Hey Midnight Warriors....Do Y'all Hear October Comin' Around The Corner?

Because I do.  And I'm PUMPED.  Everybody loves October.  If they don't they're not human.  They're not ghoul or monster or ghost either.  They're something else.  Something lame.

Anyway, I want to make October a bit eventful here at FMWL, but to do that I'm gonna need the help.  In fact, if you're so inclined, I'm gonna need the help of YOU - that's right, YOU! - the Midnight Warrior who's reading this right now.  You see, I thought this October might be a good time to talk about the people who represent horror to us all, and figure out which names really mean horror cinema to horror fans.  But I can't do it without input from folks who a) love horror and b) aren't me.

So here's what I'm asking for - sometime between now and October 15th, send me a list of up to 10 (TEN!) people - actors, writers, directors, producers, etc. - who, in your opinion, represent the best of what horror movies can be. 

You can use any criteria you like - your favorite people, the people who are most important, the people with the best mustaches or breasts - just please list no more than ten folks.  You don't even have to rank your ten or explain your ten (though you're free to do so if you like!), just gimme ten names, which I can then bring to FMWL and (hopefully) once I have a lot of lists we'll be able to run some statistics and create a bigger list and see just who horror fans feel are The True Heroes of Horror.

If you'd like to participate in this list-producing event, let me know via email at frommidnightwithlove (at) gmail (dot) com.  If you have your own site, feel free to post your list there and just send me a link, but that's not required either.  Look, there aren't any requirements, except that you a) list names of the people in horror you love and b) kick ass. 

In the meantime, I'll be using FMWL to profile and/or comment on some of my Horror Heroes, and I also hope to spotlight some awesome guests as the month goes on.  So, if you'd like to participate in Horror Heroes Month here at FMWL...well, I've already told you what to do.  And I'd be honored to have you contribute!

Midnight Movie of the Week #89 - The Last Winter

Global Warming is one of those things - like reality TV and/or politics - that the media loves and I don't really get.  I guess it means that the globe is getting warmer (duh!), but I don't know why that's such a bad thing.  Top notch horror producer and artful director Larry Fessenden seems to have a much better understanding of this concept than I do, or at least that's what I assume after watching The Last Winter, an intelligent psychological chiller that sends us into the far north and makes global warming a real force that is threatening a small group of researchers...and possibly the rest of the planet.

Set at an oil company camp in the northern regions of Alaska that hosted 30 Days of Night's vampires, The Last Winter is one of those movies that seems like it could just be a normal drama about life in the north for much of the film.  But there's something ominous from scene one, which is manifested primarily through the young, scared Maxwell McKinder - played by Friday Night Lights' Zach Gilford (who I refuse to acknowledge as anything but Matt Saracen, QB1) - who we can immediately tell knows more than we do.  A scene near the end of the first act shows us Maxwell wandering out into the tundra and staring off into the distance, where he sees something unnatural that we can't really understand.

Around Saracen/Gilford's character, everyone is going about business as usual.  Oil company bigwig Ed Pollack (played by Ron Friggin' Perlman!) is pushing to keep everything "on schedule" while scientist James Hoffman (James Le Gros, who later led the Fessenden produced Bitter Feast) thinks there's something weird going on with the weather.  The rest of the crew, which is grounded by Abby (Connie Britton, also of Friday Night Lights!), doesn't seem to know what to do; leading to rising tension that parallels the abnormally high temperatures.

The tensions rise, but they do so slowly.  This allows Fessenden and his cast to use the scenery (or lack thereof) around them to really hammer home the point that these secluded folks are at the mercy of nature.  But while they all debate how to deal with oil related problems and the love triangle that causes tensions between the top billed characters, Maxwell McKinder continues to become more distant from the group and more concerned with what he knows about what's going on around them.  Those of us who know we're watching a horror movie will probably be scratching our heads and wondering why no one else is really talking to this kid about this all, but his erratic behavior is mostly met with confusion by the crew around him.

The only explanation that any of the crew can come up with is an old Inuit tale of spirits that protect the Earth, which leads to the plot developments that a) push the film toward its climax and b) might alienate some viewers.  The developments tie into the ideas of Fessenden's preceding film, the similarly slow and character-driven Wendigo, but also involve some CGI that has taken some viewers out of the film.  The Last Winter goes from "grounded in human emotions" to "hey, this got really supernatural and I need to suspend some disbelief" very quickly in the middle of the film, and I can see why some might feel the film loses its edge at this point.

I think there's still a lot of good going on once the stuff hits the fan and the spiritual side of The Last Winter rears it's CGI head.  LeGros and Perlman powerhouse their way through several scenes as they try to make peace with what's going on, which leaves Britton's Abby to deal with the chaos that ensues at the base camp.  There's a fantastically unsettling series of events that plays out when Abby finds that one of the members of the crew has (for lack of a better word) snapped, and the otherwise slow film starts to show us a lot of things in small amounts of time as the characters experience the changes around them.  And when the film reaches a climactic scene for each character, there are plenty of questions left for the viewer to ponder.

