52 Pick-Up #43 – Basket Case (1981)

Ho-lee crap.

Okay, normally I don't open quite that bluntly, but this is one where I kind of needed to.

Okay. Compose yourself. Structure.

Welcome back to 52 Pick-Up, my yearlong journey through my cinematic to do list.

Also, a happy Halloween, as we are now less than 48 hours as of this going live, and oh MAN, is this gonna be a fun one to ring this in with.

So, this is gonna be a little more free form than some of my prior entries have been. I did like to give myself a little time to think and compose clear thoughts on the movies I've watched.

For a movie like Basket Case, I feel like dwelling on it does a gross disservice. I need to shoot this one from the hip and hope you'll bear with me for it.

So...the pitch.

Basket Case takes us to the wonderfully grimy cinematic side of early 80s New York that helped fuel so many insane right wing fantasies to this day. In this city, we're introduced to Duane (Kevin Van Hentenryck), a shy young man who seems a fish out of water with a goal to fulfill and a basket at his side.

...okay. Screw it. There's no way I can keep this going without some spoilage, and honestly? If you don't know this part of the story already, I'm impressed.

So, what's in the basket? Oh. Nothing. Just Duane's stunted, mutant twin brother Belial. Oh, excuse me – stunted, mutant, homicidal twin brother. Belial's got some scores to settle and Duane is happy to assist.

There. That's as far as I'm willing to go into detail. There's more to how genuinely strange Belial's backstory is, but I've gotta leave some surprises to justify watching this.

Not that it would hurt to reveal that here. This is something that truly needs to be seen to be believed.

Which is where my real reflex comes in here – this movie is absolutely batshit insane.

And I loved it.

Okay. I know I should explain myself a little more here.

The insanity? Well, I feel a LITTLE bad for giving it away, but I point you to the screenshot of Belial here. Yes, Belial is a hand puppet that looks like a mound of Fluff developed sentience and the first emotion it discovered is pure, seething, bloodthirsty hatred. There's so many productions that would be embarrassed of something like this.

This movie? It goes for it. It fucking GOES for it. It goes all in. The actors who are being attacked by Belial are committing to the idea that they are being violently thrashed by this weird little puppet. Van Hentenryck plays sincerely good with his brother puppet – who he also voices, by the way. And OH does he voice him. As Belial, Van Hentrenryck offers a litany of bizarre grunts, squeals and wails on the level of Gunnar Hansen in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and he does it with such genuine energy and fury that I would love to see behind the scenes footage of him recording Belial's noises, because I have to feel like that is a full body delivery.

Plus, when Belial isn't wrestling with a surprisingly dedicated actor? That weird little mutant puppet isn't always a puppet. We also get some scenes of Belial rampaging in stop motion that are something truly special to watch. There is a particular moment of Belial singlehandedly laying waste to a hotel room that had me genuinely cackling for both how absurd and how sincerely it was done.

I've seen a lot of films of varying quality this year. I've seen some I would say are artistically stunning with a lot of high acclaim.

I can't really say Basket Case is one of them. Having said that, I will still wholeheartedly endorse it, because it is so committed to its unique brand of batshit that it becomes a delight to watch.

If you have a taste for cheese, by all means. Seek this one out if you haven't already. In fact, if you listen carefully right now, you may hear the light sound of me kicking my own ass for not having watched this sooner.

Just...give it a watch. I guess that's really what this comes down to.

Whew. This was definitely a bit more freeform than I usually do with these, but what can I say? This movie almost defies a more rigid format, and after this month, I needed something entertaining like this to close out.

Which, again, close out we must. As October comes to an end and I make my way to the final two months of this adventure.

Once again, a Happy Halloween, and I will see you all again in November, where I'll be kicking off the format with a first for this series – I'm going into an anthology movie.

See you then for Robot Carnival.

Till then.

52 Pick-Up # 42 – The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

Hey there! Welcome back!

Don't mind me, just finishing up with this mess over here.

Okay, I'm not gonna go TOO far with this bit. That's just daring these draws to hit me with something really weird and/or really uncomfortable going forward.

Anyway, once again, welcome back to 52 Pick-Up, the ongoing year-long project to keep me at writing by taking down first impressions of 52 first time watches this year.

October is continuing to roll out and as the horrors persist, they are also proving enjoyably varied. So far that's meant Ken Russell going delightfully off the chain and a darkly comic story about the folly of burying the past. The variety continues this week, this time going into a grisly, occult vein with André Øvredal's The Autopsy of Jane Doe.

