Review: Fun Size

Fun Size

Dir. Josh Schwartz

Country: USA

Running Time: 90mins

Aus Rating: PG

There’s little that makes sense in the new Nickelodeon production beyond the name. A modern day revamp (of sorts) of the 1980s teen classic Adventures in Babysitting meets The Hangover for tweens, the feature debut of television writer/producer Josh Schwartz (The OC, Hart of Dixie) is a mess of a movie. Despite being set on Halloween, the scariest thing here is how many barrels Max Werner’s screenplay manages to scrape the bottom of. Even before the opening credits, Fun Size has descended into a hilariously bad caricature of what a teen film should be. Reminiscent of childish adventure flick Sleepover (Remember that? Lucky you!), Fun Size is an appalling, eye-opening experience that lacks all the zest and wit of its teen flick forefathers.

Victoria Justice stars as Wren – none of those words I just typed make sense to me, but maybe they do to the target audience? – a typical high schoolgirl on the verge of going to college. Her single mother (Chelsea Handler), has shacked up with an abs-flashing toyboy (Josh Pence – you won’t be looking at anything other than his muscle tone) and leaves Wren in charge of babysitting her little brother, Albert (Jackson Nicoll), on Halloween. Naturally everything that could possibly go wrong does. Once Albert goes missing, Wren’s best friend April (Jane Levy, Shameless) insists on going to a cool kid’s party, she discovers she has a crush on geeky Roosevelt (Thomas Mann, Project X), and gets tangled up in a war between a love-struck cashier (Thomas Middleditch) and his rival (Johnny Knoxville).

There’s plenty more, too, but it’s far too complicated to go into. Being a low rent redo of a film as excellent as Adventures in Babysitting would be forgivable if Schwartz didn’t inject his film with so much on-the-nose toilet humour, onerous slapstick, and burdensome subplots that do nothing but extend the runtime to feature length. Anything involving the ghoulish Chelsea Handler – if she walked up to you on Halloween night you’d scream and swear she was wearing a mask of human skin – is particularly unnecessary as she attends the house party of a fart-friendly acquaintance who lives with his parents (they discuss mammograms when she takes a time out from the beer chugging twentysomethings).

Fun Size doesn’t even attempt to engage with its target teen audience in any way that isn’t superficial. Wren and her friends are apparently unpopular nerds, but they’re also super attractive and endure nothing that anybody who’s been to high school will find particularly hellish. As doe-eyed teen love goes, the central romance between Justice and Mann is weak stuff, but at least the actors look like they’d still be asked for ID rather than being portrayed by borderline 30-year-olds. When age appropriate casting is the best one can say about a film, you know you’re in trouble. And to think, I made it this far without mentioning the giant humping chicken, the hippie Democrat lesbians, or the rap sequence that evokes cult essential Teen Witch. So wrong, so very, very wrong. D

Or, in simpler terms:



+

=

FUN SIZE

Review: All the Way Through Evening

All the Way Through Evening

Dir. Rohan Spong

Country: USA / Australia

Aus Rating: M

Running Time: 70mins

There’s a scene in the charming, if somewhat overly polite, Australian drama The Sum of Us (1994) where the homophobic parents of a closeted gay man watch the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras from the comfort of their plush sofas in suburbia. To their abject horror they see their son gyrating on a platform in barely any clothing amongst a sea of body oil, glitter, and high camp. The film may have primarily been about the father-son relationship between Jack Thompson and Russell Crowe, but that scene – especially in retrospect – plays like a perfect analogy for the very sudden way that gay culture was thrust upon the public by the Australian film industry in the early-to-mid 1990s. Two years earlier and Baz Luhrmann was high-kicking a renaissance in Australian cinema into overdrive with his flamboyant Strictly Ballroom, while the same year as The Sum of Us also brought with it the bus full of drag queens of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and the return of ABBA-mania with Muriel’s Wedding.

