Tales of Terror: Haunted Apartment (2005)

directed by Akio Yoshida

Japan

93 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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The direction this movie takes in terms of going about being a horror movie is unique and original enough that it's a good case for not viewing Japanese horror as a monolithic single genre, which a lot of people tend to do since many Japanese horror films encompass the same mythology and imagery. There are shades of that in here, like that inescapable "haunted bathroom" scene, but this film goes to a deeper and more personal place for its horror. 

The story goes that the main character and her father move into an old apartment building that turns out to be cursed by the grudgeful spirit of the builder's daughter, who kills anybody who stays out of the building past 12 AM, no matter where in the country (presumably the world?) they may be. There is also a trick to it- whenever new people move in, the oldest inhabitants can finally leave. These rules are stringently followed by everybody in the building because if you don't you will die a hideous death, but you might also just die a hideous death even if you're good because the building sees fit to torment you. Depends. Mentioning the daughter's name while in the building is also a huge no-no, even if your child happens to have that same name.

I really liked the atmosphere in this one, unconventional (and possibly unintentional) as it may have been. You can hear traffic noises and general city sounds at nearly all times, and that gives a distinct feeling to the apartment building- having both visited and lived in homes and apartments that are right next to a busy road, where you can constantly hear traffic going by outside, I can attest that you never really lose awareness of where you are in relation to the outside world the way you can in a quiet house. There's a kind of disrupted peace that comes with the constant soundtrack of cars and traffic and that goes very well with the sense of disrupted peace from being under an actual curse.

This is a movie that feels very hopeless, and half of its horror comes from just being so depressing. One reason why it feels unusually dark is because it goes a step further with all of its implications without resorting to an abundance of actual gore. It's horrific because it's tragic. It's watching ghosts strangle your wife every night, pleading with them, and knowing there's nothing you can do. It's knowing you're trapped by the building, that you can never travel so far that you won't be able to get home by midnight. It's being a young girl, wishing you had anything resembling a social life but instead you have a ghost girl menacing you, a dead mom, and an emotionally vacant father. For everything that's supernatural in this, there's a component to it that's relatable in a concrete, real-life way, and that's what makes it such an effective film.

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977)

directed by George Barry
USA
77 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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It's been a while since I've seen a movie I am unable to describe as anything but "baffling". The way I see it, this concept is so ridiculous that you can execute it two ways: You can either realize that a demonic bed that eats people alive is too absurd of a premise to be taken seriously and roll with it, turning your film into a schlocky, Troma-esque gorefest, or you can just go whole hog with it and take it 100% seriously, creating lore and backstory for your bed demon. Death Bed, of course, takes the second approach. 

This movie is so deeply atmospheric and filled with dread despite its villain being a demon bed that I'm honestly impressed. It reminds me of some of the darker parts of Parents because of how you're not sure where all that humor that was going on just a second ago went, except I don't think there was supposed to be anything funny about Death Bed. It's really dour and gloomy and looks like it was shot in a dungeon, save for the marshy outdoors shots (which are quite pretty). And there isn't only the bed to consider- there's a guy trapped inside a painting, unable to die, unable to do anything but watch helplessly as the bed devours unsuspecting prey. How or why he got trapped behind the painting is a mystery, but he serves as the main narrator for the film, lampooning the bed's stupidity and giving an overview of its history and victims with undisguised loathing. Most of the characters also have "inner monologues" constantly running, like the painting guy, which show us how they're feeling, because evidently the actors are unable to move their faces in a way that would express their emotions non-verbally. 

I think everyone in this movie was sleepwalking. Do we even know this film exists for sure? Are there copies of the original tapes? Or is this some kind of shared hallucination we all enter into whenever anybody mentions the concept of a film called "Death Bed: The Bed That Eats"?

I have no idea why this is such a compelling film, given that it's totally absurd and illogical and who in the world would want to watch a movie about a hungry bed? Apparently not a lot of people, given that it evaded distribution for 25 years, but thankfully due to the wonders of the digital age you can watch it in the grainy, washed-out VHS glory it was meant to be watched in, and more and more people are coming to appreciate this scuzzy gem of the 70s. There's a part where a dude sticks his hands in the bed and the bed's stomach acid melts off all his skin and he has skeleton hands. Like he's just hanging around with skeleton hands. "There's no flesh on them at all... almost like a surgical operation," he says. Oh yeah, the surgical operation they do that removes all your skin and muscle and leaves you with skeleton hands. I know that one. It's a routine procedure.

