31 Days Of Horror: Day 17: The Dark Half

The Dark Half has never exactly had the greatest of reputations. On the scale of George Romero films that no one really gives a fuck about it ranks well above Bruiser but below Survival Of The Dead.

After watching The Dark Half I can’t help but feel that this is at least just a bit unfair. I wouldn’t go so far as to call The Dark Half a lost gem or anything. It certainly is a flawed film. But it is not without merit and it certainly doesn’t deserve to be dismissed as completely as it has.

Of course The Dark Half has never exactly been what you would call a beloved Stephen King novel. Not bad certainly, but not great. It’s the kind of book you shelve next to The Tommyknockers and oh I don’t know- Insomnia. Not bad not great, just one of the books that King puts out so he can be sure he has a book out every year. The kind you devour and then struggle to remember any specific detail about when you pick up the next one a year later. The Dark Half is notable for it’s unusually dark ending and not much else.

Not that it doesn’t have a good hook though, Thad Beaumont is an unsuccessful literary writer who happens to run a cottage industry publishing hardcore pulp novel’s written by “George Stark”. Thad Beaumont also had an ingrown twin removed from his skull when he was ten. I leave it to you to piece together whether those two events are connected.

When a fan finds out what Beaumont is up to and tries to blackmail him, Beaumont decides to “kill” the pseudonym rather than pay up. You get three guesses to figure out how well that goes and the first two don’t count.

For the most part this is pretty effective. Hitchcock’s Wrong Man syndrome is always going to be effective on a very primal level unless the filmmaker is incredibly incompetent, which Romero is not. The film actually has more in common with the likes of Season Of The Witch and Martin than it does the Romero’s Dead gorefests. Most of the violence is offscreen, and what does end up happening on screen is heavily implied more often than it is explicitly shown. It’s a smart approach in many ways running counter to the ultra violent novel that King wrote, with winning results. Romero builds an unseemly amount of tension in the film.

That said, the movie is not without its flaws, Timothy Hutton (or Princess Timothy as I have it on authority that he is known) is fine as the beleagured yuppie who finds his security threatened, but is a lot harder to swallow as a stone cold sadistic badass who will strike the fear of God into you with a single look. The film ends abruptly and tones down the darkness of King’s novel just a touch too much. All leading to a muddled home stretch.

Yet as a whole the film works surprisingly well. It might not be Dawn Of The Dead, but Romero fans who have had much to shake their heads at post Land Of The Dead would do well to check it out.  

Just A Couple Of Things

Hey guys, Today's 31 Days will be up later tonight, should be a good one.

In the meantime here's a look I took with inReads at The House On Haunted Hill. 


And in speaking of horror literature...

I guess I'm a published fiction writer now, which is kind of weird. A story of mine was accepted in the anthology State Of Horror: California. Kindle users can pick it here those of you who want the book (or perhaps if you're The Last Lovecraft want a book to burn) can order that here.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 16: The Thing

It is always interesting to me just how many characters in a horror movie act as though they know they’re in a horror movie. Whether it’s the dopey teens lining up to be next years urban legends, or the scowling scholars looking up various portents everyone seems to more or less know what is coming.

Of course the horror films that tend to really hit hard are the ones that buck this trend. Films like The Strangers, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original Halloween, films about ordinary folks who too a wrong step and wound up in hell. It’s all about taking away a degree of remove. Think this won’t happen to you? Think again.

Watching the original The Thing for the first time since childhood that’s what really struck me. These people have no idea what’s coming. They are, like all the characters in Howard Hawk’s films professionals. They’re out there to do a job, even the scientist who ends up on the wrong end of The Thing’s wrath is just trying to do his damn  job. When said job goes from “transporting personal” to saving the human race from extinction at the hands of a hostile life form, the boys roll with it with a certain blue collar matter of factness. It’s just another damn thing they’ve got to deal with. The cast of dependable B Movie faces may not have the charisma of the Dean Martins and Cary Grants that Hawks normally dealt with, but they’re cut from the same cloth.

Of course how much of The Thing Hawks actually directed is something we’ll never really know for sure. Though the lowball figures tend to be “some of” while the high end estimate is “most of”.

In either case it bears so many of his fingerprints it’s tough to see how much of a difference it would make. It’s all here the overlapping dialogue, tarted tongued dames (Even in the Artic Circle you can’t escape them in a Hawkes film), aforementioned obsession with competence and professionalism, the sense of male camaraderie, unshowy long medium shots, the bonding over small items like cigarettes. If sheriff John Chance was caught battling aliens its tough to see how the outcome would be much different.