For a moment it appeared as if this country’s boutique film industry was about to push gay cinema well and truly into the mainstream, picking up the lead of the American New Queer Cinema movement as well as the more sexually open elements of European filmmaking that trickled into local arthouses and onto video shelves. Like some grand ol’ coming out party on celluloid, these films were all being released on local and international screens – Priscilla even won an Academy Award! – at a time when the AIDS crisis of the 1980s was disappearing from the news, and the image of the fun-loving homosexual with wit and sass to spare plus ace dance moves to boot was de rigueur. As a gay Australian cinephile it’s hard not to bemoan the lack of such open filmmaking since – oh sure, gay characters are frequently seen on our screens in the background, but the culture has rarely been examined in such mainstream, accessible ways since, instead left to such hard-edged films as Head On (1998), Walking on Water (2002), and the recent Dead Europe (2012).

It’s no surprise then to discover that Melburnian director Rohan Spong has had to travel to America to make his documentaries on gay life. Before now Spong’s most notable title was T is For Teacher, a look at four transgendered teachers in American high schools, but with All the Way Through Evening, however, Spong has crafted a superbly delicate and altogether moving document of one woman’s crusade to allow the victims of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to continue living. If not in body and soul, then through their work. An American production, but with some assistance from the Victorian AIDS Council and the Gay Men’s Health Centre, this “musical documentary”, as the credits call it, certainly deserves to be held in the same high regard as recent festival successes and award winners We Were Here (2011) and How to Survive a Plague (2012) for the impactful way it examines the HIV/AIDS crisis.

There is remarkably little to All the Way Through Evening and yet it feels as if it says so much. At a brisk 70 minutes, there isn’t far enough time to get into the back story of Mimi Stern-Wolfe and her “subjects”, but what Spong has assembles is still a loving ode to somebody who has tried to make a difference the best way she knows how. Mimi’s annual concert featuring the compositions of late acquaintances who died (predominantly in the ‘80s and ‘90s in the arts hub of the Lower East Side, Manhattan) sounds like a blessed event and ripe for a documentary telling. It’s amazing how seemingly every year a new documentary comes along telling a new angle to one of the worst pandemics of recent times. This film proves there is always something new to be said, and a new way to say it. That the music featured within this one is frequently soaring, poetic, and beautiful certainly helps.

Featuring the works of four predominant composers, none of which anybody this side of 9th Street, New York City, will have heard of, their songs and their music cut through the proceedings like glass. The stories of Kevin Oldham (died of AIDS in 1993, aged 33), Robert Chesley (died of AIDS in 1993, aged 50), Robert Savage (died of AIDS in 1993, aged 44), and Chris DeBlasio (died of AIDS in 1993, aged 34) will certainly leave audiences in a contemplative place, and that’s probably the perfect end result for this documentary. Releasing in local cinemas to coincide with World AIDS Day on 1 December, All the Way Through Evening is a perfect catalyst for remembrance. With this film now in existence the work of Stern-Wolfe will now always be imprinted in a way to be remembered. She admits to slowing down and who can blame her. In the twilight that her friends never got the chance to live, this woman has done more than enough to make her legacy as memorable as those of the men she has championed for the last two decades. All the Way Through Evening is a fitting tribute to her and a moving viewing experience. B+

Scream to Scream, Scene by Scene: SCENE 12 of Scream 3 (0:36:54-0:47:26)

In this project I attempt to review the entire Scream trilogy scene by scene in chronological order. Heavy spoilers and gore throughout!



SCENE 12 of Scream 3
Length: 10mins 32secs
Primary Characters: Dewey Riley, Gale Weathers, Jennifer Jolie, Steven Stone, Angelina Tyler, Tom Prinze, and Ghostface
Pop Culture References:

• None so overtly, but I'm sure there are plenty!

Weird double feature idea: Peter Deming Lensed Hollywood Flicks from the Early 2000s! There's Scream 3 and there's also Mulholland Drive. The nighttime shots of Los Angeles certainly look the same.


