Tag: Horror

Alien Dead A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Alien Dead (1980) – A Movie A Day 2021 #40

Alien Dead art used on the limited edition Blu Ray I have.

When I’m not sure what I want to watch, a good genre standby for me is a zombie movie. More often than not I’ll be able to find something to enjoy about a zombie movie regardless of the quality. And really, although it’s not an exact formula, the cheaper the zombie a movie is, the more I might be inclined to like it. There are huge exceptions to that rule on either end of the budget spectrum, but I’m just trying to convey the fact that I can love a zombie movie even if it is, by all normal standards, a terrible movie. That brings me to today’s movie of the day, Alien Dead. 

Alien Dead is the second feature written and directed by low-budget maestro Fred Olen Ray. “Maestro” might be generous, but Ray has produced, written, and/or directed tons of movies over the past 40-plus years, and he’s still working to this day. He’s inspired many, many filmmakers in that time, and it’s safe to say he is very well respected in the filmmaking community. I haven’t seen a ton of his movies, but the ones I have seen absolutely stick with me. My dad had a VHS copy of Ray’s third film, Scalps, when I was a kid, and I made sure to save it when he down-sized his tape collection years ago. Scalps is laughable in many ways, but I enjoy it unironically for its many endearing qualities. Alien Dead, the movie Ray made right before Scalps, fits into that same category for me. 

Alien Dead takes place in the swamps of Florida. We follow a small-town news reporter, Tom Corman (who I’m guessing is named in reference to Roger Corman), as he attempts to solve the mystery of a local woman’s disappearance. The town sheriff, played by Buster Crabbe who is probably most famous for playing Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon in the 1930s, is disinterested in, well, pretty much everything, and he blames alligators for the woman’s death. As Corman digs into the story though, he discovers that the swamp’s gators have disappeared. Unknown to Corman and the sheriff, mysterious human-like monsters are rising out of the waters of the swamp to kill and sometimes eat people. So basically, Alien Dead is about water zombies. I guess I could have said that first and saved a paragraph.

There’s really not much more to the story than that. The zombies attack and kill people, and by the time Corman and the group of like-minded people he collects along the way realize what’s happening, it’s too late to do anything except fight for their lives. The plot is simple and straightforward, and the way its presented is fun if you like super-cheap, no-budget horror.

The zombies vary wildly in design. Some have full rubber masks, some of which you can plainly see where the mask stops around their neck. Other zombies just have gray makeup applied. Then other zombies have kind of a combination of the two with makeup appliances haphazardly smooshed onto their faces. It’s great.

The zombie attacks are equally unbelievable. There are many moments where there will be a wide shot with no zombie, then it cuts to a close-up where the victim is suddenly surprised by a zombie that appears just off screen. It makes no sense, and I love it. And the biting is mostly just the zombies rubbing their mouths on people while drooling blood. Many takes hold long enough so you can see that they aren’t actually biting anything.

Speaking of takes being long enough to catch stuff that probably shouldn’t be shown, there were more than a few times when it seemed like the cuts were too early or too late. People would be perfectly still during a crossfade then suddenly start acting as if is some just yelled “action” (which is probably exactly what happened). Other times the camera will hold on someone too long and they’ll look directly into the camera as if to say, “are we done?” 

I could probably go on, but you get the idea. Alien Dead is a bad movie, but it’s also great. What I mean to get across when I say that is not that I love it because it’s bad, just that I love it and it’s bad. Nothing I’ve written is meant to make fun of it. I genuinely enjoy the movie for what it is. To me, Alien Dead is an example of someone who wanted to make a movie and did what they had to do to get it done. It has an endearing quality that I love, and I’ll absolutely be watching it again at some point. 

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The Reckoning (2020) A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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The Reckoning (2020) – A Movie A Day 2021 #39

The Reckoning poster

Today’s movie was initially chosen while looking for a newer horror movie in an attempt at doing better at keeping up with recently released films. I only watched a few newer movies in January, so I want to make a stronger effort to keep up. As I was looking around at what’s come out lately, I discovered that writer/director Neil Marshall’s latest, The Reckoning, released on video on demand just a few days ago. My decision was instantly made.

I became a fan of Neil Marshall when I saw Dog Soldiers back around 2002, and I became a huge fan of his after The Descent in 2005. The Descent is still my favorite of his followed closely by Dog Soldiers and Doomsday (I haven’t seen Centurion), but I haven’t been able to add to my Neil-Marshall-movie-rankings list for a very long time. Sure, he directed Hellboy in 2019 (which I enjoyed), but as far as the movies he’s written and directed, he hasn’t put one out since 2010. That is, until The Reckoning debuted last year amid the theater-less world of the pandemic. I’m sad I didn’t get to see Marshall’s latest on the big screen, but I’m overjoyed that I just finished watching it at home! Where does it fall on my list? It doesn’t topple my top two, but given time I think it could fight for the third spot. 