Folks who like to have everything wrapped up in a nice neat package might not find The Last Winter (or Fessenden's other directorial efforts like Wendigo and Habit) to be their cup of tea, but I dig the heck out of his willingness to focus less on scares and more on people.  That's what I take away from The Last Winter. I might not understand what global warming and native american spirits are all about, but the film's final scene makes my jaw drop anyway - because I'm human too and I know what terror feels like.

Trollhunter

(2010, Dir. by Andre Overdal.)

The found footage film has been all around the indie horror scene for some time, but few entries (in fact, probably just Cloverfield) can match the spectacle of Trollhunter, the Norwegian import that puts us in the car with a legitimate (you guessed it) troll hunter.  The pitch is the same one we've heard before - these tapes were found, they're thought to be authentic - but there's little else about Trollhunter (save the ending) that requires it to follow the found footage formula.

Unlike films such as The Blair Witch Project or The Last Exorcism, I often found myself forgetting that the characters were the ones controlling what I saw on screen in this film.  Much of this is due to the scale of the film, because we don't relate to people seeing gigantic hairy creatures with the same concern that we feel about kids hunting witches or dealing with a possessed girl.  There's certainly a detachment from reality that comes when we see the trolls that inhabit this film, but the film plugs forward with its idea anyway. And I'm pretty grateful for that.

The film (and the film crew within it) follows the title character Hans, played by Otto Jespersen, on his journey to keep Norway safe from the many types of trolls - each of which are violent and crave the blood of Christians.  His antics - which include actual real life scape-goats, the spreading of "troll stench" on peoples' groins, and the use of many ultraviolet light guns that seem like leftovers from a ghetto-er version of District 9 - are quite entertaining, and would make one heckuva fake reality TV show, but that's not the point of Trollhunter.  The point is that Hans is sick of working for the government's TSS (Troll Security Service) and is willing to blow the lid on troll culture to a student camera crew.

The result is a film that, like the best b-movies, dares us to believe in the reality that it provides.  This troll hunter's sidekicks begin the film scoffing at the idea of trolls, and their opinion certainly goes along with the audience's perception.  I'd guess that many people will scoff at the idea of a film about giant trolls, but this film is all about the buy-in.  The filmmakers and cast go to great lengths to make what we're seeing seem realistic, and I felt like their efforts paid off: once we accept the idea that these characters are in real danger from trolls, the film becomes a full-scale thrill ride.  Much credit belongs to the film's special effects, as the creatures we're introduced to - from the tri-headed "tosserlad" to the mammoth "jotner" - look surprisingly realistic.  Well, realistic as far as giant trolls go, that is.  I'm trying to say they don't look blatantly CGI fake, I guess.  (And if you're struggling with the idea of trolls, I'm slightly convinced that the rules for dealing with them are like 99% the same as the rules for vampires...so just pretend they're giant cranky vampires.)

The trolls are probably the best reason to see this movie - they should certainly please any lover of giant monster cinema - but the film has a lot of other things going for it too.  The acting is more than adequate, with Jespersen giving a wonderfully dry performance as Hans and the rest of the cast filling the side roles well.  The film also moves at a brisk pace and features several worthy action scenes, which are probably topped by the scene in which an armored Hans takes a stand on a bridge with mixed results.  A lot of the action comes with some sarcastic wit and dark humor too, which only adds to the film's charm.

As one of those giant monster lovin' dudes I speak of, I expected Trollhunter to thrill me a bit - and I got what I expected.  This is a fun monster movie that's professionally written and executed.  I was a little put off by the found footage aspect of the film being kind of an afterthought at times, but I think that's a testament to just how impressive the film's acting and effects are.  Trollhunter isn't packed with scares, but it's got plenty of thrills and should provide solid entertainment for anyone who's willing to consider some goofy looking trolls that don't have neon colored hair.  This is a fun bit of monster action that's just waiting for you and your friends' howling approval.

Midnight Top Five - The "Modern Horror vs. Not-So-Modern Horror Double Feature" Edition

One of the great things about horror movies - and I'm trying to say this seriously - is that they're so darn repetitive.  I'm not saying remakes and sequels and not being original are good things in and of themselves.  What I am saying is that a great terror comes in many shapes and sizes.  Something that scared us as a child can still scare us as an adult - but the way it scares us or the thing about it that scares us or the intensity of the scare changes with time.  And the fact of the matter is that horror movies have been asking us to be afraid of the same things for decades, they just do it in different ways.

So, when the friends of FMWL over at Pussy Goes Grrr - a one of a kind blog that often brings the goods - introduced me to their "Juxtaposition Blogathon" (and after I looked up juxtaposition at dictionary.com to make sure I didn't say something dumb), I started thinking about just how often some of the horror movies we see these days share traits with horror movies that have come before them.  And how, a lot of the time, the older horror movies seem to have fallen by the wayside.  The result? Five unique "Double Feature" pairings that just might rock an evening in your future.

Let's get to it.

The House of The Devil & The Devil Rides Out

We start with two of my favorite movies to talk about here at FMWL, one of which was my first Midnight Movie of the Week pick and another that was a MMOTW pick soon after and might be my favorite horror film of the last decade.  There's an obvious connection that can be made due to their names (HINT: It's "The Devil"), though Old Scratch doesn't actually show up in either film.  

