Island of Misfit Psychopaths

While we're talking about remakes, what happens when you remake a film that relatively few people have heard of?

Come Out and Play is that remake.

Come Out and Play is a remake of the 1976 Spanish film Who Can Kill a Child?.  The original film was a statement on the effects of war on children.  We're not quite sure what's happening in the remake.

Francisco and Beth (who is very pregnant) are out to enjoy their last vacation in Mexico away from the kids before their third child is born.  They rent a boat after a huge carnival and head out from mainland to a remote island for some fun in the sun.  The island is inhabited by children.  Lots of children.

The lack of adults around should probably have given them some kind of clue that they shouldn't be there because, yep, you guessed it, these kids are fucking crazy.

Shadow-puppets of DOOOOOM!

No explanation is given for the kids' behavior.  They just point and giggle when an adult is slaughtered.  One adult is beaten with a cane.  Another is stabbed multiple times and has a chuck of cement dropped on his head.  In the film's climax, Beth's unborn child is somehow affected by whatever is turning the ankle-biters into LITERAL ankle-biters and kills her from the inside.

Nanny-Nanny-Boo-Boo!

I kind of have mixed feelings about this one.  On the one hand, it's shot beautifully and Ebon Moss-Bacharach's performance is stirring.  On the other hand, there's no fucking plot.  It really seems like the director (Makinov, who, per Dread Central, is apparently a weird-ass motherfucker, what with wearing a mask all throughout shooting) just said, "Hey, let's get some kids to kill stuff."

However, while there's no meat to this movie other than the dead bodies, the suspense and tension are here in spades.  This is, in large part, due to the ethereal score with it's theremin drones and the fact that you know something's wrong the minute you meet the kids for the first time.  NONE of these kids speak a word, by the way, which makes them creepier.

SAY SOMETHING!!!

One thing to remember, though, is that the movie isn't about the "why", it's about the reaction of the protagonists.  How are they going to get out and how can they do it without hurting children?

Frankly?  I say fuck it.  The minute a rugrat comes after me with a sharp object, I'ma bust out a smackdown.

This is another one of those "Your mileage may vary" movies.  I kinda liked it (probably due to my fascination with killer kids) but I say give it a watch and decide for yourself.

One... Two... You Know the Rest.

In my continuing defense of remakes, I feel I must address the 2010 remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street.

Because I liked it.  Probably more than it deserved.

Just a quick recap of the story, kids have killer dreams about murderous, knife-glove wielding child molester who is seeking revenge on the parents of said kids who torched him in a boiler room for... y'know... molesting their kids.  Kids are dropping like flies in their sleep (although it really doesn't look like they just passed on quietly considering the gaping wounds and all) because if you die in your sleep, you die for real and it's up to Nancy to stop the Kentucky Fried Fiend.  It's the circle of supernatural death!  WOOHOO!  Somebody needs to get National Geographic on this, y'all!


NOTE!  This is NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, a reduction of the value of the original because Wes Craven is a fucking master and Robert Englund will ALWAYS be Freddy Krueger. 

That said, a whole lot of people absolutely hated this movie.  Personally, I'm blaming it on that cultural zeitgeist called "I hate remakes".  I really don't think people sat and judged this on its merits because, other than the MTV quick-cut editing, this was a great movie. 

SCREEEEEEE!!! Take that, assholes.

For one, as I always say they should, Samuel Bayer DID treat the original series with respect.  Even though he most definitely went darker and edgier with it, he left in enough humor to make it bearable.  They didn't want Krueger to be all wise-cracking and goofy and I appreciate that.  Seriously, Freddy got to be a bad joke by the end of Englund's run.  Frankly, I think they could have left out a lot of the background stuff and given us better chases but I get what they were trying to do.  They did make the punishment of Krueger AND the burn-scar makeup more realistic, though, and that was kind of awesome in and of itself.

Next, the acting in the remake is TONS better than the original.  Sorry, Wes, but you were still very much in the throes of "the same diction coach" period of leading ladies when you cast Heather Langenkamp (who was amazing but still felt stiff).  Rooney Mara, in comparison, is an Oscar™ winner (in this role... we know she was a nominee for Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).

