Blue Diamonds, Purple Horseshoes, Red Hearts

The lengths to which greed will drive us are almost infinite.

The depths to which horror movies will sink ARE infinite and that's kinda why I like them.

Today we take a trip to wee Ireland and slap ourselves in the face with bad brogue and twisted fairy tales.

Yes, kids, we're looking at St. Patrick's Day with Leprechaun and ye should thank yer lucky stars I'm not diggin' any further into yon franchise because "In Da Hood" was just bloody feckin' awful.

So, in this one, Dude O'Stereotype finds leprechaun's gold and takes it back to America with him.  Dude O' Stereotype dies of a stroke trying to keep leprechaun away from gold but leprechaun is stuck in a box thanks to its four-leaf clover kryptonite.  Fast forward to where Dad buys the house Dude died in and Girly MacComplain-y-pants bitches incessantly about having to spend the summer with her father amongst the sand and tarantulas and is basically our entire set-up for a big moral lesson about how money just isn't all that important.  Enter giant, strapping painter with not-quite-flowing Fabio hair who reminds us, again, that money is less important than a sincere apology.

Did Mr. Rogers write this?

So, anyway, we're then introduced to painter-dude's little brother and their benevolent handi-capable buddy and our cast is complete.


Then they find the crate and the trouble begins seeing as how benevolent handi-capable buddy brushes the clover off the crate.

Also?  Timmy fell down the well.

Awesome.

So, now that the titular leprechaun is free, he can cause a whole lot of trouble, especially since little brother and benevolent handi-capable now have some of the leprechaun's gold.  And BHC swallowed it so it's there for AT LEAST 12-24 hours.

I'll tell you what, though.  As much of a wall of fromage this movie is, it's actually not bad.  It has that "made-for-TV" quality to it that a lot of late-80's-to-mid-90s horror movies possess but that doesn't take away from the wickedness of it.  The pogo-stick scene alone makes it worth it.  The movie is actually fun to watch and spins the supernatural slasher nicely.  It's a hell of a lot better than Wishmaster, anyway.

Boingy-Boingy-Boingy...

At the VERY least, it marks a decent start to Jennifer Aniston's career.  Of course, now that she's not doing the horizontal mambo with Brad Pitt, we don't see her that much, anymore.

I kinda miss her.

Yeah, she's done some good stuff, recently, but I would kinda like to see her more.

The world needs more sassy, aging Valley girls with awesome hair.

Jelly Beans

In the annuls of holiday horror, none stands brighter than Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill!

And by "brighter" I mean "I have never been more offended in my life".

It starts with an overacted robbery in an Easter bunny mask, which, all things considered, was probably the best and most easily understood scene in the whole movie.

This?  Makes sense.

Moving on, we now have the youngest mother of an adult (16... HA!) special needs kid EVER telling her badly acted adult special needs kid that she's got a date who shows up with bad Wolverine hair and cheesy porn 'stache wearing the Easter bunny mask from the robbery and gives him a blood-stained chocolate bunny and proceeds to tell the b.a.a.s.n.k. that a bad kid ripped the ears off of the Easter bunny which, effectively, ruins the kid's whole day because this kid LIVES for Easter seeing as how his dad died on Easter ten years ago.

Then a hobo gives b.a.a.s.n.k. a rabbit and b.a.a.s.n.k walks in on mom and new guy having sex which just causes a whole lot of OTHER problems like discovering that b.a.a.s.n.k. learned a few choice curse words from the gardener.  New guy walks in on kid and his new rabbit and proceeds to use the rabbit as blackmail.

Then Mom has to work a double shift and leaves the kid in the care of the new guy who invites over Pedo Pete who happens to have hookers, blow, cash and a taste for handicapped kids.

New guy is a bad egg.  HA!

And this is just in the first 20 minutes.

They improvised a SONG about hookers and cocaine, for Pete's sake!  Ray, the nelly pedomonster, comes with a briefcase filled with drugs and dildos AND he seriously needs a manicure.  Also, film makers, THANKS FOR THE NEGATIVE STEREOTYPE, ASSHOLES!

PAINFUL!  Painful and just fucking wrong.

But then the fun starts.  Knives and drills and a different Easter Bunny mask, oh, my.

Yeah, it still doesn't help.

I really don't have anything else to say.  This movie is an insult to just about everybody on the planet. 

Including hookers and pedophiles.

Skip it.

Our Bodies: Not Quite Ourselves

Today on Trope... Wednesdays... Damn, I gotta get a better name for these.

Anyway, today, we're going to look at the wacky world of the human body.