Despite the absence of a traditional devil, the hooks that bring the films together include big ol' houses filled with Satanists, some moon mumbo jumbo, and a fresh faced young girl (Jocelin Donahue in the latter, Nike Arrighi in the former) who is the key to completing some kind of ceremony.  A lot of people say that men have advantages over women in this world, and if it's true then it certainly seems that not being the target of a Satanist cult is one of the more posh advantages us dudes have.  Sorry ladies.  

The biggest difference between the films - besides the more than forty years that passed between them - is that one offers a tall veteran actor (Christopher Lee) as a powerhouse hero, while the other offers a tall veteran actor (Tom Noonan) as a subdued catalyst of evil.  But hey, I still love both films to death - and anyone looking for a couple of cult-based chillers could do worse than starting with these two.

Feast & The Being

I'm not sure if a lot of other people do - I rarely hear anyone talking about it - but I love the heck out of Feast.  It's a totally ridiculous and over the top gorefest that normally wouldn't even cause me to look twice, but there's something about it that just stops me every time.  It doesn't subscribe to any kind of reason, Hollywood expectations are certainly thrown out with the bath water, and it's the rare film where you really feel like any of the characters could die...except you really don't, because there's one girl who's way too hot and way to prominent in the film to die.  Pretty sure there's a graph out there that proves being high on those scales is the best way to survive a splatter flick.  If not, there should be.

It should be noted that Feast does slightly break from this with the character played by my favorite Twitter Crush, Jenny Wade. I'll let you see what I mean in the flick.

Though Feast is pretty one of a kind in its madcap lunacy, its mixture of slimy creatures and and off the beaten path setting makes me want to pair it up with another splattery flick, the barely known 1983 flick The Being.  Despite the presence of some known names - Martin Landau and Jose Ferrer show up - this small town Idaho based tale of toxic mutation is pretty forgotten these days.  Which is totally sad when you consider the fact that bearded/flannel shirted producer William Osco takes center stage while using the alias  Rexx Coltrane.  He's worth the price of admission alone.

Neither of these films will really scare you too much - though there's a fantastic scene with a toddler, and Easter Egg Hunt, and a mutant in The Being - so get ready for plenty of monster based silliness, some horrible acting, and a whole lot of splatter.  If you're prepping for a gore-based cheese movie night, these two should bring the thunder.

Rogue & Alligator

Yes, I realize that Rogue is a movie about a crocodile and Alligator is (obviously) a movie about an alligator.  Go ahead and tell me the difference, I'm gonna forget it soon (again) anyways.  The point is that these two fellas have big chompers, are greenish, and can take a man down faster than he can say "Hey, what's the difference between an alligator and a crocodile?"  So you gotta pay respect.

Greg McLean's Rogue seems to teeter between getting more or less respect (based on who you talk to) than his debut feature Wolf Creek.  That's more of a statement about just how divisive that film is (I dug it, if anyone cares), but Rogue suffers from no such schism.  This is a very competent and very consistent thriller that pits man against nature, and the director does a great job of pitting folks who didn't plan on an adventure against the toothed killer.

Someone else who didn't expect to face off with a reptilian killer is the always fantastic Robert Forster, who stars in Alligator as a detective who investigates the possibility that a 36 foot gator lives in Chicago's sewers.  Since the streets of Chicago don't provide as much watery goodness as the Australian outback, Alligator is a more talkative film than Rogue, complete with a script from indie darling & Piranha/The Howling scribe John Sayles.  But both movies provide maximum teeth gnashing, and they should be good friends despite their killers' scientific differences.

Snakes on a Plane & Venom

If gators/crocs aren't your thing - I'm not sure why they wouldn't be, but whatever floats your raft, man - then perhaps you'd be more interested in some cheesy snake action.   It boggles my mind that it's been more than five years since Snakes on a Plane happened, and I'm still kind of sad that the movie has fallen through the cracks a bit in the years since its release.  I'm not exactly sure why the people who were so excited about a movie called Snakes on a Plane were so quick to turn their backs on a film that acted like it was called Snakes on a Plane, but I still think it's a ton of fun.

Some have complained that Snakes on a Plane spent too much time setting up the silly reasons for the snakes being loose on the plane, and I will give them a bit of a pass on that one.  Aside from the unstoppable Samuel L. Jackson and that lady from ER - who stand out mostly because of their experience in the spotlight - most of the people in Snakes on a Plane just aren't that interesting.  But, then again, the movie has a ton of SNAKES on a PLANE.

If you're looking for something more ambitious (just take a look at the movies mentioned on that poster!) which features more characters and less snakes, there's always the 1981 chiller Venom.  It offers only one snake - a black mamba that's super crazy - but gives us one of the best b movie casts ever.  Klaus Kinski, Oliver Reed, Michael Gough, Sterling Hayden, and Susan George all become pawns in this tale of a kidnapping gone wrong via snake, and the film is better thanks to their presence.  In the end, Venom (like Snakes on a Plane) is a pretty silly affair - but if you put the two together you should have enough interesting characters and more than enough snakebit action to make for a fulfilling evening.

