Tag: horror

Phantasm: The horror franchise that gets by on vibes

“You think when you die, you go to heaven. You come to us!” – The Tall Man

Horror movies are littered with franchises that churn out endless sequels, but there’s nothing quite like the experimental weirdness of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm series, a perfect treat for this Halloween week.

The original Phantasm from 1979 remains a masterclass in creepy, slow-burn terror. Writer and director Don Coscarelli was only 25 when he created Phantasm, and the story can be seen as a young guy trying to grapple with the concept of death for the first time. Teenager Jody and his wide-eyed little brother Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) are mourning the mysterious death of one of their friends, but the funeral becomes steeped in strangeness as the mortician – a towering figure known only as “The Tall Man” (Angus Scrimm) – seems to be something less than human. Weird robed Jawa-like creatures are skittering about in the shadows. Dead people are being stolen and reanimated.

And then there’s the moment that made Phantasm iconic – in one of the most bizarrely terrifying scenes in horror history, glittering silver spheres come hurtling down the deserted mortuary hallways, spiked with knives that burrow deep into your skull, suck out your blood and kill you. Jody, Mike and their friend, balding ponytailed ice-cream truck driver Reggie, soon become embroiled in a battle with the Tall Man for their very souls.

Nothing quite “fits” in Phantasm – the story has a kind of dream logic. In the final act we learn the Tall Man may be from some other world entirely as Jody and Mike briefly fall into a vast void with scarlet skies. Phantasm feels like a clear influence on the Nightmare On Elm Street series, which turned out a much more audience-friendly, wisecrack-filled spin on the notion of a killer who can manipulate reality. I even get an echo of its liminal space horrors in the recent hit Backrooms.

You could drive a truck through the escalating plot holes in the Phantasm series, and to be honest I’m still not entirely sure what’s “real” and what’s a dream. Jody dies, but does he really? “Nothing is ever really what it seems,” a character says at one point, which sums it all up. The lapses in logic and continuity in the Phantasm franchise are less of a bug and more of a feature. A little mood goes a long way:

The first movie remains the most distinctive, but there’s enough distinctive vision in even the worst of the sequels to make them worth following for Phantasm Phans.

Even mildly successful horror flicks got heaps of sequels in the 1980s, but it took until 1988 for Phantasm II to be released. It shows the push of a major Hollywood studio to try and make it a horror hit machine like Freddy and Jason, adding in a superfluous love interest, and recasting Mike with a Teen Beat-friendly new actor. The new Mike is a sullen bore, lacking the amateurish relatability that Baldwin brought to the original, and the romantic angles shoved in here feel forced. (Suddenly Mike is psychic, and has a bond with a sexy stranger?) Phantasm II loses a lot of the ambiguous feeling, instead throwing in more gore and more guns, and the plot is even more choppy – Reggie has a never-seen family who get killed offscreen, for instance. But there’s cool expansion of the series’ opaque “lore”, gruesome uses of the spheres, and a great chainsaw battle. It also shows the franchise mutating into a kind of never-ending road trip, as Reggie and Mike begin what seems to be an infinite loop of searches for the Tall Man. Gradually, all external life for these two is stripped away – they have no jobs, no friends, no real purpose but fighting and losing to the Tall Man, forever.

Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead from 1994 swerves in yet another new direction, bringing a bit more comic tone. Phantasm II’s love interest is swiftly, nastily dispatched in the opening scene and never mentioned again, and A. Michael Baldwin returns as the original Mike but is almost immediately sidelined for most of the movie as a prisoner of the Tall Man. Instead, it becomes Reggie’s show as he sets out to find Mike. Fortunately Bannister has enough everyman charisma to carry the franchise, and he’s quickly saddled with a homicidal child sidekick and a smack-talking Black woman partner. To top things off, Mike’s brother Jody, apparently dead since Phantasm, returns somehow reincarnated as one of the floating spheres, which now can talk. Yeah, it gets weird. That’s Phantasm for you.

“My name is Reggie. I was an ice cream vendor by trade. Now, I am a soldier. A soldier in a war against his army of the living dead.” – Reggie

After the middling Phantasm III, I was surprised by how decent Phantasm IV: Oblivion is, combining the chilly menace of the first film with some amusing set pieces and giving us far more of the Tall Man than we’ve ever had before, digging into his mysterious origins with some time travel and dimension hopping. There’s some inventive gore, particularly a scene involving a female traveller Reggie hooks up with and a novel use for those deadly spheres. Mike attempts to learn more about his strange bond with the Tall Man while Reggie hunts for him (again!). Much of Phantasm IV takes place in the desert, which gives a welcome new look to the series, instead of being set in mortuaries and shadowy darkness. Angus Scrimm gets to do a bit more than just growl menacingly, as we discover he was once a scientist in the 1860s trying to discover more about reality who became transformed into the Tall Man. Several deleted scenes from the original Phantasm are merged seamlessly into the narrative here, making it feel like everything’s come full circle. As always, plot threads are dangling and things left unexplained (Phantasm specialises in fake-out twist endings that never quite get resolved) but at this point, you like it or you don’t.