The Reckoning is set in England in 1665 during the England witch trials while the bubonic plague was wreaking havoc across the land. The film follows a woman named Grace whose husband contracts the plague and kills himself to prevent the inevitability that he will pass it along to his wife and baby girl. Grace is then accused of being a witch by the lecherous and conniving squire who owns the land Grace and her family live on, and the rest of the film follows Grace is she is tortured in an attempt to get her confess to entering into a pact with the Devil. Grace’s will is strong, but the mental and physical strains she endures push her will to the breaking point. 

One thing I really enjoy about Neil Marshall is the tone of his movies. He approaches them seriously, but his directness can sometimes be blunt to the point of campiness. I think that’s most apparent in the utter ridiculousness of Doomsday, but I can see bits of it in The Reckoning as well. There’s a scene where the squire that accuses Grace voices his concerns to a bunch of people in a pub, and the whole scene is almost comical in how things quickly escalate. The squire tosses out the bait, end everyone almost immediately chimes in with some variation of “now that you mention it, I saw her once and then a bad thing happened one day so she must be a witch.” Subtlety is thrown out the door, and the idea of mob mentality, something you can build a whole movie around, is summarized in about a minute and a half. It’s great in its own way, and I enjoy it. 

Marshall is also unsubtle with his flair for blood and violence. The Reckoning is a violent movie and there are a few graphicly bloody shots scattered throughout, but I appreciate that it’s not all focused on the torture of Grace. Most of Grace’s torture happens off screen (at least, the physical acts of torture), and we often just see the bloody aftermath. The best/worst of the blood and gore is reserved for the people who really deserve it. Decapitations, crushed heads, multiple stabbings, and more happen on-screen in a way that makes you want to cheer rather than squirm. Mostly. 

I enjoyed the cast as well. Charlotte Kirk plays Grace, and she pulls off a great combination of vulnerability and strength. Steven Waddington is sufficiently scummy as the squire, but the better bad guy in the movie is Sean Pertwee as John Moorcroft, a witch hunter. Pertwee is maybe best known as Alfred in the Gotham TV series, but he’s worked with Neil Marshall before in Dog Soldiers. He also played Smith in one of my favorite outer-space horror movies, Event Horizon. Pertwee has a feeling of proper menace throughout the movie, and I wanted to see Grace get revenge on him more than anyone else. 

The final act of the movie turns into a bit of an action/revenge film, and that’s pretty much what I was hoping for. Again, Neil Marshall is not subtle. The Reckoning is not an A24 arthouse movie about witches, it’s a sometimes campy, often violent genre film about sweet, sweet revenge. Is is historically accurate? Probably not. Did I enjoy it? Absolutely. Hopefully Neil Marshall won’t take another ten years to write and direct another movie. 

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Forbidden World A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Forbidden World (1982) – A Movie A Day 2021 #38

Forbidden World poster

Do you remember a few days ago when I wrote about Dead Space and said it’s a remake of a movie from 1982? Well, I said I would see that original movie pretty soon, and soon is now. Today’s movie of the day is Forbidden World, a sci-fi monster movie that borrows more than a little from Alien, yet feels original enough in its presentation and story that I won’t be talking about Alien for the rest of this journal entry (which is something I couldn’t avoid when writing about Dead Space). Forbidden World is a campy sci-fi b-monster-movie with lots of action, tension, blood, gore, and beautiful women. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I might have a new film to add to my list of favorite movies about groups of people isolated with a murderous monster (yes, that is a list I have in my head).

If you read my journal entry about Dead Space, then you already know the plot of Forbidden World. It’s pretty much the same movie, only Forbidden World is far, far better. The basic plot is that a hot-shot space pilot answers a distress call at an isolated research facility on an alien world. The pilot, Mike Colby, journeys to the facility with his android companion, and they discover that a group of scientists have created something that has grown out of control. The creature they made begins to attack and kill the people at the facility one by one as it gets bigger, grosser, and more dangerous.

So yeah, the basic plot points are the same between Forbidden World and Dead Space, but there’s so much more depth in Forbidden World. Characters’ motivations make tons more sense, the creature is explained way better, and the special effects, though still low-budget and cheesy, look great. I’m glad I saw Dead Space first, because without knowing anything about either movie, I was able to enjoy Dead Space fine for what it is. Comparisons to Forbidden World would have been impossible to avoid had I seen it first, and that would have caused me to enjoy Dead Space less.

