Teeth (2008)

This is the best flesh-eating-vagina movie ever made. But it's the only flesh-eating-vagina movie. At least as far as I know. I'll have to ask my friend Jim about it, and then he'll probably name like 10 Japanese movies about killer vaginas. But if flesh-eating-vaginas becomes a Hollywood genre, Teeth (2008) will be the Black Christmas of its kind: A movie that is important because it's the first one, but also a movie that just isn't all that great. Though we can't ignore the glaring truth: flesh eating vagina movies will never be important.

Some of this was really great. There were times during the beginning when it reminded me, of all things actually, of early Tim Burton stuff. Like the twisted suburban fantasy stuff. The main character, Dawn, lives in a quiet neighborhood with her ailing mom and stepdad, and as she bikes home from school one day, we see the looming towers of a nuclear power plant behind her house (hinting at the cause of Dawn's "gift"). The music is bright and plucky, reflecting Dawn's virtuousness and her good little go-getter attitude. Then there a bunch of up and down moments. Some don't quite work, like the scenes where Dawn is explaining abstinence to the Purity Ring kids at school, which I thought could have been funnier. And then other scenes are on point, like the dorky dude at the end who finally gets to sleep with Dawn, who he's lusted after throughout high school. At this point Dawn has learned to harness her power, and since he seems like a nice enough guy (rather than the wayward Purity Ring kid who gets a little overzealous), she uh, allows him to enter...but then he calls his buddy in the middle of the act to brag about his conquest, and oops, bad move dude. The facial expressions in this scene are so good.

There's enough campiness here for me to have enjoyed it quite a bit, though. Jess Weixler, who plays the main character, Dawn, is pretty amazing, and I'm sure she's getting calls to be in all sorts of indie horror stuff now, although IMDB lists what look like a few dramas on her plate. And as it should be, all the death (penectomy?) scenes are done with maximum gore and were effective enough to make my crotch sore with sympathy pains. Of course, once we've seen the first vagina attack, the rest get tired pretty quickly, since there all just variations of that one. But there's a hilarious scene where Dawn's gynecologist (Josh Pais), gets his fingers ripped off. He falls to the floor, blood gushing, screaming "It's true! Vagina Dentata! Vagina Dentata!" Man, that part had me cracking up. And there are 3 full-on realistic severed-weener shots before this whole movie's over, but not one single close-up of the titular chompers. That seemed to me like a logical step in keeping with all the over-the-top-ness, but maybe they thought it would compromise the naivete and cuteness of Dawn's character if they showed that. Or maybe they did and had to cut it for an R rating? Why am I so interested in this?

Most of those attack scenes got the appropriately ridiculous treatment, even if there was a bit of letdown after I realized they were just the same thing over and over. The whole subplot with Dawn's sexually jealous step-brother seemed kind of thrown-in and underdeveloped. It's just there waiting until it needs to fulfill its duty as the movie's "final showdown," which is expected and feels anti-climactic when it ends.

So Teeth is good if you want a slight little horror comedy. Now that we have the first one out of the way, I look forward to someone doing this a little better the next time.

Pug (2006)

It's about time someone gave the pug-nosed dog a cinematic re-evaluation. We had lovably stubborn Otis from that wonderful family film Milo and Otis, that bundle of attitude Frank the Pug from Men In Black, and who could forget Duke Leto Atreides' wrinkly-faced companion from Dune? Well, probably no one even knows about that one, and I had to actually do a google search for "movies featuring pugs" to find it. Also, there were like 3 sites devoted to this topic.

Well, now we have Bentley, who rips to shreds all our onscreen pug stereotypes as if they were so much chew toy stuffing.