It took 18 years for the final Phantasm movie, 2016’s Phantasm: Ravager, to be released – and it wasn’t really worth the wait. It’s the only one not directed by Coscarelli, who co-wrote the script. It’s a messy hybrid of SyFy Channel-level production with a few decent ideas, but ultimately it just feels like a sketchy coda to the main story. We pick up years after Phantasm IV with a battered Reggie emerging out of the desert (what’s he been doing? who knows!), still searching for Mike and chasing the Tall Man (a clearly ailing Scrimm), but then it abruptly switches to another timeline, where an elderly Reggie is battling dementia in a nursing home, and a third timeline in a post-apocalyptic future where the Tall Man has mostly destroyed the world as an armed resistance fights back – Terminator meets Phantasm, if you will. Director David Hartman’s cheap approach strips away gravitas in favour of splattery shocks (if you’ve ever wanted to see a sphere kill a horse, this is your movie). Special effects that would’ve looked cheap on a PlayStation 2 don’t help the overall feeling that this is a fan film that’s broken containment.

It shows how much Coscarelli’s unique style and voice matters to Phantasm, and once you strip it away you’ve got just another generic horror franchise. It does give us a chance to say farewell to Angus Scrimm, who died shortly before its release, and Reggie (Bannister himself died just this year). But at this point after five films, the endless twists in reality and lack of narrative closure feel kind of exhausting. Is the entire series just a dream of a dying man in the end, or does the battle go on forever? Phantasm: Ravager tries to have it both ways. I’d prefer to think of Phantasm IV as the end of the series, and this as a kind of misguided tribute. It’s also cool that Scrimm, Bannister and (mostly) Baldwin remained the stars of the series for its entire 37-year run.

The Phantasm series is schlock, but to me, it’s evocative schlock. For all its silliness and flaws, Phantasm seems to strive to be about something – the unstoppable nature of death, the void we all face wide awake at 3am – rather than just an escalating gory body count. The Tall Man is Death itself, implacable, unbeatable, and always there, waiting to reach out for all of us. Now that’s scary.

The Bride and why I love all the Frankenstein’s monsters

Frankenstein’s Monster is dead, but he’ll also really never die. 

I love it when a character hits the cultural level of a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, and can be endlessly reinvented for new eras. 

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride is the latest reimagining of the bones of Mary Shelley’s tale, a wild, anarchic creation myth and love story. It’s as loose and freaky as major Hollywood productions ever get these days, and while it’s sure to be divisive, I kind of loved it. 

Very loosely retelling the events of Bride of Frankenstein in the 1930s, Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley gives a delightfully unhinged performance as a new “Bride” to Christian Bale’s wounded and lonesome Frankenstein’s monster. The Bride at times feels as rough and patched together as the monster himself, but that’s what charmed me – it tells something new by stitching together ghostly possession, a screwball musical, a blood-spattered romance and a Bonnie and Clyde-style violent lovers on the run arc. 

The monster and his bride tear through polite society, and while the plot is sprawling and doesn’t always add up, terrific turns by Bale, Buckley and Annette Bening as this movie’s “mad doctor” work well. A truly insane homage dance number to Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is the most audaciously strange scene I’ve seen so far this year. This one’s for the sickos, and I’m proud to be among them. 

I’m here for all the Frankensteins, to be honest, right on down to campy ‘60s kaiju romp Frankenstein Conquers The World and the ultra-sleazy Frankenhooker. 

There remains endless potential in the story of man creating life, and how it (usually) all goes horribly wrong. 

We’re only a few months from the last great Frankenstein movie, Guillermo Del Toro’s Gothic Oscar-nominated epic of an adaptation of Shelley’s novel with a committed and curiously sexy performance by Jacob Elordi as the monster. That one is as overwrought and passionate as The Bride, but in a completely different way. Those great lonesome Arctic chase sequences – always my favourite part of the original novel – sparkle on the big screen. 

A rough Google estimate tells me there’s been close to 500 spins on the Frankenstein story. Boris Karloff set the standard, of course, and his performance, closing in on a century ago now, remains the template for investing the monster with both humanity and menace. Christopher Lee played the creature as a hurt, abused animal, with melting-egg makeup that seemed startlingly grotesque in 1957’s Hammer production The Curse of Frankenstein – then followed by a half-dozen more Hammer movies that totally reimagined the creature’s story each time, even as a woman and once as a New Zealand wrestler with the world’s worst makeup job. 

Every era has its Frankenstein – splattery gore from Andy Warhol in the ‘70s, kid-friendly spoofs like The Monster Squad in the 1980s, bombastic excess like Kenneth Branagh’s 1990s take. I like the weirder angles, like Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Bound from 1990 that throws time travel and metafiction into the mix. 

I’m even fascinated by the schlocky look of 1910’s Frankenstein by Edison Studios, the first adaptation of the creature’s story done in a mere 16-minute silent film, with Charles Stanton Ogle as a shaggy, deformed monster that’s memorably bizarre. A mere 116 years old now, it’s more of a curio than a successful film, but it sets the template for many a Frankenstein story in the century-plus since. 

And that doesn’t even get into the non-film realms, like DC Comics turning Frankenstein’s monster into a kind of immortal holy warrior, queer fiction imaginings like Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein and the novel and movie of Gods And Monsters, or modern-day parables like Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad. 

