The Quatermass Xperiment

Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) was one of three astronauts launched into space in a rocket by Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy), but he's the only one found on board when the rocket crashes on a farm. When he's dragged free, all Victor can say is "Help me," before slipping into more-or-less a catatonic state. Before long, it becomes apparent to Quatermass, Scotland Yard Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner), and others that something inhuman has taken over Victor, threatening the entire world.

The Quatermass Xperiment is a movie I was curious about for a long time before I finally saw it. I first became aware of it when I learned John Carpenter used "Martin Quatermass" as a pseudonym when he wrote Prince of Darkness. Carpenter even appears on the DVD to talk about his love for the movie.

Watching it for the first time, I see why it appeals to Carpenter. It's apocalyptic sci-fi horror, dark and cynical, and it mixes subtle mystery and tension with (for the time) graphic shocks.

Would You Rather

I love Jeffrey Combs. The man has turned in countless great performances in the horror and science fiction genres, and when I see he's in a movie, I immediately become interested.

Combs’ presence intrigued me with Would You Rather, and indeed, I don't think I would have enjoyed the movie as much if he weren't in it. He plays such a wonderfully loathsome and nasty villain and carries the movie on his back.

Plenty of movies start off interesting and become disappointing by the end. Would You Rather works in the opposite direction. It begins fairly uninvolving. I was disappointed the filmmakers took a great, schlocky idea and played it seriously, which drained out a lot of potential fun and humor. But, by the end, I confess the movie had me hooked, creating genuine tension and unpredictable moments.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1991)

Director Stuart Gordon is best known for his H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, but with The Pit and the Pendulum, he moved on to Edgar Allan Poe, handling the material with the same splatter gore and black humor he’s known for.

Spain. 1492. The Inquisition under Torquemada (Lance Henriksen) is in full swing. During the auto-de-fe, Maria (Rona De Ricci), aghast at the cruelty on display, begs for the violence to stop when a child is whipped. Entranced with her beauty, Torquemada orders her arrested as a witch. She's taken to the castle dungeon for torture while her husband Antonio (Jonathan Fuller), a baker and former soldier, tries to rescue her.

Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, but viewers of The Pit and the Pendulum can expect a cavalcade of atrocities: the iron maiden, the rack, floggings, burnings at the stake, a tongue is cut out, and Torquemada wears a spiked corset with the spikes pointed inward. It's as bloody and ghastly as you'd expect a movie about the Inquisition to be.

Three...Extremes

America and England are responsible for most of the anthology movies I'm familiar with, but Three...Extremes is an East Asian production from three different directors: Fruit Chan of Hong Kong, Park Chan-wook of South Korea, and Takashi Miike of Japan. Each one of these directors directs a 40-minute segment.

Chan starts with "Dumplings," the tale of an aging ex-actress who visits a woman for dumplings that restore youth but are made with a gruesome ingredient.

In "Cut," by Park, a successful film director and his wife are kidnapped by an extra from his movies and tortured.

With "Box," Miike tells the story of a woman haunted by nightmares of being buried in a box in the snow.

Throw Momma from the Train

An early scene in Throw Momma from the Train hits close to home.

Larry, the community college creative writing professor played by Billy Crystal, listens blankly as a student reads from her submarine story.

“Dive… DIVE,” yelled the captain through the thing. So the captain pressed a button, or something, and it dove. And the enemy was foiled again!”

I've been in my fair share writing classes and workshops. Believe me: this is only a slight exaggeration of the terrible writing one can encounter. Thankfully, I've never met anyone who has written anything as uncomfortable as “100 Women I Would Like to Pork.”

Ran

Ran is legendary director Akira Kurosawa's final masterpiece, what is often referred to as the Japanese King Lear.

