Because who goes to a "Noon Movie"?

Midnight Movie.  A beloved tradition for movie-goers in which cult films are shown, boyfriends try to get girlfriends to grab their dicks in the back row, nerds show up to talk over the movie, occasional costumes are worn and much popcorn is spilled.

You know?  I'm not really sure what to say about this one.

Mostly because it's so fucking BLAND!

There's not gonna be a lot of review of this one because I'm fairly certain that information I actually needed forced all knowledge of Midnight Movie out of my head.  I'm not saying it's a bad movie, I'm saying that it's intensely forgettable.  I remember more high school algebra than I do about this movie.

For serious, I want someone to watch this to remind me what it's about 'cause the only thing I remember about this is the most improbable and impractical slasher weapon, ever.

Twisty knife-thing. 

And that's about it.

I'm done.

I have reached the full extent of my film knowledge in regard to Midnight Movie.

I'm gonna go watch something GOOD, now.

Things NOT To Do On A Mexican Vacation

Brace yourselves, kids.  I'm about to review one of those "Love it or Hate it" movies.

You all know how much I love the Man-Eating Plant and I did mention this film a while ago and meant to review it earlier but you know how things go.  Work, life, making sure your neighbors don't notice the smell... stuff like that.

So, yeah.  The Ruins starts out in Mexico with two young couples on vacation.  The guys make friends with some German guy (because German dudes in horror movies are ALWAYS the safest people to hang with) and decide, on the last full day of their vacation, to help him and his other buddy try to find his brother who was led to a Mayan ruin by archaeologist poon.

And they get to the ruins, right, and are immediately harassed by Mayan natives that, for some inexplicable reason, do not speak Spanish or English, because fuck you, tourists, and are forced to climb the pyramid to escape rocks and arrows, because fuck you, technology.

Aww.  Bestest vacation, EVER!

When they get to the top, they hear a cell phone so German dude shimmies down a handy-dandy rope to look but the rope breaks and so does his back and legs.  Fortunately, one of the guys is a med student so he's all, "Bring him up here but try not to move him too much.  Go ahead, girls, I'll be waiting up here."

That's right.  Look at the pretty plant that's covering the entire ancient temple.

Overnight, one of the girls discovers some vine on her leg.  No big thing, right?  Then they check on German dude and discover that the vines have eaten his legs down to the bone.

GAH!!

THEN, they hear the phone again and the girls take another trip down the shaft.  They, in effect, get shafted. WOO!  Anyway, while they're down there, they notice that the sound isn't coming from a phone, it's coming from the plant which has, somehow, evolved the ability to mimic sound and is ambulatory enough to physically attack the girls.

Take that, creationists.

One of the girls gets convinced, due to dehydration or panic or whatever, that the vines are growing inside her.  Her friends are all, "Nooo, Meester Vine no here" but they are totally wrong.  Because this is a horror movie and fantastical things happen all the time in horror movies.  She spends a good chunk of the movie going hysterical and accusing her friend of cheating with her boyfriend (because she's done it before) when, you know, she's right there and she knows that the plant can mimic sound and, finally, cutting huge swaths of her own flesh to pull out the vines that ARE SO TOTALLY CRAWLING UNDER HER SKIN like big, ole green parasites.

Just one more and I can go back to being a crazy woman.

Words are said, hands get slashed, boyfriends get stabbed, fun for the whole family!

Now, I don't know about you but, personally, I think this movie is the best of both worlds.  It's totally b-grade trash but it does have a certain artistry to it that transcends its trashiness.  The Ruins kind of makes you watch it with this "I'm sexy and I know it" air that says "I know I'm brain candy but I'm TASTY and you can't resist me." 

And it's not like it's a bad movie at all.  In fact, I think it's a GREAT movie.  There's enough backstory on the characters to make them interesting, there's enough gore to keep us cringing, and, for once, we have a mostly realistic man-eating plant in a horror film that doesn't require that much suspension of disbelief.  It's like Little Shop of Horrors and Day of the Triffids had a baby and gave us this unstoppable wall of anthropophagous foliage.  Well, kind of unstoppable.  They DID keep it contained by salting the earth around the pyramid and killing idiot trespassers with rocks and arrows.

