Waxwork (1988)

Ahh Waxwork, it’s been so many years at this point but I can never forget the wonderment you brought me as a child. I still remember the first time I ever saw this movie laying down at the foot of my parent’s bed with my brother in awe of the most awesome vampire twist stories we had seen, then falling asleep and waking up to ‘It’s my party (and I’ll cry if I want to)’ jamming out in the credit sequence. It was a few years back while I was at college that this film had sparked my interest again as I found the DVD on sale at Blockbuster and WOW, I had no idea or recollection of how campy and awesomely bad this movie was! So In this I bring you my review of one of the most FUN horror films I have had the pleasure of viewing in my day.

So to start, the cast is almost nothing without Zach Galligan whom you might remember from the ‘Gremlins’ movies, not that big of a name mind you but a face to recognize none the less. It would seem that most of the money was spent on the one somewhat big name actor, as the rest of the movie looked about as low budget as it could be, but big budgets aren’t really necessary when the plot of your film consists of several spoiled college kids stumbling upon an evil waxwork that seemingly pops up over night to trap kids into the various horror scenarios which the displays depict. Now to me that was a pretty sweet idea format to be able to mesh everyone’s favorite horror stories throughout time into one movie, in my humble opinion I feel they did it up right. So basically the waxwork has a way of sucking people into the scene whenever they pass over the velvet partitions, and their death inside the scene seals their fate in wax, and the evil behind the waxwork is one more scene to completion. Apparently when all the scenes are filled then all of these monsters are released upon humanity where they will seemingly destroy the world.  So a movie with the Wolfman, Vampires, Mummy, Zombies, Phantom of the Opera, and apparently the Marquis De Sade… Sounds like fun.

I know I mentioned the low budget earlier, but this is one of those movies that proves with the right amount of campyness, hilarious line, and ridiculous violence… Budgets don’t matter too much. For about the first few min of this film you are witness to some struggle on a dark and stormy night resulting in a man getting decapitated bu fire (you really have to see it to believe it), then we are whisked away to a spoiled young man’s life where his butler seems to be about the coolest servant ever preparing his young master’s cigarettes and coffee behind his mother’s back, as well as preparing his homework for him. A few good one liners have already presented themselves at this point, and pretty much the whole movie will follow in suite with this theme. So as we progress and meet the rest of the young scalawags at school, at which time you get to meet a history professor obsessed with dictators and assigning 15 page essays for tardiness punishment. Now it’s at this time that you get to be witness to what is possibly the worst representation of a football game ever represented on film, and I really could not be more serious about this, its truly comical and is quite obvious that the director had never seen a football game in his life… I guess this all adds to the charm of the movie though.

Fast forwarding through some lame played out dialogue, our party arrives at the waxwork for what has been built as a private screening, and is just too cool for most people. It is in this scene that we get to see quite an amusing scenario of a midget abusing a giant who seems to be somewhat retarded, again one of those quaint not so politically correct moments that the 80s were known for. It is unfortunate at this point that our first death stumbles along, and it happens to be from one of my favorite characters in the movie… but don’t worry, he has one of the most entertaining death sequences in all of film. You see, throughout the film at this point we have been gifted with his one line masterpiece “That’s gotta hurt”, a classic line that was introduced even before Seinfeld had made it a point to joke about it. So as he is sucked into this werewolf scene, where the young man stumbles upon a cabin in the woods and naturally decides to check it out and see what the deal is. after some joking dialogue, the stranger starts transforming into the worst wolfman I have ever seen, but not to worry he does manage to rip a man in half starting with the skull when two hunters barge in with silver bullets. Anyways as our unfortunate young man gets bit and is transforming he manages to squeeze out his tagline ” This has gotta hurt” as he is shot and killed… end werewolf scene in awesome fashion.

Now to be perfectly honest, most of the horror scenes are pretty lame, but the first two were great, so I am talking about them in a little bit of depth.  The second scene that happened was a pretty sweet vampire/count Dracula setup where one of the young ladies is seduced into having dinner with what you can already tell are vampires. There is a great part where they are eating ‘steak tartar’, which later tuns out to be leg meat from a guy strapped to a table in the kitchen, and they were just stripping meat off his leg and serving it like it was a Brazilian steak house… pretty freakin sweet.