Patient Zero (2018)

directed by Stefan Ruzowitsky
USA
86 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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Surprisingly not awful. I am actually quite surprised to look it up on Letterboxd and immediately see a ton of one- and two-star ratings, because I went in expecting something like that, and was actually somewhat impressed by how watchable I found it. It isn't excellent, but it isn't a one-star film.

So the thing that sets this apart from other zombie movies is that the main character is a half-infected guy who can speak the infecteds' language. Technically, I guess the thing that sets this apart is that the infected have a language, which is a massive paradigm shift for zombies as a whole: it upends the idea of the zombie, because if they can talk, communicate with non-infected humans (under the right circumstances), plan, coordinate, and, as it's later revealed, plant a tracking device in one of their own... what really, truly separates them from us? It's much harder to distance yourself from a person if they're capable of movements as complex as yours, even if they're driven by a desire to rip flesh from bone and limb from limb. Surprisingly, this is never really brought up in any significant way- they do attempt to do the whole "us zombies actually r better + more evolved than you normies" thing, but the argument is not strong and is abandoned fairly quickly.

There's just one scene in this that carried a really striking emotional weight and maybe this is corny, maybe the whole film is corny, but I thought that, by itself, it was a very tragic scene. After one of the secondary characters is turned, he makes the others promise to visit his son, who he's talked about before, and wish him a happy birthday. After his death we see the main two characters visiting a grave to place a cupcake on it. I thought that was awfully sad for such an otherwise blunt and clunky film.

For the most part Patient Zero never manages to rise above the cliches of its subgenre, save for the important plot point of zombie language, and a lot of its appeal comes from actors fighting each other who you would never think to have a fight scene between. Stanley Tucci attacks Matt Smith (who's attempting a horrendous New Yawk accent) and is tag-teamed by Agyness Deyn and Natalie Dormer. Stanley Tucci is actually a big reason to watch this even if everything else about it sounds terrible to you, because seeing him be a monster is a pretty far cry from the roles I'm used to seeing him in, and as usual he does a great job. Matt Smith really isn't half-bad either and harnesses a lot of physicality for his role, even if everything that comes out of his mouth sounds ridiculous. Give this one a chance guys. I know it's not original but it's fun anyway.

The Evil (1978)

directed by Gus Trikonis
USA
89 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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You'd be hard-pressed to find a more generic-sounding title and premise than 1978's "The Evil", a haunted-house film in which a professor buys an empty Civil War-era home despite many warnings about its hauntedness and subsequently finds himself and his friends getting haunted when they all come over to fix up the house and have a nice time. But despite sounding like about two hundred other haunted house movies that already exist, this film has some merit and it's really a very decent watch if you have patience.

This particular horror movie belongs to a trend that cropped up in the 70s (possibly tied in with Satanic Panic fears) of films that dealt with ghosts in a somewhat subtle but much more realistic way than the sensationalist theme prevalent in horror during most eras, including today. These films focus more on the activity of the haunting rather than the identity of the ghost, sometimes eschewing a human backstory entirely and instead classifying it as simply a poltergeist. The Evil and films of its ilk usually at least vaguely attempt to slap some science on their haunting, which is something I love: the idea of how the paranormal fits into a scientific theory of the larger world. The acknowledgement that ghosts do fit into a scientific picture of the natural world is enough to get me to think more highly of a film than I might have otherwise.

For the most part the haunting in The Evil manifests formlessly: slamming cabinets, mysterious gusts of wind, and weird laughter from the basement. But (as evidenced by the presence actually killing a person early on in the film) this is a force that's far more powerful than just throwing stuff at people and slamming doors. It escalates gradually until everybody's life is very much in danger, and a lot of people actually do lose theirs. There are a lot of shots where invisible forces drag a person across the floor or make them fly through the air, which gets kind of goofy after a while, but serves as evidence of how powerful the haunting is. The presence in the house is very fond of manhandling its victims, which generally goes against the accepted rules of how a ghost may and may not influence the living world.

