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.