New Year's Evil (1980)

directed by Emmett Alston
USA
86 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

Slashers in the 1980s and before seemed to be much more creative with their plots, possibly because the horror industry hadn't yet figured out that they could churn out dozens of "people go to a cabin in the woods and get killed with an axe" films on the cheap. I feel like slashers are generally judged on either the visual intensity of their death scenes or the strength of their villains, and because New Year's Evil is full of overacting and awkward fake choking noises, the second option is more viable.

Another thing that the slasher genre seems to have lost over time is the distinctiveness of its bad guys: Somehow we went from the lurking, almost-faceless presence of people like Jason Voorhees and the over-the-phone killer from Black Christmas to just anybody who can wield a large object with extreme prejudice. In some ways this is an interesting development, because the shift from killers having some distinctive element about them to killers being random people we might meet on the street is very realistic, and because of that I can't really say that I prefer character villains to average-Joe villains. This is why I thought New Year's Evil's antagonist was unique: he shape-shifts enough between evil deeds to be somewhat unnerving, and has enough of the unfamiliar in him to freak us out, but the casual reveal of his tie to the lead woman and his unfortunately realistic misogynist motives make him feel truer than monolithic, instantly recognizable Freddy Krueger types.

This definitely has an established place among cult-ish classics of the subgenre, but honestly, aside from a vaguely original villain, there's not a whole lot to remember it by. Like I said, a lot of the acting is too over-the-top right where it's important for acting not to be over-the-top, and a lot of it has that inherent fakeness that comes about whenever any mainstream film attempts to depict punks. It has an original theme song that's moderately rad, but this early on into the evolution of punkdom, it seems like there was a kind of crossover between punks and new wavers that leads to the music feeling a lot more subdued than I'd expect from anything with the label "punk" today.

I get the feeling this is a movie that not a lot of people watch sober. I've always loved the camaraderie of New Year's Eve, because at virtually no other time can one find people literally all over the world celebrating the same (somewhat arbitrary) thing (unless you use a different calendar). So happy New Year from me to you, if this is indeed your New Year's; if it is not, I hope this Monday treats you well.

After Midnight (1989)

directed by Jim & Ken Wheat
USA
90 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

So this is a horror anthology directed by some guys whose only other claim to fame is a movie about Ewoks. The wrap-around story is a professor teaching a class on "the psychology of fear" and doing things that should get him super duper arrested, like brandishing a gun in class, putting said gun to the forehead of a student, and faking his own suicide. I mean, I get that it's supposed to hype up the movie and it's not meant to be believable, but it just made me roll my eyes at how try-hard it was.

The first segment follows a couple stranded out on a dark country road who decide to go up to the dark country manor to see if they can find a dark country telephone. This is a recurring theme: people blundering into scary places thinking they might find a phone. It's also a staple of pre-cell-phone slashers, all the characters constantly stumble into nooks and crannies going "phuh-phuh-phoooonne????" as if every dark corner of the world is supplied with a working phone booth that they'll surely find if they just grope around in the shadows a little bit more. Anyway, this short is pretty good, and it involves an accidental death that- although cheesy (flying head!)- is genuinely upsetting to think about.

The second one is about four girls who run afoul of a creepy guy living with a bunch of dogs in an abandoned gas station after- you guessed it- one of them decides an abandoned gas station is a perfect place to look for a phone. The guy I could do without, I've seen a million films where girls get chased by guys with knives, but the best part about this one was the dogs. I felt like it was really good at making the dogs into characters themselves, not just a blind snapping mass of fangs getting in their Schutzhund training. They had good dog actors for this part, I give props for that. Also that the girls are resourceful instead of flailing around helplessly the entire time.

The third has Marg Helgenberger in it. That's about all that can be said. It isn't original (is any of this original?) and it felt like it was over too soon. Again, After Midnight seems too concerned with being edgy and pleasing a crowd to feel like a genuine examination of fear. Maybe these scenarios had the potential to scare people in the 80s, but I think modern viewers would appreciate more of a look into why things are scary, not just a rehashing of "these are some plots where people are scared". I did like the telling-ghost-stories aspect of it though, those are my favorite kind of anthology horror films. I'm mad that I fell asleep before I got to see the stop-motion skeleton with an axe at the end.

Two Front Teeth (2006)

directed by Jamie Nash and David Thomas Sckrabulis
85 minutes
USA
4 stars out of 5
----

I've really been pining (get it? Christmas trees? pine trees?) for a half-decent Christmas horror movie this year, because I've run almost out of options for ones I haven't seen, and now I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel and watching things that are truly atrocious. In Two Front Teeth, I've finally found a Christmas-themed horror comedy that's good and funny. The director later went on to make WNUF Halloween Special, a segment from V/H/S 2, and to write several films for Eduardo Sanchez, including the terrifying Lovely Molly.