The Bride builds on all these flocks of Frankensteins, and Gyllenhaal’s weird delight of a film embraces the shimmering fluid identities of the monsters – her romantic duo are alternately enraged and peaceful, needy and fiercely independent. I expect The Bride is the kind of movie a lot of people will hate, and it’s certainly not flawless, but it’s brave in its own weird way.

For a book that came out 208 years ago, Shelley’s Frankenstein is still remarkably futile ground for birthing all kinds of stories about mankind’s hopes and dreams, and nightmares. 

Swamp Thing: The forgotten comic book movie franchise

As part of my annual Halloween month monster movie marathon, I went back to the swamp. Swamp Thing, that is, who starred in two almost forgotten comic book movies that oozed their way through the ‘80s. Nobody would ever call them timeless classics, but I’m weirdly fond of them. 

Swamp Thing and Return Of The Swamp Thing came in that kind of interregnum in superhero movies through much of the ‘80s, in the period between the last good Christopher Reeve Superman movie Superman II in 1981 and the Tim Burton Batman-palooza of 1989. In that grim limbo we comics geeks made do, dimly, with unsatisfying stuff like Howard The Duck, Supergirl and Sheena: Queen Of The Jungle. 

Neither Swamp Thing movie is really great, but there’s something about them I’ve always found cheesily enjoyable, from their campy humour to their amiably low-fi practical effects. Now, Swamp Thing has starred in some of the greatest and most out-there comics of all time, and the basic muck-monster idea has exploded into existential horror, cosmic wonder, time travel, LSD-tinted romance and much more. But on screen, there’s still something loveable about just having a guy in a rubber suit wandering around the swamps. 

There was an attempt to make 1982’s Swamp Thing the next Superman, with adverts on the back of every comic and awesome poster art. The movie closely follows the comic plotline about a scientist, Alec Holland, (the great Ray Wise, who I kinda wish had been allowed to suit up as Swamp Thing himself) whose groundbreaking research is targeted by thieves. In one of those only-in-comics accidents Holland is set on fire, doused in his mysterious chemical formulas and thrown into a swamp, where he re-emerges as a half-man, half-man muck monster. With the aid of another researcher (Adrienne Barbeau), the Swamp Thing (played by Dick Durock) seeks revenge on Anton Arcane, the evil mad scientist behind all his troubles (Louis Jourdan). 

Swamp Thing is a breezy monster mash of a movie, with a costume where the seams are clearly visible and the steamy swamp setting is one of the film’s biggest assets. Swamp Thing is a monster, but a good guy, and in the end he gets into a classic monster-movie throwdown wrestling match with Arcane, who inexplicably ends up turned into this wild bug-eyed shrew/rat man hybrid when he overdoses on Holland’s formula. It’s a so-bad-it’s-good moment.

Maybe it’s because it was one of the first real “horror” type movies I saw, but I still love Swamp Thing, flaws and rubber costumes and all. Barbeau is a great steely kick-ass heroine, Jourdan is smoothly menacing and Dick Durock gives Swampy a melancholy charm. It’s a movie that just gets to the point, pure popcorn cinema with a dash of sadness over poor Alec Holland’s fate.

The sequel Return Of The Swamp Thing pretty much gives up at being serious at all. It starts off, weirdly, with a credits montage that features lots of glorious art from Alan Moore’s legendary 1980s Saga of The Swamp Thing comics. As these images by Steve Bissette and John Totleben pass across the screen you think whoa, is this movie going to boldly reinvent the whole idea of a swamp monster hero like Moore’s comics did?

But nope, it’s a tease. Return Of The Swamp Thing is a far campier and sillier sequel that feels like it came straight from a USA Up All Night! marathon. It opened up, very briefly, in theatres a month or so before Batman in summer 1989, and it’s a plucky last gasp of the slapdash amateurism most superhero movies had until Tim Burton came along. 

This time, Swamp Thing has a much cooler leafy costume that apes the looks of the Alan Moore comics, but that and an eerie scene where Swampy slithers out of a bathtub drain and puts himself back together are about all that this one has in common with the Moore stuff. 

In one of the weirdest castings of all time, Heather Locklear plays a hilariously broad valley-girl version of the comics’ goth girl love interest Abby Arcane, while poor old Louis Jourdan looks half-dead in his sleepy return as Anton Arcane, rather inexplicably no longer a shrew-man. The henchmen are ridiculous action movie parodies and the movie features two of the most obnoxious child actors you’ll ever see and a far more talkative Swamp Thing who feels like some chill surfer dude rather than the rumbly monster of the first movie. (Seeing Swamp Thing laugh like a businessman at a cocktail party is one of the most off-model moments of the film.) It’s a ramshackle, small-scale story that basically seems to consist of Arcane doing more goofy evil science stuff, and Swamp Thing defeating the rather physically unimpressive bad guy by… throwing a chair at him. We don’t even get a return of the bizarre shrew-man costume. 

