And Fangirl Panties Wept

Slither is one of those horror movies of which I have never heard a bad review,

I firmly believe this is because Nathan Fillion stars in it.  Don't get me wrong.  Monsieur Fillion is a brilliant actor and he is eminently attractive.  I can most certainly see the appeal.  This is why conventions are full of Firefly Browncoats and teenage girls wearing silly orange hats that look like Grandma went on a creme de menthe bender and had to get rid of leftover ugly Christmas sweater yarn.

NOT Nathan Fillion.  Almost as good.  I'll be in my bunk.

But I digress.  Slither is an odd duck.  It's an alien invasion movie, it's a zombie movie, it's a David Cronenberg Body Horror extravaganza.  It's a LOT of things and you all KNOW how I hate mixing genres.  In this case, though, because it really doesn't take itself seriously, it works.  It works really well.  It works a LOT better than it's original form, Night of the Creeps.

Trust me.  This cat is much more shocked than I am.

I really don't know how to break this down, plot-wise, for you.  Town asshole gets infected by alien slug, screws around with his wife's sister, turns her into boob monster that can only eat rotted meat, she explodes in a shower of alien zombie slugs and everybody in town except for the sheriff and a select few others get sucked into some kind of twisted perma-orgy that has to be seen to be believed.  And these are not pretty naked people.  Ain't no supermodels here.  It's like catching your history professor at a bathhouse.

Eeeeeeeeew.

The thing that makes it work is that it evolves in clearly defined stages and it evokes this kind of '50s B-movie plot that seems really simplistic at first but then grows into a slavering beast of a film that is seriously underrated.  It's what those '50s horror movies wanted to be but couldn't because of limitations in special effects and the bane of all film, the Hays Code.

The Hays Code wouldn't allow boob-monsters, for one.

What makes Slither interesting to me is that it's obviously a sex/STD/abusive relationship allegory but you're never quite sure which one it is at any time because you're so focused on how FREAKIN' AWESOME this movie is. 

In any case, Nathan Fillion plays to his strengths as the small-town sheriff.  He's all corn-fed and adorable and just all-around likeable.  I know he's capable of much more as an actor but everybody I know just wants to hug the man and possibly steal his spaceship.  

Let the man save the planet first, OK?  Sheesh.

Whedon-isms

When I first heard about The Cabin In The Woods, I about peed myself (only not really, 'cause eew).

"Joss Whedon doing a slasher flick?  Say it isn't so!  My inner nerd is about to explode!  This is gonna be AWESOME!"

And then it came out and I paid for my ticket and I got my gigantic, overpriced popcorn and bladder-buster of a Diet Coke and I sat in the perfect seat in the middle of the theater and I waited for it to start.

If you remember this, you're older than me.

And I was not disappointed!  In fact, from the minute I saw Amy Acker I knew I was in for Whedon-fanboy paradise.

See, this is not a horror movie for horror fans.  Well, it IS, but not in the way you'd expect.  This is a horror movie for those horror fans that like to pick apart horror movies.  This is a movie for the fans you know are going to try and actually build Marty's bong. 

Bringing the bong was a bad idea?  I guess I won't save you from the redneck torture zombie, then.

This is a movie for people like me that examine each and every trope in the business.  This is a movie that tries to USE all of those tropes all at once and I LOVE IT!

See what you missed? 

And, of course, Whedon being the master of all snark, the dialogue is snappy and quick-witted.  It's like he's distilled every episode of Buffy into a 2 hour feast of sarcasm.  SQUEE!  Plus it gives us the man-candy that is Chris Hemsworth and that is never a bad thing.

For those of you who HAVEN'T seen it yet, and shame on you, Cabin in the Woods starts out oddly.  Because you expect it to be just 5 kids going to the titular cabin.  No, we start out with scientists talking about other departments.  The reasoning behind this is not readily apparent, but it's quickly fleshed out to the amusement of all.

I'm not going to give out spoilers for this one because I really do think that you have to watch this one even if you're not a horror fan.  The comedy element alone should mitigate the scares and everyone should take every opportunity they can to make fun of Jodelle Ferland and her inevitable type-casting and then poke her dead career with sticks.

Hands up if you expect a drug-fueled crime spree suicide in 10 years.

Cabin in the Woods BEGS to have itself broken down frame-by-frame and analyzed for decades.  Not only is it that good, but it would almost REQUIRE it just to pick out every shout-out to every other horror film it references.  This is the horror movie that Joss Whedon made for US, the nerds.  I'm not quite sure if it was a loving gesture or hate-filled, cyanide-laden revenge, yet, but I, for one, relish the challenge.

What are you waiting for?  Grab a notepad and get watchin'!