So, time for the pitch.

The movie starts us off with local police called to investigate a house. They arrive to find what looks to be a massacre that would be mysterious enough on its own. The mystery is further complicated by the presence of an unidentified corpse half-buried in the house's basement (Olwen Kelly.) On the heels of that discovery, we're introduced to father-son coroner team Tommy and Austin (Brian Cox and Emil Hirsch.) Tommy is shown to be a seasoned hand at his trade, with a keen eye to noticing the little details that can tell a lot about a corpse and how they died. Austin, for his part, is still learning the ropes, but is open to learning. The mystery corpse is brought to them, where the local sheriff is counting on Tommy's insights to help determine who this person was and how they died. What starts as a routine, if unusual autopsy becomes something more sinister as father and son find clues on and in the corpse that suggest this death was anything but routine.

This is one of those titles I have been circling for a few years before this project gave a good incentive to just go 'do it already.' I had a loose idea of the premise as far as the autopsy and there being something supernatural about the body, but was trying not to go any further past that and see where this went. As a result, there were some aspects of this that proved a pleasant surprise to me, even if there were some I was a little disappointed with along with that.

In both cases, this reaction ultimately comes down to the execution of this central premise. I'll give credit where it's due before that and start by saying the general production here is good – especially the two-man performance of Cox and Hirsch, given how much of this movie rests on their shoulders. The two play well together, and as someone who predominantly knows Cox through his more villainous or grouchy characters, it was nice to see him in more of a genuinely fatherly role in this, give or take for some elements of guilt he is wrestling with that come into play as the movie goes on.

Back to my point on how this story is executed, I'll start by saying, the marketing had me expecting this to lean into the occult horror aspects more swiftly and directly. In that regard, I was pleasantly surprised by the slower build up this employs in getting to the more unearthly details of what became of the titular corpse. That slower burn actually wound up becoming the part of this movie that wound up really hooking me. For much of the first half, the movie plays less like an out and out horror (after the prologue, anyway) and more like a sort of puzzle. Tommy and Austin working at the corpse, finding new clues stowed inside of it, some of which address previous questions, but often leave new questions in their wake. Each new step expanding the mystery and keeping this engaging in ways I didn't expect. While I did appreciate the growing supernatural elements as the movie went on – at times seeming to up the ante as each seemed a new force unlocked in the investigation – the actual autopsy was what I kept wanting to see more of.

Which is part of where the disappointment came in, unfortunately. It's the inevitable risk when you get a movie like this where so much is hanging on the mystery – eventually you'll have to make the reveal, and there's a risk the payoff won't measure up to the build-up.

In the case of this movie, I can't say feel like it doesn't measure up. At least, not entirely. On paper, there's a novel idea here, and I do like some of what the movie does with it. But the actual moment of denouement felt a bit unsatisfactory for me after how much I was enjoying the journey getting there. It's not awful, it just feels like they take so much time setting up the clues that the actual explanation feels rushed to get the ending underway.

Which, if I will be fair, I'm otherwise satisfied with. As rushed as the explanation for the corpse and its history feel, the movie does make up for it in where it goes with that knowledge, both in terms of the emotional payoff for our two leads as well as where the movie then takes things for the very end.

Overall, Øvredal has been a director that, to date, I've been in the camp of 'not bad', on. I will admit up front that I still have not seen his breakout in Trollhunter, so maybe that's the one that will do it. As it has been otherwise, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was overall decent and I will grant The Last Voyage of the Demeter had promise, even if I feel like it fumbled the ending in a big way. Of his work that I've seen, The Autopsy of Jane Doe is so far the closest to a solid hit, and it's got enough promise there that I will be seeing where else he goes from here (even factoring in that I'd heard generally mixed reception to Passenger, I'll get there one of these days.)

With that, it's time to close up this morgue drawer and get ready to keep moving. With one week left in October, I've still got one more horror waiting on deck.

And oh MAN, this is one I'm still surprised has eluded me all these years.

But no longer! Next week, I'm finally ticking a long time title off the to do list with Frank Henenlotter's cult classic Basket Case.

I've got a good feeling about this one.

Till then. 

 

52 Pick-Up # 41 – Demon (2015)

Hey there! Welcome back!

Pay no mind to the body in the back. In fact, just pretend I never mentioned a body back there and let's get on with a nice, orderly entry in this year long dive into a cinematic to do list.

Okay, that played a little better than the warm-up gag for Enemy, so there's that.