We meet Bentley as he's being purchased and carted home to the unsuspecting Hilton household. David and Judy Hilton have decided their 2 children are old enough to start learning responsibility in the form of pet ownership. And what better pet to take under their roof than that symbol of cuteness and...um, ugliness: the pug. Little do they realize, Bentley is the 13th descendant in a long line of pugs bred by Earl Willoughby, a occultist and part time breeder who, as the legend goes, used black magic and satanic rituals to produce pug-nosed pups with murderous instincts. The breeder's "handbook" sternly foretells the coming of the 13th birth in the killer pug lineage, who will basically be the Damien of dogs or something, and will command the power of the Great Evil Cur, yadda yadda yadda... Anyway, this is all explained in flashback in the hilariously overacted opening scene, which features two (count 'em) instances of the phrase "by the mange of beelzebub!" and gives Warlock-era Julian Sands a run for his money.

The bulk of this Z-grade laughfest, which looks like it was shot with a handheld EasyShare camera, consists of the boilerplate "series of gruesome deaths that no one can explain". Awful lines like "There isn't a canine on the planet that's capable of this kind of carnage!" spoken by the nerdy zoologist, are tossed out repeatedly. The acting is high-school-theater level at best, and the plot is riddled with so many holes it makes Ernest Goes To Camp look like Chinatown. The attempts at romantic chemistry between the heroic (but dumb as a brick) dogcatcher and neighborhood ditz fall with resounding thuds.

But let's face it, all these things don't matter, because the movie succeeds in delivering the real goods: pugs killing people. The pug attacks are spectacular. Gory as hell (the dog-wrangler must have basically dipped the real life pug in red corn syrup) and in fact, surprisingly realistic. There's a great scene in which Bentley attacks the pretty unsuspecting babysitter, and a scene involving a guy's brains and a dogfood bowl which I won't ruin by explaining how amazing it is. Every possible way a tiny dog could attack a human is explored in this movie, and they're all extremely funny (and bloody). The low-angle point-of-view camera stuff is a nice touch too, accompanied by really fast panting sounds.

And can anyone really hate a movie that features the line, "Eat this you scrunchy-nosed fuck!", followed by a shotgun blast to that cute wittle facey-wace in the movie's head-scratchingly apocalyptic final scene. Pug-lovers and PETA members, unbunch those panties, because of course this isn't the end for Bentley. He is brought back one final time in the form of some giant 8-legged pug-spider-giraffe-thing, only to be commanded back to hell by the dying breeder Willoughby with his last breaths. It's all god-awful and gut bustingly funny, as it damn well better be. And as the big styrofoam creature is pulled back to the great green-screen netherworld, I could see the strings that pull it.

There's a little twist ending of course, where we're back to happy suburbia, and 2 little girls find a stray pug puppy under a tree in the park. The puppy has a pentagram-shaped birthmark on his neck, but screw it, those girls are taking him home anyway, because he's KEE-UTE. I was really hoping for a Turner and Hooch style ending, where the girls find the little rascal devouring the family cat or something and they go "This is not your room," but maybe that was asking too much.

Session 9 (2001)

I can't remember a movie in the past couple months I've been more pumped to see than Session 9. I thought Brad Anderson's follow-up to this, The Machinist (aka OMG Christian Bale is really skinny") was great, and from the hype I read on Netflix, IMDB and some "Greatest Horror Movie Lines" forum I can't remember the name of, I was convinced Session 9 was going to be even better. It wasn't. Pretty close, though.

While I was watching this movie, I started getting this feeling that the director in a way had a great horror movie before he even started shooting. I mean, he wrote a script about 5 men slowly going crazy while working in a creepy, old, and HUGE, abandoned mental institutition, without any special effects. His budget could be really low. He's working with a really small and manageable cast and crew. And he's been given access to shoot anywhere he wants in this old, scary ass building. That's about as ideal a scenario as I can think of. There's no possible way he could fuck this up. Is there? Maybe. But anyway, he doesn't.