"Is this a wrap party of this a wrap party? Scene 34, Maureen's murder flashback."
"I never liked that scene."
"That's because you weren't in it."
Not for nothing, a lesser franchise would have done a scene like that by now, and thank gawd they never did. Obviously they couldn't have given the reveal of the climax being facts about Maureen death, but they still could have done one at some point. I shudder to think. I do like that the next joke is about "the Prescott house flashback", as if the entirely of Stab 4 is just made up of Sidney returning to Woodsboro and having flashback after flashback.

I think we all remember where we were when we first caught a glimpse of Matt Keeslar, don't we? Mine was Waiting for Guffman and boy that was a sight! He had a great run, actually, with Guffman, Urbania, and The Last Days of Disco. Sadly, I think he expected Scream 3 to be a breakout role for him. A look at his IMDb profile shows a lot of television one. One suspects many of them are pilots that never got picked up. Sad. He's such a good looking man. Such a good looking man.

Some time ago when I sat my friend Suze down to watch all three Scream films (so, "some time ago" was before Scream 4 came out at least) because she'd never seen any of them, and by the third film came around we just spent most of the time mocking the clothes because MY GAWD WHAT WAS GOING ON IN THAT WARDROBE DEPARTMENT. It's actually very amusing on Jennifer Jolie because her character so flamboyant and over the time that you can totally see her wearing clothes like that, even if they are horrendous most of the time (She'd be on Go Fug Yourself daily). Gale, though?

Yikes!

I seem to remember when this scene happened we both burst into tears of laughter. Look at her! Consider for a moment what she is wearing and I dare you not to laugh. I mean, despite the fact that they're just heinously ugly to look at, are those red leather pants not the most inappropriate attire one could wear when there's a killer on the loose? And that bag. Oh my lordy, that bag! As if her hair wasn't bad enough...

I know Scream 3 is about Hollywood, but I'm surprised they put in so much smoking. I have nothing to say about it per se other than I think it's curious and somewhat uncomfortable.



I have nothing to say about these shots either. Except maybe "has Parker Posey ever played a mid-century vampire?"

Scream to Scream, Scene by Scene: SCENE 11 of Scream 3 (0:35:32-0:36:53)

In this project I attempt to review the entire Scream trilogy scene by scene in chronological order. Heavy spoilers and gore throughout!



SCENE 11 of Scream 3
Length: 1mins 21secs
Primary Characters: Sidney Prescott, Ghostface (voice),
Pop Culture References:

• When a Stranger Calls

Okay, look, let's just get this out of the way right now so we can swiftly move on. Yes, it has been a very long time since I last did an entry in this series, and yes, I got all of your emails and comments asking me to continue. What took me so long? Basically, I'm a lazy git. If they'd just go ahead and announce that maybe-probably-not-sorta-well-who-knows Scream 5, or if information started to leak about that upcoming television series then my inspiration would have been sparked all over again (plus, let's face it, Scream 3 isn't exactly the best of the trilogy!), alas... anyway, here we are. I hope to be able to commence the series at regular intervals, but don't hold me to anything.

Remember in Scream 4 when they just decided Neil Prescott was dead?

The Scream movies are good for a lot of things, but one of the lesser mentioned ones is the watch the development of telephone technology. The first film is predominantly landline based, so much so that a character with a "cellular telephone" is viewed upon with instant suspicion. The second film sees mobiles featured far more predominantly, while the third seems them all but taken over. Scream 4, of course, features everyone using smartphones and bluetooth.

Oh, how very Carol Kane in When a Stranger Calls. "The call is coming from inside the house", and all that jazz. Let's just be thankful that Maureen Prescott didn't return from the bloody grave like the last time we visited Sidney's house in the hills.

Oh. That was a brief return, wasn't it? Still, I like that it mirrors the bait and switch nature of scene 10 from Scream at the same moment of the film. But that's just preparation for all the toxic, explosive gas we're about to sniff in the next scene. I promise it won't take months until I do it!

