We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
NIGHTMARES (1983)
I've been vaguely aware of director Joseph Sargent's horror anthology Nightmares for quite some time, but it's not a movie I felt compelled to check out or look too deeply into. The generic title and the bland artwork of eyes and reaching hands just didn't make it seem very interesting. I finally watched it this year, and it turns out I should have given it a chance a long time ago.
A mixture of stories written by Christopher Crowe and Jeffrey Bloom, Nightmares was initially shot as a pilot for a series that would have aired on NBC if it had been picked up. The film consists of four segments with no wraparound story to help us segue from segment to segment, it's just separated into chapters.
This first segment was my favorite of the bunch, and anyone who's familiar with urban legends (or the movie Urban Legend) will know what's going on here. Titled Terror in Topanga, the segment stars Cristina Raines as Lisa, a housewife who is so addicted to nicotine that she leaves her husband and kids at home and drives off into the night to go buy some cigarettes even though the news has warned her that there's a homicidal escaped mental patient on the loose. Slashers are my favorite type of horror movie, so this story of a woman cruising through the dark while a killer stalks the area was the most appealing part of Nightmares to me.
The second segment, The Bishop of Battle, was the next most appealing to me, and that's because it stars one of my favorite actors, Emilio Estevez. In fact, the presence of Estevez in the cast is the main reason why I finally decided to give Nightmares a chance. In The Bishop of Battle, Estevez plays a video game enthusiast who is currently dedicated to reaching the thirteenth and final level in a game fittingly called The Bishop of Battle. He's so obsessed with beating this game that he even breaks into the local arcade after closing time so he can play it in peace. This turns out to be a very bad idea.
The third segment, The Benediction, was my least favorite of the bunch, which is surprising given the fact that it's a killer car story and I tend to love killer car stories. Lance Henriksen stars as a Catholic priest stricken with a crisis of faith. Abandoning his church, the priest drives off through the desert - where he's confronted by the most evil vehicle this side of The Car. That may sound cool, but I found the execution to be underwhelming, and I wasn't really into the whole "crisis of faith" part of the story.
Nightmares wraps up with a segment called Night of the Rat, which centers on a family - led by Veronica Cartwright as Claire and Richard Masur as her husband Steven - whose house is invaded by a giant rat. This thing is huge, big enough to kill the family cat, and really disrupts the daily life of the family. It even turns out to be telepathic! Night of the Rat is a bit silly, but entertaining enough overall.
With a running time of just under 100 minutes, Nightmares delivers four mostly-solid horror stories that I'm glad, to varying degrees, that I finally got around to seeing.
INTO THE DARK: BLOOD MOON (2021)
Up to this point, every entry in the Hulu / Blumhouse anthology series Into the Dark has had something to do with a holiday or a notable date in the month of its release. That was the whole idea behind the show. For example, we've gotten Into the Dark movies set on Halloween in October, on Thanksgiving in November, etc. The pandemic messed with the production of the show's second season, but that doesn't really explain why the March 2021 entry Blood Moon is so far off from the month it was released in. If the filming of season 2 had stayed on track, Blood Moon should have been released in September of 2020. But it's not set in September, or in March. The story takes place around the night of the full moon in June, July, and November. So other than the fact that March has a full moon just like every month, the concept of Into the Dark was otherwise just thrown out for this one.
Despite that, Blood Moon is a good movie. Directed by Emma Tammi from a script by Adam Mason and Simon Boyes, the film centers on single mother Esme (Megalyn Echikunwoke), who has even more to deal with than the average single mother because her young son Luna (Yonas Kibreab) is a werewolf. How did this happen? Well, it's the result of Esme deciding to have a child with a man she was fully aware was a werewolf. So she basically asked for this burden, but clearly was not aware of just how much trouble it was going to be. Although Esme does her best to keep Luna locked up on the night of the full moon, it seems something inevitably goes wrong in every town they move to, and then they have to find a new place to live. Blood Moon follows Esme and Luna as they move to a new place - and of course, things eventually go wrong here, too.
Blood Moon may be a bit predictable, but it's well-crafted and interesting to watch as we wait for everything to fall apart. Echikunwoke and Kibreab both did well in their roles, and the set-up of the story is sure to stir up debate among viewers. There was certainly a lot of talk about Esme's life decisions between the friends I watched this movie with.
Blood Moon didn't fit the month it was released in, but it was still one of the better Into the Dark movies. With this, season 2 of the show has come to a delayed end. I hope we'll have a third season to look forward to.
HAWK AND REV: VAMPIRE SLAYERS (2020)
It took me a while to get into writer/director Ryan Barton-Grimley's horror comedy Hawk and Rev: Vampire Slayers - in fact, roughly 50 minutes of the 85 minute running time had gone by before I really became interested in what this movie was showing me. Although it had been throwing a barrage of jokes my way that entire time, most of them weren't landing for me, and I felt the story was dragging along.