At times, Session 9 was a nearly perfect psychological horror film, loaded with tingling atmosphere, dialogue, and visuals. Here are photos of Danvers State Asylum, where the movie was shot:



Chilling. Bleak. Damp. I could practically smell the mold as I watched. Gently paced and intelligently constructed nearly the whole way. But at times, it seemed to get a little confused as to what direction it wanted to lead the audience, especially toward the end, which was the only real disappointment. Although glacially paced at first, it was never boring. It builds as things get weirder and weirder until the slasher-movie finale, where everything's explained to be deceptively obvious.

The story is simple. 5 men arrive at the abandonded Danvers State Insane Asylum for a 5-day asbestos removal job. The leader of the team, Gordon (Peter Mullan), is under the emotional and financial stress of running a small company with a newborn daughter at home, so he agrees to do the job in a week because he desperately needs the money, even though his partner Phil (David Caruso) warns that it will take 3 weeks. As Gordon tours the asylum with the groundskeeper to get the scoop on the place (echoing The Shining here big time), he notices a lone wheelchair sitting in an infinitely long hallway, and a suddenly a voice that would make Hannibal Lector shit his pants, welcomes him, "Hello...Gordon." He shakes it off and the men get to work. The ridiculous deadline, coupled with a slowly growing malevolent presence in the building, strains the 5 men, bringing out their own fears and pitting them against each other. A series of taped interviews with a former patient, labeled Session 1-9, is discovered and played, and tells the story of a deeply disturbed woman whose split personality, Simon (the voice Gordon hears), told her to murder as a young girl.

The interviews are played throughout the film underneath the unnervingly quiet visuals, giving us clues, as the camera stalks down hallways, isolation chambers, and finally, the bloody corpses of the men as the building's truth is revealed.

Until the weak ending, the shocks are real and never feel cheap. The horror is never shown explicitly, only felt. One character, Hank, discovers a cache of gold coins hidden in a wall in the basement of the asylum, and as he starts to head back upstairs to join the others, he realizes he's not alone. Anderson does the suspense here perfectly. There's no music, only heavy breathing. And as Hank turns through the pitch black corridors, the steadicam shows us his point of view. He raises the flashlight towards the tunnel behind him and we see a dark figure at the other end, moving toward us. He freaks and starts running, tripping, and looking every which way. He turns a corner and Oh Shit! Of course something bad is there. It's all typical horror chase stuff, but it's just done SO WELL. There's also a bravura shot, I swear it blew me away, where the generator they're using to power the lights while they work, suddenly dies. Mullet-headed Jeff is afraid of the dark ("I got nyctophobia") and gets caught in the basement. As the lights that line the hallway go out one by one, he tries in vain to outrun the darkness that envelopes him, screaming. Hank disappears and is later found by Phil in the basement, in another great disturbing scene, severely shaken, hidden in the corner, and clad only in his undies.

The ending unfortunately is just a 15-minute Whodunnit? where the audience is trying to guess who the "bad guy" is. Throughout the film, it's unclear where exactly the danger is coming from. The men? The building? Which is fine and kept my interest. But as the ending draws nigh, Anderson seems to want us to think it's Mike (Stephen Gevedon, who also co-wrote the script), who stumbled upon the interview tapes and can't seem to stop listening to them. Did he go crazy listening to the tapes? And then all of a sudden the killer is supposed to be Phil, who keeps getting more aggressive towards Gordon, and then Jeff, and so on, etc. It's sort of lame because these implications are made through Gordon's hallucinations, not through the true character's action/dialogue, which would have earned genuine audience confusion. It's easy to throw in a conversation between two characters, then cut to a wide shot where only one of the characters is actually there, to show he's just imagining it all. That happened a little too much for my taste. Then finally we figure out who's gone nuts, and it's so obvious. Maybe Anderson thought it was too obvious, so he cluttered it with all that confusing stuff at the end. Sometimes you have to be PROUD of the obvious! There's a derivative psycho killer sequence and one too many pans of bloody pictures of Gordon's family, but then the very last line is classic, as the last patient interview (session #9) is heard underneath a sweeping exterior shot of the asylum. The doctor asks Simon where he lives, and the voice answers: "I live in the weak and the wounded...Doc." Brilliant. This suggests universality, and opens the film up to interpretation. Is Simon is the dark, murderous, urge inside anyone who feels attacked, emotionally or physically? Probably best not analyze that one too much, but it's just a great fucking line.

