allen Poe shows up in TWIXT to help Hall Baltimore solve a vampiric mystery, as well as going on a claymation epic in ANNABELLE LEE (too bad I watched THE RAVEN already, huh? Coulda gone for the hattrick). Mary Shelly, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Piladori turn up to sex it up in GOTHIC. The Marquis de Sade shows up (in skull form) to torment Peter Cushing in THE SKULL. And in a more modern twist on the same thing, John Carpenter shows up as the Crypt Keeper/narrator in BODY BAGS and Carol Clover, author of the seminal slasher study Men, Women and Chainsaws, shows up in the semi-fictional S&MAN. So all in all it was a year of artists getting involved in the action. The final word on the dangers of being a storyteller in your own story, though, has to belong to the childhood fibbers in POISON FOR THE FAERIES.     

SEQUEL: 11

Has a Sequel: 3 (ANNABELLE LEE, CHILD’S PLAY, CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN)

IS a sequel: 1 (VHS 2)

Is a Sequel AND has a sequel: 7

*WATCHER IN THE ATTIC, CHILDS PLAY II-IV, RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD and EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN, LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES are all in the middle of a series.

Biggest Sequel Surprise: that SOCIETY doesn’t have like 19 DTV sequels.

REMAKE: 10

Has a Remake: 6 (APRIL FOOL'S DAY, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, WATCHER IN THE ATTIC, GOTHIC, THE SHINING, THE HAUNTING)

Is a Remake: 4 (MANIAC, WE ARE WHAT WE ARE, SEANCE, NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE)

Most Surprising lack of a remake? PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS. You just know there’s gotta be some jackass at Platinum Dunes devoting every waking moment to thinking about how to ruin that one with a grim, shiny remake that negates everything good about the original. But as of now, it ain’t happened.

HAMMER STUDIOS: 4. Didn’t get to as many Hammer films as I thought I would, but if you include the two Amicus entries (THE SKULL and HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD) it comes out to a more reasonable 6. Blame the fact that I didn't get to all the FRANKENSTEINs that I expected.

SPAGHETTI NOCTURNE: 4. Did I really only watch four Italian horror films? Weird. I guess with the Spanish RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD, Mexican POISON FOR THE FAERIES and American Giallo ALICE, SWEET ALICE it ended up feeling like more. But not to worry, AUTOPSY and EYEBALL are really, really Italian.

FOUND FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK? 4. Not an official category, but since I spent so much time talking about it in THE BAY I thought I’d run the numbers anyway. Can’t believe I watched the same number of Hammer, Italian, and Found Footage films. That’s gotta mean something, right? I suppose THE BAY is probably the best consistent example of this medium that I saw, but the highest point is Gareth Evan’s segment from V/H/S 2. I gotta admit I enjoyed the heroic idiocy of Renny Harlin’s DEVIL’S PASS, too, even if it’s a long way from being even mildly tolerable as a movie.

MORE (PETER) CUSHING FOR THE PUSHING? 5. Again, I was expecting to get at least one more Frankenstein film in there, oh well. Next year we’ll get more.

SLUMMING A-LISTER: Geez, I don’t even know who counts anymore. Wes Craven? Brian Cox? Barry Levinson? Jared Harris (who appear twice!)? Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick featuring Matisyahu? Michael Caine? Ving Rhames? Gabriel Byrne and Natasha Richardson? Dana Andrews and Niall MacGinnis? The cast of TWIXT? Telly Savalas? Elijah Wood? Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani? Koji Yakusho? Carol Clover? Jack  Nicholson? Mark Hamill, Debbie Harry, David Warner and Twiggy? I’m always happy to see all those folks in horror movies, but I mean, it’s not exactly surprising to see Michael Caine in some chintzy genre flick. Once you’ve done THE SWARM you pretty much don’t get to claim to be slumming in anything.  Doesn’t make him less awesome, just not quite a slumming A-lister. I dunno, I guess only Elijah Wood and Jack Nicholson would really count at the point of their careers they starred in the movie in question. And they were both in really good ones so it doesn’t really count as slumming. So I guess I just have to salute all those excellent actors for representing the genre I love.

