Wednesday shorts

Today we're going to take a look at three classic short films. Each one is very different from the others but each is a classic. Let's take a look at them one at a time.

                                  Film #1 is AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE.

                            

This short film is actually the longest the three reviewed today. This is a 1962 Academy Award winning film based on the story by Ambrose Bierce. It was also used as an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1964. Odds are you've seen this one but assuming you haven't I'll quickly lay out the plot.

During the Civil War, a man is about to be hanged off a bridge. The rope breaks and the man ends up swimming down the river, avoiding gunfire and attempts at capture. He makes his way back to his old home and as he embraces his beloved the rope drops and you realize the escape was a fantasy in the moments before his execution. Yep, I spoiled a film from 1962 that everyone has seen. But the point is you can watch it again on YouTube.

                                                          Film #2 is THE CONTRAPTION.


                             

As the YouTube file above states, this stars Richard O'Brien. He plays a nameless man who spends the short duration of the film building something in his basement. You'll have to watch this one to see exactly what he's making. It's pretty freaky and one short you should remember for a while. Definitely worth your few minutes to watch it.

And now for the final short of the day. I saved the scariest one for last.

                                             Peekaboo! It's THE DUMMY from 1982!

                                                             The Dummy at YouTube

Click that link to watch it as the YouTube uploader has disabled embedding for this film.

This one aired on HBO and USA during the early 80s and it's one scary little film. It's a killer ventriloquist dummy. That's all you need to know, but it's so eerie and creepy because the makers of this film obviously know the scary formula. They know the tricks of the horror trade to get this film to deliver a major case of the willies. This is genuinely a frightening little film.

So there you go, three short films with a widely different range. From the psychological horror of AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE, to the weird enigma of just what Richard O'Brien is constructing in THE CONTRAPTION, to the truly terrifying tale of THE DUMMY. We're here to serve.

Goosebumps courtesy of Ray Bradbury.

                                   The late great Ray Bradbury is responsible for today's treat.

                                           SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES


                 

Here is the film itself.

Now forgive me as I have not seen this film in years so my memory is a little hazy. It came out in 1983 from Walt Disney Studios of all places. Based on Bradbury's novel and adapted into a screenplay by Bradbury as well. It stars Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark, the showman of an ominous traveling night carnival called Mr. Dark's Pandemonium Carnival.

Two boys, curious about the place decide to check it out for themselves where they encounter a carousel that changes your age depending on which direction it spins and other creepy magical attractions.

Before long, the town falls under the spell and Mr. Dark is able to collect the damned souls of the townspeople. It's up the boys and the town librarian to give Mr. Dark a run for his money and save their little town from the clutches of evil.

As I stated before, I have not rewatched this film yet. I found the film on YouTube and immediately started preparing this entry, knowing that this film is prime Screaming Streaming material. I do recall being serious creeped out by the film all those years ago and hopefully it still has the power to do that.

The hugs that burn.

Back in 1980 this creepy little film came out and gave us all the spookies before vanishing. Years later, Troma found a print and got the distribution rights. Because of that, it is now a movie offered up as a freebie on their YouTube channel.

Uh oh. Is this another evil children movie? Yes, it is. Appropriately called THE CHILDREN.

                          

                                                               And now for the film. Here it is.

This is a very entertaining flick about a school bus full of kids that drives through a toxic cloud. When the townspeople discover the bus, the kids are all missing. But they begin to show up again, full of love and hugs.

Don't take them up on hugs though. They have acquired some horrid powers that cause their hugs to deliver lethal burns.

That is essentially the plot so no need to go any further into details that you can get from watching the film yourself.

I watched this a couple years back after Troma got the distribution deal. It was on Netflix instant and I loved the movie. It is still one I need to buy for myself because while the plot is simple and even pretty dumb at times, there is something about it that is very unnerving and disturbing about the way the film works. Plus you have to admit that poster is right up at the end of Creepy Street.

The film that inspired Screaming Streaming

When I started this blog it was because it had become apparent that so many old and forgotten films had made second lives on YouTube in their entirety. While watching the following film on a rare DVD that I own, it was brought to my attention that the same film was freely available online.

                                                     Behold the power of LIQUID SKY.

                                                        And now you can see it for yourself.

LIQUID SKY is a film from 1982 that will be high on your list of weirdest movies ever seen. On the same list as MYSTICS IN BALI, which was covered yesterday. But for completely different reasons.