Yep.  She sleeps gooooood.

 

Also?  I'm sorry but Jackie Earle Haley was FUCKING PERFECTION as Fred Krueger.  The man has this creepy short-eyes vibe to him in real life that translated note-for-note and the rage that he pulled out as the vengeful Krueger was chilling.  I didn't NEED jokes.  I wanted to be scared and Haley's electronically deepened voice did the trick.  

The movie really did play to the fans by giving us moments that we recall from the original, though.  The wall scene (above), the gooey hallway/stairs and the bathtub scene in particular.

And, apparently, we've found Rooney Mara's "good side".

On top of that, there are little trivia bits through the whole movie, right down to the character's names.  Nancy and Freddy are obviously the call-backs from the original but Jesse is from Freddy's Revenge and Kris is from Dream Warriors and Dream Master. 

It's all of these little bits and pieces that make this a fun flick for me.  

 

You don't have to agree with me.  I'm fully aware that this is a derivative work.  I just don't think it deserves the low opinion people hold of it.

IA, IA, BLOGATHOTEP, PHTAGN!

OK, so I've already talked about Lovecraft Country what with its weird-ass customs and all.  Now, let's talk about some of its inhabitants.

No, I'm not referring to Mrs. O'Grady.

I'm not talking about her cow, either.

No, today we're talking about what Lovecraft termed "Eldritch Abominations".  These are horrifying mockeries of natural law that just cannot be described.  Oh, you can say words that fit, such as tentacles, ichor, gibbering, squamous, rugose, and yonic voids but you will never convey the maddening otherness.  Period.  Because those words are just symptoms.  

Eldritch abominations don't just LOOK like some ancient, universal infant had too much time to kill and an abundance of Play-Doh™.  In fact, many of them don't look like that at all.  They run the description gamut from "human" to "OHGAWDWHATTHEFUCKISTHArgblgrlwblbblbblbb*gibberdrool*?!?".  They don't always have to be literally big, bad monsters.  Much like alien geometries, there's something... off... about them.  Then again, "big", when used in conjunction with an EA, likely means "You are looking at a fraction of the actual being and that fraction is using the Sears Tower to scratch it's butt."

 

Not an accurate size chart.

These beings come from "beyond" ("...the stars", "... the dawn of time", "... rational human thought", etc.) and most of them alter reality on some level.  In some cases, just reading an eldritch abomination's NAME can cause pants-wetting and madness.  Running?  Naaaaaaah.  I'll just sit here and soil myself, thanks muchly.

Whatever they are, though, not all of them are malevolent.  Some are benign or at least amoral and willing to help for shits and giggles.  Most of them, even if they ARE on the good side of the coin, just don't give a shit because they're beyond human morality.

As for examples, we obviously consider Lovecraft's pantheon to be the most visible, what with Cthulhu being all popular and shit but, seriously?  These bitches show up EVERYWHERE and you don't even recognize them as such because they're CRAFTY.

Yep... Abomination.

From a literary standpoint, we've got authors from Tolkein to Terry Pratchett giving us Ungoliant, Shelob, Bel-Shamharoth, the Infernal Star Toad with a Million Young, and, wait for it, Mary FUCKING Poppins!

Maybe she's existed for a trillion years with it.  Maybe it's Maybelline.

Yep.  That's right.  Mary Poppins.  She of the talking umbrella (which is probably a minor abomination on its own) and the bottomless carpetbag.  She who sits on clouds and adjusts her makeup (so that she won't frighten her young charges... right away...).  Ancient and magnificent being who BABYSAT GOD.  Mary Poppins has powers beyond human understanding and everyone KNOWS that there's something off about her but she's just so fucking helpful.  In that "I'm not gonna take yer shit, so get yer scrawny ass to bed or we're not going to take a field trip through sidewalk drawings tomorrow" kinda way.