October rolls on with a slate of horror movies lined up for this month, and this week I'm changing gears and countries for a darkly comic slice of Polish folk horror.

So, without further ado...

Demon introduces us to Piotr (Itay Tiran), a Polish man working abroad who has returned to his home country, where he is about to marry Żaneta (Agnieszka Żulewska.) Alongside marrying into the family, Piotr is also moving into an old estate that had previously belonged to Żaneta's grandmother. While working on some renovation ahead of the wedding, Piotr makes a strange find buried in the yard.

Okay, maybe a human skeleton is more than 'strange', but at the time, he initially decides not to tell about it. Which seems like a good idea at first. Then as the wedding is underway, Piotr starts to behave strangely. What follows is one part a slow burning tale of possession, one part an absurdly black comedy of manners, and one part a story about the way the past tends to come back despite the best efforts of others to silence it.

As a horror movie, this is an odd one to classify in a few respects. There's elements of a ghost story, a possession story, a folk tale (the nature of the spirit is ties into Jewish folklore, and that's all I'll say lest I give too much away), and, yes, again, dark comedy. It never feels like it leans too especially far into any one or the other. To be honest, part of why my instinct is to put it under folk comes from my first viewing of this care of the fact my copy is part of Severin's All the Haunts Be Ours folk horror collections.

That weird classification is part of what really made an impression on me while watching this and kept me interested. While there were elements I could see were being set up, there was never a sense of being able to predict just where some elements were going. Especially with regards to the subplot involving Żaneta's father (Andrzej Grabowski) and his increasingly more harried attempts to downplay his son-in-law's growing erratic behavior, resorting to ever more outlandish ways to keep the guests distracted.

Alongside this very dark comedy, the movie has a quietly somber thread with regards to the nature of the dead body found. Again, I'm trying not to get too specific for spoilers, but in light of the country in question and the time period the deceased is placed around, there is a historical subtext that becomes hard to ignore, especially given some of the political sentiments Poland has been embracing in the past decade and change. The idea of Poland trying to downplay its past sins, unearthed by chance and a relative outsider, is a striking and surprisingly sobering theme, and it's impressive how well the movie balances it with the absurdity.

On the sobering note, there is one other thing about this movie that feels hard to not bring up, that is the death of its director, Marcin Wrona. Without going into too much detail on it, looking into the director's background, found out it was reported that he hanged himself after completing this movie, making it his final feature. While a quick search did not give any indication to the reasons for the suicide, it's a detail that makes parts of this movie land differently, particularly with regards to what becomes of Piotr as the movie unfolds. No definitive connections, but it's hard not to wonder with that knowledge.

As a horror movie, this isn't really one that will scratch the scary itch for the Halloween season. It presents an effective slow burn, but the supernatural elements more inspire thought than fear. I'm not saying this as a complaint, more a way to help adjust expectations for if anyone is interested in watching this. It's a horror, but not in the ways you'd expect.

For those who this may be disappointing to? Don't worry, next week brings us back to some more straightforward horror. I'm going into a nastier, more occult vein with a movie I've been circling for a while now in The Autopsy of Jane Doe.

Till then.

52 Pick-Up # 40 – The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

Oh, October. Easily one of my favorite months.

Welcome back to 52 Pick-Up, my year long self-imposed challenge to keep writing in the form of first impressions on 52 movies I have not seen before.

This week, October kicks off in suitable fashion with – you guessed it – a weighted draw for horror movies!

The first draw feeling appropriately timed given the director in question is currently back in the cinematic zeitgeist, despite having been dead for some years now.

I was tempted to fudge the schedule so I could do this later in the month to coincide with the new restoration of The Devils, but I decided to play fair, so time to kick the month off with Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm.

Even when not expressly designed to be one,
this movie is prettymuch exactly the Ken Russell
vampire movie I would have expected.

In making the pitch for this, I'm going to issue one of two disclaimers for this entry. This first being that, as of the time of this writing, I have not read the Bram Stoker novel this was adapted from. I am now adding it to the to do list as I am interested in seeing just how it compares (being Russell, and that this adaptation is in modern times, I'm not anticipating a painstakingly faithful take), but at this point, I can only speak to this movie on its own terms.

With that now settled, as stated above, The Lair of the White Worm is a modernized adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel of the same name. The contemporary set film centers around an archaeological dig for a convent in a remote British town. Angus, the archaeologist (Peter Capaldi) believes his findings may hold clues to a local myth of a beast known as the D'Ampton Worm that was said to have plagued the countryside. On further excavation, Angus starts finding strange signs connecting the dig to recent disappearances that lead him to suspect that not only might the stories be true, there may still be a Worm terrorizing the lands.