Drive Angry & Race With The Devil

In cinema, you simply can not keep a good devil down.  Earlier in this list we were worried about the houses he was in, then him riding out, and now we have two films that involve getting away from Beelzebub and his followers on the open highway.  

I've already written a biased and glowing review of Drive Angry here, but I should repeat just how fun it was to see a modern film take on such a grindhouse idea with such disregard for Hollywood expectations.  Nicolas Cage teams up with writer Todd Farmer and director Patrick Lussier to present a film that recognizes how cheesy it can be (William Fichtner's performance as "The Accountant" should prove that entirely), but the plot's usage of Satan as an omnipresent force and willingness to juxtapose what Fichtner and Cage know against a silly southern cult of "Satanists" puts Drive Angry in an interesting horror related spot.

If you want to see more reputable actors take driving around a cult landscape seem more serious, I recommend pairing Drive Angry with the 1975 hit Race With The Devil.  Though the film is most famous to me for being used in The 'Burbs and features a supremely anti-climactic ending, Race With The Devil is almost certainly what Drive Angry would have looked like 35 years ago in a RV - except that Peter Fonda and Warren Oates are running from the cult and not toward it. And if Drive Angry is a little too self aware for y'all, then Race With The Devil's super serious tone should be plenty pleasing.

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And there you have it.  10 movies for the price of five.  Maybe you don't want to watch them as double features - I suppose I could have nominated the likes of Venom and Race With the Devil as substitutes - but I hope you'll at least consider some of these films that preceded their more famous recent counterparts.  If nothing else, they should remind you that the same horrors can come at you from all sorts of different angles.

Happy viewings, Midnight Warriors!

Stake Land

(2010, Dir. by Jim Mickle.)

If I had a bucket list of things I want to see in a horror movie, it's safe to say that the "zombie road movie" would have always been close to the top of the list.  I just wanted to see some smart dudes/dudettes driving around, trying to find safety, and discovering different kinds of terror wherever they go.  I thought Romero was gonna go there after Land of the Dead - and he kind of did with Diary of the Dead - but he never was able to recapture the humanity of Dawn of the Dead that really would have made the thing work.  The idea hadn't really worked for me in any of the few attempts I'd seen - until this week, when I saw Stake Land.

Of course, I should get a bit of nerd classification out of the way here.  These are not zombies.  These are vampires.  But they're the kind of vampires Richard Matheson would have written about, the kind of vampires we saw in The Last Man on Earth and I am Legend.  They're not your Bela Lugosi/Bram Stoker/Gary Oldman romantic vampires.  They're what I like to call zompires.  Which makes my zombie analogy OK, OK?

Stake Land follows the narration of a young man named Martin (Connor Paolo), who rides the vampire infested highways with Mister, a gruff vampire killer played by the film's co-writer Nick Damici.   The youngster is sort of like the narrator of Moby Dick who becomes intrigued by the violent Captain Ahab, also chronicling the people who join their journey - primarily a converted cannibal woman played by Kelly McGillis and a young pregnant woman played by Danielle Harris.  The film wants us to relate to Martin - even though he's not the most interesting character around - because he is young, scared, and uncertain as to what lies ahead of him.  That's something that any young adult can relate to in some way, which makes it a little easier to get involved in Stake Land's story.

I'd avoided most advanced writings on Stake Land going in to the movie (and I hadn't watched a full trailer, either), so I was a bit surprised at how poetic the whole thing was.  A lot of that is credited to composer Jeff Grace, who knocked out one of the year's best musical scores; a musical score that creates a dramatic connection to the material.  The film has a lot of chances to let this beautiful music fill the screen as the camera oversees the landscapes that the characters are crossing, which gives the film a lot of peaceful moments.  In fact, the final moment of the film is about 40% about the characters and 60% about the score, which is given a ton of power to take the film home as the last shot disappears.

The sense of peace that is provided by the music and cinematography is a great tool for director Jim Mickle, because it allows him to shock us even more when the film jumps into its action-filled scenes.  In what might be the film's best scene, the characters find refuge in a makeshift town and start to take part in an impromptu jamboree, only to be disrupted in a shocking manner by the vampires and the violent Christian clans that have been assaulting the countryside.  It would be unfair for me to recap what occurs in this scene, but the frantic change in tone left me in a state of awe, knowing that I hadn't seen anything quite like it in a horror film before.  Mickle and Damici develop a methodical pace throughout the film, leaving the viewer feeling that carnage could break out at any moment, no matter how peaceful that moment is.

Stake Land didn't wow me immediately - I think I expected something more up tempo than what I got - but I quickly wanted more of it once I finished the film.  This is that man vs. horror-filled nature tale that I'd been longing for for all these years, taking us on an interesting journey and not forgetting to shake our comfort levels along the way.  It's original, it's well made, and it's incredibly memorable.  (It's also a crying shame that it didn't get a major theatrical release, but that's a whole 'nother issue.)