One of my favorite aspects of Forbidden World, besides the copious amount of blood and gooey alien monster fluids, is the presentation of the movie. For one, I just love the 70s/80s look and feel. It’s something that can be difficult to describe, but I know it when I see it. The costumes, the sets, the lighting, it all has that classic sci-fi feel of the era. But more than that, the way the movie is edited can be quite unique at times. 

Starting very early in the movie, there are moments when we’ll see flashes of other scenes, often when music is playing. It feels almost like a dream sequence of sorts, but it’s not. They could be flashbacks or flashforwards depending on the scene, and when put together they give the whole movie a very fun vibe. I’m probably not explaining it well, but I suppose I’m just trying to say that the unique editing helped to evoke certain tones while I was watching. I liked it a lot, and it got me interested in the movie right away.

Forbidden World is definitely something that I’ll revisit at some point. I often get cravings for just this type of monster movie, and I’m very happy that I found another to add to my go-to list.

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The Blair Witch Project A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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The Blair Witch Project (1999) – A Movie A Day 2021 #37

The Blair Witch Project poster

It was kind of a rough day, so I decided to pick a movie to watch that I knew I’d love. Something of a comfort movie. I have a lot of standbys that I go to depending on my mood, but I decided to pick an older favorite I hadn’t seen in a long time but had randomly been on my mind recently. Today’s movie of the day is The Blair Witch Project, a movie that I consider to be one of the best of its breed. 

Most of you reading this probably already know what The Blair Witch Project is about, but I’ll go ahead and recap it just in case. The movie is framed as actual film and video footage found deep in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland. The footage was supposedly shot by three film students, Heather, Josh, and Mike, as they were gathering footage for a documentary about a local legend, the Blair Witch. The trio went missing during their trip into the woods and were never found, and the footage we see in the movie is supposed to show us their final days before becoming a part of the legend they were there to investigate.

One of the reasons The Blair Witch gives me such good feelings undoubtedly has to with with the fact that I experienced the amazing marketing buildup to the movie as it was happening. I discovered the existence of the movie not by seeing a traditional movie poster, but by coming across a “missing” flyer hanging up at a small independent theater. I was intrigued. There was also a web site created for the movie (which is still online!) that has images from the movie plus tons of “evidence” and extra videos portrayed as real-life interviews and news footage about the missing students. Even though I knew it was just a movie, the length the filmmakers went to allow viewers to suspend their disbelief is admirable. So before I even saw the movie, I was already invested in the characters and the story in a big way.

The other big reason The Blair Witch Project gives me such good feelings is because I remember what it felt like seeing it in a theater for the first time. It was such a unique experience in a lot of ways. For one thing, it had to be the first time I’d seen a movie in the 4:3 aspect ratio in a theater, and that helped add to the realness of the experience. Also, the quality of the footage was all over the place which, again, adds to the realness and the uniqueness of the theatrical experience. Shots were out of focus and fuzzy, big moments often happened off screen, and the ever-present “shaky cam” that I know so many people dislike all worked wonders on me. I was enthralled from beginning to end. I was so excited after leaving the theater because it was such a new and fun experience. 

I know a lot of people look down on found footage for various reasons, and I get it (mostly), but when its done right, it can be fantastic. For my tastes, The Blair Witch Project is done right, and that starts with how it was made. Now, I’m not trying to write an essay on The Blair Witch Project or found footage movies in general, but here’s a brief explanation of why the movie works so well for me. As I understand it, all of the footage was shot by the three main actors as they spent a few days and nights effectively isolated in the woods. They were given drop boxes with clues on where to go next and secret guidelines for how their characters should react in certain situations, but otherwise they were left on their own to shoot footage and improvise the scenes. Crew members were kept hidden from the actors during the day, and the crew would increasingly harass the actors at night as the Blair Witch got closer and closer. It sounds like an excruciating ordeal, but it made for a movie that feels more realistic than most other found footage films. 

One of my biggest pet peeves about found footage is when the action is too perfect on screen. Like when the camera pans over at just the right moment to perfectly frame some big action or line of dialogue. Or when it seems clear that scenes were done repeatedly because of cuts between shots that are supposed to be in the same moment, yet the footage feels disconnected within the space of where the characters are. I get why most movies do that, filmmakers want important moments to feel important, but it makes it feel less real to me. Important moments are missed all the time in real life, and people panicking are going to miss more than they see. Stuff is missed all the time in The Blair Witch Project, and not seeing what’s in the woods yet hearing the panic in the voices of the actors as they flail around with their cameras is far scarier in my opinion. That said, if you get motion sickness from shaky cam, maybe skip this movie. 