Flu shot, my ass...

Today being Halloween, we honor the dead.

Me being me, we honor the dead RISING.

And declare them adorable.

And how DO the dead rise?  Well, barring voodoo, witchcraft and other fictional supernatural belief systems, the most common cause is "THE VIRUS".  Because none of us are using enough of our sick days as it is.

Normally a result of military or other less-than-above-board experimentation, when given a backstory at all the virus is dispersed any number of ways.  Either it survives an attempt to destroy it and is dispersed via airborne means (usually through crematorium exhaust), it is released accidentally when someone knocks the very fragile glass beaker to the floor, the government/military releases it on purpose as simply a vector test or my PERSONAL favorite (Thank you Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant) it gets released by well-meaning but utterly stupid political/environmental dirty hippie activists.

Not this kind of dirty hippie activist.  These guys just like fun fur and peyote.

And the sad thing is that we all know this is coming. 

Mad-but-well-meaning Scientist:  "I'VE DONE IT!  I've created the cure for AIDS using retroviruses and pixie sticks! Let me just leave this virus containment unit out in the open where anyone can get to it and go celebrate (before we move to human trials that will tell us whether or not it will reanimate dead tissue) with a Taco Bell and Vodka bender!"

Seriously?  Let the face-palming begin.

So, yeah.  The virus is loose.  Now what?

Well, the very best you can hope for is that either it does not have immediate effects, as in 28 Days Later (which, I'm sorry, does not contain real zombies... they are zombie adjacent) and that you must actually be dead for it to "turn you" or that you're immune.  In Mira Grant's (see above link) "Newsflesh" trilogy, everyone is already infected and there's no way to prevent that unless you're raised in a bubble. 

Fuck you, John Travolta... or should we leave that to your masseur?

In this type of scenario, though, the slightest scratch or bite from someone who has already seroconverted sets off a chain reaction that "activates" the virus that's already inside you.  The virus then proceeds to overwhelm your body and shut down your systems one by one until the virus controls you like a bloody, meaty puppet.  The virus is not sentient but it "knows" that it needs to propagate thus the shambling and the moaning and the biting and the oy, geflavin.

Similarly, the virus may only affect dead tissue but it is transmitted through the death-gnaw and the above situation applies yet again.  Unless you're immune, in which case you have to worry about imminent capture by the CDC and your own vivisection and no one wants that.  Let alone you.  The sight of one's own entrails tends to be disturbing and in horror movies you ALWAYS get to watch.

Please note that "The Virus" may not actually BE a virus.  In this day and age, it could be a drug or nano machines or a parasite or spore... wait... spores and parasites?

Yep.  And they exist RIGHT NOW in real life. 

Ohiocordyceps unilateralis is a fungus that specifically targets the Camponotus leonardi ant (or other closely related species) as a means of reproduction.  It actually takes hold of the ant's brain and forces it to high ground... err... plant where the fungus then causes its host to clamp down with it's mandibles and stay there until the newly formed fruiting bodies rupture, releasing spores with which to infect more ants and there we have the circle of undeath.

GAH!!

There's also Leucochloridium paradoxum, a parasite which, throughout its life cycle, infects snails and affects their behavior so that they willingly get themselves eaten so that birds will spread their eggs through the miracle of poop.

GAH!!!

We don't know if similar molds or parasites can affect us the same way but I bet you're all calling somebody to clean out your vents right now, huh?

DON'T SCRATCH THE PAINT!

Did you know that cars are actually designed to look like they have faces?  The higher the horsepower, the more aggressive the face.  That being the case, Christine must have a top speed of warp fucking 19.

She'll gnaw on your SOUL.  HEEHEE!  Gnaw...

This isn't Stephen King's best movie by a long shot, but this 1983 gem is one that I, personally, adore.  As a kid, I wanted my first car to be a '58 Plymouth Fury and having it haunted by a spirit of vengeance was just a nifty options package.  And, seriously?  Think of the money I'd save on gas and repair bills.  I'm pretty sure that any model of car that has fins sharp enough to shave with just slurps the oil directly out of the asphalt, anyway.  Plus, I'd NEVER have to worry about people pissing me off.

King is the master of turning the bullied into monsters and his work with John Carpenter is always sublime.  The juxtaposition of the "Faustian bargain" with the "Yandere" (see On Widowers and Poor Dating Habits) is spot fucking on and I thought it was FANTASTIC how the car could only speak through the radio.  I never looked at Little Richard the same way, again.  Keith Gordon, who hasn't done a lot of acting since then but has been a BEAST behind the camera, played up the transition from pizza-faced nerd to greasy, arrogant cool, well, not flawlessly, but well enough that I never questioned it.  