Midnight Movie of the Week #88 - Dracula A.D. 1972

When you put about half of my favorite things (like Christopher Lee, Caroline Munro, Hammer Films, and horror movies) together in one place, you're probably going to get my attention.  It's kind of science.  There was a study - I think it was in Norway - that proved unequivocally that putting these things together is 100% guaranteed to get my attention.  I'm not sure if any animals were harmed during the study, but that's not the point.  The point is that Dracula A.D. 1972 is kind of a Mike taunter.

The film opens with what you'd expect from a Hammer Dracula film - Lee battling Peter Cushing in the olden England countryside.  Nevermind the fact that Cushing hadn't appeared as Van Helsing since 1960's Brides of Dracula, nevermind the fact that Lee wasn't even in that movie: that's the image of Hammer horror we all remember.  The catch is that, by 1972, ticket buyers didn't really remember it.  To them, Lee & Cushing as Dracula and Van Helsing was an old thing.  Horror had changed throughout the 1960s thanks to the likes of Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, and Night of the Living Dead, and the only way Hammer could survive was to update.  It's the same thing that happened to the slasher genre in the late '90s.

The slasher genre became self aware when it needed to change, but that wouldn't really work for Dracula in the 1800s.  You can't have Van Helsing start quipping about how people need to watch more movies or how the director created Dracula because of his own nightmares.  So, Dracula A.D. 1972 does the next best thing - it kills off the characters in the opening scenes, then brings them back 100 years later in modern day.

As much as I love the old Hammer, I gotta say that this switch in time and place is probably the second most charming thing about Dracula A.D. 1972.  While I'm being honest, I can admit that some of those Gothic Dracula films run together in my head at times.  On the other hand, Dracula A.D. 1972 stands out like a shiny lighthouse, because it's the one with the '70s and a creepy relative of Drac named Johnny Alucard and that awesome band The Stoneground in an early film party scene.  Amidst all the changes, we still get a bit of the same, as Lee's Dracula is resurrected.  As the old saying goes, "You can't keep a good vampire down".

Cushing also returns to the new century as a descendant of Van Helsing, but the movie brings plenty of fresh blood to the scene too.  Stephanie Beacham (complete with an unfortunate '70s mullet and a slew of chest revealing tops) co-stars as this Van Helsing's granddaughter, who becomes the main target of Alucard and Dracula.  She's joined by a bunch of hip London friends who enjoy things like crashing old peoples' parties and sitting around and being hip.  The group includes a bunch of goofy looking guys, who must be cool to hang out with ladies like Beacham, the fetching Marsha Hunt, and the most charming thing about the film - my dearest beloved Caroline Munro.

The film doesn't capitalize on its new setting entirely, and Hammer could have taken a cue from another horror icon who was adapting to the early '70s scene at the same time.  In making films like The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Theatre of Blood, Vincent Price and the filmmakers he was working with worked to add humor to their films to complement their horror trademarks.  Despite A.D. 1972's updated setting and the silly party scene at the beginning, the film is very direct and straight-laced throughout the rest of the film, which leaves the final product a lot closer to the outdated Hammer films it wanted to escape from.  The result is still pleasing to a fan of those films, but it's easy to see why just moving the film to modern times wasn't enough to rejuvenate Hammer Films.

There's still a lot to like about Dracula A.D. 1972, despite the missed opportunity in tone and a few lulls in the action.  The film still manages to provide a lot of fun scenes and new twists on the Dracula movie, and the mixture of veteran performers Lee and Cushing and young stars and starlets provides some unique scenes that we wouldn't expect from other Hammer films. I think 1970's Scars of Dracula did a slightly better job of integrating young characters into the Hammer world, but that's not the point.  If you've got the choice between this one or Hammer's follow up - The Satanic Rites of Dracula - which replaces the modern young folks with a modern Satanic cult - I have the feeling you're gonna pick Dracula A.D. 1972 every time.

If you blow up this picture, you'll be creeped out by the hairy nerdy glasses guy trying to sneak dance with Caroline Munro on the left side of the frame.

Maybe I like Dracula A.D. 1972 more than I should, but I dig the heck out of it's idea to merge London's wild scene of the early '70s and Hammer's classic tales of Dracula and Van Helsing.  With the likes of Munro and the music of The Stoneground helping out, Dracula A.D. 1972 continues to be an interesting statement on where Hammer was going at the end of their first reign of terror (which ended a few films later with To The Devil, A Daugher....) and a cheesy distraction for fans of its era's style.

FMWL's Best of Summer 2011 (Part Two)

Last night we covered my favorite theatrical and blu-ray finds, which was a blasty, but tonight FMWL's Best of Summer wrap-up digs just a little bit deeper.  It's time to talk about the movies you won't find in your multiplex and wouldn't spot on the shelves at your local megastores.  It's time to look back at my favorite "finds" of the summer...which always leaves me giddy. :)

(See that? I used a damn tootin' emoticon in a post....THAT's how giddy these finds make me!)