Scream:
Intro, Scene 1, Scene 2, Scene 3, Scene 4, Scene 5, Scene 6, Scene 7, Scene 8, Scene 9, Scene 10, Scene 11, Scene 12, Scene 13, Scene 14, Scene 15, Scene 16, Scene 17, Scene 18, Scene 19, Scene 20, Scene 21, Scene 22, Scene 23, Scene 24, Scene 25, Scene 26, Scene 27, Scene 28, Scene 29, Scene 30, Scene 31 Scene 32, Scene 33, End Credits

Scream 2
Scene 1, Scene 2, Scene 3, Scene 4, Scene 5, Scene 6, Scene 7, Scene 8, Scene 9, Scene 10, Scene 11, Scene 12, Scene 13, Scene 14. Scene 15, Scene 16, Scene 17, Scene 18, Scene 19, Scene 20, Scene 21, Scene 22, Scene 23, Scene 24, Scene 25, Scene 26, Scene 27, Scene 28, Scene 29, Scene 30, End Credits

Scream 3
Scene 1, Scene 2, Scene 3, Scene 4, Scene 5, Scene 6, Scene 7, Scene 8, Scene 9, Scene 10

31 Horrors: The Town That Dreaded Sundown (#24)

Wherein I attempt to watch 31 horror films over the course of October. 31 horror films that I have never seen before, from obscure to acclaimed classics. We'll see how well I go in actually finding the time to watch and then write about them in some way.

Curiously unreleased on DVD (not even in America, let alone Australia), I didn't feel quite so guilty acquiring this 1976 small town slasher through a few dubious means. There's a decent quality version currently airing on TCM in the states, but the copy I watched was a pretty shoddy VHS rip that, if little else, added to the atmosphere of watching an old horror title that came to exist in the age of video cassettes. I watched Charles B Pierce's film on Halloween (after Vampyr and before Hardware) so I was very much set for it to blow me away, and given it is one of the more obscure (yet amazing) references in Kevin Williamson's screenplay for Scream - "It's like The Town that Dreaded Sundown!" - I was really hoping for it to blow me away, too.

"It's about a killer in Texas, huh?" - Deputy Dewey, Scream

And whenever the movie was directly following the killer on screen The Town that Dreaded Sundown was a fabulously freaky experience - and the VHS transfer made the deep midnight blues and blacks that permeate these sequences feel appropriately grubby ala The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The stalk-and-kill scenes featuring the baghead killer who wields a shotgun and, in one particularly odd yet scary scene, a trombone are really well done and reminded me of David Fincher's Zodiac in the way they happen to matter of factly and straightforward. Another film it reminded me of was Maniac, but I think any film I watch from now that features a shotgun blast through a car windscreen is going to remind me of that fantastic film.

Sadly, the killer - known as "The Phantom", and based on a real unsolved case in Texarkana, Texas - isn't really the focus of the majority of the film, but rather the police investigation into his case. I say "sadly" because these passages of the film, centered around Ben Johnson's detective character, are like the dopey cop sequences of Last House on the Left stretched out to feature length. Much like Wes Craven was somehow able to juxtapose the absolute horror of the action with bumbling idiocy of those two police characters, whenever the Sundown killer isn't on screen it succumbs to tedium. It's all so incredibly uninteresting and silly and goofy and I don't understand how these scenes fit into the same film that the killer himself was a part of. There are far too many banjos and cross-dressing coppers getting felt up by overweight detectives. It amuses me to find (after having written most of this) that Jason at My New Plaid Pants had the exact same opinion as me. If Jason agrees then I know I'm on the right page and not just watching a movie in the wrong mood.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown: B+; All that other crap: D+. Let's give it a median C+, shall we?

31 Horrors: Peeping Tom (#23)

Wherein I attempt to watch 31 horror films over the course of October. 31 horror films that I have never seen before, from obscure to acclaimed classics. We'll see how well I go in actually finding the time to watch and then write about them in some way.