So from this point in the movie on, it goes a little bit down hill till the end, Zach’s character Mark turns into a detective figuring out what happened to his friends, and the evil waxwork owner works on fulfilling his evil plot to unleash these henchmen upon the world. It is in this time that you find out that Mark’s uncle had apparently devoted his life to riding the world of these evils, and had known this was going to happen for some time now. So as the movie spirals out of control, the two remaining characters, Mark and his new love interest Sarah have joined parties with Marks uncle and all of his evil monster hunting buds. It is around this point that Mark figures out he can travel back and forth through the scenes, and rescues Sarah from an extremely hot whipping scene involving her getting off from getting tortured by the Marquis De Sade. We also get to see another pre death quote for the ages where Mark’s uncle (first before he is decapitated by the wolfman gets out “Oh nooo, I’m Dying!”.

So there you have, as the plot of the movie muddles together, inherently so does my review… If you love cheesy fun horror movies, you must definitely see/own this one.  The gore is great, the lines keep you rolling, and it is just a great example of how fun horror movies can be when you want them to be.

8.0/10

The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

So last night I saw a midnight showing of ‘The Human Centipede (First Sequence)’ at the indie theater downtown. A buddy of mine had told me about this film in passing just saying that he had talked to a guy in a bar who said it was one of the more disturbing films he had seen. Well this was not off track at all. I can easily say that this is most definitely without question the most disturbing film I have seen… and sets the bar as far as shock-horror sub-genres go.

To give a little backdrop, this movie was a limited release this past weekend in the states, but I believe it has been out in Europe for a little bit. It received no rating from the MPAA, which pretty much means anything goes since they were unwilling to compromise content for the sake of a rating and slot across theaters across America. To that aspect I have to give a tip of the hat, as too many times film makers compromise their dreams to fit in with the MPAA. After viewing the trailer, my stomach was already wrenched, and I knew if anything this film would deliver a disturbing shock. And now to the review…

We open on a car parked on a side road, a well set up shot of a twisted man staring at a photo of three dogs standing upright, ass to mouth in a line… Now people in the crowd were laughing here, but I sincerely believe they had no idea what was really behind this picture. The sinister man apparently shoots a trucker stopping on the side of the road for a restroom break and scene, we now have our villain, and strange eerie sense that there is allot to the picture the old man had. As we move along the plot gets simplified as we all have seen it many times… a few kids are vacationing in a foreign land, get a flat tire, ‘oh noes what are we to do, here’s a house lets see whats up’ type of setup. Now I will say this, the house was well designed and just horrifying in itself with pictures of Siamese twins, and wall size artistic renditions of conjoined twins all over the walls.  Our villain makes his second appearance and has a weird resemblance to Christopher Walken… he soon roofies the girl’s waters and it is game on…

Once the girls awaken in this basement/hospital surrounding strapped to their beds, you get that horrible wrenching in the pit of your stomach,  and you know the director has done a good job setting the mood and creating the type of surrounding that is already unnerving (hospital room) and combines it with something even more unnerving (trapped in basement). Kudos to you sir, you have now made me start questioning my rationale in seeing this movie, and slowly the obnoxious comments from the peanut gallery lessen. After getting his three victims lined up in hospital beds, strapped in and sedated our villain emerges as a Doctor, not only a doctor but a surgeon who until his retirement had specialized in separating conjoined twins… This is where he divulges his newest love… joining subjects rather than separating them, creating his own monsters out of live subjects. Here we get a good explanation of the picture he loved so much at the opening scene as he refers to his ‘beloved 3-dog’, which was his 3 rottweilers he had surgically grafted to one another. OK, honestly at this point the terror had built in me and I’m thinking to myself ‘what the fuck did I get myself into, im not feelin right’. Also while I’m thinking this I am also reminded in my head that this is the kind of stuff that I had prided myself on being able to see for so many years without flinching… I HAVE TO MAKE IT THROUGH.

So at this point I reset myself mentally, and the doctor pulls up a slide of the procedure he plans to execute on these three unfortunate victims. A not so simple procedure involving knee ligament removal so that the three can never extend their legs, thus forced to only stand in a doggy style position; as well as lining the victims up ass to mouth and attaching them via skin attachment surgery with the second persons mouth attached around the first’s anus, and the third person’s mouth grafted to the second person’s anus… Thus creating one single gastric cycle between three people (essentially person A eats real food, person B eats poop of person A, and person C eats processed poop of person A via person B). And there we have it ‘The Human Centipede’, and good God I am truly horrified. My stomach is doing cartwheels now, and I am honestly scared and sympathetic to the victims (again nod to the director).