…And yet, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just my love for Swamp Thing as a character and the low-stakes vibe of these movies, but it’s far more entertaining than the plodding, overly serious and dull attempt to bring Swamp Thing back in a very short-lived TV series a couple years back. Word is James Gunn wants to do a new Swamp Thing movie as part of his DC universe empire. I know these days everything is done with CGI and motion-capture but I still kind of hope that if they do a new flick, we still get a guy in a somewhat sloppy rubbery costume stomping about in the muck.

When it comes to Swamp Thing on film, the dirtier, the better. 

The Evil Dead and the evolution of Ash, from shy boy to demon slayer

I love the original Evil Dead trilogy and its splattery slapstick charms, so you’d better bet I was down for a marathon of the whole shebang at the legendary Hollywood Avondale this weekend, featuring an introduction by producer and honorary New Zealander Rob Tapert.

Tapert was right there, along with his mates director Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell in the Tennessee woods when the extremely low-fi 1981 original was shot, and has since gone on to be a producer of many great flicks in the years since – and also created a little character called Xena The Warrior Princess and married a Kiwi named Lucy Lawless, so he’s got some serious Kiwi bona fides.

Watching five hours of Evil Dead flicks on a rainy, windy Saturday night is my idea of a good time. Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead II (1986) and Army Of Darkness (1992) form a trilogy which starts off as a group of young folks facing evil in a cabin in the woods and ends up with an army of skeletons battling knights in armor while a blustery guy with a robot hand eggs them on. 

I recommend a strong stomach and plenty of caffeine if you’re going to mainline all three movies at once, but it’s also fascinating to watch how different they are – the original is more straight existential horror, while the second almost remakes it but with a much more comic eye, while the third almost abandons horror and gore entirely for a straight out slapstick parody of all those old Ray Harryhausen flicks with sword-fighting skeletons. In these days of carefully plotted cinematic universes and decade-long “phases,” the Evil Dead trilogy is a monument to just making up shit as you go along. 

The only constant through it all is Ash, swaggeringly portrayed by Bruce Campbell. Images of Ash with a shotgun in one hand and his chainsaw taking the place of his other hand are iconic in comic horror, and his adventures have continued long after the original trilogy in plenty of comic books and videogames – and the surprisingly great 2015-2018 Ash Vs Evil Dead series that gave us everything and more the long-promised Evil Dead IV could have. 

Continuity is not a strong suit in the Dead trilogy – the success of the dimestore-cheap production of Evil Dead led Raimi and company to make a sequel, but it’s kind of bolted together with what Tapert called a “condensed” recap of the original in the first 10 minutes or so that reimagines the movie and streamlines it, then picks it all up again with Ash still battling those demons in the woods. 

And yet, watching the whole trilogy is also like watching Campbell and Ash find their way into a character. The catchphrase-shouting arrogant Ash we all “think” of when we think of Evil Dead only really comes into focus halfway through Evil Dead II, and becomes his most ideal self in Army Of Darkness.

When we first meet Campbell in Evil Dead, he’s a bland non-entity sitting in the back seat of the car heading to that infamous cabin in the woods, a sidekick to his more extroverted pal Scotty. You think Scotty’s going to be the big hero but then it’s quiet background Ash who ends up the “final girl.” It’s always a shock rewatching Evil Dead to see an almost shy Ash at first, who barely cracks a joke and who becomes the series’ focus only by his lucky knack for surviving the demonic chaos that consumes his friends. 

How did Ash go from shy boy in backseat to the alpha male in Army Of Darkness spitting out lines like “Gimme some sugar, baby” and “Yo, she-bitch! Let’s go!” The endearingly choppy nature of storytelling in the Evil Dead trilogy ignores rather than tries to fill in the contradictions of how Ash became, well, Ash, but in my own mental backstory I like to paper in the cracks of it all to be a tale of how Ash survives the incredible trauma of having his girlfriends, best pals and total strangers literally torn to pieces in front of him, of having to chop off his own demon-possessed hand and horrors that would drive anyone bonkers. 

In my head canon, Ash was the shy college boy when all the Deadite doings started – he’s actually repeatedly rather a coward in the climax of the original Evil Dead – but when the evil never stopped, he forces himself to become what he thinks of as a hero. Trauma remakes Ash, body and soul.

By the time Army of Darkness rolls around Ash is stranded in the year 1300 surrounded by “primitives,” and has completely reinvented his own personality to be the hero he probably saw in lots of late-night zombie movies. You can’t imagine Evil Dead 1981 Ash lecturing crowds of peasants about his superiority like Army of Darkness Ash does. He spouts bull-headed cliches and romances the pretty girl and stomps around with his “boomstick” but it’s all a bit of an act, really. He’s putting on the Ash, savior of humanity act to survive. 

That’s my theory, anyway. It could also be that the Evil Dead trilogy, as wildly entertaining and inspirational to creative folks as it is, is also just a slapdash bag of gags, gore and grit stapled together from film to film with no real deep concerns about how the cliffhanger end of Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness literally don’t mesh together at all, or whatever happened to Ash’s friends in the car in the first movie who’ve been erased from history by the second. I thought as I watched all three movies back to back that if they’d come out in this social media age of endless fanboy dissection, every clickbait website in the cosmos would be bashing out hate essays about the canon “mess ups” and “Evil Dead contradictions EXPLAINED!!!” videos. 

