Okay I really should have watched this months ago when it premiered on Shudder and that streaming service is still the only place to view the new zombie film.

Hailing from Canada Blood Quantum is a zombie movie set in 1981 on a Canadian Native-American reservation. Produced, directed, written, and starring member of First Nation Tribes the film approaches the now tired zombie sub-genre from a thematic perspective of colonization and does a damn fine job of it.

The story centers on Traylor, his estranged wife Joss, their son Joseph and his pregnant white girl friend and Joseph’s half-brother and Traylor’s delinquent son ‘Lysol.’ The movie unfolds in two distinct periods, the first day, the day the Zombie plague erupted and six months later as winter approaching and the tribe is dealing with an influx of refugees to the safe harbor that they have created on the former reservation. The twist to the genre and source of the film’s title is the quirk that Native Americans are immune to the infection bites of the zombie and do not rise up as walking corpses. All of the is driven by the Native-American characters with their interpersonal dynamics and prejudices propelling the plot. Much like the little seen Maggie this is a family drama that unfolding during a zombie pandemic but albeit with much more Dawn of the Deadinspired blood and gore effects.

Blood Quantum is a shining example of how to use speculative fiction and its unreality to explore issue bedeviling our real world without pulling out a tired soapbox or losing track of the entertainment required to keep an audience engaged. If you have access to Shudder this is a movie well worth watching.

Little Monsters a 2019 Zombie-Comedy is a bit of a ‘bait and switch.’ The trailer and promotional material pushes the storyline of Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o) as a kindergarten teacher who must keep her charges safe during a zombie outbreak while simultaneously keeping the small children from understanding the truth of their dire situation by making it all an elaborate game. Those plot elements do make up a substantial portion of the film’s second and thirds acts but Miss Caroline is not the story’s protagonist.

The story’s main character is David, a pot-addicted, obscenity spewing, failed street busking musician, man-child. So, the core plot of Little Monstersis a very tired one, the immature man forced into adulthood. David intersects with Miss Caroline and her class because his nephew Felix is one of her students and after becoming enamored with Miss Caroline David accompanies her and the class on the field trip where the zombie outbreak take place.

A third central character is Teddy McGiggles played by comedian Josh Gad, a popular American children’s television host on tour through Australia where the film is set. in another expedition to trope-ville Teddy is a boozing, foul, kid-hating character with little to differentiate him from similar characters that have come before.

What saved Little Monsters and made the viewing enjoyable was the immense talent of Lupita Nyong’o. This woman as an actor is simply credible in everything she plays and can draw in a viewer while making a character that on the page feels rather worn fresh and complex. Had the movie been centered on her character rather than the fairly typical David the movie would have been greatly enhanced and it is no surprise that the marketing focused on the movie’s greatest asset.

In this movie much of the comedy works though there is a fair amount of ‘cringe’ comedy focused on a character’s lack 0f self-realization that brings public embarrassment, so on that front your mileage may vary. The story’s approach to the nephew Felix is charming and the both the young actor and the character are endearing enough to pull the viewer into serious concern when he is threatened.

Overall this is worth at least one viewing though you must remember that it is not until the second act that the film’s real star and emotional heart arrives.

Little Monsters is currently streaming on Hulu as a Hulu Original.

Voice from the Stone is a 2017 atmospheric horror film with Games of Thronesstar Emilia Clarke leading the small cast. It centers on Verena (Clarke) a young nurse that lives with families to help psychologically troubled children. She has come to the Rivi family is post war Tuscany to help with Jakob who has not spoken for several months following the death of his mother Malvina. Welcomed to the family by Malvina’s mother Lilia and more coolly by her husband Klaus Verena
finds Jakob a difficult case and the young boy’s obsessive listening to the stonework of the ancient house intent to hear his mother’s voice from beyond grave layers a sense of insanity onto the boy’s silent condition. Finding herself increasingly attracted, in part due to Lilia’s prompting, to Klaus and with her attempts to help Jakob failing Verena becomes desperate to remain with the family in the isolated mansion.  Eventually twists are revealed and the story lands in a far too easily predicted conclusion.

Despite starring an actor from a global sensation Voice from the Stone received only a limited release in 2017 and was primarily a Video on Demand product. Currently streaming on the horror specialty service Shudder, Voice from the Stone fails to create a sense of building dread and inevitability essential for slow burn atmospheric horror and instead plays as a family drama that only in the final acts makes any move towards the unsettling and horrific. Adapted from an Italian novel I suspect that the source material is very much an interior story driven mostly by the Verena’s thoughts and suppressed emotional reactions and while that can be translated to film it is a particularly difficult task that has foiled more talented filmmakers. About a third of the way into this movie brief running time of 87 minutes I voiced the opinion that this could very well turn about to be quite similar to Henry James’ The Turning of the Screw another horror story that relies heavily on the psychological life of its central character but instead this story does come to a definitive conclusion and not a unsettling ambiguity.

Voice from the Stone failed to fully engage me as a viewer and failed to deliver any revelation that surprised or shocked and instead proceeded in a plodding manner to an ultimately unsatisfying conclusion. It is not a film I can recommend.

This past Saturday and friend and I re-watched An American Werewolf in London, John Landis’s 1981 groundbreaking and genre defining monster movie. It had been decades since I last watched the movie but my memory was one of it being an entertaining but flawed film and my experience this weekend confirmed that.