There is one typical ghost in this, and I absolutely loved the look of him- that milky-white specter, that undulating wisp of a human form- but the haunting turns out to not be what you think. I don't want to spoil it, but I don't say "it isn't what you think" in a disappointing sense, like when a horror film reveals that it was all in somebody's head and they were in a hospital the whole time. I mean that the "haunting" comes from a place deeper and more insidious than a poltergeist or a build-up of bad energy. The last ten minutes are really wild, and a character who movies tend to have a hard time agreeing upon the look of appears in a getup that gave him exactly the kind of dark charisma he should have had. This film has some serious issues with camp, misogyny, and a light dusting of casual racism, and it feels much longer than its runtime, but- especially for the era- this is a solid and watchable horror film with good ideas about how to be creepy.

The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968)

directed by Noriaki Yuasa
Japan
82 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This whole movie has an almost childlike understanding of how the world works. It goes like this: The main character lives at a boarding house run by nuns until her real family finally comes back to get her. Eventually she finds out she has a secret sister living in her house who despises her and wants her to leave, but she won't leave because she's diligently waiting for her father to return from a scientific expedition in Africa. The film uses a lot of the same cliches that uncreative children's and young adult novels do, and it has the same sense of everything being somehow very easy yet also very precarious: e.g. your parents could simply swoop in to rescue you from your plight any day, but your newfound happiness could also vanish at the drop of a hat at the hands of your malevolent half-sister. I feel like only from the perspective of a child is the world so flexible and full of potential.

There's a lot of "fever dream" (really they're just regular dreams) sequences that account for most of the action up until the final quarter of the film, and they're amazing. They're these weird, hypnotic, hallucinatory images of living dolls and sisters magically transformed into snake girls throwing snakes that transform into knives. Almost like something out of Hausu, but black-and-white and a little more subdued. So most of the time, this feels very much like a children's movie, but there's also moments that are surprisingly scary: for just one example, there's a scene towards the end where the Silver-Haired Witch (who is kind of a mysterious and origin-less figure in her own right) pounds on the child protagonist's fingers to get her to let go of a ledge and fall to her presumed death, and it's genuinely kind of upsetting. Most of the violence falls into the category of fantasy, but there's also moments like that which are weirdly brutal and un-child friendly.

The evil half-sister is also genuinely a little unnerving because I couldn't tell what they had done to her face. I wasn't even sure they'd done anything to her face until they actually rip off her mask towards the end of the film. I thought the actress was just really, really good at not moving a single facial muscle. It looks like maybe they applied some kind of white paste to mask her natural expressions (like an external Botox), because when it's taken off she looks more natural and relaxed, but when it's on, you can't even tell. She just looks uncanny for some reason you can't really put your finger on.

It explains a lot that this is a Kazuo Umezu adaptation. There's a lot out there in the way of "bad things happening to innocent young girls" in anime and manga but Kazuo Umezu somehow manages to not make that trope feel as skeevy as most others do. I think he skips the uncomfortable undertones and is just concerned with siccing spiders, goblins, snakes and old haunted houses on innocent, unsuspecting children for the hell of it. In the overall canon of 60s horror from Japan, I have no idea where this film fits in, because it's got so much going on. But it's fairly fun, even if a bit dusty and difficult to understand. Recommended for Halloween-time viewing.

Vassilisa the Beautiful (1939)

directed by Aleksandr Rou
Russia (Soviet Union at the time)
72 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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A relatively early entry into the Russian Fantastika subgenre/style, Vassilisa the Beautiful is a fun one. It almost seems like two different folktales smashed together: Three brothers shoot arrows into the sky to lead them to the women they're going to marry, but one brother's arrow ends up leading him to a frog. The frog turns out to be a princess cursed to do penance as a frog. Her sentence was almost up, but since the brother nabbed her, she has to return to imprisonment (by Baba Yaga!) and marry a horrible dragon. There's a lot of fairy tale logic going on here, but that's what makes it enjoyable. 