But whether or not it all makes a lick of sense or not, I do love how Bruce Campbell turned the gawky background guy in the back seat into a towering icon of horror movie heroism. As he’d put it – it’s pretty groovy. 

Universal Monster endings: The Creature Walks Among Us

I’ve written many a time before about my love of the classic 1930s-1950s Universal Horror monster movies, which almost a century on still cast a spooky spell. And my sentimental favourite has always been Creature From The Black Lagoon, whose 1954 debut came at the end of Universal’s classic run.

Creature is in my mind an almost perfect old-school horror movie – it’s got exploration of the unknown, man meddling where he shouldn’t, a sexy lady in a swimsuit and a monster who is ultimately a tragic figure. In a tidy 79 minutes it tells a classic beauty and the beast story with a kind of haunting elegance (especially those gorgeous underwater scenes) and gives us one of cinema’s most memorable monster designs. I’ve watched it countless times and get a kick out of it every time.

It’s a shame the two sequels never felt very essential, although in one choking last gasp, the franchise finale The Creature Walks Among Us is almost a good movie. 

Universal Horror movies were the best, but they weren’t usually very good at sequels. Other than the original Frankenstein, which boasted great follow-ups in Bride Of and Son Of Frankenstein, most of them fumbled at sequels. They foolishly didn’t bring back the iconic Bela Lugosi for a sequel to 1931’s Dracula until 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which while fun, isn’t exactly top-tier. Lon Chaney Jr’s melancholy Wolf Man ended up as a supporting player against other monsters after the first Wolf Man, Claude Rains’ Invisible Man died and sequels to that were bland bores, while Boris Karloff’s Mummy was reborn again and again without Karloff in a series of increasingly silly riffs. By monster mash House of Frankenstein – where the monster barely does a thing until the final 5 minutes – everything was increasingly played out.

A clutching claw at the heart of civilization! They don’t make tag lines like they used to.

The same problem befell the Creature of the Black Lagoon, who was enough of a hit to come back for two more sequels. The uninspired 1955 quickie Revenge Of The Creature is basically a remake with a Florida aquatic park setting and a brief cameo by Clint Eastwood in his movie debut. 

The last sequel – and the last of Universal’s classic monster era in general – was 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us, which took an intriguing idea and dropped the ball, but left us just enough hints to imagine a much better movie. 

In this one, the Creature is once again captured by pesky humans – but this time by a fanatical scientist, Dr Barton (Jeff Morrow), who wants to experiment on him, turning him into from an aquatic creature into a more human organism. (The pseudo-science explanation given is this would somehow prepare humans for interstellar travel.) The Creature is captured but badly burned, which gives Barton the excuse to alter his genetics. Of course, being a monster movie, things go badly for everyone in the end.

It’s an interesting idea but the execution is limp – far too much time is spent on irritating scientist Barton’s marriage troubles, and the Creature feels like an afterthought in his own movie. Also, the end game appears to simply be to set the Creature up in a kind of petting zoo enclosure, so not sure what all that science was really for. 

In the encyclopaedic book The Creature Chronicles by Tom Weaver – an insanely comprehensive green-scaled bible that’s a must for any fan of the movies – it’s revealed that earlier drafts had a fair bit more Creature action and debate over what it means to play god with such a being. Little of that shows in the finished movie, which is workmanlike and slow and padded out with dull humans. Only the Creature himself – despite the alterations, still an unforgettable look – is worth paying attention to. The Creature’s sad journey – given short shrift in the film – is the movie that should’ve been made.

There is something haunting about the repeated images of the mutilated monster, who now has very human eyes, reduced from a sleek underwater god to a hulking, out of place figure in a world he doesn’t fit in. Creature Walks is a monster movie with very little monster action – the final minutes kick in with the Creature framed for a murder by nasty Dr Barton – who he then, of course, kills himself. The Creature evades punishment, unusually for a monster movie – he is last seen lonesomely on a beach, advancing towards the ocean, where in his altered form he will surely die. Is this the end of the Creature? It’s a pleasantly open-ended and evocative ending. 

And even though the movie is a pale imitation of the original Creature and much better Universal Monster movies, those final moments feel like they could sum up the appeal of classic monsters in general – a misunderstood creature alone, on a beach, staring at the sea, trying to find a place to belong. 

Movies I Have Never Seen #28-29: Psycho II and Psycho III (1983, 1986)

What are they? How do you follow up one of the best horror movies in history -make that one of the best movies, period – by the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock? Let’s do a two-fer in this occasional blog series by looking at the first two long-gestated sequels to Hitchcock’s classic 1960 Psycho. The original remains a near-perfect thriller, forever changing how we think about showers, with Anthony Perkins’ mother-fixated psychopath Norman Bates firmly fixed in the screen slasher movie pantheon. But, you might ask, what happened to Norman after he was hauled off to the asylum at the end of Psycho? Although Hitch died in 1980, Psycho II eventually came out in 1983 and Psycho III followed in 1986 to answer those questions. 