I could go on about why I love The Blair Witch Project so much, but in the end it really all comes down to the fact that I think it’s a well-made movie that does exactly what it sets out to do. It feels real for the most part, and I love the gradual buildup to the final few scenes. I’ve seen a bunch of found footage movies over the years, many I enjoyed and many not so much, but The Blair Witch Project will always be in the upper echelon of the format. 

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Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain (2004) – A Movie A Day 2021 #36

Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain poster

Continuing (and maybe ending) my loosely-linked movie watching streak, today’s flick pick features one of the stars and the director from yesterday’s movie. Charles Band, a prolific director and producer of low budget movies and the creator of Full Moon Features, directed Decadent Evil as well as today’s movie, and Debra Mayer, the master vampire Morella from Decadent Evil, plays a plucky news reporter named Mary Anne in today’s feature. And so, without any further ado, today I’ll be writing about Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain, a strangely fun movie with blood and gore, mad scientists, and manimals. Yeah, manimals.

A title like Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain tells you a few things without even seeing a single frame of the film. First, the “Dr. Moreau’s” part of the title tells you that the movie will have at least some passing resemblance to H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau or any of its many adaptations. I’ve never read the novel, and I can’t remember seeing any of its adaptations all the way through, but I understand there are human/animal hybrids in it. Judging by Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain, I imagine that’s all the writer of the movie knew about the original novel as well.

The second half of the title, House of Pain, tells you that this is probably going to be a violent movie without a whole lot in the way of subtext or symbolism. I suppose you could also gather that information knowing that this is a Full Moon movie directed by Charles Band, but even if you didn’t know that (which I didn’t when I first came across the movie), the title still instills a sense of lurid shallowness. Once again, after watching the movie, the title is spot on.

And together “Dr. Moreau’s” and “House of Pain” tell you that you’re in for some b-movie campiness and cheesiness if you decide to watch it. I made that decision, and I definitely got what was promised. I think I even enjoyed it more than Decadent Evil.

Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain is set sometime in or around the 1940s, and it follows a guy named Eric, his best friend Mary Anne, and his brother’s ex-girlfriend, Judith, as they search for Eric’s missing brother. A quick trip to the local strip joint gives Eric a lead in his search. Eric follows a stripper, Alliana, whom his brother apparently had the hots for. Before Eric can ask Alliana any questions, he sees her punch her hand straight through some guy’s head for trying to force himself on her. Eric, Mary Anne, and Judith follow the woman to a huge house on the outskirts of town, and inside they discover, naturally, Dr. Moreau’s house of pain.

Eric, Mary Anne, and Judith are quickly taken prisoner, and the movie follows their efforts to try to escape with their lives and all of their body parts. See, Dr. Moreau is back from his island vacation, and he’s now being forced to repeatedly operate to try to turn some of his hideous creations into normal humans. There’s a short pig man named Gallagher, a huge panther (or something) man named PeeWee, and a fish woman named Gorgana. Gorgana is the daughter of Pak, Dr. Moreau’s former assistant who now forces Moreau to keep working until he fixes his daughter. And there’s also Alliana, a beautiful and deadly creation that looks like a human, but has enhanced strength and a huge mean streak. There is a whole bunch of drama between all the members of the house of pain, but the real focus of the story is seeing if Eric, Mary Anne, and Judith can escape before they end up next on the mad doctor’s operating table. Or worse. It get worse, but I’ll let you experience that if you decide to watch.

The movie is full of camp and cheese. Whether that’s good or not is up to your personal cheese tolerance, but I enjoyed it. The pseudo-1940s dialogue felt really cumbersome in the first few scenes, but after a while I started to find the stilted lines kind of charming. I mean, when I see a pig man spouting flowery soliloquies at people chained up in a cage, I can’t help but enjoy it on some level.

Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain is all about brightly colored, tilted camera, monstery goodness built on a base of ridiculous drama with a bit of nudity every so often for variety. I liked it fine. Am I being too forgiving? Maybe. The continuity is often laughable, the plot is stretched to its breaking point just so the movie can get to where the next scene needs to be, and lots of character moments just don’t make sense. But as a mindless way to spend 71 minutes of my life, I can think of worse things.