I still have a few of my October viewings left to write up, but Michael Powell's classic Peeping Tom is officially the first of my horror selections to have been screened in November. I ran out of time, but am still wanting to watch the 31. It was inevitable given my late night start times usually resulted in me going "oh, I'll leave that movie that is hailed a masterpiece until another time when I won't have a high chance of falling asleep and, instead, will watch something sillier and lighter." Ya know? Yeah. I still very much anticipate watching Changeling and Don't Look Now, but at the time I felt more like, oh I dunno, Student Bodies instead.

Still, no matter whether I watched it in October or in April, I'd still want to talk about Peeping Tom! More of a thriller than horror - certainly less horror inclined that the film it is frequently linked to, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (yet another instance of my October horror selections having a connection to that particular masterpiece) - it still manages to conjure up an intensely nerve-wracking world that I found entirely captivating. Whether deliberately or not, Peeping Tom embraces an artificial aesthetic that is both glorious to look at and yet a prominent thematic device. The film is, after all, about voyeurism and what better way to subliminally instruct an audience that filmgoing is, essentially, an act of voyeurism than by playing up the cinematic language? Catching audiences off guard with damning themes seems to go down a lot easier when its drawn in bold colours and deliciously constructed imagery.

Known as the first "slasher" film - "Peeping Tom, 1960, directed by Michael Powell. The first movie to ever put the audience in the killer's POV", Scream 4 naturally - and released the same year as Psycho, it's actually quite easy to see how this film caused such a ruckus in Powell's home country of Britain (also Hitchcock's home country, but Psycho was an American production). Presenting England in such a light, especially by one of their own, can't have have endeared him to too many people. The seemingly rather easily replicable nature of the crimes with the increasing popularity of home cameras, too. As a member of the famed Powell & Pressburger team, this was a detour and one that essentially ended his career, which is a particularly cruel fate given the (eventual) rapturous response that Hitchcock's Psycho received. The film was also a very obvious inspiration on the aforementioned Scream franchise (especially number 4), which gets it bonus kudos points from me.

Peeping Tom's biggest hurdle is its lead actor, Karlheinz Böhm. With his breath, somewhat posh, vocal delivery, the character of Mark Lewis is hardly a charismatic one. Of course, he doesn't necessarily have to be. I guess if he were then the scenes wherein we're meant to believe he's coming out of his shell thanks to the inquisitive Helen, played by Anna Massey, wouldn't come off quite as creepy as hell as it does, which was surely Powell's intention. He's a weirdo that most viewers would have had a hard time responding to (much different to Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates) and the acting style that Karlheinz Böhm utilises is occasionally quite distracting in its lack of subtlety.

Still, Peeping Tom doesn't rise or fall simply on the actor's shoulder (and, it must be said that Maxine Audley is super fantastic as the blind mother of Massey's Helen). It's a film deep in rich context that's so wonderfully explained by one Martin Scorsese:

"I have always felt that Peeping Tom and 8½ say everything that can be said about film-making, about the process of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it and the confusion between the two. 8½ captures the glamour and enjoyment of film-making, while Peeping Tom shows the aggression of it, how the camera violates... From studying them you can discover everything about people who make films, or at least people who express themselves through films."

Furthermore, the character of Mark Lewis frequently alternating between real world and the world as viewed through his camera, it's almost as he really isn't there. Much like Patrick Bateman who used those almost exact words in one of his pre-homicide monologues, Mark seems permanently poised on the verge of disappearing altogether. Swathed in oversized jackets and uncomfortable without his prized camera possession, his meek demeanor only forms flesh and blood when, well, in the presence of somebody else's flesh and blood. Much like Halloween begins from the perspective of Michael Myers before effectively moving onto a permanent otherly plain of existence, Peeping Tom portrays this man as somebody who never really was. He floats about seemingly unnoticed by many, and those who do don't tend to think too highly of him. Years of seeing his predominant male figure pursuing the act of perverse voyeurism has allowed him to slink through life determined to not be the sort of person that anybody would care about.

