31 Nights of Terror! Midnight Meat Train

Almost a year ago to the day I was at my parent’s house bored, alone and hopelessly unemployed and without anything to really do I fell upon a free on-demand film called Midnight Meat Train which I figured would help pass the long October night. A year later and I suppose you could say that nothing has changed and through a number of coincidences I have again found myself at my parents house so, seeing the oblivious opportunity I decided it would be a good idea to take advantage of on-demand and watch it again- something I knew I was going to do anyway because, as I remembered, it is an excellent movie.

Let me get out of the way first that it is not perfect; anytime I see someone taking a bath in a bathroom the size of my little Philadelphia living room in New York City I get annoyed, especially when that someone is an unemployed photographer whose girlfriend supplements their existence as a waitress. I mean, if they lived in Utah or something, I would understand. Midnight Meat Train seems to have problems at times with attention to detail like that: there is also a fight scene where our hero is standing and in the next clip he is on his back without ever being knocked down as if the editing department simply wasn’t trying and other little inconsistencies as such here and there.

Such errors are, however, to be forgiven when a strong and well executed plot is to be presented: the second Clive Barker story in my 31 Nights of Horror to get high marks, so I guess I am beginning to see what Stephen King meant when he called Clive Barker ‘the future of terror’. In short, Bradley Cooper is a photographer who is trying to make it big but falls short because of his inhibitions with relation to the real grit of his city. In an attempt to bring his work to the edge, Cooper uncovers a conspiracy of murders with a terrible motivation.

JRR Tolkien believed strongly that if you dabble too closely with evil, evil will consume you and Midnight Meat Train has fun playing with this theme in quite an effective way. Speaking of effective, they also utilize Vinnie Jones to his full potential as well: it seems that after his unexpected success in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, every director who thought he too was Guy Ritchie tried desperately to give Vinnie Jones some one-liner to say which will sound cool and tough, though often fall flat on its face: a phenomenon best seen in Swordfish. Here, director Ryûhei Kitamura was smart enough to use him as a silent but intimidating character, which pays off because Vinnie will scare you to death.

Leave it to the Japanese to make a horror film with some effort: Midnight Meat Train has color, atmosphere, good acting, a logical and well played out plot and, yes, character development. We have been talking a lot about character development lately and this is a good example of where it works. The film takes itself very seriously and as we follow Cooper in his downward spiral, we too must take him seriously, which is effectively done here by well written dialogue presented by competent actors in strong scenes shot by a competent director. Compare that with Jeepers Creepers where the first scene looks well shot until you realize the director most likely just positioned the camera so well by accident, as is proven throughout the rest of the film.

Midnight Meat Train is Halloween with an original twist: it’s creepy, edgy and well put together; like a Giger painting, albeit shinier in places.

31 Nights of Terror! Zombieland

There is nothing like to going to the cinema during a festive period to really stimulate the holiday gland; sure it’s fun to be alone in the dark at home curled up with a bowl of popcorn, but every once and again it is nice to get out of the house. With this in mind I decided to take 31 Nights of Terror on the road and go see the new Zombieland which has come out just in time for Halloween and it has solidly reaffirmed my conviction that there is no logical justification for going to the Regal Cinema: the tickets are more expensive, the popcorn is more expensive, the commercials go on forever and, above all, the movies, like Zombieland are terrible.

Now some might say that calling this film terrible is an exaggeration, and that I must have been taking the movie too seriously; but quite to the contrary, going into Zombieland I was expecting all out zombie madness in a post-apocalyptic America where logic in fact had no meaning. The first fifteen minutes or so of Zombieland put me in a great mood because it was exactly that: funny, stupidly gory and full of man vs. zombie action.

I read a long time ago a quote from a writer whose name has since escaped me who said that the beginning and ending of a story are easy, it’s the middle that’s really difficult and it would appear that the writers of Zombieland were in whole hearted agreement. I can easily see them sitting in front of their computers staring blankly at the screen with the first fifteen minutes and the larger part of the climax written realizing that they only had thirty minutes worth of screen time and that they were going to end up on the short real of some film festival if they didn’t fatten the story up…

Which I where I get really annoyed.

If the writers were in need of inspiration, why in the good Lord’s name did they look to teen comedies for it, as opposed to the numerous successful films of the same if not similar comedy/horror genres which have a strong reputation? I thought that I was going to go watch the nonsense of Woody Harrelson fighting zombies with a rag tag crew and instead got Superbad 2: This Time With Zombies except it would appear that Michael Cera was busy and so they had to hire another clone of the stereotypical insecure-nerdy-boy-who-represents-our-target audience since one apparently isn’t enough.