That is not to say that we don't still basically have five characters that are subject to the whims of the greenery but, hey, since when is that a concern?

Personally, The Ruins is a favorite but I also know that I'm weird so there you go.

If you liked it, awesome!  Go watch it again.  If you hated it, awesome!  Go watch it again because I'm sure you're wrong and I'm an unpaid movie reviewer on the internet so you totally have to do what I say.

That IS how it works, right?

There's a Reason Behind the Blog's Name, You Know...

Yes, yes, I forgot yesterday was Tuesday, blah, blah, blah.  So, guess what?  You get a bonus TropeFest post this week.

And today, we look at why I chose my blog's name (and why a whole lot of other folks chose it, too, because I never claimed to be unique).

Say it's Halloween and you come home with your stash and there's a nice, juicy, healthy apple in there.  You take a bite and then you say to yourself, "My that was crunchy and sweet but why do I taste something coppery.  Apples aren't coppery.  Maybe I should take a look at that," and BAM!  Razor blade in your apple.  Bloody gums and trips to the ER.  Moms around the country go schizoid trying to find the asshole that sliced up her baby's face.

This isn't a commonly used trope but when it IS used, it's pretty darn effective.  Nobody likes the thought of the tastiness combined with the harmful and Halloween, very often thought of as a children's holiday (at least in the U.S.) adds the risk of harm to children.  What kind of asshole wants to hurt kids?  Who does that?

Note that this trope is NOT Halloween-specific.  Just about any gift food will do.

Oomph.  I haz it.

So, like I was saying, for DECADES, American children have had to contend with their parents seizing their candy before they can eat any of it to search it for any kind of malicious tampering, thereby instilling in them a general mistrust of everyone since, y'know, everybody knows that parents use this as an excuse to eat the candy their kids worked hard all night begging for.  Mommy's on a diet, my ass, she's after the ONE full-sized Snickers I got all night.

I don't care if you ARE my mother.  Hands off my gummie bears!

Wanna know how we know this?  Because even as children, our bullshit meters go off the charts.  This, kids, is an urban legend.  There has never ONCE been a documented case of this happening for real.  Ever.  Not that affected a child, anyway.  Joel Best, a professor of sociology at CSU-Fresno, has been trying to debunk this urban legend for thirty years.

The legend, though, started in World War II with a group of POWs called the "Men of Spirit" (as described in the autobiography "The Colditz Story") who spent their free time ("free time" being described as that time they spent NOT trying to escape) stuffing kitchen waste with razor blades so that when it was taken to neighboring farms as pig swill, well... you know... a lot of decent pork went to waste.  How it went from a tale of wartime sedition to a boogeyman story is completely unknown.

Now, none of this is to say that people HAVEN'T handed out Halloween candy that was tainted through other means or handed out deliberately inedible treats because they hate the thought of costumed beggars, or completely by accident, or even kids dying out of sheer happenstance on Halloween from other causes.  The fact remains that there have been only TWO cases where a child has died as a direct result of the candy but neither case occurred with candy that was tampered with by a malicious stranger. 

One child, Kevin Toston, died in 1970 of a heroin overdose but it is believed that the urban legend was only used to obscure the cause of death which, in reality, was that he'd gotten into Uncle Smokey McCrackpipe's stash and the rest of the family sprinkled heroin on his candy to draw away suspicion.

The other child, Marc O'Bryan, was murdered in 1974 by his father, Ronald O'Bryan.  Ronald O'Bryan killed his son with a cyanide-laden Pixy Stix (presumably to get the insurance money) and, in order to make it look like there was a random madman, snuck those same Pixy Stix into the goodie bags of his daughter and three other kids.  Luckily, those children didn't actually eat theirs.  Ronald O'Bryan was put to death by lethal injection on March 31st, 1984.  (Urban legend says it was on Halloween, which would have been apropos but nobody says the justice system has to be all ironic and shit.)