Hawks (or whoever) creates a surprising amount of tension for someone who never tried his hand at the horror genre before or since. Though the artic base is a good deal brighter, efficient, cozier and much more obviously a set than Carpenter’s grimly functional installment, it retains its sense of isolation. The imagery holds up surprisingly well for what is essentially a low rent monster movie from the fifties as well. Though when seen in full the large domed James Arness can’t help but look a little silly, when seen from far off and obscured, as when the men watch him rampage through the dog pen, or in silhoutte as he often appears, or best of all when he’s lit on fire by the soldiers and runs through the pitch black artic night like a living torch he remains suitably creepy.

Yep The Thing sure is a great film. Strange that it inspired just the John Carpenter remake and nothing else.

And. Nothing. Else. 

31 Days Of Horror: Day 15: The Final Destination

Whelp here  we all are for one final time. Intially supposed to end the series with a bang, a 3D!!!! bang (Seriously you haven’t seen this much stuff fly at a movie screen in a horror film since Friday The 13^th Part 3), The Final Destition brought back David Ellis to take things out with a bang, and a kapow… and a brain hemorrhage (Too bad that James Wong didn’t direct Part 5 in order to keep the symmetry going). 

I have to say I do like the Ellis installments significantly more than the Wong ones. Ellis ups the ante, knows how to build tension and most importantly seems to have an innate skill at misdirection that makes some of the modes of shuffling off the ole mortal coil genuinely surprising. As well as pretty funny.

You know how it goes by now, premonition, disaster; all deaths will be answered in the order that they were received.

This time the twist is that the lead continues to receive premonitions as events continue, because death wasn’t being enough of an asshat I guess. And also that most of the people saved were fairly reprehensible.

Yep The Final Destination ditches the whole likable cast and clever plot thing from Part 2 and instead focuses on running through as many kills as possible. The characters are transparently meat puppets filled with blood, even by the somewhat lenient standards of character depth in the fourth installment of a horror film. The film barely limps past the 80 minute mark and that’s with significant padding. Also problematic is a depressingly predictable over reliance on CGI. I doubt that so much as an ounce of Karo or latex was used in the film and it’s so distracting that originally I wondered if the film was going for a PG-13 before realizing, “No they’re just really bad at this”.  Needless to say the film plays faintly ridiculous in 2D with CGI models of hooks and nails and shit occasionally flying at the screen inbetween scenes for no other reason than Holy Shit 3D.

And yet I have to admit I had more fun during this installment then I had during either one or three. Look no ones going to mistake this for a great horror film- ever. I know it’s derivitive, I know it’s a cash grab I know it’s kind of dumb. But it’s also the only installment that manages to have an ending as deranged and chaos filled as its opening, has at least one sequence (The salon) that legitimately had me on the edge of my seat.

Not bad for the fourth installment of something I wasn’t that crazy about in the first place. 

31 Days Of Horror: Day 14: Final Destination 3

Well one step forward two steps back.

Death got bored again and unable to think of any clever plot contrivance ala Part 2, he decided, “Maybe that cute girl from Scott Pilgrim and Death Proof will notice me if I send her psychic visions.” So like a nervous schoolboy leaving a note on her desk, Death sends a fiery vision of death via rollercoaster, and then after she saves the lives of yadayadayda instead decides that he’s better off just killing everyone again. (If these movies have an inherent flaw its that they’re front loaded. Without exception the most impressive scene has been the opening one.)

The film brings back original writing team of Glen Morgan and James Wong, Wong returns to the director’s seat as well. Unfortunately it kind of shows. I may have had my issues with the first Final Destination, but one thing you can say for it is that it played things straight.  Final Destination 3 tries to blend the approaches of Part 1 and 2. Going for over the top kills during the death scenes and solemn gravitas inbetween. It’s classic have your cake and eat it too and the mix just doesn’t work.

The fact is that it’s pretty clear that Wong and Morgan don’t have a whole lot of ideas this time out. I mean there’s no way you can tell me that they wrote the original Final Destination with the word Franchise in mind. They don’t feel all that invested in the characters, every one is stock and not particularly well written stock (Wait why is the Goth Kid even at the popular girl’s funeral, let alone making a scene “defending” her there.) Even as an intensely likeable and crush worthy actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead, can only do so much with her unlikable, flat character. It feels like Wong’s most frequent direction to her must have been, “Furrow your brow.”  The most they can come up with to shake up the formula this time out is to make all the main characters atheists this time out. Er- edgy?

As for the death scenes, they’re fun, if not as much fun as the one’s in the last installment. They’re pretty far over the top (like the tanning bed fry up) and go for short punchy shocks over complex Rube Goldberg machinations. This actually isn’t that bad of a trade off. What the film loses in momentum thanks to this it gains in shock. The weight lifting death is possibly my favorite in the series.

Out of the three Final Destination films I’ve seen so far this is probably my least favorite. It’s still not bad, but it feels just sort of there. Without part one’s earnestness or part two’s gleeful over the top savagery. And the absence of Tony Todd knocks things down at least one full notch for me. In short, if you’re a fan of the franchise this deliver’s the goods, albeit not as well as the others. If you’re a doubter stick to Two. 