Normally I would complain when a film doesn’t have any character arcs or plot development but that said we need to straighten this out a bit because watching mainstream movies is a little like watching a child put on their mother’s make-up: you can see that they get the general idea and it would even appear they understand the importance of what they are playing with, but beyond that cute novelty they still look like complete fools and their effort to impress only makes us giggle. I was, or at least tried to be equally hard on Jeepers Creepers and there is a good point of comparison here: Jeepers Creepers failed because its complete lack of reliable character development and a plot so thin if you rubbed grease on it, it would disappear and this was a problem because we needed to feel something for the characters, we needed to know them so that we could be scared for them. The movie failed to deliver on this connection and so we watched annoyingly bad decision making from a distance. Inversely, I understood that Zombieland was to be a comedy where there is little need for characters to have as much emotional value so we can get on with the barrels of laughs and so I am not quite sure why we spent the better part of an hour getting to know each main character with a back story and even flashbacks to help identify each of their personalities. Who cares? Where are all of the zombies? Why aren’t they fighting them?

If you look at Shawn of the Dead in comparison you see better what I am talking about- the movie has a relatively simple plot which moves forward rife with jokes and pretty much from the first few minutes or so zombies show up on the scene and never really leave all the way to the end. Plot and dialogue serve merely as connectors between funny zombie scene to the next until the movie is over and you press play to watch it again and again, which I remember doing three times the first week. Zombieland, meanwhile, abandoned the chance to become a cult classic by sticking to the silly concept of four people left on Earth and going for a crowd pleaser, abandoning Zombies in the middle of the film all together, assumingly because they had spent that time slot of their budget on a big name cameo.

Speaking of which, I take serious issue with the casting of this film as well- though in the defense of the cast, they all played their parts well, it was just that their parts were completely wrong. As the trailers may have already shown you, it is Woody Harrelson’s character that keeps the laughs going and makes the film worth watching though, sadly enough, most of his best moments are already in the trailer. Aside from that, there is a little girl who is annoying when she is around, which is thankfully not much and then our still-in-college-just-like-you nerd and ambiguous mishmash of stereotypes of a girl who both help play out the all American geek fantasy of going from playing video games with no social life and probably writing bad movie reviews to being the hero boyfriend of a fantasy girl. Which, by the way, I suppose really is a fantasy because there is nothing realistic about her; not that I expect too much from a movie called Zombieland but this woman never takes her black eye liner off, day and night and it seems pretty much immovable and seeing as this is a post apocalyptic world where such commodities would be scarce, I am somewhat led to believe that she has it tattooed on her, which at least makes more sense. I mean, for God’s sake you might say that I am digging a little deep into detail here but they are the ones who pointed it out: there is actually a conversation between the two girls talking about how ugly they have gotten due to lack of showering and no make up. No make up! You could tear off some from around your eyes and give it to your sister and still have a large enough layer for tomorrow!

That is exactly where Zombieland falls apart, in its attempt to be ever so slightly too serious and I am sorry for picking on it so much but they started it: I went to the movies to see dumb jokes, lots of blood and zombies getting taken out in an hour and a half bonanza which I thought would basically be like Dead Rising: The Movie. What I got was a few laughs, most from the first 15 minutes of the movie which you see in the trailer, some clips which will most likely become youtube clips-of-the-week and then be forgotten when New Moon comes out and all the tenny boppers move onto something else.

Me, personally, I am going back to the Ritz.

31 Nights Of Terror! Interview with the Vampire

I’m not sure why but when I tell friends that I am going to include Interview with the Vampire in my 31 Nights of Terror I always get the same response that ‘that’s not a Halloween movie’ and I don’t think that I entirely understand. Certainly the film is not exclusively a Halloween movie and obviously that is what the producers felt back in 1994 because they released it in November, possibly for fear that calling something a holiday movie of any kind cheapens it and limits its appeal though on that I am simply speculating.

With that said, Interview with the Vampire is not only in my opinion a Halloween movie, but a great example of what film makers should be aiming for when they set out to make a movie. Anne Rice wrote the screenplay for her own book and the film was directed by Neil Jordan, a man known not to compromise quality for quantity and the end result of so much effort shows in this film. There are perhaps three main ghouls of Halloween: ghosts, monsters and vampires and it is often difficult to imagine what one could do with such characters to be original again and that is where Interview with the Vampire comes into its own. Despite being relatively linear in its narrative, Interview with the Vampire is a complex multi-layered story which runs the gambit of themes including the more obvious ones of life, death and religion but also skewed morality and ambiguous sexuality. More brilliant still is that the film is by no means art house movie and if you’re the kind of person who is not interested in so much drama because it is all too artsy then you can skip over all the themes and just enjoy a good vampire movie and that is film making at its best.

The set pieces are amazing and in their day were nominated for a number of awards. Grant it, not every film gets such a blockbuster budget and so maybe it isn’t fair to compare, but then again not every painting of the renaissance was well funded but that doesn’t take away from the fact that monumentalist pieces are monumental and in this case, Interview with the Vampire is the Sistine Chapel of vampire movies.

The acting is perfect, the costumes are amazing, the locations are well shot and the score is spot on though perhaps just one tone away from being perfect because I didn’t find it to be haunting, which would have gone well here. Speaking of haunting, though I wouldn’t say that the film scares me, there are moments which will shock you the first time around and leave you feeling trully disturbed for a while. I have seen the film a hundred times and I am still always awed by the ‘theater’ scene of ‘vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires’ who are, as Louis calls them, ‘monstrous.’