There's something very artificial about this, and I couldn't stop wondering where they filmed it. It had to have been somewhere out in the steppes because there are these shots of the faux-quaint log cabins in the faux-quaint little village where you can see in the background that there's just... nothing. Like, a cluster of houses in the foreground with maybe one or two people here and there, and then an expanse of grass behind them, no trees, no mountains, nothing. It's almost unnerving. Like the characters only exist in this isolated area, and if they were to step outside the confines of their fake village, they'd disappear. I realize that constructing film sets in the middle of nowhere and then abandoning them is/was a common practice, but something about the underpopulated setting of this film with total nothingness in the background made me feel weird.

The film takes place in that sort of liminal, imagined "back then" time and place that exists only when people want to tell folktales about the history of their country. No specific time is stated but everybody wears these sort of generic shapeless cotton things and tills fields (again, what fields? it's just grassy wasteland out there) and generally performs the stereotypical image of peasant stuff.  Also of note is that they don't actually mention Russia in this one- it's just the virtues of "our native country" being touted instead of any specific place. But we get the inference anyway.

This isn't one of Aleksander Rou's later films that would be draped in pastels and/or technicolors up to the eyeballs, and as such it's a little more understated and less of a treat for the eyes, but it's still rather fantastical-looking and has plenty of fun for all ages with a surprising minimum of attempted indoctrination. Most of these Russian Fantastika films will have either a guy in a bear suit or some actual bears. This one has both. I get uncomfortable when I see the bears in these movies because of how performing bears are typically mistreated and I only hope these ones were alright.

Duplicates (1992)

directed by Sandor Stern
USA
87 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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With under 200 ratings on imdb and only four people counting it as "watched" on Letterboxd, this isn't a very popular movie. It seems to have gotten caught up in the wave of late 80s-early 90s "cyber-thrillers" and was advertised as something involving computers wrecking our lives and ruining our privacy: the tagline is "Someone's Stealing the Past to Destroy the Future" which is... a bit grimmer than the reality of the film.

There's a weird honesty in Duplicates, and that's the reason why I like watching sci-fi movies from the 90s. Not all of them, because there's certainly a lot of cheese in that era, and mostly not the mainstream ones, because they've been riffed on, sequeled, capitalized on with tie-in products and spin-offs, and dissected by the popular eye so many times that they've been alienated from their original context. But things like Duplicates, TV movies that exist mostly in the memory of people who watched them late at night when they were kids and/or in awful-quality VHS rips on YouTube with like 500 views, somehow feel more real. 

They landed some fairly popular actors for this one, but for most of them, this is one of the most obscure films in their back catalogue. Good acting really elevated this above a forgotten entry in the dusty backwaters of TV movie history. The human element of losing family members, finding them, and losing them all over again is the backbone of the story, and it's not as corny as it could very well have been. I found that instead of the slightly half-cooked cyberbits this film presents, I connected more to the performance of the lead actress as a very average person who lost family and never quite managed to get over it the way the people around her probably hoped she would.

This is also spot-on in its portrayal of a relatively small-scale, independent government conspiracy, and here I'm getting into some spoilers so consider this a warning. The motivations behind the body- and memory-snatching going on are ostensibly not evil from the point of view of those perpetrating them, but to anybody with half a brain and, more importantly, half a heart, it's obvious how what the government is doing is wrong. It reeks of the kind of faux-bleeding-heart activism politicians put on and take off for the camera like stage makeup: the scientists just want to make society safe, they just want to remove those "bad" people, those "undesirables", and they'll just discreetly test it on the people no one will miss in the process, because some people are worth saving and some are not, in their eyes. There's just something about this movie, and it may have been the mood I was in, but I felt a poignancy in this that I hadn't expected at all.

Hover (2018)

directed by Matt Osterman
USA
86 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This is a SyFy original movie, but it's a significant departure from their trademark style. For one, they seem to have dropped the "SyFy Original" banner and are simply calling them SyFy Films, possibly to show everyone that they make ~fillums~ and not just awful quasi-filmic entities you waste an hour and a half on. It looks like they finally started paying attention to current trends in film and to current events in the world at large- and it pays off, it really does, because this is miles better than anything else the channel has put out to date, except maybe Splinter.