And, there's MORE!  Nintendo's Kirby?  Eater of fucking everything?  Abomination.  Mr. Mxyzptlk.  Yep.  The House in House of Leaves.  Abso-fuckin'-lutely.  Pop culture LOVES to hand these things off to unsuspecting readers/players/whatevers.

As for film, HOO boy.  Gozer from Ghostbusters who has no form but that which someone gives it.  Like, say, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.  The Tall Man from Phantasm is a cosmic horror anchored in another dimension.  The Thing?  It may not actually be one but considering that a single cell of this being can cause a catastrophic infection of the entire planet within 3 years, it certainly comes close enough.  The ship from Event Horizon.  Oh, lord, the ship.  We don't talk about the ship. And finally?  This guy.

Awww!  Eldritch candy!

This thing is The Greedy from Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure. It scared me shitless as a kid.  All slopping around spewing out and eating candy and in search of a "sweet heart".  Not a girlfriend.  A sweet heart.  Literally.  This needs to not freak my shit out as much as it does, but there you have it.

And, finally, I'll leave you with these gentlemen.

Ya know whut?  I'm happy.

These are Blobfish from Australia.  They're deep sea fish so they don't have swim bladders but are mostly gelatinous.  They're in danger of extinction because they live in the same area as a lot of edible fish that are caught by trawling the depths.  Personally, I think they're heralds of Cthulhu and they show up only to visit pain and madness on fishermen.  They are probably not, but I like to hedge my bets.

In any case, here's some good news.  Just because something is ugly does not mean it's a harbinger of doom from beyond the depths. 

PLEASANT DREAMS!

Lord of Tears

Hey, all!  I just got an update from Lawrie Brewster about the Lord of Tears release Kickstarter Campaign.

They're reached their first goal of $15k and Sultan Saeed Al Darmaki (author of My Black Halo) just became an executive producer but they still need a little help.  Right now Kickstarter is the only way to pre-order the DVD and the kickstarter is to get the movie printed, marketed, complete the soundtrack project and sent to festivals and such. 

So, that said, here's the link.  Please donate if you can.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lawriebrewster/lord-of-tears

I'm lookin' forward to reviewing it. 

Scalpel... Forceps...

I'm trying to come up with the words for this but they're fighting me.  I'm pretty sure this review is going to leave me bruised.

I guess the best way to do this is to just jump right in.

Excision.  Richard Bates Jr's feature film directorial debut.

Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) is a deeply disturbed teenager with a controlling and emotionally distant mother (Traci Lords), a milquetoast father (Roger Bart) and a little sister with cystic fibrosis (Ariel Winter) whom her parents dote on.  She fantasizes about becoming a doctor.  More accurately, she fantasizes about performing surgery on her classmates in a gruesome, over-the-top fashion which makes her the BEST surgical candidate EVER!  Only, not.

She's obsessed with blood, to the point of licking her own tampon  (FUCKING EEW!  EEW, EEW, EEEEEEEEEEEEW!).

 

Was not kidding.

She also experiences very extreme dreams about mutilating people in a chic and fashionable setting.  Because, apparently, she has never seen the inside of a hospital.  I'm fairly certain that scented candles and Elizabethan collars are not considered sterile.

 

Seriously, I just posted this for the man-candy.

We get to watch as she destroys lives one by one and slips deeper into her delusion despite going to counseling as suggested by her mother (religious counseling, which she bristles at because she thinks the pastor is a hypocrite).  The boy who takes her virginity (which she arranged to occur while she's on her period)?  Check plus his red wings.  His girlfriend?  Check.  The girl next door?  Check.  Her own family?  Check, check, check.  Seriously, fuckin' checks everywhere.  BAM!  Parental disappointment.  BAM!  A face full of uterine lining!  BAM!  Chloroform!  BAM!  No med school for you!

TV Night=Teen Torture

Now, while the troubled teen is by no means a new concept in horror, I don't think we've ever gone so deeply into their psyche before and that includes May.  This kid has some SERIOUS delusions of grandeur borne from a subconscious need to make mommy love her again despite what she says.  She wants acceptance from her parents that she's not getting because her parents are as deeply flawed as she is.  She wants acceptance from her peers but she's fucking weird and her classmates can sense it.  The only character that isn't flawed emotionally is flawed physically which is what causes the emotional flaws to begin with.