Even where it's been reported, it's most often found to be a prank perpetrated by the kids themselves.

As ingrained into our culture as this is, though, in film, it doesn't pop up nearly as often as you think it would.  Oh, it's there and it scares us for all of the reasons listed above, it's just not prevalent.

In Night of the Demons, we have a wrap-around story where a child-hater spends the day putting razor blades in apples and is eventually served an apple pie by his wife.  After a few bites, he asks her where she got the apples.  Sanity tells us that she had to slice the apples to make the pie which means she knew all along what he was doing.

Helen, in Candyman, finds a small stash of chocolate bars and one of them contains a razor blade.

But the best examples of ALL are found in Trick'r'Treat, which is not so much a horror anthology as it is a Halloween anthology.  First, we have the Principal who puts out randomly poisoned chocolates (because he is a serial killer) and then we have Mr. Kreeg, who is being punished by Sam for not showing the proper holiday spirit, falling down stairs that are strewn with needles, razors, tacks, shards of glass and colorful hard candy.  Eeeeeexcellent.  That second one isn't a literal example but it certainly gets the point across.

HA!  Point.

So, anyway, when your mom wants to check your candy, watch her.  Watch her close.  'Cause she'll steal you blind and leave you with nothing but toothpaste, black licorice and Necco wafers.  Oh, and none of this "You get one piece after dinner" crap, neither.  You take that pillowcase full of candy and you hide it where your parents can't get to it.  Kids lose 90% of their candy by letting their parents watch it for them. 

If you're gonna develop distrust, you may as well do it the right way.

Breathing Without Instructions: F-

I have mentioned many, many times that the characters in horror movies are fucking morons.  Today on TropeFest, we look at those that are too dumb to live a little more intensely.

Now, I'm going to say this again.  People in horror movies are seriously stupid.  Of course, if they were NOT stupid we would not have a movie which is exactly why this trope exists in the first place.

SOMEBODY has to get the ball rolling.  Somebody has to prove an easy target.  Somebody does not necessarily have to be just one person.  Whether it's the teenagers in Jaws who swim around with a shark fin who should have the bejeezus slapped out of them for allowing the REAL shark to eat someone else or the ex-husband in The Stepfather following said stepfather into what basically amounts to an abbatoir, horror movies wouldn't be horror movies if horror movie characters didn't pass around the idiot ball.

Idiot Ball:  A plot device in which a character's stupidity fuels action.  Sometimes this leads to a life lesson.  Not in horror movies.  Not related to Happy Fun Ball.

She's got TWO idiot balls.

This sort of thing occurs in movies to make us, the audience, say "Why the hell did you DO that, you ass?"  I'll TELL you why they did that.  To make us talk about the movie when it's over.  To get us to tell our friends about the stupidity that occurred so that others will go see the movie.  Of course, if this is OVERused, no one will go see the movie, resulting in a flop.

So.  What is it about horror in particular that makes stupidity fatal?  It's simple.  As I've said before, horror movies, particularly slashers, are often morality tales and if you ever read Highlights magazine, you know all about Goofus and Gallant.  Goofus, obviously, does stupid shit and will likely get punished and/or hurt for it.  Gallant does the right thing and is, thus, unharmed. 

Oh, look.  A personal injury lawsuit in it's larval stage.

In horror, we have the assholes who willingly choose to swim in shark and/or piranha-infested waters.  The stupid European backpackers who traipse across the moors in England during a full moon or take a trip to irradiated ruins.  The douche-nugget that lets a previously undiscovered houseplant to drink his blood.

In first place for horror movie stupidity?  The scores of victim wannabes that take field trips to Camp Crystal Lake.

Population: Minus-150 Million

It really makes you wonder if there has ever been any press about this place because, seriously?  Any other place in the world with this much mutilation mayhem would be cordoned off by the local, if not federal, authorities and NOBODY would be getting in there unless they had a badge.  But, noooooo.  Idiot teenagers keep finding their way into the camp and keep getting their heads turned into juicy campfire burgers.  They hear the stories.  They talk about Jason all the time.  They KNOW what goes on there.  And, yet, they go back time and time again. 

