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!”

San Diego has two drive-in theaters and both are now operating during the COVID-19 lock-down. Last night I went to the Santee Drive-In and watched the most recent iteration of The Invisible Man.

Universal Studios had planned to make an Invisible Man film as part of the Dark Universe Franchise series but the smoking crater left behand after the release of Tom Cruise’s The Mummy and the disappointing performance a few years earlier of Dracula Untold (2014) destroyed those plans as thoroughly as a snap from Thanos. This movie was produced by horror specialists Blumhouse and is quite the good film.

Written and directed by Leigh Whannell, The Invisible Man stars Elisabeth Moss as Cecilia Kass as a woman who has escaped the physical and mental abuse of her brilliant tech-bro husband Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Following her escape Cecilia grapples with the PTSD from her years in an abusive relationship and learns that Adrian has apparently killed himself but soon she becomes convinced that through his technological brilliance Adrian has faked his own death and is now tormenting her with some manner of invisibility. Friends and authorities are naturally quite skeptical of her assertions and dismiss them as stress induced mental illness leaving Cecilia to reclaim her life and her power alone.

The script is tight with nary a wasted beat or moment and the characters presented are smart and capable. Cecelia, though dealing with sever PTSD, keeps her head and shows a level of intelligence and cunning that is often rare for characters of horror cinema. (Though it was left to the teenager in the story to instruct Cecilia that you never use water to fight a grease fire.) Whannell’s direct sure and on target with even the use of jump-scares, where a sudden action or appearance in frame is used to startle the audience, motivated by character and logical plot developments. I can’t honestly judge the cinematography as the outdoor presentation ruined a number of darker sequences but other than that the film had a sharp, cold, modernist look that well suited the story and tone. The score was neither particularly memorable nor intrusive but support the scenes well without drawing excessing attention. The entire cast delivered competent performances but this movie lived or died on Moss as she carried the entire story and appeared in every scene as our sole viewpoint character. I can report that she excelled and gave us a credible, sympathetic, and ultimately strong character worthy of our support.

The Invisible Man (2020) is well worth the time and I look forward to seeing it again at home where I can enjoy the photography under better conditions. The unsuitability of the venue to films with dark sequences forced me to leave after the first feature as The Wretched promised substantial scenes at night or in deep darkness.

This film has popped up once or twice on my cinematic radar and yet time and again had managed to slip away unseen until this past weekend. I became much more interested in the film after watching the documentary Horror Noir about the intersection of horror media, principally film, and the depictions of black people in media.

The Girl with All the Gifts is a 2016 post-apocalyptic ‘zombie’ film directed by Colm McCarthy from a screenplay by Mike Carey who also write the original short story and adapted the material into a novel of the same name. Glenn Close stars as Dr Caldwell a medical scientist searching for a vaccine against the fungus that creates the ‘hungries.’ (First rule of up-scale ‘zombie’ movies, never use the word ‘zombie.’) Caldwell works at a remote military installation where a number of children who are infected with the fungus but present as normal children most of the time are studied and dissected in the search for the vaccine. Gemma Arterton plays Helen Justineau a teacher schooling the class of children. Her star pupil is Melanie, played by Sennia Nanua with a skill and competence that promises a bright future as an actor if she chooses to pursue one. Melanie is fantastically bright, charming, inquisitive, and helpful except when she is taken by her feral hunger which can be aroused with a simple smell of human skin. When the base falls to a horde of hungries the three characters along with an Army Sergeant and another solider are forced to flee across territory abandoned to the hungries in an attempt to reach another secure facility near London. Along the way tension erupt between Caldwell need to use Melanie to produce a vaccine and Justineau’s growing affection for the bright friendly girl.

I placed the word ‘zombie’ in quotes not only because the film uses the term hungries but also that these infected are not living dead revenants. In theory these are simply human infect with a parasitic fungus that has usurped control undoubtedly inspired by the spores that does the same to some species of ants. However, in practical considerations the Hungries fall under the ‘fast zombie’ trope and are generally as mindless as previous cinematic generations of the undead. While the film attempts to create a plausible scientific basis for its unending hordes of hungries it is best to place to one side any actual scientific knowledge while watching the feature. Considerations for how quickly a mindless automaton would succumb to hunger and dehydration are typically ignored as are basic tactical operations that would render any well-armed force immune to the horde’s wave attacks. That said this is a really an excellent film that shares a lot of thematic components with Richard Matheson’s I Am Legendnovel. It is currently streaming on Netflix and while violent it does not luxuriate in the gore but rather focuses on idea of identity and character. It is well worth watching.

Two years ago the British anthology horror film Ghost Stories was released to a limited run the States; a run that my sweetie-wife and I missed. The movie is currently on the streaming service Hulu and last night we gave the horror film a spin.

Written and Directed by Andy Nyman & Jeremy Dyson with Dyson also playing the lead character Phillip Goodman the film is an adaptation of their stage play about Professor Goodman’s investigation of three paranormal events as he tried to debunk them into rationality.

You would not know that this is an adaptation from a live theater event. Nyman and Dyson have done a terrific job of translating the material for the visual media of film. The movie is filled with delicious and unsettling imagery and many segments build suspense masterfully. The framing device of Goodman’s post event investigation is tried and true cinematic method of linking what would normally be three unrelated narratives. In Ghost Stories though it turns out that the three stories are not unrelated but rather share a central narrative that is an outgrowth of Goodman’s own issues, guilt, and motivation.

Sadly, that is where Ghost Stories fails me. While there are others that count this as their favorite horror film of 2018 (or 2017 if you are looking at UK release dates) it falls apart at the ending. Endings are a critical time for all narratives, it is where the point and meaning if the story comes into clarity and conflicting themes are finally resolved. Nyman and Dyson do that but in such a manner that I found it frustrating and wholly unsatisfying. To reveal this exact shape of this failure would require venturing heavily into spoiler territory but I will say that my sweetie-wife predicted the ending a good ten minutes before it resolved. Naturally your mileage may vary on how well the ending does or does not work for you but for me it ruined what had been a very enjoyable ride with a destination that was a thrilling and exciting as depilated bus terminal.

Four years ago, I took a chance, and convinced a friend of mine to also roll the dice and went to see this South Korean zombie movie Train to Busan. It turned out to be the best zombie movie I have ever seen, beating out 1979s Dawn of the Dead by the slimmest of margins. Dawn is the classic film that launched the zombie apocalypse genre and is a terribly on-point satire of American consumerism, however Train has a best set of characters and story, but not by much.

Last weekend I watched the anime prequel to Train to Busan, Seoul Station. Not as groundbreaking or as tight at Train it still maintained a high level of quality and made for an excellent companion piece to the first movie.

Now we are finally getting the sequel to Train to Busan with the lengthy title; Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula.

Set in the years following the outbreak of the fast zombie plague Peninsulatakes place in a Korea that has become an apocalyptic nightmare. Directed and co-written by Yeon Sang-ho, who directed the original, Peninsula looks to widen toe scope away from the claustrophobic setting of Train into a wider dysfunctional world.

The truth of the matter is that most of the time sequels are a disappointment but I have my hopes and in these dark times we all need hope.

Peninsula is set for release this year, 2020, and is likely to be available as a Video on Demand rental.

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