Fair warning: This movie's sense of humor is pretty stupid. It's generally inoffensive, but it's probably only amusing to people who enjoy awful puns and think those newspapers that have headlines about women getting pregnant by Bigfoot and/or women delivering half-bat, half-human babies are funny. The most important thing to this movie is being funny- there's little to no concern about aesthetic and style, and certainly no attempts to be "so bad it's good" or really to go for any specific type of humor at all. The only goal is whatever will be humorous and the film absolutely hits that goal.

Two Front Teeth also has basically no plot and feels remarkably like everybody was just making it up as they went along, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending, again, on how you like your jokes. There's no pacing, so don't expect the best to be saved for last or anything, because except for the final battle between the real, wholesome St. Nick and an evil impostor called Clausferatu, the action happens basically whenever the film feels like making it happen and is not confined to climaxes or pivotal narrative moments.

Good acting is also not a huge concern, which frees up opportunities to just be funny rather than focusing on the specifics of exactly how to deliver lines. I don't doubt that this was all scripted and planned out, and I don't want it to seem like I'm implying that it's only good because it feels like there was little directorial interference- it's just that the end product of the script, direction, acting, and cinematography is something that feels fun and off-the-rails. The passion put into making it is the most important thing. I wish more horror comedies would embrace being goofy, because Two Front Teeth was excellent and just what I needed to recover from some direly horrible movies.

All the Creatures Were Stirring (2018)

directed by David Ian McKendry and Rebekah McKendry
USA
80 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

Reviews lead me to believe that this movie was going to be totally abysmal, but I watched it anyway because I need to watch more Christmas horror movies to make me feel The Spirit due to a lack of snow outside. Turns out this movie is great and some people don't know how to have fun. I'm not going to bother reviewing the individual segments because they were all pretty good, the only one I wasn't fond of was the weird one with a vengeful deer (?) that I may or may not have fallen asleep during.

One of the issues a few people seem to have with this is the wrap-around story. The whole deal is that each segment is introduced by three actors performing an artsy, almost-mime routine, which is being watched by a couple on a date. Each segment starts out performed onstage, and then segues into a properly filmed short with real actors and sets, et cetera. People seemed to take issue with the fact that, in-universe, the couple is shown commenting on how bad the segments are and how little sense they make, but the couple isn't seeing what we see, they see the people doing their art-house routine. They're not commenting on the same shorts the real-life audience is watching.

This could totally be one of those cases where I can't tell that a film is bad because I myself have bad taste, but I found All the Creatures Were Stirring to be not only super fun but well-made. Everybody in it is apparently involved in the horror community somehow, from having positions within magazines to hosting podcasts, and you can definitely tell that these are people who are familiar with the genre and know how to turn a restrictive budget into something authentic and entertaining. Constance Wu is also in it, and if you're like me, you may be a little resentful that you have to wait until the very last segment for her to show up.

I really appreciated the novelty of this whole film, it's not like a lot of holiday-themed anthologies where nobody who contributes to the film seems to have any ideas beyond "somebody dresses up like Santa and kills people". The things that happen in All the Creatures, both within the segments and in the wrap-around, are strange, inexplicable occurrences, not simple slashings and boring hauntings. They range from clingy demons to festive aliens to secret vampires (??) to Groundhog Day with ghouls. Everybody is entitled to their opinion and all, but I really can't overstate just how awful these reviews were. I feel like I watched a completely different film, one that I'm happy I took a chance on.

Index Zero (2014)

directed by Lorenzo Sportiello
Italy (filmed in Bulgaria)
82 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

I was interested in this because the two-sentence synopsis was really vague and I didn't know quite what it meant: "2035, United States of Europe. Some humans are not sustainable anymore." I thought it would be interesting if the concept of "sustainability" in this film was treated as an extension of the personal-responsibility rhetoric preached by large corporations pretending to be eco-friendly. Like how brands squawk about how you're a bad person if you use plastic straws, but meanwhile they use more water in a single day than the population of a small country. I thought maybe Index Zero took place in a world where people were punished for not practicing "sustainability"- I.E., "forget your reusable shopping bags and we will take away your food ration". 

It turns out that the real explanation is a lot simpler; in a time of overpopulation, some quasi-governmental organization decides which people use "too much" resources, and the ones whose needs can be balanced out become "sustainable". Those who would be too much of a hassle to care for (sick/elderly/pregnant/just "unwanted") are unsustainable, and are abandoned by society. Index Zero did a really great job at worldbuilding, in my opinion, and I'm not sure if the idea of a United States of Europe was an intentional jab at the United States of America and all our failings, but I'm pretending it was. 