Peeping Tom is, perhaps more than anything else, a ravishing visual treat. The cinematography of Otto Heller is marvellous and works wonders in bringing a sort of film noir meets technicolour palace to life. The human figures that navigate his frame frequently weave through as Heller's camera glides ever so gracefully around them, cornering them in their own shadows. The confrontation sequence between Mark and the blind Mrs Stephens is a master of this blend of styles and was, for me, the film's greatest moment. Maximum suspense is wrung out of the otherwise innocuous camera that Mark carries around like a comfort blanket. It's spinning gears capturing death intensely and up close makes for a stunning piece of set decoration long before we discover the secret device hidden within it.

There's obvious much more to go into with this movie, but in a more formal way. I'm sure there are plenty of people who've done that and with far more intelligence than I. I was deeply involved by Peeping Tom, and parallels to Psycho aside, found it to be a startlingly original and daring piece of work. It's entirely apt that Michael Powell's career was ruined because of Peeping Tom since he almost seems to be going out of his way to make a film that can very easily be seen as him blasting audiences for their cinematic bloodlust. It's an endlessly fascinating film and one that shan't forget too soon. A

31 Horrors: Hardware (#22)

Wherein I attempt to watch 31 horror films over the course of October. 31 horror films that I have never seen before, from obscure to acclaimed classics. We'll see how well I go in actually finding the time to watch and then write about them in some way.

Well this was insane and I loved it.

It's hardly surprising to discover that Richard Stanley's 1990 sci-fi/horror action flick received a poor critical reception upon its release. It's a tough film to pin down, seemingly a pastiche of so many different films that it's hard to keep count - post screening my friends and I labelled Blade Runner, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, The Terminator, Alien, Short Circuit, Rear Window, Total Recall, Vertigo, and several more as obvious influences - and yet one that, despite it's mad sloppy screenplay, proved to be an intoxicating winner. It's an exhausting hoot of a film that shows flutters of such astonishing technical finesse that I couldn't help but admire its chutzpah even when it was flapping about like a fish out of water. I loved this movie, perhaps against my better judgement.

Set primarily in one of those futuristic dystopian cities that became so popular in the aftermath of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner where the skies bleed red from nuclear radiation and the cityscapes are dark masses dotted with neon and fluorescent. Hardware begins with the emergence of Dylan McDermott's Moses out of the desert where he has been scavenging for spare parts. Taking some mysterious, but uber-cool, electronics home to his girlfriend who uses these type of foreign objects in her industrial artworks. They live in a world riddled with dirty violence and people are lining up for voluntary sterilisation to reduce population growth. Naturally, the machine from the desert wakes up from its robotic sleep and begins to wreak havoc in exceedingly violent and explosive ways.

I'd never actually heard of this movie before I saw it on a Halloween night double bill with, what else, Halloween at the Astor Theatre. It shares nothing in common with that 1978 classic, so it was a double bill in horror goodness only, but I'm glad I got the chance to see it and to do so on a big screen. The astonishing editing and production design is best experienced on a cinema screen where they merge to form a dizzying collaboration. As the film continues to go higher and higher with its batshit craziness - culminating perhaps in a truly confounding, eye-popping sequence that takes a bit of visual influence from 2001 and Vertigo - I was continued to grow fonder and fonder. Richard Stanley, working from a screenplay (an admittedly odd, muddy one) by Stanley, Steve MacManus, and Kevin O'Neill, never lets up and isn't afraid to go to some truly unexpected places. The gore, too, which rears its head in the final act is certainly a bright and red in a gleeful fashion.

As a visual feast, it ranks alongside Blade Runner, Dark City and The Matrix as dying worlds on life support. It's visually stunning. The claustrophobic one-set nature is obviously derived from Alien, but Stanley is still able to do some interesting, fresh things with it. I admired the performance of Stacey Travis, more the star of the film than McDermott, and found she was able to make the preposterous sequences glisten with genuine emotion, not to mention blood, sweat and tears. Even when it descends into a grotesque Real Window moment of voyeuristic perversion, she keeps the film from spinning off of its axis, something that Stanley clearly had no interest in.

