CHRISTMAS 5

Ah, Christmas. The time to suffer the obligations of gift-buying, family-seeing, traffic-enduring, and other such unavoidable traditions that go along with said day. And after the turkey or seven fishes or whatever Christmas food staple nestles warmly in your tummy, the inevitable will happen: You will plop on the couch, flip on the tube, and you will have three options: watch 24 hours of A Christmas Story, 24 hours of Scrooged, or 24 hours of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Or…you could try something different. Consider these five alternative films to enjoy during the Merry Yuletide whatever.

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GREMLINS

It’s Christmastime in Gremlinstown, and the snow is falling like insane crazy. So much snow falls in this film that it almost feels like it takes place on another planet, and when poor Zach Galligan is unable to start his VW Bug that looks like a gigantic marshmallow, you can almost feel the biting cold nipping at your nose…and every other part of you. But it is Christmas, after all, and one present in particular is going to change his life: Gizmo, the adorable Mogwai who can purr, sing, dance, and spawn monsters out of his back.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A traveling salesman buys a mystical animal from a funny little shop for his son for Christmas. The animal, a Mogwai, is not to be fed after midnight, is not to touch water, and is not to be exposed to bright light. If any of those things happen, all hell will break loose. Well, hell does break loose: Old crippled women are thrown out windows and science teachers are stabbed to death with syringes.

You know! For kids!

Here’s the thing about Joe Dante: While he and his colleagues Spielberg and Lucas became famous for their films that danced in the nether regions between PG and R (it was Temple of Doom that gave the world the PG-13 rating) before moving on to a more distinct age group, Dante never really left. His films have consistently been way too dark for PG/PG-13, yet still lighthearted enough not to be saddled with the R. The 'Burbs, Gremlins, and even his most recent effort The Hole all exist in such an unsellable place (by Hollywood standards) that studios don’t even know what to do with him. In this day and age, films that should be R are neutered down one rating lower. The Die Hard and Alien series come to mind. Because it’s easy to market films with a clear idea of a rating. But Joe Dante consistently blows the lid off that establishment, almost with mischievous glee, happy to remain in that oblivion-like rating of PG-15½.

People die like whoa in Gremlins. And the gremlins themselves are boiled, burned, fried, exploded, and chopped into bits. Chunky gore flies every which way, and you can't help but feel conflicted that you're enjoying a film with so much viscera juxtaposed against the fucking adorable Gizmo.

But this is Dante's playground, after all.

Christmas Lesson: Don’t buy mystical animals from the Chinese.

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BLACK CHRISTMAS

This is one I appreciate more and more every time I watch it. The first time I saw it, I knew very little about it. I was expecting a cheesy flick about a stupid gimmicky killer riding the coat tails of Michael Myers, a la April Fool's Day or New Year's Evil. I expected heads rolling down steps and candy canes shoved into eyes. I was ready to love it because of the so-bad-it’s-good mentality.

But Bob Clark’s 1976 Canadian thriller (pre-dating Halloween by two years) is actually pretty classy, not terribly violent, and especially eerie. Simple and uneventful though they may be, the opening credits as the camera hovers on the front of the sorority house, and as a very somber choral version of “Silent Night” plays, it’s so effortlessly ominous that it always sticks out in my head. This is one title I make sure to watch every year, and when I slide the DVD into my player and let it rest on the main menu for a tad, that same eerie rendition of “Silent Night” fills my house and gives me goosebumps.

For those not in the know, Black Christmas tells the tale of a sorority house assaulted by perverted and threatening phone calls from an unknown person. Though the first phone call of the film is shocking to us, seems as if they’ve been getting them for some time. Most of the girls, including the incredibly cute Olivia Hussey, thinks it's disturbing, but another – a very young and pre-insane Margot Kidder – acts indignant about the whole thing. Plus she drinks a lot.

College!

My favorite thing about Black Christmas, other than the very confined setting and actual attempt at setting up as many motives as possible, is the ending. Ambiguous endings often rile up audiences, but us horror fiends hardly ever get one. More than anything we get cheap, last-second “twists” that insinuate the problem our protagonists spent the last 90 minutes trying to solve hasn’t actually gone away. And the end of Black Christmas isn’t just ambiguous, but it punches you in the face with how unresolved the story is left.