As a parting thought, the poster artwork for the movie is fantastic. That’s really what made me choose this movie over anything else. Also, I know the movie is going to be 17 years old this year, but I’d like to see a sequel with some new manimals (that’s Dr. Moreau’s word, not mine). Not to spoil anything, but lots of things die in this movie, so the sequel will need new human/animal hybrids. I would like to suggest half shark alligator half man, and I would like Dr. Octagon to write the dialogue for the film. If you’re unfamiliar with these references, please enjoy the following song.

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Decadent Evil A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Decadent Evil (2005) – A Movie A Day 2021 #35

The Decadent Evil DVD cover.

Today’s movie of the day is a strange one. Still continuing my linked-movie choices, the movie I watched technically contains a lot of the actors from yesterday’s movie, Vampire Journals. That’s because today’s movie, Decadent Evil, uses a whole lot of footage from Vampire Journals to set up an entirely new and almost completely unrelated story. It’s weird.

I actually bought the DVD for Decadent Evil sometime last year, probably in the dollar bin of my local used movie store. I got it because the DVD cover looks kind of dumb, and I like dumb horror movies. I started watching it soon after purchase, but I stopped once I realized that it might be a sequel or a spinoff or something. It’s kind of neither of those things though, and the use of the footage from Vampire Journals feels like the filmmakers were just padding the movie to make it over an hour long. Now that I’ve finally gotten around to watching Vampire Journals, it made sense to pick Decadent Evil next. Was it worth the wait? Not really.

Decadent Evil starts out with a digest version of the entire plot of Vampire Journals. The stories of Ash, Zachary, and Sofia are told pretty much in their entirety as we watch ten minutes of clips from the movie. Towards the end of the recap, we are told that one of Ash’s underlings, the vampiric Cassandra, left the country after the events of Vampire Journals and started her own vampire clan in America. The thing is, Cassandra isn’t in Decadent Evil at all, and unless I missed something she’s not even mentioned. The movie focuses on a trio of female vampires, and I assume the insinuation is that they are descended from Cassandra, but now that I think about, that doesn’t make sense time-wise. So yeah, it’s already a rough start and the real movie hasn’t even started yet. 

Oh, but I forgot to mention the narrator for the opening recap that has nothing to do with the movie. The first shot of Decadent Evil is of a homunculus, a tiny red humanoid thing. He’s a creepy-looking puppet in a cage, and we don’t get an explanation of who or what he is until well into the the movie. But anyway, the beginning of the movie goes from the shot of the homunculus right into the recap, and there is someone narrating the events we’re watching. Naturally, since the only humanoid thing I’d seen so far was the tiny red puppet, I assumed he was the one narrating the story. Like, maybe he’s actually really smart, or maybe he was once a human and got mixed up in some dangerous magical scenario. But despite one of those things being sort of true, we don’t find out any of that until way later. And it’s not like they’re big reveals that have meaning for the story. They’re just things the filmmaker decided not to mention. 

So, if you watch Decadent Evil just skip the first ten minutes. You don’t need any of the information from it, and it might actually be distracting because you might make a bunch of incorrect and pointless assumptions like I did. While you’re at it, just skip ahead to the thirteen-minute mark. There are about three minutes of credits that feel like they go on for another ten. I appreciate the use of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer font for the credits, but they were just too long. So now, once the ensuing establishing shots are done, the movie begins for real about fourteen minutes in. With the movie being only 74 minutes long, that’s one-fifth of the run time wasted. 

You know, you might as well skip the first real sequence of the movie too. The first two characters we really get to meet are a pushy scumbag of a guy and his reluctant girlfriend (or wife or something, I’m not sure). The guy begs and pushes his girlfriend into going to a strip club. Then he pleads with her to go with him when one of the dancers invites them over to her house for a more hands-on encounter. Then he guilts her into having a ménage à trois which she clearly doesn’t want to do. But finally, well over twenty minutes into the movie, the guy is mercifully killed by a vampire that we haven’t gotten to know yet. The girlfriend is also slaughtered, and about twenty-five minutes into the movie we finally start to learn what’s going on. 

Three female vampires live together in a mansion somewhere in or near Los Angeles. Morella is the master of the house. Morella has lived for an unknown yet very long amount of time, and she is on the verge of maybe becoming invincible because of some blood thing they explain in the movie (it’s not important enough for this journal entry or really even for the movie for me to explain it here). Morella acts like a domineering mother to Sugar and Spyce, two younger and less experienced vampires. It was Spyce who brought the guy and girlfriend home, and it was Morella who killed them. Morella and Spyce are your typical evil seductresses, but Sugar is a nice vampire. Sugar has a boyfriend named Dex, and when Dex is visited by a vampire hunter named Ivan, Dex puts his life on the line to save Sugar, and Sugar puts her life on the line to save Dex. It all builds up to a tepid vampire-slaying session with more discussion than action. Oh yeah, and the homunculus’s name is Marvin, and he doesn’t really even play much of a role in the movie despite being in the gross final shot. Then we get about eight minutes of credits and the movie is over. 