This hallucinogenic, post-apocalyptic, weird, crazy horror extravaganza was a real treat. Evil robots are always fun, but I don't recall seeing anything this flat out bonkers. A movie without blinkers on in its wide-eyed technology-is-evil-yo attitude and that has the balls to really go to some odd places. I loved it! And who can resist a movie in which Iggy Pop features as a radio DJ? A-

31 Horrors: Night of the Demon (#21)

Wherein I attempt to watch 31 horror films over the course of October. 31 horror films that I have never seen before, from obscure to acclaimed classics. We'll see how well I go in actually finding the time to watch and then write about them in some way.

I was entirely surprised when I happened across the DVD of this film at the local library. A Jacques Tourneur film described as "one of the scariest films ever made"? I've already discussed my affinity for this French director's horror output - specifically Cat People, but also I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man - and I'd never heard this British film from 1957 mentioned alongside them in any real reverence. It's not produced by the esteemed Val Lewton so that probably doesn't hurt, but I imagine that maybe its newfound recognition comes from this list by Martin Scorsese wherein he labels Night of the Demon as one of the "eleven scariest horror movies of all time." Why eleven we'll never know, but it's hard to not see the internet culture immediately rushing to claim it as such after somebody of Martin Scorsese's stature says it's that good.

As if the title and the poster up top (a fabulous original UK quad) didn't alert you, Night of the Demon (retitled to Curse of the Demon for its recut American release) is about a demonic spirit that forms itself into the form of a cross between a roller-skating Godzilla and the creature from the Black Lagoon. As silly as that sounds, the demon's brief appearances are actually quite startling in their effect. That instant, unexpected appearance of something unnatural in an otherwise benign scenario will always work at eliciting a chilly shudder up the spine at a far greater ratio than anything other scare you can manufacture and Tourneur does a remarkable job when he utilises it here.

Night of the Demon is actually far less about a demonic apparition than it is about a skeptic's ambition to reveal a cult as false. It that respect it would make a surprisingly apt and fabulous double with Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. They both have a very cold, but beautiful, way of getting to the core of the institution that is the cause of so much conflict with a robust and lively central figurehead and a meek, if feverishly determined, younger man trying to work it all out. Night of the Demon, of course, twists its story of a cult and its charismatic leader into a very literal horror direction, but it works.

I loved that Tourneur and writers Charles Bennett and Hal E Chester utilised classical elements into the story. Stonehenge being a particularly inspired choice as that mysterious formation will always make for an easy backdrop to something supernatural. Several set-pieces are indeed flatout terrifying for what they suggest and how they're framed - how about that visit to the homestead of a "demon" victim with the reveal of the parchment? - although an extended storm sequence at the mansion estate of Niall MacGinnis' Karswell perhaps could have been shortened (maybe the US version does as such) and causes the pace to lag. Filmed in a way that utilises Tourneur's trademark film-noir aesthetic, Night of the Demon is surely a beautifully made film. While it doesn't quite all come together as a whole that warrants the title as one of the scariest films ever made, it does make for a delicious surprise and a wonderfully smart take on the issues. B+

31 Horrors: Vampyr (#20)

Wherein I attempt to watch 31 horror films over the course of October. 31 horror films that I have never seen before, from obscure to acclaimed classics. We'll see how well I go in actually finding the time to watch and then write about them in some way.