Don't get me wrong.  This is a FANTASTIC movie with plenty of blacker-than-black humor and a bleak outlook but the characters... NONE OF THEM... are likeable in the least.  Everyone in this movie, except for the little sister, is an asshole.  The fact that mother and daughter only see each other eye-to-eye at the end is only indicative of the schism that they have created between them.

LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!!

As a study of the modern, dysfunctional family, this movie is pure brilliance.  The dynamic between Pauline and her mother is vitriolic and painful to watch.  It's not abuse, per se, because the mother just wants a daughter that makes her look good (and who doesn't) but the fact that they are both portrayed as utterly selfish and unwilling to bend feels natural even as the actors are gnawing on the sets.  

And the fact that we're not watching a descent into madness, but, rather, a FURTHER descent, makes this a fascinating watch.  Bitch was crazy to begin with.  We just get to watch the natural progression of it.

To top it all off, we have this dichotomy of an unattractive, quirky, utterly insane Pauline in "real life" as compared to the surgical, fashion-forward goddess Pauline of her dreams.  AnnaLynne McCord is a strong-jawed elfin beauty and the make-under is kind of amazing.

All in all, this movie has flaws.  It's slow-paced.  It's a little heavy-handed.  It features Traci Lords as a mother-figure (seriously?).  Those things aside, it's a great film and it's highly recommended.  

Be prepared to be uncomfortable. 

Yer so cool, Brewster!

HEY!  I'm gonna review a vampire flick!  This is a first!

As we all know, the 80s brought us some of the best horror, even if it was filled with enough Aqua Net to last RuPaul for the rest of her life and shoulder pads designed to kill.

This extends to vampire movies, too, in the form of Fright Night.

Fright Night was an odd duck in the vampire genre because it didn't take place in a city or in Romania or London.  It brought the vampire to the 'burbs and with a plot not unlike Rear Window, it added a distinctly Hitchcockian vibe to it.  Add a touch of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf and the American staple of the late night TV horror movie host and you've got a heapin' helpin' o' bloodsuckin' awesome.

Our story goes like this:  Charlie Brewster is a huge horror fan, watching the local late night horror show whenever he can, Fright Night, hosted by Peter Vincent.  This, of course, leads him to be particularly sensitive to the fact that his new, (supposedly... at least he's pretending to be) gay neighbor, Jerry Dandridge, is a vampire.  Nobody believes him but if they did, the movie would be about 20 minutes long.

What the fuck am I doing here?

Since his future lesbian girlfriend, Amy Peterson, doesn't believe him, she enlists the actually quite cowardly Vincent to assist in proving Dandridge is not a vampire.  Peter is, wisely, skeptical but goes along with it.  And then he sees Jerry's lack of reflection in the mirror. 

This causes Dandridge to hunt down future gay porn star Evil Ed and future lesbian girlfriend and turn them into vampires in an effort to lure Charlie to him for the purposes of, DUN Dun duuuuuun, revenge.

YOW!  Black'n'Decker Pecker Wrecker, much?

Tom Holland gave us yet another example of how humor and horror are used successfully together.  Not only did this scare the pants off of my 12-tear-old self, but it made me laugh out loud.  The blending of the different types of vampire films up until that time was brilliant.  The classic aloof vampire. The Hammer-inspired host.  The Renfield-like Evil Ed.  Finding the references made it that much more fun!

Plus, there's this face.  GAH!

Fright Night had a soul to it that a lot of vampire films don't.  Maybe that was because of the change in setting but it felt like "This is what happens when a normal person has to deal with the weird".  And, really, there was only one complete asshole in the film and that was Evil Ed.  I liked the character but he does get to be annoying after a while.  It's that voice of his.  Nails on a fuckin' chalkboard.

Even 28 years later, it's still a fun watch.  Bust it out and laugh all over again.