But, again, we would have no movie without these fools so, what are we to do?  Cheer for them!  Make your voice known!  And their rallying cry shall be "WHYYYYYYYYYY!!!"

Hail to the fools!  Hail!

Wes Craven? Why Must You Hurt Me So?

It's April Fools' Day, kids and you know what that means.  It means that assholes are going to be posting fake ads on Facebook, making silly memes, putting "kick me" signs on people's backs and generally being douchebags.  Why do we think this is any different from any other day?

So, anyway, in keeping with the theme, I will not be reviewing April Fools' Day, since I already did that, but, in fact, I will be reviewing shame on celluloid.  A film that really should be relegated to the dustbin.  A barker so awful that I'm surprised anyone's career who was involved in it remained intact.

Carnival of Souls (1998).

Ugh.  Really, Wes Craven?  You allowed your name to be associated with this?  You asshole.

For people looking for any kind of connection with the original, don't.  All we've got is a name.

For people looking for Shawnee Smith to be the star, don't.  The star is actually Bobbie Phillips, a perfectly adequate actress that retired in 2004 after a bit part in Showgirls in which her bits were all hangin' out there for the world to see.  (Showgirls is still the best unintentionally hilarious movie ever made.)

 

Not Showgirls but check out Shawnee's bitchin' 90's braid.

Let's talk about the plot, shall we? 

Little Alex Grant (Phillips) watches her mom's scary clown boyfriend Louis Seagram (Larry Miller) rape and kill her.  She spends the rest of her life in terror, waiting for the bad man to come after her and her sister, Sandra (Shawnee Smith).  Surprise, fucking surprise, he does.  Because this is Horror Movie Land and we wouldn't have a movie if he didn't.

 

Gun fellatio.  Ahhhh... no.

During the process of exacting his revenge for being a balding prison bitch, Louis ends up in a car with Alex and Alex drives the car into the river which is only sensible.  Sure.  That's a distraction, alright.   She seems to find herself in a carnival of sorts only without the actual carnival.  She deals with freaky looking things whose only scary trait is the ability to twitch their heads around very quickly (which has now, officially, been overdone, just FYI) and has fully clothed sex with an angel and it all turn out to be just a death hallucination, the end.  "Cause Alex is dead, see.  She was dead the whole time.

And who wouldn't want to be dead after seeing this?

Creepy French tickler.  Gah!

This movie is what I watch when I'm bored on the couch and need to take a nap but I can't fall asleep for some idiotic reason.  Twenty minutes into it and I'm normally out like a light, snoozin' away, blissfully unaware of the suck playing itself out on the screen.

One of the big problems, here, is that not only did Wes Craven not direct this, but there were actually TWO directors.  Sometimes this isn't bad, say, for example, in From Dusk Til Dawn, but this time around it looked like they fought to see who could be the most boring.  Adam Grossman and Ian Kessner need slapped for realsies.  Even people who are afraid of clowns would just point and giggle at the failure.

And then we've got the fact that they had a fantastic opportunity to go huge with the creepy carnival thing but... well... didn't.  Flat, flimsy and flaccid were the circus sets.  The only thing scary about their carnival was Louis' painted on mustache.  *shudder*

 

The green screen stuff was fairly horrifying, too.

The acting was adequate and that's about the best you're gonna get out of me.  It wasn't all stupid and wooden but it wasn't good, either.  I'm really surprised that none of the actors involved, including Miller, didn't just hang up their hats after this one.  Well, Phillips did but that was a few years later.  We didn't see her again until she showed up on an HGTV home design show (she didn't show us her tits in that one).  It's fortunate that Smith and Miller were able to move on to bigger and better things after this even though Larry Miller has always irritated the fuck out o' me.

So, yeah.  Seriously.  Do not waste your time.  This is not a joke.  Avoid this like a Sumatran Rat-Monkey.  If you want Carnival of Souls, watch the original.  At least that version has some artistic merit and uses subtlety to its advantage.