I couldn't really figure out exactly how the Simon presence related to Gordon, as his backstory didn't quite add up to someone who was "weak and wounded." The connection doesn't totally work for me. Other than that, and that flawed ending, it's a damn fine piece of psychohorror. Also my girlfriend and I jokingly referred to this movie as Brett Favre Loses It! because we really thought Peter Mullan looked like Brett Favre from certain angles.

The Fog (1980)

For a guy who looks like he may have just gotten done changing the oil on my truck, John Carpenter knows how to make a damn good horror movie. Maybe I'm saying that because my truck needs an oil change and I was looking for motivation to actually go get one as I watched this movie.

Anyway, I have to admit right off the bat that I've never seen Halloween (1978) all the way through, only caught bits and pieces during what seemed like its endless airing on AMC last fall. Although that sort of turned me off to watching it anytime soon in full, I'm planning on fulfilling my horror-fan duty and seeing it before the end of the year. There, I've made the vow online. The Thing (1982) is quite possibly my favorite horror movie ever, which deserves about 30 new paragraphs of praise which I'm sure I'll write later. Carpenter had an impressive 10-year streak of horror/action/trash films that started after Halloween, included such 80's gems as Escape From New York and its sequel, Big Trouble in Little China, and concluded, in the best conceivable way to end such a streak, with They Live, which I'm not sure counts as a true movie, but probably more as a movie-quote-generator ("either put on these glasses or start eatin' that trash can"). The Fog was made during the start of this streak, and while its got some slow scenes and a handful of what are by today's standards groan-inducing cliches, I would agree with Carpenter's own assessment of the film as a "minor horror classic." Yeah, it's kinda sorta classic.

The Fog is a good ol' fashioned ghost story. The town of Antonio Bay is celebrating its centennial, which just happens to coincide with the arrival of a mysterious green fog that carries with it the bloodthirsty remains of Captain Blake and his men, who were a group of lepers hoping to set up a colony very close to Antonio Bay exactly 100 years ago. The recently settled citizens of Antonio Bay weren't going to sit around while a bunch of weirdo lepers move in next door, so as Captain Blake and his ship, "the Elizabeth Dane" sailed toward land to begin building, 6 men from town started a massive fire on the beach to distract the ship, disorienting them and eventually causing them to crash and die horrible, watery deaths. This is all explained in a pre-credits scene, by old Mr. Machen (legendary Brit John Houseman) to a group of young Boy Scouts at a campfire, which sets up the rest of the movie. One of the boy scouts has a hot mom, Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau, still very much a sex symbol in 1980), who hosts the late-night radio show at the local station, and she has a weird thing going on with the town weatherman, who calls in to whisper some cheesy sex-talk, but also to warn her of the impending fog bank approaching the town. Jamie Lee Curtis, fresh off Halloween with vocal cords in-tact and recharged, shows up as hitchhiker Liz who just happens to get picked up at the wrong time at the wrong place by local fisherman Nick (Tom Atkins, another Halloween-er). Jamie Lee's real life mother, Janet Leigh, plays the town's...I don't really know what she was...mayor's assistant or something? And then there's Father Malone, played by Hal Holbrook, who finds out he's a descendant of one of the 6 men who started the fire that killed Captain Blake and his men, and not only that, the gold that was stolen from Blake's ship is hidden at Malone's church.