The story concerns David and Jack two Americans on a backpacking trip and their encounter in the north of England with a werewolf that leaves one dead and the other cursed with lycanthropy. There is a tragic romantic sub-plot with a nurse, Alex, played by genre favorite Jenny Agutter and a massive climatic sequence of the werewolf rampaging through central London to complete the movie.

An American Werewolf in London is a film that has left its mark on the horror genre and specifically on how people have dealt with and described werewolves and their transformations ever since. Both this movie and The Howling, released earlier in 1981, presented the first on-screen transformation that were not simply variations of the lap-dissolves used in previous werewolf films all the back to Universal’s The Wolf-Man in 1941. Both Rick Baker who did the special make-up effects in An American Werewolf in London and Rob Bottin for The Howlingprogressed to careers that pushed the boundaries of practical effects until the advent of digital visual effects.

An American Werewolf in London also presented the transformation from human to wolf as something terribly painful and motif that with its overuse has since become a cliché.

With a running time of 97 minutes the movie is by far too brief, and simultaneously feels leisurely in its developing romance and rushed in its head-long drive to get to the next supernatural sequence. This blinding speed short-cuts characters and their development for the sake of plot and exposition and contributes the film’s finale feeling abrupt. I distinctly remember sitting in the theater during its initial run feeling like the it needed to be more, that it was unfinished, as the credit’s scrolled across the screen.

For the past several years one of my favorite things has been the Horrible Imaginings film festival. In 2018 the festival moved the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego to the Frieda Cinema in Orange county, about a 90-minute drive from my home. However, an all-day and deep into the night festival or short and feature length horror films is well worth the drive and so I still attend. Indeed, I have discovered some of my favorite horror film at the festival including Alena a ghost story set in an all-girl Swedish school.

Last year Festival Director Miguel Rodriguez started a new element with Campfire Tales where one evening per quarter the Frieda cinema and Horrible Imaginings would host three or so hours of horror shorts. While the evenings sounded fun and interesting, I couldn’t quite justify driving for three hours and eliminating an evening with my sweetie-wife, for essentially one long films worth of entertainment and so I haven’t attended any of the campfire tales events.

This year COVID-19 changed that. Because in person events were still banned Miguel moved the festival on-line and after paying a very reasonable admission donation, I was able to watch the offerings at this quarter’s Campfire Tales. Better yet I watched them on my schedule, after an evening of board and card games with my sweetie-wife and a couple of friends. From 9 p.m. until nearly midnight a friend and I watched the short horror films and had a truly wonderful time.

I hope, even though it goes against my own interests, that Miguel can soon get back to the in-person screenings he adores and hosts so very ably but I can’t deny how much fun it was to take part in a cycle of ghost, monster, and psychological horror films.

The past several nights I watched the 1973 blaxploitation horror film Scream, Blacula, Scream. A sequel the previous year’s movie Blacula about an old-world African vampire played by the incomparable William Marshall, and depending on how geeky you are you may know him best from the Star Trek (Original Series) episode The Ultimate Computer as Daystrom the inventor of the M-5 computer, that arrives in an American urban center instigating a plague of vampirism before meeting his end at the hero’s hand.

Scream, Blacula, Scream, starts with a Voodoo congregation in turmoil as their high priestess passes without naming her successor and two devotees contend for her title, Willis, the self-important son of the priestess, and Lisa, played by Pam Grier, who is more popular with the congregation. Willis, unable to endure his rejection invokes dark magics and unwittingly reanimated Blacula initiating a new cycle of vampirism.

Not as sharp or as on point as its predecessor this film in many respects moves too quickly. Lisa’s lover, Justin, a police detective moves from skeptic to vampire hunter with too much ease and the political among the congregation was brushed aside far too quickly for something that had been introduced with the elements of a major plot development.

That said, I enjoyed this movie. Marshall’s command of every scene in which he appears is unquestioned and he brings a tragic dignity to his African prince that was cursed for confronting the slave trade. Pam Grier, one of the stars to emerge from the blaxploitation cycle, isn’t given a lot of the stuff to do as an actress but she takes this meager meal and gives us a banquet of a performance.

Side comment; while watching this film I realized that Pam Grier is a nearly perfect image for the character Sakita Bergen in my military sf series I am

American International Picture

writing. I shall have to keep that in mind.

In the end this movie suffers from being rushed to screen and doesn’t compare favorably to its progenitor piece but it is still worth at least one viewing.

This will be quick. My sweetie-wife found a film she wanted to watch during our 30-day free trial of Fandor, The Devil’s Men US Title Land of the Minotaur.  Starring Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasance this is a Greek horror film about a minotaur-worshipping cult that abducts college students willy nilly and has a young girl kill them in sacrifices to their half bull half man god. Pleasance is a local Irish priest with an accent that is never very good and often disappears entirely while Cushing is an expat Hungarian noble with a wholly English accent that is the high priest of the murderous cult.

Roger Ebert called this ‘the worst Peter Cushing Film ever,’ but we think both Shockwaves and The Uncanny can give this poorly crafted film a run for that title. I have never seen a movie directed with such a lack of spatial awareness, scenes get turned around, characters are unaware of the geography around them and there is nothing in this movie to recommend it. During the climax of the story the priest informs the young heroic man helping him that they must get there before moonrise when their friends will be sacrificed, never mind that there have been loads already without that full moon, now they have a ticking clock. The companion asks how does the priest know this? It’s a good question because absolutely nothing that happened before this clued either the character or the audience to this suddenly critical fact. The priest’s answer? “I just Know.” He might as well have said, “The writer told me!”