Before (on the left):  Asshole McHipster-Glasses

After: Asshole McPopped-Collar

We all know the story of Christine (and if you don't, why the fuck are you here?).   Nerdy kid (who, for some reason, has the school's best football player for a best friend and, yet, is still the unpopular kid) buys a used car that turns out to be possessed.  By what, we're not sure but apparently it was possessed even before it left the factory, seeing as how it took a bite out of one of the line workers.  The movie is kinda vague on the actual inhabitant.  (The book had it possessed by the car's previous owner, a bitter, cranky old man who was pretty fuckin' evil.  Who leaves his kid to choke to death in the back seat because they might get something on the seats?  Of COURSE she's gonna get something on the seats if you let her choke.  It's called a corpse.)

Not her, but you get my point.

So, yeah.  Car is possessed, car leads nerdy kid to believe that she loves him, car is highly jealous, kills nerdy guy's enemies and tries to kill nerdy guy's new girlfriend.  New girlfriend and popular best friend feed car to car crusher.

Now, King is no stranger to the killer inanimate object.  He brought us Trucks (Maximum Overdrive), after all, and that had anything with a motor get all stabby.  (Note to self.  Never get an electric knife.)  In Christine, though, we really do get the idea that Christine is more than just murderous, she's manipulative.  She is the very worst kind of woman and she's not even a woman.  No shade toward women, here, but Christine is a freaky stereotype gone wrong and SHE doesn't even have to resort to tears to get Arnie to do what she wants.

The biggest reason I love Christine is because all of these assholes that Christine kills are fucking stupid.  Have you never heard of stairs?  Yeah, you can try going down some alley that's supposed to be too small but a demonic car will find a way to fit.  Stairs are really the only way to go.  Even better, a spiral staircase.  Sure she might knock it down but you're up there and you can always have food flown in unless you pissed off the damn helicopter, too.

One of the awesome things about Christine, besides it being the end of that era in film where girls had to put on their best Polly-Prissy-Pants voice on camera (I was seriously glad when every fucking in actress in Hollywood stopped going to the same elocution coach), was that, from a violence perspective, it would have been a PG film but Carpenter, KNOWING that everybody hates a family horror film, made sure that the word "fuck" was used enough to get it an R rating.  

FUCK YOU, RATINGS SYSTEM!

Punk-ass bitch.

AMUCK!!

A lot of die-hard horror fans will probably hate this next post because it doesn't, technically, involve a horror movie.

Except it kind of does.

But it doesn't.

I'm going to go on record here and say that Disney's Hocus-Pocus is one of my very favorite spook movies.

Except it's not that spooky.

But it is.

See, this is that movie that has a little something for everyone.  It's definitely a kid's movie but it's grown up enough for adults to enjoy it, too.  (Disney has really gotten the hang of that over the years.)  It's not gory or scary, really, but it's just creepy enough to keep you interested.  It's got a great, if simplistic, story and, now that we're older, we can appreciate that it brought us a young Thora Birch who's practically a psychological indie-horror mainstay, now.

Except we don't know what the hell happened here...

And the movie does have some horror cred behind it.  Mick Garris co-produced and wrote the screenplay. 

This isn't to say that it isn't cheesy as hell.  I mean, it IS a Disney movie and it actually wasn't even supposed to go to the big screen.  It was supposed to be a made-for-tv movie for The Disney Channel.  But the cheese-factor is WHY I love it.  Besides the fact that it does have an incredible cast.

I mean, Bette Midler as the head villain, a centuries-old witch aiming for world domination and Toddler on a Bun for lunch?  Come on.  Who casts that unless large hunks of cheddar is what they're going for?

I'm sorry, Bette, but as much as you want to be considered a serious actress and you have the chops for it, you're always gonna be bold, brash, ballsy Bathhouse Betty to me and that, and the fact that you had TONS of fun making this movie, shines right through.

Add in an utterly ditzy Sarah Jessica Parker and the fat joke that walks, Kathy Najimy (prior to losing a lot of weight), and there really is a triple-threat, there.  And MY favorite part, as is everyone else's, I'm sure, is Bette's big musical number.  It's probably my favorite version of "I Put a Spell On You", ever.  (No disrespect, Screamin' Jay Hawkins.)

There's really not a lot here to hold on to the hard-core gore-hounds but I still think this is oodles of fun and it's a Halloween staple in my house.  

I don't even HAVE kids.

I buy fun-size Baby Ruth bars for ME, bitches.  Hands off.

Of course, my triglycerides tell a different story and are possibly out to get me.  I'm not full-on paranoid, yet, but I still think I see little fat ninjas lurking about sabotaging my lunch and turning it into a salad.

Assholes.