In case you couldn’t tell, I didn’t care much for Decadent Evil. Without all the padding at the beginning and end, the actual story part of the movie is about 45 minutes long. I enjoyed the laughable effects such as when the guy at the beginning of the movie gets his throat slashed, but it’s 100% clear that the ensuing blood comes not from his neck, but from someone squirting it on his cheek from off camera. I kind of liked the idea of the forbidden love between Dex and Sugar, but I never truly felt like they were in much danger. And I had to laugh when a certain connection was revealed between the vampire hunter and Marvin the homunculus. So I guess you could say I enjoyed Decadent Evil for what it is, but I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again. I’m a glutton for punishment when it comes to movies though, and I know Decadent Evil II exists, so look for that in a future installment of A Movie A Day. It won’t be any time soon though. 

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Vampire Journals A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Vampire Journals (1997) – A Movie A Day 2021 #34

Vampire Journals DVD cover

Continuing my linked-movie journey I began a couple days ago with Dead Space, today I watched a movie from the same director as yesterday’s movie, Subspecies. Ted Nicolau directed all the movies in the Subspecies series, but instead of one of those, today I picked a spinoff of the series titled Vampire Journals. If Subspecies felt like it drew its inspirations from classical gothic vampire movies including Nosferatu, then Vampire Journals draws most heavily on the moody, tortured souls of Interview with the Vampire. You might even go so far as to call Vampire Journals a bit of a rip-off of the film version of Anne Rice’s tale, but I’ll be nice just say it feels very much like an homage in a lot of ways.

Vampire Journals follows Zachary, a vampire “with the heart of a mortal.” Zachary, with his chiseled features and long hair not dissimilar to Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire, is a vampire hunter of sorts. Zachary is currently on the hunt for Ash, a powerful vampire who has doomed/gifted many people with eternal life. It is Zachary’s mission to end Ash and his entire bloodline, but as Zachary stalks Ash’s extravagant lair in New York, he takes pity on a woman, Sofia, who has become the target of Ash’s “affections.” Zachary does his best to protect Sofia while still attempting to find a way to kill Ash, but Ash is powerful and has many allies. Plus, Zachary struggles daily (or rather, nightly) with his more sinister vampiric urges. What follows a dark and moody story with a lot of highly dramatic vampire dialogue and dreamy, Victorian-esque imagery.

Like Subspecies, I was a little surprised with how serious the focus of Vampire Journals is considering it’s a Full Moon production. I usually think of campy, silly horror movies when I think of Full Moon, but maybe I just haven’t seen enough of their library. Vampire Journals can verge on being campy with how it unabashedly adopts many of the vampire genre’s clichés, but its approach to every scene is so serious that I feel like the filmmakers really just wanted to make a good, pure vampire movie. Scenes can be overly dramatic at times, but that just seems to come with the package. The tortured-soul vampire kind of has to be overly dramatic, doesn’t it?

As for how I enjoyed the movie, I liked it fine. This isn’t the style of vampire movie I’ll usually pick as a first choice, but the characters were interesting and the movie was well made. I enjoyed how the filmmakers made the most of what I assume was a fairly small budget. There are some beheadings and other bloody moments, and they all look good. My favorite part was how they represented the vampire’s ability to “fly” though. There would be a shot of a real shadow moving against the background of the scene, then the vampire would “materialize” in a jump cut. I’m pretty sure it was all done practically, and it looked really good. It’s some great ingenuity that I absolutely appreciated.

And yeah, I appreciate the movie as a whole. I doubt I’ll revisit it again any time soon, but I’m glad I watched it. I will get back to the Subspecies movies after a while, and I understand one of the characters from Vampire Journals appears in the fourth installment of that series. I do hope the rest of the Subspecies movies are more about classical vampire ambiance rather than tortured-soul vampire drama though. I’m sure I’ll enjoy the movies either way, but I’ll enjoy them more if they’re more like the first Subspecies.