It takes place in New York during the new wave era of the early 1980s. A fashion model named Margaret (Anne Carlisle) lives her life amidst the neon lights of the dance club and the hip spots of culture. She has an abrasive relationship with Jimmy (also Anne Carlisle in a dual role) who is a drug addict that keeps trying to proposition Margaret for sex.

Yeah, that's kind of creepy. Moving on. Through the excess of the drug infused lives of the characters, a tiny flying saucer lands atop the roof of Margaret's penthouse. A German scientist happens to be following the craft as he watches it from rooftops with a telescope. The tiny aliens appear as psychedelic visuals and their own vision is just as odd.

                                                                                Alien.

                                                                              Alien vision.

These weird fellas are after heroin so they came to the right place but while observing the salacious sex lives of the occupants, they discover that at orgasm, the human brain produces a chemical that closely relates to the composition of heroin. So the aliens begin to kill anyone Margaret fucks as soon as they climax. The bodies then disappear. Margaret assumes she has a power of some sort and so she exploits it to meet her own agenda.

That's your basic plot. Aliens like heroin but kill punk rockers for their sexy brain juices instead.

So needless to say this is a funky film. It's a wash of neon vibrance and electronic synth music. A specimen of the emerging hipster culture of the early 1980s. And it also gave birth to Screaming Streaming. Rock on.

Somebody double dipped in the weird sauce.

Today we'll focus on a famous import that you'll remember for some time. You are in for an experience with this film.

                                                                  MYSTICS IN BALI

                                                                           And here it is.

So we have this woman named Cathy that travels to Indonesia to study the black arts for a book she is writing. An old crone agrees to teach her the ways of Leyak, a form of magick. The old woman demands something in return from Cathy and soon Cathy's head is detaching and flying around with a string of entrails attached, preying on pregnant women.

                                                                         See? Told ya.

Cathy's local boyfriend brings in his Buddhist uncle to help fight the old woman and it turns into a wild and outlandish battle with lightning and dopey-looking visual effects whizzing back and forth as the two slug it out.

It's hard to put into words just how out there this film is. There are better reviews online but I try to refrain from major spoilers and describing the whole damn movie in these daily reviews since the idea is to give you something to watch, not something to read the entire plot about. This film is chocked full of oddities though. People turning into pigs, flying heads, scampering limbs, stereotypical cackling witches with long fingernails, the list goes on and on.

Give this one a try if you've never had the pleasure. Because honestly I could have just as easily typed "WTF" a couple hundred times between the pictures and it would convey the exact same measure of bewilderment I feel for MYSTICS IN BALI.

Roughing it.

There sure are a lot of horror movies that discourage you from ever going out into the wilderness. Hell, I'm even in the process of making one myself! But today we'll focus on this big reason.

RITUALS AKA THE CREEPER is the show of the day!

                               

                                                                        And here it is!

RITUALS is a 1977 film starring Hal Holbrook about a group of friends on a trip into the wilderness that run into some psycho that hunts them. It is DELIVERANCE on a nastier scale.

It starts off innocently enough when the men's boots go missing but it quickly escalates in seriousness as they encounter various traps and pitfalls. It then turns into a survival film before the climax which goes right back to straight full on horror again.

There's some cool screenshots I could share for this film but it would spoil the fun. This film is better if you go into it not knowing any more than a general synopsis, which I just provided. It's a film that is long forgotten and unknown nowadays.

I love this film. It's mean. It's dirty. It's survival horror at its best. And well worth your time to watch it. This film is a real treat and it took some digging on my part to find it online for you. I'm glad I did and I hope you do too.

Burn, baby, burn!

So here's one you might like. Another notorious entry in the Video Nasties list.

Yesterday I told you to watch out for clowns. Today I'm going to flat out tell you DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE. At all. Period. Bad idea, OK?

So now you can watch it to find out exactly why that is.

Actually it's not so much the house that is the danger, but the inhabitant. A lonely guy named Donny who is just a little bit like our old friend, Norman Bates. You see, like Norman, Donny had an abusive mommy and like Norman he keeps her dead body in the house. Whereas Norman liked to dress as her and stab women in the shower, Donny prefers chaining women in his fireproof basement and burning them to death.

                                                                Which is not very nice.

                                                                  Too much Aqua Net?

Actually this is one of the better films from the Video Nasties list. It gained a larger audience during the early days of the DVD at a time that not many movies were available in the new format. While it does have plot similarities as I already noted, DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE can stand on its own two feet with a decent story line and disturbing death scenes.

                                             ......and some nasty looking burnt-ass corpses.