Well, it's easy to see why this has been deemed as so influential, isn't it? Per the Eureka! Masters of Cinema DVD sleeve, Carl Theodore Dreyer's Vampyr was deemed by Alfred Hitchcock as "the only film worth watching... twice", Vampyr is seemingly a very obvious inspiration to Psycho. Vampyr, also the inspiration to Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep in a far more obvious way, is about a man who leaves his life and descends into a fantasy horror upon arriving a motel in the middle of nowhere. What is Janet Leigh's Marion Crane is not a fantastical being on the run? Where does she end? A middle of nowhere motel. While Marion met a far crueller fate than Nicolas de Gunzburg's Allan Gray (the film's unofficial subtitle is The Strange Adventure of Allan Gray), Vampyr too descends into a mystery-solving horror ala Psycho, just with vampires instead of mummy-dressing psychotics. The similarities don't quite end there, however, as Hitchcock appears to have aped several slices of striking imagery too.

Vampyr is the first sound feature that Dreyer ever made, coming on the heels of The Passion of Joan of Arc. Having said that, Dreyer has stuck to a silent aesthetic for the most part and there is minimal dialogue as a result of the producer's wish to record the film in both French and Germany languages. Title cards are frequently used and many of the actors - unprofessional actors for the most part I've since discovered - work more in sinister glances than horrific speeches. Dreyer, too, uses static imagery more than the theatrical horrors of his international brethren. Vampyr's release was actually delayed in Germany so that Dracula and Frankenstein could be released first, certainly one of the earliest sign posts of the international film world working with a domino effect.

At only 72 minutes, Vampyr doesn't exactly dig deep into the vamp mythology, but it does manage to craft an excessively eerie atmosphere. As Allan Gray attempts to solve and break the vampire curse that has swept across his village without succumbing to it himself, Dreyer infuses it with enough images of wrinkled, doom-ravaged faces and sickle-wielding townsfolk to power several films. It's holds an incredible power, a spell if you will, that doesn't break until it's over. A bewitching and altogether stunning piece of brilliantly crafted cinema. A-

31 Horrors: Island of Lost Souls (#19)

Wherein I attempt to watch 31 horror films over the course of October. 31 horror films that I have never seen before, from obscure to acclaimed classics. We'll see how well I go in actually finding the time to watch and then write about them in some way.

I knew as I popped in the Eureka! Masters of Cinema Blu-ray for this 1932 (by coincidence, the second of October's horror flicks to have come from that year) that Erle Kenton's Island of Lost Souls was an adaptation of sorts of HG Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau. Given the title change I figured it was one of those unofficial adaptations where everything's the same, but not. Alas, I was wrong. By the time a character is introduced called, you guessed it, Dr Moreau, it became obvious that this was just a straight out filming of the novel. Well, as close to one as you could probably get in 1932. I haven't read the book so I can't tell you how similar they are, but at least in Europe it was marketed with its original book title in tow.

The film isn't all that special, to be honest, but as an almost schlocky pre-code genre title, it makes for some interesting viewing. Starring Charles Laughton as the aforementioned doc, and Richard Arlen as the shipwrecked man who uncovers his research (if one can call it that) into regeneration and vivisection. There is also Bela Lugosi (Dracula!) as a half-man/half-beast creation known as the "Sayer of the Law", and Kathleen Burke as The Panther Woman. She was supposedly chosen amongst a group of 60,000 candidates and, on the marketing, wasn't even credited by name, but merely as "The Panther Woman". Those old Hollywood types really knew how to sell a woman's soul for financial gain, didn't they!

Island of Lost Souls came out a year before King Kong, and the two share quite a few similarities. So much so that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that that 1933 classic used some of the same sets as Kenton's picture. It opens with a boat sailing the choppy seas and various characters finding themselves amongst a island dense in as much flora as mystery. Admittedly, the first and the third acts hold most of what I found interesting here, with the middle - basically everything about the boring Panther Woman - losing my patience. I enjoyed the opening with its gruff sailors and charming, yet sinister, Charles Laughton. The end, too, is quite intense as the beasts retaliate against their maker - certainly it was Laughton's final scene that earned this movie its status as banned in the UK? At only 71 minutes long though even the stuff I didn't too much care for didn't stick around long enough to prove too detrimental. To be honest, I watched this early in the month and forgot to write it up. I have as little to say about now as I did then, I suppose. B-