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Subspecies A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Subspecies (1991) – A Movie A Day 2021 #33

Subspecies poster

For today’s movie I decided to try something a little different. Rather than just pick some random movie based on little more than a whim, I thought I’d pick something to watch based on what I watched yesterday. So yesterday I watched Dead Space, and today I decided to watch a movie featuring one of the main actors from that movie. No, I didn’t go with the obvious and choose another Bryan Cranston film even though he was the only actor I really wrote about yesterday. Instead, I picked something starring Laura Tate who, in Dead Space, stars as Dr. Salinger, the level-headed love interest of the space cowboy main character. In today’s movie of the day Laura Tate plays Michele, the mostly level-headed love interest of a friendly vampire. The movie I chose is the Full Moon cult-classic vampire tale, Subspecies. 

I’ve heard about Subspecies for years and have its home-video cover artwork set in my memory, but I’ve never actually watched it. That is, until now. Subspecies is a gothic-inspired vampire movie that seems to borrow its aesthetic from some of the classic Hammer horror films with a bit of 1922’s Nosferatu thrown in. The movie focuses on a trio of young women, Michele, Mara, and Lillian, who travel to Romania to study local folklore. Meanwhile, Radu, an evil vampire with fangs and extra-long fingers reminiscent of Count Orlok, has traveled to the same Romanian village to kill his vampiric father (played by Angus Scrimm of Phantasm) and steal the legendary Bloodstone. The young women inevitably cross paths with Radu during their explorations, and what follows is a fun and familiar vampire story with skittish villagers, secretive vampire attacks, and a buildup to a final showdown in an ancient castle.

The first thing that struck me about Subspecies is how good it looks. It was shot on location in Romania, so the visuals are fantastic. The special effects can be somewhat hit and miss, but even some of the lesser effects are charming in a b-movie way. The cheesiest effects are easily Radu’s tiny stop-motion minions, but I think they give the movie a classic feel. Radu is the only vampire that is ever made up to look inhuman, and he looks and acts convincing in the role. His long fingers seem to be an annoyance for him and make it look kind of silly when he tries to hold things (especially when he attempts to sword fight), but the neat visual effect his fingers give when he’s vamping through the scenery is a valid trade-off. Also, his fingers help make his shadowy entrances and exits from rooms that much more fun in a German-expressionism-esque way. 

While Radu is definitely the most fun and memorable character in Subspecies, everyone else does a good job as well. Michele becomes the focus of Radu’s benevolent brother Stefan (who is also trying to get his hands on the Bloodstone), and Stefan’s interest in Michele makes her a target for Radu. There’s a bit of cat and mouse chase throughout the movie that climaxes with a fun final battle and a satisfying ending. The love story between Michele and Stefan feels a bit light, but the ambiance of the movie as a whole made me not care about that so much. I just had fun with the classic feeling of the movie and the plot that felt so familiar that I knew pretty much everything that was going to happen well before it actually happened. 

There are four total Subspecies movies and one spinoff. I’m probably going to pick tomorrow’s movie in a similar way to how I picked today’s, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll pick the next Subspecies movie in the series. I definitely do want to watch them all at some point, but I might space them out a little. 

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Dead Space A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Dead Space (1991) – A Movie A Day 2021 #32

A nice and misleading Dead Space poster.

My recent viewing of Leviathan put me in a mood for similar sci-fi horror movies, so I searched around until I found something that stood out to me. I stopped searching once I came across Dead Space, a movie that looked like a super-cheap Alien rip-off from 1991 starring Bryan Cranston. Well, Bryan Cranston doesn’t star in the movie necessarily, I’d say he’s a co-star at best, but he is in it. Everything else I assumed about the Dead Space is accurate though. It is indeed a super-cheap Alien rip-off, and I had a lot of fun with it. 

Apparently Dead Space is not only a rip-off of Alien, but it’s also a remake of a movie called Forbidden World from 1982. I haven’t seen Forbidden World yet, though I’m sure I will soon. Anyway, here’s the plot for Dead Space. In the future, a “space cowboy” by the name of Steve Krieger intercepts a distress call from a remote research station on an alien planet (the wiki page and IMDB both say the station is on Saturn, but it definitely is not). Krieger arrives to help out, but he finds that not everyone wants him there. Out of courtesy for his trouble, head scientists Emily Stote and Frank Darden (Cranston) inform him of their situation. The small science team at the station have been researching a virus which has mutated beyond their expectations. Stote and Darden think the situation is being handled just fine, but the scientist who sent the distress call, Marissa Salinger, thinks their situation is anything but under control. Krieger ends up staying for a while, and naturally the virus (which is actually an organism that can mutate and transit a virus) escapes and causes havoc. Then the rest of the movie is all about the small crew trying to survive and kill the virus monster before it murders them all. 