We love our bodies.  We feed them and love them and hug them and make sure they get laid on a fairly regular basis and we call them George.  Most of the time, anyway.  Some of us are out to slowly kill ourselves with food or booze or what have you but for the most part we actually enjoy this whole "moving and breathing" thing we do.

Sit back.  Relax.  Envision your body in its repose and the beauty of the lines it creates and the tiny movements that come from breathing and blinking and the way the hair moves with the breeze.  It's a marvelous thing.  Lift your hand and be amazed at the things it can do for you.  Flex and wiggle your fingers.

WHAT THE HELL IS IT DOING?!?  KEEP IT AWAY FROM THAT KNIFE!!! WHEN DID IT GROW EYES?!?  THIS IS NOT MY HAND, ANYMORE!!!  ARGLBLGLBLGLBLGLE!!!

This is what we refer to as Body Horror.  When your body, or parts of it, are no longer under your control.  When something is... changing you.  When you've become a carrier for something you can't explain.  There are a TON of sub-tropes and related tropes that I'll cover later, I'm sure, but for now, let's get a general overview.

The first well-known instance of this trope in film belongs to Tod Browning's Freaks, wherein the female lead gets her comeuppance at the hands of the carnies by being turned into a freak herself.  It's not often seen after that, mostly due to the Hays code and the fact that Freaks basically killed Browning's career (even though the film is considered a horror/suspense classic, now), until the 1970s when they started to relax the Hays code since they had instituted the MPAA ratings system.  It still showed up in some classics like I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The Fly and the like but it wasn't until the 70s or so when it really came into its own.

Mint?



With the advent of better special effects and out from under the watchful eye of the Hays Code, film makers could push the envelope when it came to making the human body do things it was never meant to do.  From Ssssssss! to Shivers, directors were making everyone they could into monsters more realistic than we had ever seen before. 

Canadian director David Cronenberg is the MASTER of body horror and his style, even when he's NOT twisting limbs or putting vaginas on television sets, is deliberately designed to take you outside of your comfort zone and really examine the themes he places in front of you, whether they be the censorship of artists (Videodrome) or the sexualization of Western culture (Shivers).  His remake of The Fly with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis which, as in the original, delves into "science for the sake of science", is one of my absolute favorite movies.

Kinda takes "meat puppet" to a whole new place, doesn't it? 

But body horror isn't always so visceral.  It could show up in the form of illness (as in Safe) or pregnancy (like Rosemary's Baby or Blessed).  It could also be not-quite-real, as in Bug where the protagonists believe they're under attack by carnivorous aphids but it's never quite spelled out whether or not it's a shared delusion.  Mad science is often a root cause, such as in The Human Centipede.  Most of the time, though, it takes the form of a painful transformation of some sort.  The most classic of which is the man-to-dire-wolf transformation in An American Werewolf in London.

Watching the classic scene, David Naughton looked and sounded as if he was in absolute agony.  We saw, heard and could practically FEEL the changes his body went through.  The tearing flesh, the snapping bones and joints... We wanted it to stop. 

SOMEONE needs a manicure...

The trope isn't just used in horror movies, either.  In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the book AND the remade movie) Mike TeaVee, Augustus Gloop and Violet Beauregard are subjected to massive physical changes as a result of their transgressions in Willy Wonka's candy-land.  Mike is stretched out like taffy, Augustus appears to be made of chocolate, now, and Violet, after being juiced, has the consistency of rubber and purple skin.  I'm still under the impression that both of those movies count as slasher flicks.

Suffice it to say that this is one of the most common horror tropes simply because we don't like untoward things happening to us.  We like to envision our bodies as perfect (even when they are not) and are shocked and dismayed when things happen to them beyond our control.  I've heard tell that Multiple Sclerosis is one of the most earth-shattering diagnoses a person can receive.  Stephen Hawking has a BRILLIANT mind trapped in a body that doesn't work.  The Human Bot-Fly?  Don't look for it if you're at all squeamish.  Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva causes damaged tissue to turn to bone.  Cancer.  Ebola virus.  Even psoriasis is enough to squick us out.  Something is visually WRONG and we don't like it.

Just remember, kids.  They use bleach to treat necrotizing fasciitis.

SWEET DREAMS!

Curly Wooden Shoes and Spite

QUICK!

What's the first thing you think of when you hear "Amsterdam"?

I bet it's pot, isn't it?

And I'm pretty sure there was a LOT of it smoked when the script for Saint was written.

It seems that the Dutch are into horror films in a BIG way and this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Of course, we also know they're big into tulips and prostitution so I'm not quite sure what to make of this revelation.

Let's take a look at some cultural differences so this movie will make a little more sense, shall we?