Why I never saw them: Sequels made years, nay, decades after the original generally stink. There’s the occasional Top Gun: Maverick or Mad Max: Fury Road, sure, but there’s also an awful lot of Terminator: Genisys and Independence Day: Resurgences out there. And Psycho was so smoothly crafted, from its bait-and-switch premise to the haunting final grin on Norman Bates’ face – why mess with it? Yet over the years Psycho II has been rehabilitated online as a kind of lost rough gem, and I decided it was time to head back to the Bates Motel.  

Do they measure up to their rep? The smartest thing these sequels do is NOT turning Norman Bates into some Michael Myers pantomime unkillable villain rampaging again and again. As in the original, we see Perkins wrestling with Norman’s demons, and the audience weirdly finds itself rooting for him. Both sequels are better than you might expect, and Psycho II in particular is a clever, absorbing pick up of Norman Bates’ story, 23 years on. Recently “cured” and released from the mental institution, an older, fragile Bates attempts to pick up the pieces at his life at the old Bates Motel. But Norman faces scorn and suspicion from the community, and relatives of his victims aren’t willing to give him a chance to start over. Psycho II is about whether or not redemption is truly possible or if we’re all trapped by our pasts, and it tells its story in a cunning, thoughtful way. There’s blood and murder, sure, but it’s fairly restrained. 

Psycho III, directed by its star Perkins himself, takes a swerve away from the understated tension of the first sequel to craft a gorier, sexier tale, one that feels very much of a vibe with other ‘80s slasher horror flicks. But it also gives Norman a surprisingly touching love story with a troubled ex-nun who strongly resembles his 1960 victim Marion Crane. Colourful and with a fair helping of black humour, it’s an interesting louder and bolder counterpoint to Psycho II, even if, by the end, it kind of feels like we’ve reached the logical end of the line for Norman’s story. (One final sequel/prequel featuring Perkins, Psycho IV: The Beginning, would follow in 1990 not long before Perkins’ sadly young death at age 60 from AIDS-related causes, but I haven’t seen that one yet.) 

The sequels are tremendously helped by the dark charisma of Perkins, who added whole new layers to Norman’s complicated character. His portrayal in Psycho II is heartbreaking as the damaged Norman tries, valiantly, to have a normal life, while the nastier Psycho III gives him a more menacing, debauched air. (The disease that soon would kill him was perhaps already having effects on Perkins, who looks dramatically older despite a mere three years passing between Psycho II and III.) 

Worth seeing? Psycho II is absolutely worth checking out for any fan of the original, of Perkins’ nervy acting, or sequels that don’t go in expected paths. Psycho III is a little more conventional but it still has enough neon-soaked gaudy charm to make it an interesting diversion. While the original remains impossible to surpass, seeing Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates at that creaky old hotel after so many years turns out to be a lot more entertaining than anyone could reasonably expect. 

From Vampira to Svengoolie – The undying world of the horror host

A vintage horror movie, a vaguely spooky host and lots of lame jokes – what’s not to love?

On my recent travels to the US, I got to experience a lot more of the cluttered joys of infinite American cable TV than I usually do, and one thing I particularly enjoyed was catching up with long-running horror movie host Svengoolie’s Saturday night movie of the week on MeTV.

Svengoolie’s schtick is a grand throwback to the pre-internet world, where you couldn’t just find movies like Scream, Blacula, Scream! or House of Frankenstein through a few clicks. On stations throughout America, horror hosts would showcase dusty old vintage movies with plenty of jokes, skits and commentary.

Svengoolie (aka Dave Koz) has been doing this since 1979, believe it or not, and syndicated throughout America for the last decade or so. His campy, corny host act leans into the cheese and groan-worthy puns. But it’s also great fun because it feels like a secret club of fandom run the way it should ideally be. There’s no toxicity here, just silly in-jokes, rubber chickens, and an unending adoration for things like wolf men, Roger Corman flicks and giant ant invasions. 

There’s something kind of charmingly low-fi and comforting to me about a grown adult dressed up in Halloween gear introducing schlocky old movies. The horror host first emerged at the dawn of television in the ‘50s, and has shambled along semi-underground in some form or another to this day, with a new generation even taking the format to streaming.

I generally missed out on the peak horror hosts era from the 1960s to the 1980s, although I have hazy memories of old Universal Monster movies being shown on Saturday morning TV in the early ’80s with some goofy small-time local hosts kicking off the show.

I also honed my bad-movie love back in high school watching the USA Network’s “Up All Night” panorama of abominable flicks like Night Of The Lepus and Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes, sneeringly hosted by the late Gilbert Gottfried, and the classic riffing hosts of Mystery Science Theater 3000. These snark-fests all share a little DNA with the horror hosts idea. 

The horror host was pioneered by the iconic wasp-waisted charms of the still-eerie Vampira, whose 1954 show didn’t even last a year but who paved the way for many others.

Vampira, alias Maila Nurmi, lived a complex life trying to recapture her brief stardom with things like an appearance in Ed Wood’s legendarily bad Plan Nine From Outer Space. Very little footage of her show survives now, but even brief clips show how this primordial queen of goths scared stiff the buttoned-up world of ’50s TV, and forged generations of successors: 

There were many more – Zacherle, who chilled spirits on the East Coast for decades, or the famed Elvira, who successfully homaged/ripped off Vampira’s sexy bad girl act in a later, far more relaxed cultural era to become one of the most recognisable horror hosts of all time. 