So the fog rolls in of course, and the zombies of Captain Blake and his men start going around killing people. There's no gore (I don't even recall one speck of blood), only a few close-ups on some unfortunate folks as they're pierced through with fishing hooks, cutlasses and there's one dude who gets his eyes sliced into with a long knife, but it's off camera, and all of these offings are effective mainly because of the juicy sound effects. Every single scene of Blake and his men arriving is scary as hell. Carpenter's sparse, tense direction is on point during these moments, and there are two especially nail-biting parts: a long, quiet take in which a doomed fisherman is crept up on from behind by a looming black shape, and then during the film's climax, as Father Malone is surrounded by walking corpses, half-shrouded by the fog, their eyes start to glow red as they pull out their swords, the effect is chilling and the words "THIS GUY IS SCREWED" are all but written on the screen in front of you. Actually, some of these scenes really reminded me of the illustrations for the kids horror collection, Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark, which scared the crap out of me when I was little:



There are a few other, though not quite as effective, scenes of scary stuff like a dry wooden plank suddenly starting to leak water, and a cheap "jump" moment where Father Malone sneaks up on Janet Leigh's character as she enters the church, which is followed by a very awkward exchange between the two actors, which I'm not sure was intentional. In fact, as much as I like Hal Holbrook, I thought there was a really strange rhythm to the way he would deliver his lines, like towards the end he's mumbling something about the "6 original conspirators!" and everyone else starts arguing overtop of him, and when they stop, he sort of finishes his lines in a confused daze. That's a minor quibble, though, because I think his character is intended to be a bit of a tippler, as evidenced by the scene between he and Bennett (John Carpenter himself) where's he's knocking back the wine chalice, and hey, he's just realized that zombies want to kill him, so he's got every right to be dazed. There's also a long, explanatory middle section which slows everything down quite a bit, and Carpenter crosscuts between the obligatory, "they're going to kill us!" realization scene where everyone's eyes slowly widen, with a stretch of dialogue-less scenes with Adrienne Barbeau, who, while hot, couldn't quite keep me from checking the running time. Curtis, Atkins, and Leigh are all solid as they react to the carnage and "figure out a way to explain all this!" like all good traditional horror movie heroes must. Everything's kept pretty natural and restrained, and that gives the handful of creepy Blake-arrival scenes much of their impact. There's also Carpenter's signature electronic score which pulses and rumbles under key scenes which adds to the creep-factor. Again, I liked his score to The Thing much better, but it works well here. Eventually Father Malone gives the dead sailors their rightful gold and sends them back from whence they came, everyone's happy, and towards the end, Barbeau's character has an awesome monologue as she broadcasts over the radio:

"To the ships at sea who can hear my voice, look across the water, into the darkness. Look for the fog."

What a great line. I thought the film should have ended there, but then there's a twist "they're not really gone!" ending which seemed a little silly and tacked on to me.

But all in all, a solid, traditional horror film, if a little slow and cliched for nowadays. I'd recommend it to those looking for something older, low-gore, and maybe even family-friendly, but who still want good scares.

I read that Carpenter shot this film in anamorphic widescreen Panavision to give it the "big budget" feel, even though it only cost $1 million, a relatively low budget even in 1980. The scenes of Adrienne Barbeau's son on the beach and much of the static wide shots of the town look amazing, although I'm not sure if the interiors and night stuff would have been hurt that much by using an ordinary lens. Also Carpenter was very dissatisfied after viewing an early cut of the film and decided to trash 30% of it (!). So 1/3 of the film is from reshoots, including the opening boy scout scene, and the more violent stuff, the close ups, inserts of people getting killed. And then after coming off of the high he felt with Halloween being such a hit, he was understandably disappointed when The Fog didn't go over nearly as well with audiences when released. By now it's collected a sizeable fanbase and then there was that remake in 2005 which apparently has a 5% (FIVE PERCENT) rotten rating on rottentomatoes.com. That means THREE people out of FIFTY FIVE rated it positive. I've got that lined up on Netflix because I need to watch a comedy. Please please please let that movie be funny and not just horrible.

Finally, what the hell is a "stomach pounder?" At one point, the Barbeau character's son asks "Mom, can I have a stomach pounder and a coke?" I was cracking up. Ah...never mind, it's a cheeseburger, I think. I just looked it up. Now I, too, would like a stomach pounder and a coke.