Barton-Grimley stars as Philip "Hawk" Hawkins, recently released from Army prison after receiving a surprisingly light punishment for murdering a fellow soldier with a 2x4. In Hawk's defense, that soldier was a vampire, but his belief in vampires has led to him being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Hawk now works as a night security guard at an empty apartment building - and when he sees a couple Goth guys accompanied by a leather-clad "gimp" entering the building, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that his hometown of Santa Muerte, California is being invaded by bloodsuckers.
This isn't the first time Hawk has imagined that something terrible is happening in Santa Muerte, so he has trouble convincing people of this new threat, but he is able to recruit some assistance from his vegan pacifist best friend Revson McCabe (Ari Schneider), who joins the vampire-hunting mission only after making Hawk swear that there will be no hurting or killing of vampires. So it's clear early on that these guys aren't going to be accomplishing much. The title Hawk and Rev: Vampire Slayers may make the movie sound like it's going to be packed with vampire-slaying action, but if that's what you're expecting to see you'll be very disappointed.
A more accurate title would have been "Vampire Stakeout", because most of the movie is dedicated to showing Hawk and Rev trying to figure out how to keep an eye on these suspected vampires, and this stretch of the film goes on for so long it started to feel interminable. Even with a few vampire attacks to spice things up, and even with Hawk and Rev getting other characters involved, like an acquaintance from Army prison (Richard Gayler as Jasper) and a "girl writer" who becomes a love interest for Hawk (Jana Savage as Theo), those first 50 minutes were a slog to get through.
50 minutes in, Hawk and Rev finally get confirmation of exactly what's going on in Santa Muerte, and that's when it became interesting to me. I found the last 35 minutes of the movie to be a lot more fun and engaging than the build-up had been. I wouldn't want to sit through the first 50 minutes of Hawk and Rev: Vampire Slayers again, but for this viewing the last 35 minutes were enough of a payoff to make it worthwhile.
If the film's sense of humor really works for you, you'll probably have a blast with it all along, because there is a steady stream of jokes every minute. I got a few laughs out of it, but the humor wasn't appealing enough to me to make me enjoy sitting through such a slow-moving story. The last 35 minutes, though, that was good stuff, and the movie does have some really cool-looking credits.
The review of Hawk and Rev: Vampire Slayers was originally posted on ArrowintheHead.com
MUTE WITNESS (1994)
I remember reading praise for writer/director Anthony Waller's feature debut Mute Witness in the pages of Fangoria magazine, which is why I rented the movie as soon as it showed up on the shelf at one of the video stores in my home town. For the most part, I was quite impressed by what I saw, as Mute Witness turned out to be a very well directed, entertaining thriller with terrific suspense sequences and also a few good laughs.
Set in Moscow for budgetary reasons, the film centers on a mute special effects artist named Billy Hughes - played by Russian actress Marina Zudina, who didn't speak English at the time, so it's mind-blowing that Waller (raised in the Middle East and England) was able to communicate with her well enough to get the pitch perfect performance Zudina delivers. Billy is an American working on the set of an English-language film that's being shot in Moscow for budgetary reasons. Andy Clarke (Evan Richards) is the director, and Billy's sister Karen (Fay Ripley) - who is in a relationship with Andy - is also a crew member. Andy is making an awful-looking slasher movie, but when Billy hangs around the studio too long after filming wraps one night, she ends up witnessing a real murder being committed on the set. Two crew members are using the set to make a snuff film that ends with the murder of a prostitute.
There are some excellent, thrilling cat and mouse scenes involving Billy and the killers, and the situation gets even more complicated when it's revealed that the killers are working for a criminal organization that also has some corrupt cops in their pocket. As great as the scenes where Billy, Andy, and Karen are confronted by killers are, the introduction of the mob aspect is where the movie lost me a bit during my earliest viewings of it. I just wanted to see the characters deal with the snuff makers, not a whole organization. As years have gone by and there have been repeat viewings, I've come to appreciate the film more for what it is rather than what I was hoping to see.
The mob part of the story did allow Waller to drop a special celebrity cameo into the movie. Oscar winner Alec Guinness, best known as Obi-Wan Kenobi, shows up very briefly as a mob boss known as The Reaper. It's crazy that Waller got Guinness into the movie at all, but it's really mind-blowing when you take into account the fact that Waller shot Guinness's cameo eight years before he raised the funds to make the rest of the movie. He crossed paths with Guinness at an awards ceremony and asked him to appear in his movie, which didn't even have a script at the time. Guinness had a brief window of opportunity before he had to catch a flight, so he agreed to do the cameo for free as long as Waller didn't put his name on the movie. Guinness is credited as Mystery Guest Star, but his appearance still drew a lot of extra attention to Mute Witness.
This was a great debut for Waller, and seemed to promise that he would be bringing us a lot more awesome movies as his career went on. He caught the attention of Hollywood studios with this movie, but unfortunately the Hollywood job he decided to take for his second feature was An American Werewolf in Paris. That werewolf movie was so poorly received, it hobbled Waller's career when he was just getting started.
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