Like Shakespeare's tale, Ran concerns an aging monarch who foolishly divides his kingdom among his children, banishes the one child who sees the folly of the plan, is rejected by his other offspring, and is driven mad as the land becomes engulfed in war. Both stories also prominently feature a royal fool whose silly behavior and nonsense songs reveal the blunt truth of the monarch's behavior.

Lord Hidetora is the elderly leader of the Ichimonji Clan. Following a boar hunt, he decides to relinquish his power and divide his kingdom between his three sons: Taro, Jiro, and Saburo. Saburo recognizes the plan would never work because he and his brothers were raised on conflict, but his protest enrages Hidetora, who banishes Saburo and Tango,a trusted adviser who defends Saburo.

Wings

Wings, directed by Larisa Shepitko, is a post-World War II drama set in the Soviet Union, where it was produced, about a woman who served as a pilot during the war but now struggles in her civilian life.

There are many American movies about veterans struggling to adjust to life out of uniform, such Coming Home and First Blood, but I don't know of any others from a Soviet perspective, and I don't know of any other prominent female directors from that period in the Soviet Union.

Shot in black and white, Wings follows Nadezhda Petrukhina (Mayya Bulgakova), who served with distinction during the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Air Force. Twenty-plus years later, she's the headmistress of a vocational school. The students don't respect her, her daughter Tanya (Zhanna Bolotova) won't introduce her to her new husband, and overall, Nadezhda feels unfulfilled, out of place, and unappreciated.

Nightmare Alley (1947)

A carnival is supposed to be a fun, wonderful place filled with thrilling rides, exciting acts, and all-around entertainment, but plenty of them are scummy, dirty, ramshackle operations, and carnies operate in their own little world. It's a different lifestyle non-carnies can't relate to. Behind the scenes, it's about the money, and who knows what other secrets are lurking beneath the happy facade shown to the outside world.

Nightmare Alley gazes at the underbelly of show business. It tells the story of a small-time hustler, Stanton "Stan" Carlisle (Tyrone Power) who begins the movie as a worker at a travelling carnival and rises to fame and fortune as a mentalist doing cold readings before falling spectacularly, undone by his greed, wandering eye, and arrogance. It's a morality play crossed with a tragedy.

Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight

What do you get when you combine the sensibilities of John Carpenter and Sam Raimi and add the awesomeness of Billy Zane? You get Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, the first feature-length spinoff of the ghoulish HBO series. While not the sort of thing to keep you up all night afraid of the dark, it is terrific fun.

After a brief prologue featuring our old pun-spouting friend the Cryptkeeper (voiced by John Kassir), the movie dives right in with a man named Brayker (William Sadler) pursued by The Collector (Zane) to a ramshackle motel in the middle of nowhere. Brakyer holds a mysterious key, and The Collector besieges the motel with an army of demons to get it. Held at bay by blood from the key, the smooth-talking Collector attempts to tempt the occupants of the motel (CCH Pounder, Jada Pinkett, Dick Miller, and Thomas Haden Church, among others) into giving up Brayker and the key.

Demon Knight is directed by Ernest Dickerson, who got his start as a cinematographer for Spike Lee and who has since made a name for himself in television horror, directing episodes of Masters of Horror, The Walking Dead, and Dexter. Dickerson brings style and energy to the proceedings here: splatter gore, cockeyed camera angles, a fast pace, and tongue-in-cheek humor.

Mandy

The first image of Nicolas Cage in Mandy is as a lumberjack, using a chainsaw against a tree, and I said aloud, "I hope that's Chekov's chainsaw." It ought to be a sin to show Nicolas Cage using a chainsaw at the start of a movie and not have him use it as part of his “Roaring Rampage of Revenge.”

Thankfully, Cage does get to use it against the villains who harmed him and his wife. You have to wait a while before he does, but much like the rest of the film, the payoff is worth the wait

Mandy is a strange beast. Cage plays Red Miller, who lives a secluded lifestyle with his wife Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough). They run afoul of a weird hippie cult led by Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache), who becomes obsessed with Mandy and orders his underlings to bring her to him.