BOOBIES: 14 (this number represents the total number of movies featuring boobies, not the total number of observed boobies. That would be way higher, presumably at least twice as high if we’re counting boob by boob.)

DECAPITATIONS OR DE-LIMBING: 20

eyeball loss: 4

Head Loss: 11

Head loss was the most common dismemberment, but I think the eyeball punishment ended up being more memorable and a more distinct theme. Heck, EYEBALL pretty much sells itself on that concept alone.

ENTRAILS? 10. Mostly Zombie-related, but occasionally you get an oddball like the exploding Hobo in STREET TRASH.

CULTISTS: 5. This is always a hard category to pin down, I thought I made it easier for myself by downgrading from the more specific “Satanists” last year to the more inclusive “cultists” this year. But it didn’t really help; still a lot of gray area (and not enough gray matter). I decided it is a vampire cult in LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES, but ended up not counting the nutty evangelicals in FROM WITHIN or the nutty cannibal family in WE ARE WHAT WE ARE.

ZOMBIES: 10, if you include Zombie Poe from ANNABELLE LEE, which I do. Zombie movies started out a little weak this year with the lamest section of V/H/S 2, the incidental (and sometimes cartoon) zombies in EXIT HUMANITY, the coy ZEDER (good movie, not much Zombie action) and the grating CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS. They finished strong with PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES, though, ending up the single most common antagonists I counted. The 10 counted include two counts of Frankenstein’s Monster, which I decided after much soul-searching does indeed count as a zombie.

VAMPIRES: 5. Obviously Klaus Kinski is gonna win this category.

SLASHERS: 9 This fuckin category is again causing problems, because serial killers, psycho killers, and slashers are not the same but have a lot of crossover. To me, a “Slasher” represents a very specific type of killer-on-the-loose movie, nearly always a whodunit, with a specific style of murder scene that frequently places emphasis on creative gore. So something like ALICE, SWEET ALICE  or EYEBALL seem obvious, but man, what about THE SHINING? I mean, he slashes, right? Or WATCHER IN THE ATTIC, which would probably count if it wasn’t from the perspective of the killer (but is is, so it doesn’t. Also there’s no slashing)? Still, I thought there were enough solid, clear examples to feel confident about these 9.

CURSES: 5. Ugh, another vague one. I gotta get a more specific term. These five count only cases where a curse is specifically mentioned. And exclude CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN since despite the title, no curse is evident.

(UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS? 12. This is a category I had to add along the way, as I noticed a disturbing trend developing. Between the Chuckys and the unnerving mannequins in TOURIST TRAP and MANIAC, this category started to fill out pretty quick. And then I started seeing dolls just fuckin’ everywhere. I wasn’t sure if I would be allowed to count the doll-faced killer in ALICE, SWEET ALICE, but then the problem got solved anyway because there’s a completely inexplicable three-faced doll in there apart from the killer. That’s when I knew I was onto something, that this was the year of the doll. And I did it all without a single “Hello Dolly” pun.

OBSCURITY LEVEL: ( Chart based on my own subjective interpretation)

High                                       Medium                               Low

IIIIIIIIIIII   IIIIIII  II   III    I I    IIIIII  II IIIII I                     I         IIIIIIIIIIIII

ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: After an incredibly strong start, sleepiness began to take over by the end of Chainsawnukah, maybe around movie 35 or so. I have no explanation as to why that might be; as a scientist, I’m merely reporting what I see. Although, now that I look at it, it’s virtually identical to last year’s 14/10 spread.

Yes: IIIIIIIIIIIIIII 15

No: IIIIIIIIII 10*

N/A: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII 28

*Plus one we’re not gonna talk about.

2013 SUPERLATIVES!

TRASHIEST: STREET TRASH, and proudly so.