Best of: The Indie Horror Scene

Absentia: And we're starting off day two of our adventure with the one film I saw this summer that really scared me.  I'm not talking "guy behind you screaming boo" scares either, I'm talkin' real, effective emotional and physical "I don't want to go to sleep tonight" scares.  Mike Flanagan's tale of two sisters haunted by different demons is a truly original horror film, and his slick direction kept me on my toes throughout.  With a couple of effective twists and some fantastic acting, this might just be the best horror movie of the year.  (Read The Mike's Review)

Ghost From The Machine: A more subdued horror tale, Ghost From The Machine offers plenty of family drama while leading the viewer into an intriguing paranormal plot.  The few images of the film's more haunting spirits sent some good chills down my spine, but I'll remember this one more for its Frankensteinian look at the dangers of playing with things man can't understand.  It's the rare ghost tale that builds tension using human emotion instead of sound effects or moody lighting or editing tricks.  A Hollywood remake of this one is on the way, but you can find the DVD of this one out now. (Read The Mike's Review)

Best of: Everything Else I've Randomly Loved

Bitter Feast (2010, Dir. by Joe Maggio): The Food Network meets Theatre of Blood in Bitter Feast, a fun offering from Glass Eye Pix that combines plenty of comedy and drama.  James Le Gros gives a fantastic performance in the lead, which outweighs a lot of the film's flaws.  Some good gore, but the drama and the characters were what kept me involved with this one.

Blue Thunder (1983, Dir. by John Badham): Roy Scheider goes rogue in a super helicopter in this 1983 actioner, and he's joined by a fantastic cast that includes Warren Oates, Malcolm McDowell, Candy Clark, and everyone's favorite Wet Bandit Daniel Stern.  This is one of those flicks I'd read about for years and always wanted to see, and it didn't disappoint.  The final scene is one of the most badass things ever put on screen.

The Boys From Brazil (1978, Dir. by Franklin J. Schaffner): Gregory Peck and a slew of child Hitlers is pretty much all you need to know about this one.  It's a little long and a little silly and I've just never been that fond of Laurence Olivier when he was old and extraordinarily hammy....but it's got Peck going berserk and the creepy children played by Jeremy Black.  Like other classics based on Ira Levin novels (including Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives) there's also a lot of fun in watching the plot unfold around the actors. 

Bucktown (1975, Dir. by Arthur Marks): Fred "The Hammer" Williamson shows off his iconic persona in this simple story of a man who takes justice into his own hands.  The simple story of corruption in a small town reminds of films like Walking Tall, but the presence of The Hammer, Pam Grier and Carl Weathers (in a supporting role) give it it's own life.  Blaxploitation that works well.

The Centerfold Girls (1974, Dir. by John Peyser):  As brutal, foul, and distasteful as can be, The Centerfold Girls is a chore to watch.  I also found it endlessly fascinating as a unique twist on the giallo and slasher genres, and Andrew Prine's weird killer is very memorable.  The three segments of the film vary in quality, but I couldn't turn away from the film's odd and violent images.

Demon Seed (1977, Dir. by Donald Cammell): I had seen Demon Seed once upon a time, but I wasn't ready for its "possessed computer vs. Oscar winning actress" plot at that time.  Revisiting the film made me really appreciate this Hollywood oddball gem, which takes itself really seriously despite the plot.  Though it's terribly dated - a film about a sentient computer controlling a house might just work these days - it's still a fascinating horror attempt. (Read The Mike's Review)

The Initiation (1984, Dir. by Larry Stewart): Ambitious slasher that combines mommy/daddy issues and nightmare research, plus sorority pledging hijinks and late night in a closed shopping mall.  Clu Gulager and Vera Miles get top billing as the parents with a secret, but it's a young Daphne Zuniga - well before Spaceballs or Melrose Place that carries the film to its twist ending.  Suffers from a lot of the normal slasher problems, but still manages to feel unique.

Red White & Blue (2010, Dir. by Simon Rumley): I called The Centerfold Girls words like "brutal" and "violent" a bit ago, but compared to Red White & Blue, that movie is a cake walk. (What exactly is a cake walk, anyway?)  This tale of sex, revenge, disease, love, and everything else in life takes a while to pull us in, but once it has our attention it never relents.  Amazing performances by Amanda Fuller and Noah Taylor lead to a mind-blowing conclusion.

Rituals (1977, Dir. by Peter Carter): The always awesome Hal Holbrook and the also cool Lawrence Dane carry this low budget Deliverance clone, which sends a group of doctors into the woods, where they soon find they're being tracked by someone who knows all about them and their profession.  The in-fighting between the characters adds to the drama, primarily when Holbrook and Dane throw down against each other.  A fine film that's never gotten its proper due.

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And, there you have it.  I wouldn't say I've found the best movies ever this summer, but these unique treats are more than enough to keep me going.

What say you, Midnight Warriors? Got opinions on these? Favorites you've found of late that you want to recommend?  Bring it in the comments below!

FMWL's Best of Summer 2011 (Part One)

List time!  With the temperatures dropping and the leaves getting ready to change into their Halloween costumes, I figure it's time to stop and smell this summer's midnight roses one more time.  This is gonna be a blitz style couple of posts, as I take a gander at a lot of films - I count  25 right now, and I might think of more as I type - that made The Mike smile this summer.  Ready? Let's Go!

