HALLOWEEN

Halloween is once again upon us. Yes, the celebration of the spooky that folk of my vintage knew only from American kids tv shows has made it almost intact o'er the great black ocean and seems happy with its new surrounds and we it. I used to resist this but it's grown on me as it has coincided with my annual 31 nights of horror movies rituals which I do enjoy. At first this was one of the many diversions from lockdown in the terrible spring of '20 but I liked it well enough to look forward to in the second half of each year.

My personal list from this year can be found here. It changes every year but always ends with John Carpenter's 1978 classic for the ages, Halloween. As this is approaching I thought I might resurrect an older tradition with this here blog whereby I'd recommend movies for a marathon. This time, I'll pick a smaller range with the idea of watching just one on the night to whomever might be in the mood. All of these are available to streaming for free (though some have ads).

FOUND FOOTAGE 

SAVAGELAND: One of my favourite approaches to horror cinema of the current century for its edgy mix of veracity and the fantastic. The one I was most impressed with this year was Savageland. It's a mockumentary with a new trope for the found footage weaponry: photographs. It is the story of the accused in a case of mass murder whose photographs from the night the entire border hamlet he lived in were slaughtered. There is an extra layer of tension between the true crime format evoked and the photographs themselves which range from the eerie to the out and out horrifying. Compelling.

Tubitv.com (free with ads)

POSSESSION

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL: one of my favourites from last year's MIFF, this is a mocked up talk show from the '70s where the host tries to boost his ratings by including a real life exorcism for his audience. What emerges about his character is equal of the frights his possessed guest and might even exceed them. A well managed mix of satire, comedy and straight up horror.

Kanopy (free through a public library membership)

FOLK HORROR

LAMB: A bizarre magical realist tale involves a childless couple in a remote location adopting a strange lamb/human hybrid. You will not expect the ending.

SBS on Demand (free with ads)

SCI-FI HORROR

EVENT HORIZON: A crew takes a propulsion engineer out to Neptune where the spacecraft he designed has mysteriously reappeared after being lost for years. A great mix of pop Kubrick with a dash of Hellraiser and some nifty concepts and art direction.

SBS on Demand (free with ads)

OCCULT

TALK TO ME: One of the freshest horror movies to appear so far in the 21st is this home grown talismanic fable of grief and taken temptation. Teenage Sophie stretches a séance style game involving an embalmed hand that kicks the door between this life and the one beyond. Very slick but also grounded in verity as the teen characters act and sound their age. Miranda Otto has some great lines as the mum.

Kanopy (free through a public library membership)

There are many more but these are free to see and worth your time. Keep 'em screaming!

ALISON'S BIRTHDAY @ 45

Three private schoolgirls hold a seance. It's all fun and games until someone actually gets possessed, in this case by the deceased father of Alison who freaks out not a little. Things start flying off the wall, the window frames burst into the room and a big bookcase falls on the possessed girl, but not before she conveys Alison's father's warning about her nineteenth birthday. Cut to the eighteen plus Alison, working in a shop just before knockoff when she goes to meet her DJ boyfriend at the local radio station. They have a date with a thriller on tv and drinks at her place. While that's happening, her aunt calls and invites her, with more than a little emotional extortion, to have her impending nineteenth with them. She goes. Within two scenes, things are going strange and this birthday business is looking all dodge.

This home grown supernatural tale surprises from the off with dialogue that swings between witty and naturalistic. For the most part this goes for the performances, though they are less even across the cast. These do their best to make up for the soggy pacing and parts of the dialogue that are awkwardly expository. Local acting veterans Bunney Brooke and John Bluthal put in some real weight as the aunt and uncle which helps keep things based. The beautiful Joanne Samuels puts in a good turn as the titular Alison, an urbane mix of skepticism and curiosity and Lou Brown as boyfriend Peter fights well against some lines that should have been erased (usually because too obvious). 

As this is part of my 31 nights of horror and I only realised during the credits that it was made at an anniverary year, this write up will need to be speedy and brief. This was part of my folk horror box set All the Haunts be Ours and completes a generous Australian section. Movie like this don't get shown free to air anymore but some streamers might include it. Put it on if you still have the vim after the main movie at home. It's light but it has a serious and craftsmanly heart.

Viewing notes: Alison's Biirthday is on Stan and Prime with a subscription and sometimes appears on SBS on Demand. I wouldn't fork out the hundreds that my box set costs just for this one movie but it is a great set.

PHANTASM @ 45

Tommy gets lucky and takes his belle de jour to the graveyard for sex one night. When its her turn to penetrate she chooses a long sharp knife into the chest. Not quite the pillow talk he had in mind but he's beyond caring about that. Also, the woman has transformed in the space of a cut into a tall frowning man. When Tommy's brother Jody goes to the funeral with his friend Reggie, they talk about how weird Tommy's apparent suicide was before Jody goes into the bizarre black and white mausoleum where he's slammed on the shoulder by the tall man in the prologue. Younger-still brother Michael, who's been following Jody around, turns up on his trail bike and watches through binoculars as the Tall Man (as the figure came to be known in the franchise) effortlessly lifts a full casket into the back of a hearse. Ok that's all in the first ten minutes and I haven't mentioned the strange creatures who seem to be darting behind headstones or the Dune-like box o' ordeals that Michael is tested with at a local medium business.