CLASSIEST: THE HAUNTING, NIGHT OF THE DEMON, maybe WE ARE WHAT WE ARE.

BIGGEST SURPRISE(s): The surprising greatness of TWIXT, SOCIETY, and MANIAC (REMAKE). Other big surprise? Who knew the original CHILD'S PLAY was actually pretty good?

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT(s): The much-vaunted but kinda lame HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL and CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS. That John Carpenter's THE WARD is only OK. And that somehow they failed to make a killer baboon movie funny in SHAKMA.

MOST INEXPLICABLE: WATCHER IN THE ATTIC by about a mile, although MY SOUL TO TAKE is pretty high up there, too.

SPECIAL AWARD FOR BRAVERY IN THE FACE OF STRAIGHT UP STUPIDITY: DEVIL'S PASS, THE CAR

Final Thoughts: Well, so far this was the most successful Chainsawnukah ever, topping my previous high (last year’s 43) with a remarkable 54 movies! I don’t know if I’ll be able to go any higher than that and retain whatever fleeting bits of sanity remain, so enjoy it while it lasts. I think overall this year ended up producing more genuine treasures than last year, although I have to admit I held off on a couple classics to save ‘em for next time. Actually the real disappointments came with the lower tier stuff; there was nothing as interestingly awful as EXORCIST II this year, most of the real low scores were thoroughly earned by boring, unimaginative crap (though admittedly nothing offended my delicate sensibilities as much as the repugnant OPEN HOUSE from last year, either). If I had to pick an unexpected favorite (leaving aside known classics like THE SHINING and THE HAUNTING) it would probably have to go to either the socially-conscious nightmarish thrill ride of PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS or the inexplicable arty beauty of TWIXT. But TWIXT stars Hall Baltimore, so that automatically circumvents the usual rating process, putting it in a different category of godlike glory and solidifying the 2000s as the Hall Baltimore millenium. Which I guess makes it the winner by a nose. So I say unto you all, go out there and live as Hall Baltimore would: get wasted, pass out, and have the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe solve all your problems. And watch out for, I guess, vampires?

Thanks for the best Chainsawnukah ever, everyone. And if you enjoyed going on this journey with me and would like more, check out my buddy Dan P’s own Halloween odyssey.

Rankings! Pinhead Sez:

Transcendent Greatness (1 puzzlebox)

The Haunting

The Shining

Genuinely Fuckin’ Terrific. (5 hooks)

Plague of the Zombies

Seance

The Signal

The Cure

Nosferatu: The Vampyre

Society

Maniac (Remake)

Twixt (The Hall Baltimore Story)

Night of the Demon

Zeder

People Under the Stairs

Enjoyable but Flawed (4 hooks)

John Carpenter’s Body Bags

Devil’s Pass*

The Curse of Frankenstein

Bride of Chucky

Alice, Sweet Alice

Poison for the Faeries

Reincarnation

We are What We Are

Resolution

Lisa and the Devil

Child’s Play

Tourist Trap

Gothic

From Within

April Fool’s Day

Street Trash

The Hand

The Skull

The Possession (barely)

Exit Humanity

The American Scream

Serviceable Genre Crap (3 hooks)

Eyeball

S&man

The House That Dripped Blood

Autopsy

Child’s Play 3

Head Trauma

Child’s Play 2

Watcher in the Attic

House on Haunted Hill

V/H/S 2 (but the Gareth Evans segment by itself is a five-hooker)

The Sleeping Car

The Ward

The Bay

Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires

Barely tolerable, possibly salvageable through copious consumption of mind-altering substances. (2 hooks)

Devil’s Pass*

The Evil of Frankenstein

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things

The Car

My Soul To Take

Unwatchable Garbage. (1 hook)

Return of the Blind Dead

Shakma

Edgar Allan Poe Volume 1: Annabelle Lee

*Somehow this is both a 4-hook and a 2-hook effort. Live with it.

HAPPY CHAINSAWNUKAH everyone! See ya next year!