Post-surgery, things are so twisted I actually start to hit panic mode internally… I mean my body really did not know how to respond to what I was being exposed to, and things are just way too intense. I gather myself and witness the first ‘eating’ cycles, almost lose it myself, and the film progresses past stage 2 into 3… The bad things have happened, nobody can stop it at this point, damage is done and how do the respond section. Now up until this point, most of this info can be found in the trailers and I’m not going to spoil the ending for anyone who is still wanting to see the movie at this point… But suffice it to say that there are extremely uncomfortable scenes ahead, the three are ‘The Human Centipede’ for some time, and there is a bunch of frustration and anguish.

When I left the theater I hated the movie, there wasn’t anything at all that I could or wanted to take away from it. To me at this point it bombed… However, as time set in and the images of this movie still remain so vivid and horrifying I realized the was a great movie. It did exactly what it set out to do, horrify audiences, and though I don’t support the mangling of humans via surgery or anything like that, Tom Six had created a film that one would never be able to un-see, or forget about. It is in this day after that I can visualize this movie as a GREAT horror movie, and does all of the things that I had preached that good movies do for so many years. If a drama makes you cry, a comedy makes you laugh, and a horror movie makes you horrified … Then the movie was good, and does exactly what it set out to do. Its the truly well done movies that stay with us well after the movie is over, had it not been well done, I would have already forgotten about it, but it has TORMENTED me since the viewing, and for that I applaud this film.

4 out of 5

And I leave you with this chilling shot…

First Post… ‘A Nightmare on Elm St.’ (2010)

Where do I start? I mean this was literally the first horror move that I ever saw, the one that started it all for me. I will be honest here, I really wanted to hate this movie, but could not find one solid reason why. Now after my second viewing I figure why not make my first entry here on this blog I started many weeks ago about the remake of my favorite… So here we go.

To start with the cast, I really felt like they nailed it here, much like the first NOES there are a bunch of limited young actors and a few ‘bigger’ names rounding out the adults. I really felt that Jakie Earle Haley had a daunting task in front of him, but probably bolstered himself into the role due to his outstanding performance in ‘Watchmen’. I mean how do you replace the legend that was Robert Englund? Answer:  you don’t, the only real option is to take on the role and make it your own and this is what I felt he did perfectly. I mean this wasn’t the same ole Freddy we were used to here, this Freddy is dark, mean, and isn’t quite the wise cracking villain we had grown accustomed to. To Haley’s credit, he poured his heart and soul into this role and it showed out there on the screen, I really  couldn’t ask for anything more. The parents played their part lead by ‘West Wing’s own Connie Britton, and Clancy Brown (who I remember from ‘Pet Semetary 2’). I felt Rooney Mara did an outstanding job portraying Nancy, not everyone’s first choice… but in my opinion she played it well, and had a very relate able and homely look to her.

Moving on to the story there were many question marks going into the movie… How much would they keep? How much would they distort? How much would I actually like? Short answers here allot, some, and all of it. I was really surprised with how much of the story line they were able to flesh out without drifting too far from the original movie, but I was surprised to see several themes appear from later films in the series, as well as new twists that I felt made the original story line make sense a little more. All in all, there was a fine line to walk between boring people who know the original story to death rehashing the same ole same ole, and distorting what is there to a point where it isn’t even the same movie anymore… I really felt they walked this tightrope well, and gave a little bit from every angle where the story wasn’t necessarily changed, but how things happened changed slightly, and I felt it worked. The pace was good throughout the film, and I really felt once it started to pick up towards the end, it had a much faster and harder feel to it than the original.

Now gore and makeup are keys to this franchise… as well as any good horror franchise, and I feel it’s only logical that I go there now. Now I had big time doubts about what they were going to do to Freddy here, you knew it wouldn’t be Robert’s Freddy, so makeup and glove would be changed. I really felt they nailed the burn victim face here, it looked as though some parts were melted to others, and the gaps in flesh looked all too realistic, I really feel they matched the new Freddy well. The glove I felt was more real, as this one really and truly looked like a weapon welded together in the garage… kudos. In the day and age of cheap computer animated blood and gore, I really felt that they stayed true, and used these effects minimally, but well done when they had to. The violence was rough, and the brutal, and definitely left you wanting more.

In the end I was left with the best case scenario out of the situation, yes they remade my favorite horror movie of all time, and no I’m not too happy about it. Buut, on the other hand I really felt that they expanded the story, and really opened up the franchise to a new generation of possible Freddy fans. All things considered, both times I left the theater I left happy and completely satisfied with what I saw. Platinum Dunes came out of this one on top, here’s to  hoping they keep it real with the sequels that are sure to come.

Rating: 4.5/5