Svengoolie, who has been doing his own thing for 45 years and is easing in a cast of possible replacement ghouls, is pretty much the biggest name left on the scene, but the success of his show on MeTV gives hope that the horror host idea isn’t dead just yet. 

In a world of TikToks and YouTubers, everyone is a host now if they want to be. Still, I’m pretty turned off by the influencer aesthetic of random strangers shouting and hustling at me from their phones while sitting in cars.

But give me a guy dressed up like a corpse or a shapely vampire woman in a bargain basement crypt setting, a few Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee flicks and a bucket of popcorn, crank up the groan-worthy jokes, and I’m happy to be scared silly in their company. 

Keeping It Short Week, Day 5: Creepshow and why short horror still creeps me out

Bwa-ha-ha, it’s still Keeping It Short Week, every post 250 words or less or else:

I took years to actually see horror movie anthology Creepshow when it came out in 1982. I first saw the graphic novel adaptation by the late great Bernie Wrightson in a shop, but as a wee pre-teen I was too scared to buy it, so I’d end up flipping through the pages every time I went to that store, scared stiff. 

Creepshow is a great little mix of gore and cheese, filtered through the sensibility of ‘50s horror comics like EC’s Tales From The Crypt. Throw together a few segments, toss in a cackling host to link them together, and off you go. The beauty of an anthology format is, if you don’t like the current bit, wait a few minutes for the next. 

Horror seems to lend itself to an anthology format more than any genre, really. Much of my favourite horror is short and (not so) sweet – those EC comics, TV series like Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone, Stephen King’s deliciously nasty short stories. 

My favourite Universal Horror movies from the 1930s-1940s rarely hit more than an hour’s length, a lesson to those who think you always need three hours-plus to tell a story. Bride of Frankenstein is a mere 75 minutes long! 

Horror can be longer format, of course, such as many of King’s hefty doorstop books like It. But for me, the best horror hits you hard and quick, leaving you gasping for breath before you even quite clock that it’s over. 

Happy Halloween! 

‘The Invisible Man’ at 90 – still a sight to behold

Sure, a monster bursting into your bedroom in the middle of night is scary, but a simple mysterious creak from a shadowy corner? A sense that someone is there, watching you, unseen? Ghouls and vampires are bad news, but an invisible man? Well, that’s terrifying.

James Whale’s 1933 film The Invisible Man turns 90 years old later this year, and remains a quick-witted, vivid early science-fiction thriller. 

I sat down with the 19-year-old to watch it again recently, and at the end, he turned to me and said with a note of surprise, “That was really good!” Not all of those sometimes antiquated black-and-white horrors would get that kind of reaction, but The Invisible Man remains a model of slick, efficient filmmaking, in and out in just over an hour’s run time.

The story is simple – a man turns himself invisible, and is trying to find a cure. But the experimental formula he tampered with is also slowly driving him insane. 

The Invisible Man is one I watch every few years and clustered right up there in the top 3 Universal Horror movies for me (jostling with, of course, my beloved Creature from the Black Lagoon and depending on my mood that day, either James Whale’s Frankenstein or Bride of Frankenstein). 

Whale was the best of the classic horror directors, lending a keen visual eye and a wry sense of camp to his scare-fests. Pairing him with the stage actor Claude Rains here was a masterstroke, because for huge sections of the picture the Invisible Man has to carry the film with his voice alone, and Rains’ purring, manic mad scientist is a gleeful delight, pinballing between vicious cruelty and tragic victim. (Originally Frankenstein’s Boris Karloff was tipped for the role, and while I love Karloff, it’s hard to imagine his sinister invisible growl having quite the same impact.)  

Based on H.G. Wells’ thrilling novella, Jack Griffith, the Invisible Man, is instantly a striking figure from his first moment on screen, wrapped in bandages and dark glasses, a simple but brilliantly effective way of rendering the character visible when he needs to be. The special effects are remarkably good for 1933, a few wires and puppetry seamlessly creating the illusion of a man who isn’t there. 

The Invisible Man also unique in the classic Universal Horror menagerie because Griffith is very much an ordinary man who did this to himself, not some mythical creature like Dracula or the Mummy or a victim of others’ meddling or evil like Frankenstein’s monster or the Wolf Man. He is human, which makes his crimes that much more brutal. 

Griffith: “An invisible man can rule the world. Nobody will see him come, nobody will see him go. He can hear every secret. He can rob, rape and kill!”

And hang on to your hats – with more than 100 people murdered during his reign of terror, the Invisible Man actually had the highest body count on screen of any Universal monster – more than Frankenstein’s creation, more than Dracula. Sure, most of that is the terrifying train derailment he causes near the movie’s climax, but Griffith still strangles, assaults and terrorises with gleeful abandon. 

Coming as The Invisible Man did in that delicate global tension between the devastation of World War I and the genocide of World War II, it’s hard not to see many a would-be dictator’s fantasies in Griffith’s speeches. 

Invisibility is a curious dual curse and blessing in the world of horror – you could go anywhere, in theory, do anything, but if you can’t turn it on and off, you’re also forever separate from the human race, a witness without an audience. 