Like Alien and a thousand other movies that came after Alien, Dead Space is full of dark, claustrophobic hallways being stalked by a creature that gets progressively bigger and more dangerous as the movie goes on. There is a chest bursting scene, multiple scenes with panicked crew members trying to find the tiny and quick monster in the room before it escapes into the air ducts, and even a scene where the monster turns into a Giger-esque creature that towers over the crew. The effects are laughable and fun in a goofy b-movie way, and the plot takes some head-shaking turns that I couldn’t help but smile at. Dead Space is not a good movie, but it is fun. If nothing else, Dead Space was a good late-night movie to go to sleep to, and it opened the door for me to watch some other related movies. 

My only real complaint is that the cover art and title are completely misleading. Some of the cooler posters and VHS art for Dead Space show an skeleton in a torn-up astronaut suit floating in space. That never happens in the movie, and the bulk of the movie doesn’t even take place in space. I mean, the interiors the crew members are in are effectively just like any other outer-space horror movie, so maybe I’m getting hung up on a technicality. But if you promise me a skeleton in space, at least make a slight attempt to give me a skeleton in space. 

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Leviathan A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Leviathan (1989) – A Movie A Day 2021 #31

Leviathan poster

Back in 1989, a cluster of underwater movies were released that would leave me with a life-long fascination with the deep sea. The Abyss is by far the most famous and successful of these water-logged sci-fi films, but it wasn’t the first of the bunch to be released. Presumably other filmmakers were aware of James Cameron’s underwater alien movie during its long production, and they probably figured they might as well try to capitalize on the growing hype for The Abyss. One of those movies that beat The Abyss to theaters is Leviathan, and that is today’s movie of the day.

I think I’ve seen Leviathan before, but it’s been decades, and I didn’t remember anything about. For years, I would confuse Leviathan with DeepStar Six, another similar movie that came out even earlier in 1989, but I think that’s just because I’ve seen DeepStar Six a few times over the years while I’ve only seen Leviathan maybe once. Well, now I’ve seen it twice, and Leviathan is now firmly planted in my brain as one of the better underwater sci-fi horror movies.

Leviathan features a setup that has been used in numerous underwater and outer-space movies. A crew of eccentric misfits is isolated in a vaguely near-futuristic facility where they are mining for natural resources The crew is led by Steven Beck (Peter Weller), a geologist who seems to have been wrangled into doing a job he doesn’t enjoy and isn’t even really qualified for. Beck does not have the respect of his crew as the movie begins, and that lack of respect is going to be tested when things get worse for everyone very soon. Beck’s crew includes a slightly elitist doctor who goes by “Doc” (Richard Crenna), a serious and disciplined athlete named Elizabeth “Willie” Williams (Amanda Pays), a skeptical and aggressive worker named Justin Jones (Ernie Hudson), the offensive and chauvinistic comic relief called “Sixpack” (Daniel Stern), and a few other crew members who don’t necessarily last long enough to make huge impressions. The cast is fantastic, and they do a great job making this very familiar-feeling movie even better than it might have been otherwise.

The story involves the crew discovering a sunken Russian ship, The Leviathan, and bringing some of the ship’s items back into their own facility. Beck and Doc are only starting to learn about what happened to the ship’s crew and why The Leviathan was apparently intentionally sunk when one of Beck’s crew begins to feel ill. That crew member doesn’t last long, and that begins a snowball effect that leads to a fight for survival that feels like a mash-up of John Carpenter’s The Thing and Ridley Scott’s Alien, only it’s happening underwater as opposed to in space or in the snow. Those are two great movies to emulate, and the quality of Leviathan helps it transcend what might otherwise just feel like a blatant rip-off.

Leviathan is directed by George Cosmatos who also directed Rambo: First Blood Part II and Cobra in the years prior to Leviathan. Rambo: First Blood Part II is one of the greatest action movies of all time, so Leviathan definitely has some great action scenes. The writers of Leviathan are Jeb Stuart (who previously wrote Die Hard) and David Webb Peoples (who previously wrote Blade Runner), Stan Winston studios did the special effects, and Jerry Goldsmith did the music. So yeah, the crew is just as fantastic as the cast. 

Leviathan is essentially a straightforward genre movie, and for what it is I think it’s great. I don’t think it broke as much new ground as The Abyss as far as its concept and filmmaking techniques go, but Leviathan is an incredibly fun and well made horror movie. The two films can’t really be compared directly anyway since their purposes and tones are so different, so I won’t even try. I’ll just say that I love them both.

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