Take that, ADD-addled modern audiences. Speaking of, see the remake! I think heads explode or something! (I’m just kidding – don’t see the remake.)

Christmas Lesson: If someone calls you on Christmas, tells you it’s Billy, and then calls you a fucking cunt, just tell them you’re Jewish.

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INSIDE

If I had a nickel for every time an insane women tried to break into my apartment and cut my baby out of me with a pair of scissors…

The French, man. We like to laugh at them and call them frogs and make fun of their fey men, but they do not fuck around when it comes to horror. I have seen an awful lot over the years. I am not the type of hardcore splatter fiend in that I will watch Z-grade gore films where people are disemboweled, but I like to think I have a pretty strong stomach. After all, I came out of Cannibal Holocaust somewhat disturbed but relatively unscathed.

Inside, though…is fucked up. It’s so absurd and gonzo that it transcends violence into cartoon territory before heading back to violence again. You don’t know whether to laugh, scream, or physically hold yourself as you witness the torture bestowed upon poor Sarah by her attacker.

It’s Christmas Eve. Sarah, recently widowed, is at home and very pregnant. There are rioters in the street setting cars on fire and creating all-around havoc (for reasons never made clear, though the country in actuality was besieged by “civil unrest” at that time). Unfortunately this will keep the police rather busy when Sarah begins to call for help…when that mysterious figure makes their appearance and begins to terrorize her…getting worse with each attack.

It builds to something very bloody, very disturbing, and very fucked.

Though I love Inside, I’ve only watched it once. Part of me believes I don’t have the balls to sit through it again. Maybe that will change this Christmas…but I doubt it.

Christmas Lesson: Don’t be pregnant at Christmas.

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CHILD’S PLAY

As a child, I knew Child’s Play 2 and 3 by heart. It wasn’t soon after when Bride of Chucky came out, and I adopted it into the “watching them over and over” club, which also contained several chapters of Friday the 13th and Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead.

So then what to my wandering eyes should appear, a commercial for TNT’s now-defunct "Monstervision" airing the first Child’s Play the approaching Saturday night. Somehow never having seen it, I popped in my tape to add it to the collection and off I went, expecting bad puns, Chucky’s way-too-quick footsteps running all around, and his use of very unorthodox weapons to dispatch his victims.

I can’t say I was prepared for what I saw. And now, as an adult who can appreciate the craft and suspense of the genre over the cheap thrills and animatronics, I really wish I had seen the first film…you know…first. Because while it still is an effective and well-done little movie, the “more is more” approach the later sequels would take have rendered the original a little less surprising.

Child’s Play, again, take its time. You’re well into the second act before Chucky the doll commits his first doll murder, and we’re damn near into the third before he comes to life before our very eyes. Up until then, the movie tries its hand at suggesting that Karen Barclay’s son, Andy, is the one responsible for the murders and mayhem occurring in wintry Chicago. Of course, even though this was not a concept the film ran with long enough to make it a significant plot point, insofar as cluing in the audience but not the characters as to the “real” killer, knowledge of the later sequels in which the doll is very much alive renders this red herring pretty much obsolete. Still, it’s a nice touch, and showed an attempt to do something different. Chucky spends much of the pre-murders portion of the film waving, nodding, and asking if someone wants to play, using his fake Good Guy voice. This is all well and good and only minorly creepy in the sense that Chucky is fucking ugly, but after Andy’s constant claims that Chucky is responsible for all the wrongdoings, his mother tears open the hatch on Chucky’s back to see there are no batteries (OMG run!). It’s very creepy, and made even creepier when the doll’s head spins a 180 in her arms as she threatens to throw him into the roaring fireplace.

Child’s Play might have one ending too many, but it’s a minor classic that, like many iconic films which spawned a franchise, can sometimes be misremembered as being like all the rest.

Christmas Lesson: Don’t buy Christmas presents from the homeless. Seriously, I don’t care how much your kid wants something. Leave it be.