The concept has been revisited many times, in a series of gradually less effective sequels in the ‘40s, none of which starred Rains, and a goofy Invisible Woman movie in 1940 that made the concept into a laboured comedy with a lot of teasing innuendo, but generally invisibility seen on screen is a man’s world.

More modern movies like Kevin Bacon’s 2000 slasher flick The Hollow Man and the excellent 2020 Invisible Man starring Elisabeth Moss leaned into the Invisible Man’s toxic masculinity with mixed results but there’s something to that – an Invisible Man also implies sex (generally in these films, you’ve got to be naked to be truly invisible, after all) and stalking and predation, factors most of the Invisible Man movies dip into. To be honest, to be invisible is generally to be up to no good, isn’t it? 

And looming over all those spectres is the inimitable Claude Rains, who 90 years on has yet to be truly bettered in the niche world of invisible horror movie villains. From that unforgettable bandage-clad visage to the cackling madness echoing through his voice, Rains still shows us that there’s nothing quite as scary as what you can’t see at all. 

The New Zealand wrestler who played Frankenstein’s monster

Everyone knows that Boris Karloff played Frankenstein’s monster. Most horror fans remember the late, great Christopher Lee, as well. Benedict Cumberbatch has played the creature. Heck, even Oscar winner Robert DeNiro has played the monster.

But did you know about the New Zealand wrestler who once played Baron Frankenstein’s horrific creation?

Ernie “Kiwi” Kingston’s turn as the monster in 1964’s The Evil Of Frankenstein by Hammer Films earned him a small but notable place in horror history, but the wrestler’s acting turn is shrouded in obscurity, nearly 60 years on. It was pretty much the only film he performed in. 

The Hammer Frankenstein cycle of movies from 1957-1974 still hold up well as a colourful Gothic series of chilling tales about man’s desire to play God, led by the inimitable Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein. Unlike the earlier Universal Frankenstein films, the focus on these was squarely on the evil doctor himself and his mad obsessions as he creates monster after monster in his quest to unlock the secrets of life and death. 

Evil of Frankenstein was the third of six films Cushing starred in, and a kind of weird outlier – the story didn’t seem connected to the two previous movies, and it’s the only one of the series not directed by Hammer maestro Terence Fisher.

A professional wrestler, 6 foot, 5 inch “Kiwi” Kingston, as he was credited, played a hulking, grotesque version of the monster, freed from frozen ice and abused by a rogue hypnotist (as you do). 

“As a person to work with, quite timid, gentle, quite reserved,” costar Katy Wild, who played a mute girl that befriended the monster, in a documentary on the Evil of Frankenstein blu-ray.  

Unfortunately for Kingston, his turn as the monster is hampered by what is probably the worst makeup in any major Frankenstein movie I’ve seen. Inspired by Karloff’s iconic look, it’s a sloppy, blocky mask that looks a bit like a grocery bag soaked in papier-mâché. The too-huge brow and lack of mobility prevents much in the way of facial expression. You can just barely see Kingston’s eyes poking out from under all the goop. 

It’s a shame because it’s possible less oppressive makeup might have given Kingston more to work with other than lurching around a lot … although he wasn’t exactly a trained actor. 

“Kiwi Kingston was actually cast for his hulking frame and not his acting ability,” the documentary on the movie notes. 

While he was indeed a Kiwi, he seems to have spent most of his life overseas.

A Christchurch history page says he was “born in 1914, to Ernest John Kingston and Edith Emily (nee) Hammond. As an amateur boxer in New Zealand Ernie had been runner-up in the heavyweight division at the N.Z. champs in 1938. He was also a top rugby player and general all round sportsman.”

He made a name for himself in NZ sport, as seen in a very fit photo from 1940 in the national archives. Like a lot of kiwis, Kingston went on a big OE (overseas experience) but in his case, it sounds like he never really returned. A wrestling blog from 2005 tells a little of his background:

“… Towards the end of the 30’s, a big strong rugby player, boxer, and wrestler, did some service in the air force and ended up in Britain. He was a (wrestler) Anton Koolman pupil in Wellington in the late 30’s, and it is sad that he was almost unknown in his own country. I refer to big Ernie Kingston, who ended up a huge name in Britain and all over Europe. He became known as ‘Kiwi’ Kingston, a big rough diamond from Banks Peninsula.”

He loved horses – “he had a pony field where he collected ponies that had been discarded and looked after them until they died,” his Evil co-star Caron Gardner remembered. 

Evil of Frankenstein was just about it in terms of movie stardom for Kingston, who only appeared in a tiny role in another Hammer film, Hysteria. He did apparently later wrestle under the stage name “The Great Karloff” which is a kind of awesome tip of the hat to his Franken-forefather, though.

Ernie Kingston died in 1992, and there’s not much out there on the internet about his life in later years I could find. 

But there’s only a handful of people out there who can say they played Frankenstein’s monster in a major Hollywood movie over a century or so of films. Kiwi Kingston’s turn as the monster long before Peter Jackson helped put New Zealand horror movies on the global map is a small but fascinating little piece of film history. Not bad for a lad from the bottom of the world.