The best thing about this film are the scenes of the scrim- the din of crowds of unwashed, angry people congregating in shady "markets" and masses that are hit and abused by rich people in riot gear. When the protagonists lose themselves in these faceless groups of people who the privileged of society wish would go rot somewhere out-of-sight, I felt like this film was doing a better job depicting the anonymity that would come with being lumped into a category of "unwanteds" than most.

This next paragraph is gonna talk about the death of a major character so... watch out. The way the woman half of the lead couple was treated irked me in multiple ways, but her death at the end of the film felt more like a dispensing-with than any kind of resolution to her story. Ironically, natural pregnancies are frowned upon by the people who decide who's sustainable or not in the film, and if she had just used the artificial womb promoted by the elites, she would have stayed alive. So I'm not sure what the point to her dying in childbirth was other than to make her a martyr or just to get rid of the pesky wimminz.

All in all, this isn't the very best film I've ever seen, but it's grim enough that I enjoyed it as a film about our ruling class finally just coming out and saying they don't want certain people to be alive. I can definitely see things like this happening in the future and in fact happening all around us- just in ways we don't necessarily pay attention to.

Alien Raiders (2008)

directed by Ben Rock
USA
85 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

Before this, I watched The Blackout, a very similarly-themed film (set during Christmastime, alien invasion, people trapped in one place) that was disappointing due to its total lack of personality and charm, so I figured that as long as Alien Raiders had some shred of uniqueness to it, it would be better than The Blackout. I think the two are similar enough that a compare/contrast isn't that far of a reach.

Alien Raiders actually achieved my hope for it to have something distinctive about it within minute one, because the bad, edgy alt-rock song played over the credits is miles better than The Blackout's total lack of anything distinguishing it from a reel of stock footage. From then on we're introduced to the situation using tension, intrigue, mystery, and fear- genuine examples of these things, done well, even if the movie as a whole isn't winning any major awards. The characters each have a personality of their own and feel like actual human beings, not just words on a page being spat out by actors who aren't thinking of their characters as anything but just that, words on a page. A whole lot of the dialogue is cliched, but at least it's being said with conviction!

Every other horror movie attempts to advertise as prominently as possible that somebody in the cast or crew had something to do with Blair Witch Project, so I'll tout the director's work as production designer on Blair Witch as well. Maybe that has something to do with why this feels watchable and smooth, even though it's fairly generic.

The only thing that really bothers me is the title, because if I'm watching a movie with "alien" in the name, I want to see some aliens at some point. I'm not too cheesed off about the lack of aliens, because what the film has instead of aliens is almost cooler (it's like The Thing basically) and the practical effects are really nice. But still, I was expecting that maybe the people who invaded the supermarket the film is set in (you know, the raiders?) were going to turn out to be the aliens in one climactic sequence where one of them gets shot and bleeds neon green, or something like that. But again, what they did instead was good too. I'm honestly pretty satisfied with this movie. It's somewhere between good and great. I think I have low standards. Courtney Ford is really cute though.

Doc. 33 (2012)

directed by Giacomo Gabrielli
Italy
63 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

This movie is totally unashamed about being a Blair Witch Project fan film. It actually has the alternate title "Blair Witch Project Spin-Off", because I guess if you call it a tribute, nobody else can call it a rip-off. I appreciate the honesty about being blatantly based on Blair Witch because the vast majority of found-footage movies after the release of BW have been, in some way, influenced by it, and have for the most part refused to acknowledge that. In attempting to emulate Blair Witch, Doc 33 sets its sights on something that's achievable for virtually anybody with a camera and some friends who are really good at screaming, and that's refreshing too: a reminder that horror can come from anywhere, that anybody can make a horror film, you don't need millions of dollars in your special effects budget to do something creative and worth watching.

At 63 minutes, we don't get a lot of time for backstory; certainly not on the characters and only sparsely on the haunting. Instead of focusing on a witch legend, the location the mockumentary takes place in is more along the lines of just being somewhere that saw so much suffering and pain that it became inherently "bad". There is a figure that looks very witchy, but there's almost something comical about her. As usual, things are much scarier as thumps on the ceiling and disembodied cries than an actual physical creature in your face, and for some reason it was impossible for me to see the "witch" as anything other than another amateur actor, only in a costume this time instead of behind the camera.

I enjoyed this movie's approach to using a ouija board, because it takes an old trope and turns it into something more ritualistic. Instead of simply placing hands on a planchette and asking any ghost who's listening their questions, the characters have to say a specific chant before each question, and then ask something formulaic- "who?" "where?" "when?", short things like that. It feels like a hybrid between a game of Bloody Mary and a classic ouija board session, and I've never seen ouija sessions depicted like this before.