This is the world of Phantasm built of strange details that seem left over from last night's whiskey flavoured writing session. It's also one of the most refreshingly original genre-bending films ever made. I said original and just above I also said that one of the details was like something from Dune. Writer/director Don Coscarelli knows you know that (and this is five years before Lynch's feature film made a big thing of it). Jody goes to a watering hole in the town called Dune Cantina. You might find some resemblance between the flying ball and the flying syringes in Dune but the similarity is slight and diverges as soon as the ball meets a head and drains the blood which it spits out a hole in its rear. That's the kind of thing Coscarelli was thinking up when he conceived of this film. He was on a phone call and played around with a Styrofoam cup, pushing through the bottom with a finger and watching as it moved apparently by itself. That's what I mean by original. A lot of what you see on screen here feels invented on the spot, spontaneous, regardless of how screenplays happen.

Apart from the impressive practical effects and atmospheres, the human story of the younger brother's sadness at Jody's intended departure for further adventures is an affecting one. The scene of Michael running after Jody as he rides a bike around the streets feels less literal than figurative, it's how Jody sees it and how Michael feels. And there is a suggestion that the weird happenings in the town that only this family appear to see, rise directly from this melancholy state. When you see what becomes of the brother from the prologue, the sting of the absence is made clear.

That aside, Phantasm is a fresh adventure with plenty of sci-fi ideas and horror scenes and a bad guy who joined the Jasons and Freddies of mainstream horror from the off. The fact that the blending of ambience between the green suburban streets and the stark gothic of the mausoleum feels so smooth is testament to why this film continues to work. This is an unofficial extension of the homely suburban leafiness of Halloween and a precursor of the Spielberg look of the decade to come but while the sex on show is not even mainstream explicit it is too clearly suggested to allow a G rating. This puts Phantasm in that strange margin where adult and young adult blend uneasily. Michael's grin at spying the sight of exposed breasts is knowing (just like Coscarelli's inclusion of it).

The other group I'd put Phantasm into is the margin of early home video and arthouse titles like Evil Dead or Tourist Trap, held together with gaffer tape but holding real originality. These travelled under even the parade of slashers and cheaper sci-fi and emerged decades later for delighted discovery. Phantasm, as aforesaid, found itself a franchise but it is this first think-it-and-throw-it-against-the-wall outing that still packs the punch.

Viewing notes: I watched this on the Well Go region A Blu-Ray which is very fine. If you are tempted to explore, you are currently limited to buying overseas or trying ebay. To my knowledge this film has not been released locally since the days of VHS (which is how I first saw it). 

Review: BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Lydia Deetz has grown up to host a successful ghost hunting tv show but is starting to see her old foe appear in crowds like a stalker. Her mother Delia, not quite grown up but older, is a performance artist. Lydia's daughter Astrid is in the polar position that Lydia was with her mother so goth mum and straight daughter, now. The dad from the first one dies in a stop motion plane crash and the family heads back to Winter River where the old house is shrouded in black for the performative memorial. Lydia's modern fragile manager and close companion, sweet talks her into getting married on Halloween. Astrid quietly rides away on a bike and crashes through the fence of the introverted boy in town and they start talks. Meanwhile in the netherworld, Beetlejuice, now an afterlife bureaucrat, hears tell of his soul sucking ex ressurecting and coming after him. There's a lot of intertwining dependencies that will lead pretty much where you expect.

I wanted to spend some weighty time on that premise to convey how long it feels to sit through it before this film gets into gear, and that's leaving a lot out. The elongated first act plays like the first half hours of episodes one and two of this as a streaming mini series. It's not boring but you get the feeling that you'll be kept waiting. But there are rewards.

Catherine O'Hara turns on the quirk dependably. Wynona Ryder is believably an older Lydia. Justin Theroux enjoyably overplays his new age balderdash character. Tim Burton's magic shop aesthetic is turned on to gush and when the narrative begins to crank into action the movie feels a lot more like home. But you also start noticing things you probably shouldn't. While the original spent time on earning character empathy, this one does more toward recognition humour and leaves things at that depth. Then you get to Astrid's subplot which would make a better Tim Burton movie that this or most of his output since the '80s. At the centre of that is the increasingly magnetic Jenna Ortega who stands in for the audience's skepticism through her sassy adolescence. As in Wednesday, X (where she really gave charismatic Mia Goth a run for her money), Scream VI or Sabrina Carpenter's Taste video (please watch that) she owns the screen.

Otherwise, this is a rerun with less of the charm that came from the then novelty of Burton's goofy gothic style. There are many self referential moments to highlight the passage of time but there are too few new inventions to allow a claim of something more than nostalgia. This is Beetlejuice in the era of YouTube ghost hunters and experiencing live events through phone screens but the crowding of the canvas between these and the callbacks just make you realise you could have thought all this yourself from one viewing of the trailer. When the big song at the climax happens you think, "wow!" and then you think, "ok". So, Tim, good to see some updates but I heard you the first time.