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INVASION U.S.A.

 

Not horror, I know, but…try telling Chuck Norris he’s not welcome here. Besides, there are many reasons to include Invasion U.S.A. One, above all else: it is violent. Not in the sadistic sense (though the film pulls no punches) but in the sense that it’s constant, and hard-edged. Chuck Norris, while playing the hero, goes very much against type here. He doesn't defeat bad guys with a wink and a smile. Though he is doing the country a remarkable service and fighting back against terrorist oppression, he has, in a sense, become the killer. Like Michael Myers hiding in the shadows, he lunges out of nowhere and offs whoever’s nearby. In Commando, you see Arnold run up to a man to stab or shoot. In Invasion U.S.A., you see the opposition only. And then you see Chuck pop up and dismantle them permanently. It very much turns the table of the action hero and makes him very atypical. In one particular scene, in which a small group of terrorists tucked away in an alley is trying to detonate explosives inside a nearby church, it would seem they are experiencing some kind of technical difficulties...because the suitcase of explosives has somehow gone missing from the church's front steps, even though every single one of them had their eyes trained on that same spot. Chuck appears above them on top of a building.

“Not working, huh?” he asks and drops the explosives he has retrieved down on top of them. With barely restrained maniacal fury, he grits, “Now it will.” (Cue explosion.)

The look in his eye is near sociopathic. In fact, he looks completely out of his mind, as if there is no humanity left in him at all.

Make no mistake, every action star has their one film in which they kill a ridiculous amount of people in a ridiculous manner while truly epitomizing what we love about the bygone action genre, before, of course, Jason Statham and gigantic alien robots came along and changed the genre forever. For Arnold, that movie is Commando. For Van Damme, it’s Hard Target. And for Norris…Invasion U.S.A.

As far as our plot, Richard Lynch leads what appears to be the entire Russian army (and some Cubans!) across America, intent on invading and taking over the entire country on Christmas Eve, when most people will be saddled with food and drink, and completely distracted. I suppose because Russians are communists, and communists hate consumerism, and King Consumerism = Christmas?

No idea, really. But it doesn't matter – not when Lynch is firing a fucking bazooka through an outdoor Christmas tree and blowing up its occupying house...and then another...and another.

All seems to be going quite well, and it would seem taking over America is pretty easy stuff.

Not so fast.

What these Russkies didn’t count on…was Chuck Norris.

Invasion U.S.A. is directed by Joseph Zito, the man who brought us Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, The Prowler, and another Norris film, Missing in Action. Zito brings the unrelenting, slightly grimy edge to Invasion U.S.A. present in his other films. And from what I have read, Invasion U.S.A. has sold more video units for MGM to date than any other of its library titles…second only to Gone with the Wind.

My personal favorite part of this film is when main baddie Lynch suffers nightmares in which Chuck Norris kicks him in the face. He does not fear being killed or tortured by Chuck, mind you...but is terrified of being kicked directly in the face.

It's good for a laugh.

Christmas Lesson: Don't be Russian, anti-Christmas, and near Chuck Norris.

REVIEW: THE HUNT

Historical and classic literature remains with us to this very day, not just in their original textual form, but in other ways—re-realized, re-envisioned, and redistributed.  One need look no further than “Sons of Anarchy” to see a very modern, bloody, and bad-ass retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. AMC’s massively popular “Breaking Bad” carries shades of both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as the soul-to-the-devil legend of Faust. Even Twilight, the most absurdly terrible thing to happen to both literature and cinema, unfortunately must be associated with the bloodsucker that started it all, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (sans glitter and organized vampire baseball games).

The reason I bring this up is because there’s another dark tale from our literary past that often resurfaces in film—that of the 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell, a morbid tale of men hunting down their favorite kind of pray in a forest or jungle landscape: other human beings. This tale has inspired some massive contributions to our genre, including Predator, Battle Royale, the absurd Van Damme actioneer Hard Target, and The Hunger Games (along with scores of others, whose titles get more and more cheesy the further we go back).