I just thought this was a really nice and well-made movie, and again, it being up-front about deliberately attempting to emulate Blair Witch Project absolves it from criticism for plagiarism as far as I'm concerned. The short running time is also to its benefit as it doesn't include anything it doesn't absolutely have to. There are Christmas decorations visible in the background and as such I consider this a Christmas film.

New Blood (2002)

directed by Soi Cheang
Hong Kong
89 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

This is a horror film, but much more frightening than the blood and ghosts is the city it's set in, which almost seems like it's halfway to becoming a ghost itself, if it isn't already one. This is the kind of place where the essential spark of belonging is just absent- nobody lives there, they only reside there. 

Someone at my book club once talked about the concept of a "moral apocalypse", not in the sense that everything turns to vice and grime and "immorality", but in the sense that everybody has a mass shift in personal morals to where they just don't care anymore. New Blood depicts a place where that has happened. Almost everybody reviewing it agrees that it feels apocalyptic, but it isn't an apocalypse like Mad Max where the world is obviously broken, or one where the cause of the downfall is quantifiable as one thing- nuclear weapons, climate change, disease, &c. The city appears to be in the mid-stages of emptying out because without people, without livelihood, a city is nothing. The shadows and isolation of the city destroy the ability of individual people to connect with each other, and that lack of connection in turn destroys the city. Just ghosts, now.

The atmosphere is overwhelmingly the most affecting thing in New Blood, but outside of that, there's a story about the vengeful ghost of a suicide returning to haunt the three people who donated blood to try and save her life. This concept actually feels like it doesn't fit with the depressing atmosphere of the film, which is an indicator of just how much of a downer the atmosphere is, that even a story about a suicide feels like it should be in a more upbeat film. I guess the desire to escape is in keeping with the desolation of the city, as is the anger the ghost feels when she finds that she died, while her boyfriend, who was planning to go with her to wherever they'd go when they died, got stuck in that horrible living limbo of a city.

I think New Blood might have attempted a really tired old "blame it on mental illness" twist towards the end, but honestly, I started falling asleep and I missed some parts. As far as that twist goes, I obviously still don't like it, but this is one of the very, very few instances where I believe it was inserted deliberately, as part of the story, as opposed to being put in because the filmmakers couldn't figure out a way to end their film. It's not a sympathetic portrayal of mental illness, but it's one that at least vaguely understands the way that your environment affects your mental health. This is the kind of movie that gets made when people have no faith in the upward progression of their city anymore, believing things can only get worse and worse.

Evenings on a Farm near Dykanka (1961)

directed by Aleksandr Rou
former Soviet Union production; Ukraine
69 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Now that it is December, it's time for seasonally-appropriate films. Evenings on a Farm near Dykanka isn't terribly Christmasy, but those are my favorite kinds of Christmas movies, and I'd imagine a lot of people who are sick of the commercialism and ubiquitousness of modern Christmas celebrations would enjoy things like this as well.

All of Aleksandr Rou's movies have some magic in them, but sometimes they can get stale, running along the same typical folksy track with little variation. This, however, is one of his better ones, even though it still uses character tropes that practically every other Russian Fantastika movie uses: the vain but beautiful girl; the hearty, honest blacksmith; a couple of drunk old Cossacks; a witch; you know the drill. I like the guy who uses his magic powers to be able to eat dumplings without moving off of his chair. The majority of humor in this comes from people like that- big fat drunken old men, cavorting around the snow, occasionally getting themselves mixed up with a monkey-like little devil. All I could think about whenever the devil was onscreen was how uncomfortable his costume had to be.

There's a really funny sequence where one man comes to visit the witch, and is interrupted by another man he's trying to avoid, so the witch bundles him up in a sack, and then the man who the first man was avoiding is interrupted by a man he wanted to avoid, so the witch bundles him up in a sack, and this goes on and on several times until multiple people are hiding from other people in sacks. I love this innocent humor, this stuff that's a little corny but really pure-hearted and not seeking to make fun of anybody.

The production design on this one is also great. There are a lot of scenes where people fly through the sky doing stuff like plucking down stars and/or the moon, or ferrying other people to St. Petersburg (as you do). I love the way the sky is constructed in this, how it's a solid backdrop that you can reach by levitating for a couple of seconds, as if the whole village is just surrounded by sky to fly in, like islands are surrounded by water to swim in. I love the way people fly in this, too- it literally looks exactly like how it feels when I have dreams about flying, right down to the swimming motions that you need to do to stay in the air. This is such a simplistic but really wonderful film and I like it so much more than films about Santa Claus and elves and etc.