Now, in terms of my response to this movie, we come to my second disclaimer. As Ken Russell goes, I'm something of a neophyte. I have had some good impressions with a few of his works over the years: I don't remember Tommy as well, but what I remember I respect for its ambitions, I enjoyed Altered States, and I have a lot of love for The Devils. I say this for some context as far as my impressions of Russell going into this, both in terms of quality and subject matter. With that said, my general impression of this lands somewhere in the middle. I found it an altogether watchable, bizarre piece of 80s British horror with a number of entertaining elements going for it, even if some may not have been intended the way they landed.

At the same time, of the Russell I have seen, this is probably trailing behind the others. Which, again, isn't a direct knock on this movie. So far, even a weak Russell has still been a good watch for me, and I'm going to be curious to see if that tracks the further I dig into his work. Part of the problem in this case is that, even before reading up on the production of this movie, I was struck by the fact it felt a bit more constrained than other Russell movies I've seen. Part of this was because him doing a horror movie was a condition of a deal he had with the studio at the time in order to get another project approved. This isn't to say he isn't trying on this movie, because I'm not sure it's possible for Ken Russell to go on cruise control, but this also doesn't have quite the same feeling of mad ambition of a Tommy or The Devils behind it.

Which is not to say the ambition isn't there,
because oh, lordy, is it ever. It's just limited by
the kind of money Vestron can put behind it.

Incidentally, this was the scene where I remembered
my wife telling me how she almost saw this movie as
child by virtue of an accidentally misplaced rental tape.
Props to her mother for pumping the brakes on that.

With this in mind, this certainly does have some of his signature touches to it. Most notably, and somewhat infamously, this movie has that unique brand of strange, artistic, horniness that has become somewhat synonymous with Russell's name over the years. In this case, embodied by the aesthetics of the antagonistic snake-centered cult that worships the titular worm (and yes, that thing you're thinking is factored into the movie too.) While the cult isn't framed itself as explicitly sexual, the trappings are all over them – from the nightmarish visions characters receive of the cult and its past (which are a little undercut by the VHS-caliber video quality, but still get into some truly strange 'seeing is believing' visuals as the movie unfolds) to the final ritual sporting what I can only best describe as a ceremonial strap-on, used both suggestively and in one case ultra-literally for impalement.

Which, no, I will not be posting a screenshot of. This movie is streaming for free on Tubi at the time of this post, you can go look it up yourself if you don't believe me.

Beyond the cult, there is one other sequence I have to point out, simply because it was one that had me genuinely laughing to watch how hard Russell leaned into the skid. Without going into too much detail, should you watch this, keep an eye out for a dream sequence involving Hugh Grant and a red pen. You'll know when you get there in pretty short order and at that point it's just a matter of watching the movie go for the most obvious joke in such a way that it loops around to be entertaining rather than groan-inducing.

I'm gonna circle back to the cult for one more thing. I want to close out on a good note, and this comes to what is, in all honesty, the single best selling point for this movie. That being the performance by Amanda Donohoe as the cult's high priestess, Sylvia. 

I'll be fair and say the rest of the cast are doing overall good work here first. The supporting cast has a nice slate of character actors, and as leads go, Capaldi is surprisingly game for a reluctant hero role, while Grant's relative inability to decide if he's in a serious movie or a comedy, rather than hurting the movie, seems to fit right in.

Donohoe, meanwhile, is completely locked in on this movie. If she didn't have a sense of what Russell was going for, she sure as Hell fooled me. As horror villains go, she is figuratively, and in some cases literally, devouring every scene of this movie she is in and for all appearances having an absolute ball as she does so. Even if the rest of this movie went completely off the rails, I would argue her performance on its own is worth at least considering for this one. 

Overall, this is a film I would call a VERY conditional recommend. I know a lot of people where I can already tell them 'maybe not this time' (if you're curious and not sure if you'd be one of these people, reach out to me, I can get a little more in-depth if this will be your bag or not.) At the same time, there's already some people I know where I have a good feeling if they haven't seen this one, I can tell them, 'yeah, this is gonna be a fun 90 minutes for you.'

Not too bad a start for the month.

With that said, next week I'll be changing gears for horror. It's a little slower, a little quieter, a lot less horny, and definitely more somber, but hey, horror loves variety. Next week, it's a piece of Polish folk horror with the 2015 movie, Demon.

Until then.