31 Days Of Horror: Day 13: Final Destination 2

Whelp, ask you shall receive.

Most of the time when I describe a sequel as “The same thing but moreso,” I mean it as a criticism. But with Final Destination 2 that turned out to be just the right approach. Final Destination 2 is just what a horror sequel of this kind should be, bigger, bloodier and actually a good deal more clever than it has to be.

As in the first Final Destination a young woman receives a premonition of a disaster and her actions then prevent several people from dying. Death slaps his bony hand against his forehead and gets to work balancing his ledgers in a manner suggesting that Death has a lot of time on his hands and is awful bored. Probably lonely to, I imagine after flawlessly executing (hur hur) one of his Rube Goldberg Body Counts he turns around to give someone a high five, only to slump his shoulders in the realization that no one is there. Poor little fella.

Ali Larter returns from the last round, having shed the black locks after producers realized that she made the least convincing Goth in the entire world in the first movie. Here she looks ready to bash death over the head with a field hockey stick. Also returning, the man with the voice to turn your bowels to water, the man with a voice so deep it made Keith David say, “Damn.” The one the only Tony Todd returns to bring a Tony Todd shaped ray of sunshine to the proceedings. Then once again leaves after one scene to the crushing disappointment of all.

Still his absence doesn’t hurt this time, simply because there’s a lot more going on. Director David Ellis, stepping in for the team of Morgan and Wan, has a long history as a stunt coordinator in Hollywood and he puts it to damn good use. The deaths here have a visceral feel that was absent to the first one. Again looking at the opening scene, semi trucks and sedans get smashed up all over the place in your average Hollywood film, but if this one doesn’t make you flinch you’re one cold fish.

The death scenes are cleverer too. Playing off your expectations in unexpected ways. In one scene a seemingly doomed character makes his ways through dozens of death traps only to be killed by a left over plate of spaghetti. So in the next scene when it looks as though the character in question is about to snuff it thanks to something ridiculously mundane we buy it. Only to have his death come in the most over the top manner in the film. The movie manages to keep you off guard. No mean feat for a franchise whose entire gimmick is based off of the fact that you know these people are going to die.

The same kind of care is taken with the plot. Instead of just rehashing the events of the first film, Final Destination 2 actually comes up with a plausible (well you know what I mean, interesting anyway) reason for death to stalk these individuals. Final Destination 2 beats it’s predecessor in care, creativity and energy. It’s a whole lot better than it has to be. 

31 Days Of Horror: Day 12: Final Destination

So I’ve never seen one of these.

Now hold on just a second. When Final  Destination first came out there was no real reason to. It didn’t look special, it was that dumb looking movie with that puffy faced Devon Sawa kid and Stifler. I was too young to know who Tony Todd was.

Just when did these movies get respectable anyway? I remember when the last one came out people were still referring to the series with out and out disdain. Yet when I mentioned to a few horror fan friends that I’d never seen a Final Destination flick, they acted as if I had just said “You know I’ve never gotten around to watching Night Of The Living Dead. Halloween neither.”

I figured I might as well check one of The Final Destination films for 31 Days Of Horror. But which one?  Well probably best to start at the beginning right? Then again I have heard that Part 2 really is the one to see. But Part 3 stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and she’s ahem- er… Well best to just watch them all then. So for the next four days (The fifth Final Destination just left the damn dollar theater) It’s Final Destination Fest here at 31 Days Of Horror. We will find out just how many ways you can skin a teen.

Things get off to a relatively low key start with Final Destination. Upon boarding the plane our hero receives a vision of the plane going up in a giant fireball (Truth in criticism this is a pretty darn impressive sequence). Understandably freaked out by this, he panics and gets himself and a random selection of students kicked off the plane. Which then explodes. Dun dun dun.

39 Days later after the memorial service and the unveiling of a statue dedicated to the victims, the random selection of students begin to die off. Why, Death decided to wait until after the memorial service to begin offing the principles is a little sketchy. I guess he just wanted to give everyone some time to pay their respects. Death may not be proud but you cannot say that he isn’t polite.

I’ll admit I’m still not entirely sold on this one. I mean it’s fine, but there’s nothing to really differentiate it from the host of WB horror that was being released around that time, save Tony Todd’s great one scene appearance. The whole mechanic it devises for “Death passing people over” is pretty sketchily drawn. And it even does that annoying thing that horror films were doing at the time of naming all their characters after famous horror figures (Valerie Lewton? Ker-rist).

The death’s are all pretty low key, without any of them reaching the Rube Goldberg craziness I’m told the series reaches earlier. Only one, involving a cracked mug, a bottle of Vodka, a house fire, some kitchen knives and a spice rack really hits any entertainingly ludicrous heights. Like I said there’s nothing really wrong with the film, it just feels sort of workmanlike.

Then again I have always been told that Part 2 is where shit gets real. So we shall see.