Best Of: The Summer Cineplex 

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: What looked like a cash-in reboot at first turned out to be a fresh and original addition to the 1968 classic.  A great film in its own right, thanks to great effects, good acting from James Franco and John Lithgow, and a ridiculously well-done script.  (Read The Mike's Review)

Super 8: I saw Super 8 three times this summer, and I never was able to come up with anything to write about it.  To me, it's one of those movies that isn't worth analyzing, because I'm having too much fun with it to turn on the critical part of my mind.  J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg craft a fantastic sci-fi tale that made me feel like a kid again - which is the best you can ask for from escapist summer cinema.

X-Men: First Class: I'm a nerd about almost any movie based on a comic book, but the four X-Men movies of the '00s were a mixed bag for me.  And it's not even that I only liked some of the movies, it's more that I liked and disliked different parts of each movie.  Enter another prequel, X-Men: First Class, which tells a new tale of the young mutants, led by young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender).  The action is well done throughout the film, but it's the performances of Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence (as the shape-shifting Mystique) that really sold the film to me.  For the first time ever, I really cared about the characters in the X-Verse.

Captain America: The First Avenger/Thor: Speaking of comic book flicks, I gotta give props to a couple of fun diversions that made me smile this summer.  Both of these films - which exist primarily to tie everything together for next summer's The Avengers - felt like what I'd expect a comic book movie to feel like.  Thor charmed mostly with its acting, led by a starmaking performance by Chris Hemsworth, while Cap's film won me over with its pulpy World War II/science fiction hybrid tone.  On their own, I find myself looking forward to revisiting each film often. (Read The Mike's Thor Review)

Best of: New Releases to DVD/Blu-Ray

Hobo With a Shotgun: To those of us who missed this film's VOD and theatrical run, it seemed impossible that this grindhouse throwback could live up to the hype.  But I quickly realized I was wrong to doubt the film, because this Hobo provides unmatched thrills and gore.  The film's mean side is complemented by a varied sense of humor that uses gross out gags and quirky characters, and the end result is what should become a true cult classic. (Read The Mike's Review)

Super: A vicious comedy that seems slightly inspired by last year's indie hit Kick-Ass, Super is another truly unique film, featuring plenty of uncomfortable and inappropriate moments (such as Juno's Ellen Page commenting on the interior of her lady parts with a choice adjective).  I wasn't wild about the movie while watching it - even though I admired the lead performance of Rainn Wilson much - but the final act really pushed the film to a powerful place.  Many kudos to James Gunn (who was also behind the raunchy recent horror Slither) for continuing to push boundaries and make us love him for it.

Drive Angry: Todd Farmer is a screenwriter cut from the same cloth as Super's Gunn; he's also unafraid to do unpopular things to win over lovers of cheese.  With Drive Angry, he gives us cheesy special effects, Amber Heard's loveliness, cool cars, good gore, sinister satanists, an over-the-top Nic Cage, AND (last but not least) a wonderfully funny comedic turn from William Fichtner.  As fun as any movie I've seen this year. (Read The Mike's Review)

Rubber: I get the complains about Rubber.  It's a completely irreverent film that doesn't really say anything or mean anything about a killer tire.  But I couldn't help feeling respect for the crazy little film, because it (and I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, I know) was unlike anything I'd ever seen.  I mean, it's a movie about a killer tire that just rolls around and makes people spontaneously combust.  I'm for that.

The Perfect Host: Just saw this flick this weekend, and had a ton of fun thanks to a sharp performance by David Hyde Pierce as a scene stealing psychopath who hosts the best dinner parties - for his victims and imaginary friends.  It's an incredibly smart thriller with some interesting twists, and great work from Hyde Pierce and Clayne Crawford.  It's a psychological winner that's worth finding.

Best of: Upgrades to Blu-Ray

Conan The Barbarian: While Jason Momoa and company were bringing Conan back to the big screen for Lionsgate, Universal had a perfect excuse to remaster and re-release Arnold Schwarzenegger's two turns as the Cimmerian.  The first film has long been a fantasy favorite of mine, and the upgraded video and audio are fantastic on blu-ray.  It's slightly disappointing that only the theatrical version of the film appears on this version - an 80 second dialogue scene in the directors cut is one of my favorite Conan moments - but that's a small concern compared to this fantastic presentation.

The Stunt Man: OK, I haven't watched my copy of this one yet - I watched the DVD shortly before its release because I was too excited to wait - but everything about it existing makes me REALLY HAPPY.  This is one of the best movies about movies ever made, featuring superb performances from Peter O'Toole, Steve Railsback, and (most importantly) my beloved Barbara Hershey.  The images I have peeked at look great, and it's got plenty of features on the awesome flick.  If you buy one new blu this summer, I recommend this one.

Nowhere to Run: I might be the biggest fan of this cheesy Jean Claude Van Damme film, but I don't regret my love one bit.  An extremely loose reimagining of  the classic western Shane (one of my favorite films), Nowhere to Run offers Van Damme on a motorcycle, making awkward humor with a Culkin kid, facing off with Ted "Buffalo Bill" Levine, and wooing Rosanna Arquette on a farm.  It was a teenage favorite of mine, and I was tickled pink to see it looking shinier than ever - even if it is an extra-free blu-ray offering.

