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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