The location shots are beautiful and truly capture the essence of the night in all of its dark beauty, a quality which I think is exaggerated particularly in October as it is in the film- every single frame of this film could be cut, framed and sold as an artistic masterpiece of photography and, watching Interview with the Vampire, I get to enjoy all 2952 of them.

Perhaps Interview with the Vampire is not what we think of immediately when we think of Halloween, but if ever there was a film that inspired you to play dress up and run about in the night pretending to be a servant of the shadows, this would be it.

31 Nights Of Terror! Hellraiser

When one thinks of horror, the long series of films which began primarily in the nineteen-eighties come to mind almost immediately: Halloween (yes, I know the original was in fact 1978, but close enough), Friday the 13^th, Nightmare on Elm St. and tonight’s feature, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. Hellraiser is not as scary as I would have imagined it would be, and perhaps this is a sign of the point to which society has disintegrated into banality since 1987, though I have my doubts about that.

Hellraiser is part of a distinct drama based horror genre which seems to aim more at telling a story which involves some kind of horror as the driving force of characters’ motivations as opposed to horror for the sake of horror à la Eli Roth. In this case, the central theme of Hellraiser seems deeper than some might give it credit because, despite what the DVD cover and posters indicate, this is a story about human desire first and foremost. Everyone has it, and everyone will pay a certain price for it, depending on how far they want to go with it. If you choose to go outside the known worldly pleasures, you must open a possessed puzzle box which, Clive Barker may or may not have been using to allude to the idea of leaving the metaphorical box of sociological norms. The puzzle box summons daemon like creatures called Cenobites who will lead you to new pleasures and pains which, according to one of the anti-heroes, Frank, are ‘indistinguishable.’

We begin the film where Frank has done just that and, after a short stay in an alternate universe, escapes back to our dimension. In order to entirely retake his human form, however, he needs the blood of other human beings who will be brought to him by an ex-lover and wife of his brother whom he has convinced to help him. He must also regain his human form before the Cenobites he escaped from find him. In this way, along with a number of side plots, Hellraiser is surprisingly complex and for the most part, the story works. The characters are interesting, their motivations are understandable and the first hour or so has all of the elements of a Shakespearian tragedy.

Hellraiser is not perfect, however, and it falls on its face almost exactly where one might expect it to begin to pick up. When the Cenobites show up, the story begins to shift focus; in the beginning the story seemed to mostly revolve around Julia and her decision to help Frank. This part of the film was amazing until it changes entirely over to Frank’s niece, Kirsty who follows a much more pedestrian and expected pattern of the young girl who cries a lot and runs away from Cenobites only to figure out the key to a mystery which no one else could put together just in time to save her own skin.

The Cenobites are not nearly as interesting as they seem when you are in the video store, either. While they are creepy, and absolutely necessary to make the story work, they are by no means any more important than any other character. In retrospect, though I have never seen any of the films, it is funny who survives in cultural memory and who falls away because Pinhead has become known as a pop icon of horror, even though he is of no particular importance in the film- that is to say, no more than any other Cenobite, and yet the others never really made it big. Just Pinhead.

My major gripe is that there also seem to be some fairly large continuity errors. The whole regeneration of life through blood thing seems to work in exact proportion to how fast Clive Barker feels like advancing the story at any given moment and in some cases, fresh blood seems to have little to no effect, like the life bar of a bad video game. Also I’m not sure to entirely understand this film’s ending. I mean for some reason we pass an entire hour and a half trying to evade an otherworld evil which seems to condemn you to a never ending dimension of sufferance if you should be so foolish as to open their gate. Fair enough, but then why is it that the movie resolves itself by simply putting the puzzle box back the way you found it? Why didn’t Frank and all of those before him do it? I was almost waiting for a last second reappearance of Frank back in the other dimension who would say ‘Oh! Is that what I was supposed to do!’ It all just seems a little too easy and anticlimactic.

Also, towards the end the Cenobites return the same way they did in the beginning of the movie. Frank yells out’ What’s going on!’ Wait a minute! What do you mean what’s going on? The same thing that went on when the most horrible and painful moment of your life occurred, the entire reason you have been killing people for an entire hour and you honestly have no idea what is going on, even though it is the exact same images as before. In fact, I am not even sure they bothered to go film those scenes a second time, they very well may have been the same clips from the beginning of the movie.

Like a lot of horror movies, it appears that writers and directors are rather good at setting up difficult situations to escape, but are nowhere nearly as talented as resolving the very problem they set forth. Nevertheless, Hellraiser is indeed for the most part a Halloween and horror classic that fits in with all the good late night pretend to be scared films for the season, though I stop short of calling it timeless. A hint to anyone who ever wishes to make a film with timeless quality: do not use fashion trends of the moment. They might look cool on opening weekend, but as Hellraiser teaches us, what was considered to be beautiful in 1987 makes a woman look about as silly as Pinhead in 2009.