Cobra: One of Stallone's biggest bombs, but this excessive action film is a cult classic in its own way.  Warner's blu-ray disc gives us Marion Cobretti in all his match-chomping glory, and is incredibly crisp for a film of its age.  This certainly isn't one of the best films I've seen this summer, but the blu-ray did a great job of reminding me that there's a lot to love about '80s Stallone, even when he's in the middle of one of the silliest cop movies of the silly decade.

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I'm gonna break this post up for now.  Apologies to all my horror lovin' readers - because this summer apparently didn't grab me when it came to new horror in theaters or on home video.  Did I miss something?  Do you have favorites I skipped?  Please, for the love of everything awesome, let me know in the comments below, because this realization makes me sad.  

In the meantime, rest assured that I'll be back soon with FMWL's best indie horrors of the summer, as well as my favorite category: the best genre films I fell in love with for the first time this summer!  Be well, Midnight Warriors!

Book Review - Monsters: A Field Guide to Blood-Thirsty Beasts

It's football season again in America, which means there's an extra spring in The Mike's step.  More annoyingly, it also means that The Mike's Lair - which lies just down the road from his alma mater's football stadium, needs to be cleaned a little more often.  As I started to sweep up the remnants of the offseason from my living quarters this weekend, I couldn't help noticing how many books on genre flicks I happened to have lying around as reference materials.  Normally I only bring books to FMWL when some kind soul offers me an interesting and free piece of literature, but it's not fair for me to keep all these sources of knowledge to myself now, is it?

Enter Monsters: A Field Guide to Blood-Thirsty Beasts, a glossy 200 page handbook which - according to an introduction written by Abraham Van Helsing in 1898 - "could save your life".  The publisher's information inside the book states that it was first published in 2004, so I'm slightly confused as to what occurred in the 106 years between the fictional character's foreword and the publication of the book.  I mean, there were generations of potential monster victims in that time span - I sure hope that they had something like this to help them out.

After the introductions and some brief instructions - including a tutorial on "Monster Behavior" and some information on the classification and location of these creatures - the book is broken up into several sections that segregate a horde of cinematic terrors into "classes" of sort.  I guess that authors Dave Elliott, C.J. Henderson, R. Allen Leider didn't want to get all the monsters mixed up, so they've broken things up in to categories like "Mutated Lizards, Fish and Dinosaurs", "Monster Men", "Manufactured Monsters", and even "Mutated Vegetables".  Each section offers a wide variety of creatures and villains that spans the history of film (and television, briefly), most of which receive a full page of the book that focuses on their traits and how us humans can deal with them.

With only part of a page available due to the large images, the authors keep their commentary on each creature brief, yet still cover a bit of information.  There's a "tale of the tape" on each page, which breaks down things like the monster's size, habitat, intelligence (via a 1-5 brain rating scale), and film of origin.  The location and size are also illustrated in diagrams on the page, which are summed up in other sections of the book.  The text includes a description of the monster and comments on four key traits - Behavior, Lethality, Weaknesses, and Powers.  Though the book is less thorough than many online bloggers (this is where I could shamelessly plug my own budding "So You Want To Be a Monster?" series), it provides a nice introduction that should help less experienced viewers to find some horror classics.

It should be noted that the book is not all horror either, as villains from many sci-fi classics and even a few comedies (including the really weird inclusion of 2000's The Little Vampire, which was released near the end of the Jonathan Lipnicki craze of the late '90s).  It's interesting to see these characters included next to some of the classic horror and sci-fi stars we're used to reading about, yet the book still seems to miss a few rather important fellas.  I'm not gonna name names, but let's just say that there's a certain amorphous pink killer from outer space who showed up in 1958 and terrorized Steve McQueen and who has become very near and dear to me who DOESN'T appear in the book.  Yeah.  I know.  Sadness.

This field guide definitely proves it's not the most in depth resource for potential opponents of monsters out there - I gotta believe there's a full Oxford Dictionary sized reference book out there somewhere that really gets down to the nitty gritty of things - but it's a fun little "pocket guide" of sorts.  Full-time horror fans might not learn much new from it, but the well-designed and visually appealing book is at least good for those who want to learn a little more about monster cinema.  I've had the book - which I found on one of those tables at Borders where they put the marked down books they don't want any more - for over a year, and it's still good for a couple of reminders of movies I love or movies I meant to see every once in a while.

This book may have been a life saver in Professor Van Helsing's day, but today's horror fan has a lot of other resources at their fingertips too.  I'm not sure I'd trust my life to the book, but it's still a fun little horror handbook that's well designed and provides some good lauhghs.  If I ever run into Godzilla or Dracula or The Grim Reaper (as played by Bill Sadler in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey), at least it won't take me long to read up on them.  If you want that comfort - or if you know someone who could use the help - it's a super cheap pickup on Amazon.  If the good professor is right, it's a solid investment in your future.