This movie really doesn't dance around the fact that it's based on the ridiculous, xenophobic reality we're living in right now, with a few tweaks to the accessibility (and financial viability) of mass drone surveillance. It starts out with an advert from the drone company that doesn't even try to hide who the drones will be targeting, with a silhouette of a running man labeled "illegals" next to other silhouettes of people in ski masks labeled "thieves", "thugs", and terms of that nature. It urges buyers to "be the good guy with a drone" and "protect your homestead"- that last point is interesting because I just read something about how the word "farmer" is coming to mean not only small-scale, traditional farmers, but also massive, harmful, polluting industrial farms. I have no doubt the corporation in this film wanted to convey a sense of down-to-earthness when in reality they catered to those same kinds of industrial capitalist farm operations.

The plot is basically that a woman uncovers mass injustice in the use of these drones (surprise, surprise) and also the fact that they literally make people's heads explode on cue. But a lot of the plot actually has to do with the main character's job as an assisted suicide doctor, which I didn't really see the relevance of. That and the drones seem to have nothing to do with each other, aside from both tying in to the main character's empathy and her dedication to ensuring that every person has a dignified death (I.E. not having their head blown up remotely).

Despite its relevance to the current political (and literal) climate, Hover still seems to exist in a world much smaller than ours. In it, corporate greed is obvious and visible, and will always be dealt with if a handful of determined people make an effort to expose it. It's actually depressing how you can tell that if this scenario played out in real life it would never be fixed, because there would be people who saw the drones as protecting their freedom. It also seems, literally, to be a very small world- that corporate presentation at the climax of the film where the secrets of the drones are exposed had like 20 people in the audience. Basically this movie feels like it's dealing with a regional problem instead of a global one, but it never says as much. I liked this on the whole but it doesn't quite have enough thrust to escape the gravity well of SyFy Originals. It certainly flies higher than almost anything else has, though.

Robot Monster (1953)

directed by Phil Tucker
USA
66 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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The majority of Robot Monster takes place an unknown amount of time in the future, after Ro-Man (the name of the alien, and also the name of the alien's planet, and also the name of every other member of its species) decimates the Earth and leaves about eight humans surviving. Functionally there are only five, as two of them are off doing something at a space base and we the viewers never get to see them. So we follow a white-bread family of five, living like the archetypical 50s family unit, except they live outdoors in some kind of walled compound with electrified perimeters and plot to kill Ro-Man however they can. Ostensibly they want peace with him, but killing him is easier than a peace treaty. Which is a very American way to go about things: "don't harm us, but if you do, we'll blast you into oblivion".

I think on the whole this was better than Cape Canaveral Monsters because it felt like it was more committed to the idea of aliens. Ro-Man's look is striking even though it's supremely goofy. He's a guy in a big fat ape suit and a space helmet with rabbit-ear antenna stuck on his head, and a face that's shrouded in shadow for the entirety of the film. Ro-Man answers to a commander who can let loose beams of devastating energy from up on high and compels Ro-Man the lesser to obey his all-powerful authority. Ro-Man the lesser, of course, betrays this for a girl. Don't get all sentimental; his desires are purely apelike- at one point he says "If I were human, would you treat me like a man?" and attempts to rip off the front of one of the women characters' shirt. This is after his agenda of completely wiping out all men, women, and children has been outlined and largely put into action. Imagine being attractive enough to make an alien pause in killing your species.

This is basically the pinnacle of the B-movie: a silly-looking alien, a damsel in distress, laser beams zapping stuff, and a plot that meanders according to its own whim along no particular fixed course. There's a lot of "Gee!"s and "Golly!"s. It's remarkably free of any seriously dour moments despite taking place in a grim future where most of humanity is vaporized, but that may be due to its big old fake-out ending spoiling the atmosphere. I can't even really be mad, because it's so typical of films from the era that it felt less like a let-down and more like something I should have anticipated from the start.

But still: Robot Monster has that "spark". It's undeniably fun. It's really upsetting that Phil Tucker attempted suicide shortly after this was released because it was such a critical failure. This is one of the more endearing 50s B-movies I've seen and it certainly has worth and watchability. "Calculate your chances. Negative. Negative. Negative."