Thomas Szczepanski's survival film The Hunt is the latest re-appropriation of Connell’s story, and it surely won’t be the last. While it doesn’t bring anything new to the table, it provides enough thrills and shocks to warrant a viewing.

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A young tabloid reporter named Alex is on his last leg at his paper. Readers no longer care about the dog-fucking women he interviews and shoots for his articles, and the editor demands he bring her something of substance, or he’ll be without a job in one week’s time. Desperate for any kind of lead, he visits his girlfriend, a local stripper/fetish sex-worker to see if she can point him towards any of her regular clients that could make for a salacious story. One thing leads to another and he finds himself drawn into the world of human hunting, run by a team of anonymous and extremely wealthy men. The game is simple: three victims, their tongues cut out to prevent being able to blow the lid off the whole thing, have small cases locked to their wrists and are sent out into the woods, where they are to be hunted down and killed. If they are, the successful hunter wins whatever awaits them within the locked cases; essentially, the “bets” that the hunters made before the start of the game. Alex, masking his true identity, takes part in the game to see just how far these men are willing to go in the name of the ultimate sport.

The Hunt landed unceremoniously on video earlier this summer, which is somewhat of a shame, given that the film is more than competently directed by Frenchman Thomas Szczepanski. With the film being 75 minutes, he has a lot of story to tell within that amount of time. And while the crux of that story is told in a way that’s at least aesthetically thrilling, what could have been an exemplary take on the story, had it been more fleshed out, instead becomes merely satisfying. The Hunt never fails to entertain on a superficial level, being that you’re watching a team of men hunt another, not going easy on their pray once they catch up. In that gleefully sadistic way of which only the French are capable (see Haute Tension, Inside, Martyrs), The Hunt, too, spares no expense when it comes to bloodshed. Though it is not consistently violent, when violence does occur, it has no problem with going over the top.

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There are very interesting themes at play here, especially being that the men in charge of the game are presented as extremely wealthy (which isn’t a new addition to the story, but could have been much more exploited thanks to the present-day chasm between the middle and upper class.) Not to mention that as the camera pans across the walls the first time we see the mansion which houses what could be called home base of the game, snippets of antiquated paintings and portraits of stately men very subtly suggest that the hunt is anything but new—that, perhaps, it’s been going on for centuries.

Szczepanski is more interested in spinning a stylistic tale than poking at your moral fibers, though there is one specific sequence in the film that’s absolutely due for praise: in a moment where Alex finds himself in the midst of the game, splashing river water across his face in an effort to shock him back to reality, he spies one of the intended victims staring at him from the other side of the river. Alex stares at this victim for a long time, a peculiar look on his face, as the victim, unsure of what’s about to happen, looks back in fear. It’s a great moment because we, as the audience, have absolutely no idea how Alex is going to respond. We already know that Alex is already kind of losing his mind in the thick of the game’s madness. And we also know the sole reason he’s even involved in the game is to save his career, the goal behind that, of course, being money. Well, before him sits a wad of cash in the case chained to the victims’ arm. Will Alex blow the lid off the story, as is the reason he is there in the first place? Or will he push all that aside and join the game, in hopes of hitting it big?. Presenting this question in the form of this scene was an extremely purposeful choice, and it’s expertly handled by the filmmaker.

Unfortunately, the film suffers form that age-old adage: We simply aren’t provided enough background on Alex for us to care about him as a character. All we really know about him is he’s a muckraking reporter who is dating a sex worker, and whose only motivation in life seems to be keeping his job at the tabloid. Except for some sex, Alex and his girlfriend don’t share any scenes together that make us feel like they are anything beyond roommates. Really, there’s no emotional moments shared between either of them at all, so all we’re left to root for is an empty shell of a man who could escape the game as just as easily succumb to it—and we, the viewers, wouldn’t really care either way.

A brisk running time, some thrilling action scenes, and all kinds of bodily harm will ensure that viewers will certainly have a good experience, but those hoping for some more socially relevant themes might find themselves disappointed.

* Images from the film are impossible to find, so my thanks to Basement Screams for the use (stole 'em) of its screen grabs.