Cotton candy crazies

Let's cut to the chase.

It's CLOWNHOUSE from 1988.

Here is the movie. Have at it.

So today we're doing CLOWNHOUSE, huh? Alright. Let's get the controversy part over with and address it so we can move on to the plot and whatnot. The director, Victor Salva was convicted of sexual abuse and spent more than fifteen months behind bars for molesting Nathan Forrest Winters, the main child actor in this film. When Salva resurfaced with his film, POWDER, so did Winters in an attempt to remind the world what Salva did. It's ugly. But it happened on the set of this film. Let's continue.

Holy crap, is that a young Sam Rockwell? Yes it is in his first film role as the older brother of Casey (Winters) and Geoffrey. Casey is terrified of clowns but when their parents leave them alone for a weekend the older brothers decide to mess with him by going to a circus. Randy (Rockwell) is a real ass in this film as he torments his younger brother over the clown issue.

Little do they know that three escaped lunatics are in the area. After they kill three circus clowns and adapt their personas, the boys are in for a night of terror as the three murderous funnymen invade their home. They must band together to fight off the killers and Casey has to come to terms with his fears.

Yep, this is actually a pretty entertaining flick and Rockwell's performance as the dickhead older brother Randy is priceless. It spent time on VHS during the 90s which is when I first saw it. It went to DVD in 2004 before a dispute over the rights and MGM caused it to go out of print. So now you can see it again, or for the first time.

An obscure French gore film.....

....will be the subject of today's Screaming Streaming. I saw this one years ago while watching underground horror films. And now it is on YouTube.

MALEFICIA is being served with a red hot poker.

        Here is your film.

MALEFICIA is a French language film and it has no English subtitles so keep that in mind. Usually these obscurities come to us in their original forms so finding it with English subs is rare. That's the sacrifice you pay if you want to see stuff like this.

So this short review is from my impressions without knowing what is being said.

The film takes place during the 1860s with a family on their way to a castle somewhere in Transylvania. When the horses refuse to go any further, the coach driver wanders off for help and witnesses a Satanic sacrifice of two women. The blood raises a horde of the undead.

The family makes a mad dash for their lives and a few of them manage to make it to the castle, only to discover more crap going on with vampires in the catacombs.

What's weird is how this film decides to treat the final minutes of the film. There is a complete change in the direction of the film and you find that everything you've been following is false, but for the sake of spoiling it I wont say how exactly. I just recall thinking, "well that was interesting".

MALEFICIA is not a great film but as a piece watched simply for the gruesome gore, it should do the trick. There is a lot of grisly stuff happening and for a low budget movie, the effects are pretty good actually.

Double feature day.

I'm going to give you two films today. Both are fairly short, about a half hour long each. This is the AFTERMATH/ GENESIS double feature from film maker, Nacho Cerda.

 I'll focus on each film one at a time. So here is AFTERMATH first.

 Here it is on YouTube.

I must be quite frank about this film. It's pretty hardcore. A very nasty and bloody film. If you are the squeamish type, pass on this film and go straight to GENESIS. Avoid AFTERMATH at all costs.

I'll try to keep the pics as clean as possible but this AFTERMATH, so there will be gory pictures here. It is a very messed up film. The guy above is a morgue attendant who prepares the bodies of the dead, which are usually horribly maimed accident victims.

This creep, who never speaks, takes his job to a new level though.

When he gets the body of a dead woman, he begins to live out his fantasies and "has his way" with the corpse, taking pictures along the way.

I think you know what I am implying. AFTERMATH is truly heinous and horrific. It will only appeal to extreme gorehounds and people who are used to this kind of film. It is made for a very small fringe audience. So be warned. That's what I am saying.

Now lets move to to GENESIS.

Here it is on YouTube as well.

GENESIS takes a totally different direction from AFTERMATH and is far more suitable for general horror audiences. It tells the story of a sculptor who loses his wife. He begins to sculpt her likeness out of clay.

But as the story progresses, the art begins to bleed.

All the while, the artist begins to dry and crackle, breaking out in grey patches. The end is becoming the beginning and the beginning is becoming the end. It's actually pretty interesting to watch.

Spanish director, Nacho Cerda is responsible for both films and are actually considered pieces of a trilogy, with his short film, AWAKENING.

His films, even with the disturbing content, show an understanding of the film medium and both are shot very well. GENESIS comes off more like a piece of art in of itself while AFTERMATH seems to have been made to see how envelopes it could push in a half hour time limit.