First off, their holiday season is almost literally a season.  Sinterklaas or Sint Nicolaas supposedly arrives on a steamboat with his Zwarte Piets (Black Petes, their equivalent of elves AND Krampus combined and the reason "black face comedy" will never be dead) in the Netherlands on the 14th of November to make his initial sweep and take any naughty kids back to Spain.  Why Spain?  Because the remains of the actual Saint Nicholas are kept in Bari, which was part of the Spanish Kingdom of Naples.  Also because in Spain, St. Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors.  That and I'm pretty sure they're put to work in the lace and sequin mines and forced to make matador pants for eternity.

300 children died in a freak Point de Gaze cave-in to make this outfit.

The celebration continues on to December 5th which is the Feast of Sinterklaas.  This is where we get our cultural image of kids leaving out their wooden shoes in order to collect candy and possibly a fungal infection.  It's important to know, though, that Sinterklaas doesn't generally leave anything larger than candy.  Mostly that's the family part.  Beyond that, the party continues until Christmas.  So, the Dutch get THREE holidays instead of one.

Where do I sign up?

So... this movie.  Apparently, all of the above is still correct but if the fifth of December falls on a full moon Sinterklaas is a stone-cold thug what with the maiming and the murdering and the oy, geflavin and he's all burnt up and zombie-like because a couple hundred years ago, the living St. Nick was all with the raping and pillaging and the citizens of Amsterdam got all uppity about it and set fire to his ship with him and all of his Black Petes on it.

Now, every 32 years, this stuff happens again a la The Fog only without Adrienne Barbeau's magnificent rack.  (In fact, there are no boobs in this one.  Sorry, teenage boys looking for surreptitious thrills.)  ONE MAN knows the shameful past and ONE MAN can save Amsterdam from a Saint gone crazy.  Of course, no one believes him.  Enter the current crop of young adults that get sucked into the mayhem.

I think this one is a heck of a lot of fun.  Sure, it's kinda predictable but it's got that Kung-Fu Theater bad dubbing thing going for it plus it's not quite your standard slasher.  The body count is moderate but there's still plenty of gore and we can always make fun of another culture's racism while blindly ignoring our own.  How jolly!

Make it a Dutch party with marzipan and chocolate and gingerbread and hash.

Not Nice

For the second time this month, I'm covering a remake as well as the original.  This, I hope, will not be a regular occurrence.  But it probably will be.  Dammit.

Anyway... Silent Night, Deadly Night, as mentioned previously, is a controversial cult horror classic.

Silent Night, the remake, is, most definitely, not.

I won't lie.  I heard they were remaking/psuedo-sequeling this one and a squee was heard 'round the world.

I fear the squee was misplaced for Jayson Rothwell and Stephen C. Miller should both meet a sockful of nickels repeatedly and in rapid succession then be fed to angry Japanese hornets.  You know... those 3-inch-long fuckers.

Run, bitches.

Ze story, she go like zis:

 Small-town cop is afraid she can't do her job.  She kind of hates Christmas because we're not sure why but it involves her going to church before work.  Her dad used to be a cop and he caught a spree killer wearing a Santa suit and a flame-thrower and we believe that has something to do with it.  So, anyway, this small Wisconsin town has a serial killer in a Santa suit, now, and it's her job to stop him.  She is not getting any help because, as in all horror movies, authority figures are fucking useless and her boss, played by Malcolm McDowell, seems to only be interested in gnawing on the scenery. 

Of course, he's never been known for "subtle".

Don't get me wrong.  I never expected it to be an Oscar™ winner.  What I DID expect, what with it starring Malcolm McDowall and Jaime King, was some decent acting.  I expected a cleaner update.  I expected not to be confused and wondering what the hell just happened.  I expected it to be darker and edgier but not so dark as to completely strip the humor out of it.  I expected to be entertained and, dammit, I wasn't.

And, you know what I expected above all?  I expected to know, without a shadow of a doubt, whether or not this was a remake or a sequel.  I mean, it had a few awesome moments, like the antlers, that are definitely a call-back but above all, this was a half-assed attempt at a brand-new story.  A lackluster "Hero's Tale" to make Jaime King's character realize that, dammit, she WAS a good cop and she's gonna GET this guy to make up for all of her past failings because SHE FUCKED UP, dammit and she admits to it and she's gonna MAKE IT RIGHT, BY GAWD!

Gimme a fuckin' break. 

Seriously?  Watch this for the brat and the cattle-prod, the porn star in the wood chipper, the antlers and the gently bouncing fakeys above them and Donal Logue getting a faceful of brass knuckles.  

Other than that, this movie can go silently to Hell.