We've seen this kind of story hundreds of times, but Mandy is not a gritty, vigilante action piece. It is a nightmarish, surreal horror thriller. It plays very dream-like, and director Panos Cosmatos's style gives the movie a freaky, acid-trip quality.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil

Have you ever been watching something like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Hill Have Eyes and found yourself rooting for the inbred killers because the so-called normal heroes were too stupid and boring? Then Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is the movie for you.

Ah hillbillies. Rednecks. Country folk. Mountain people. Where would the horror genre be without this subculture to exploit? Backwoods people have been preying on clueless city slickers wandering into their clutches for a long time. It's a trope that's found mileage in a number of different movies: Even outside of rural America, folks have a habit of running afoul of the locals.

It's an easily recognizable archetype; the story is obvious and flexible: the clash of the civilized and the savage, a battle between decent, moral people and the monstrous, deranged weirdos. These movies make us ask ourselves: do we have what it takes to fight and survive? We might discover we're really not so civilized after all, that maybe there's still some of that animalistic savage in all of us.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil has a setup that sounds like a typical plot of hillbilly horror. A bunch of college kids go into the woods for a vacation and get into trouble with a pair of rednecks, Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine). Gory deaths ensue.

Shocker

The first time I saw Wes Craven’s Shocker, I hated it, thinking it too transparent and cynical of an attempt to replicate Freddy Krueger. I went into it expecting a hardcore, intense thriller but saw a tonally inconsistent movie that couldn't decide what it wanted to be about.

Still, Shocker is a movie I've thought about many times, and I remembered some of its sequences and visuals fondly. After Craven's passing, I revisited the film. While some flaws remain, Shocker has enough inspiration to make it worth checking out. Rather than a serious horror movie, it works best as a zany, violent satire.

The Faculty

\Say what you will about director Robert Rodriguez, but the man tips his hat to his influences.

Early on in The Faculty, written by Scream writer (that sounds like something the Cryptkeeper would say) Kevin Williamson, the characters of Stokes, played by Clea DuVall, is shown reading Robert Heinlein's Double Star (which I think would make a fantastic movie or miniseries). Later, Stokes uses her knowledge of The Puppet Masters to explain what the alien menace is up to and how to possibly defeat them.

Heinlein is one of the most important sci fi writers of the 20th century, but sadly, most people these days don't know him for much beyond Starship Troopers, and that's because of Paul Verhoeven's movie, which is more of a parody of the source material than a faithful adaptation. Just seeing Heinlein namedropped here warmed the cockles of my heart.

The Eyes of My Mother

Horror films have a reliable bag of tricks to scare audiences: tight camera angles, quick cuts, loud noises, deep shadows.

The Eyes of My Mother, written and directed by Nicolas Pesce, contains few of these elements. It's shot in black and white, but instead of hiding a lurking killer, the shadows hide the rest of the world, and the light shows us what we'd rather not see. Violent, awful things happen to people, but for the most part, we don't see these actions, just the perverse aftermath.

Almost nothing is shown, and even less is explained, but The Eyes of My Mother proves to a startlingly effective horror movie. More character study than thriller, it offers a disturbing take on loneliness.

Invaders from Mars (1986)

There are two types of people in the world: those who are amused by the notion of Nurse Ratched getting eaten by a giant alien Pac-Man and those who aren't, and if you're a member of the former camp, I have good news should you decide to watch Tobe Hooper's 1986 remake of Invaders from Mars.

Invaders from Mars (written by Dan O'Dannon and Don Jakoby) is broader, campier, and busier than the original. A lot of money went into making these nasty Martians and their weird technology, and they're rendered in such an exaggerated, over-the-top, bug-eyed manner, the movie is practically a live-action cartoon. It's probably not scary if you're over the age of 12 and maybe it's too weird if you're a kid, but in its own way, it's endearing.