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.
A quartet of horror films, including some Chucky and Fear Street action.
SEED OF CHUCKY (2004)
Coming along seven years after Child's Play 3, Bride of Chucky revitalized the Child's Play franchise with great style and a fun sense of humor. The ending of that film left the door wide open for a sequel, with the titular "Bride", Chucky's fellow killer doll Tiffany, giving birth to their child. Since there had been both a Bride of Frankenstein and a Son of Frankenstein (among other "Son of" sequels over the years), I fully expected to see a Son of Chucky go into production very soon after the successful release of Bride of Chucky. But franchise writer Don Mancini defied expectations with his approach to the follow-up - which is why it took six years for us to get a sequel that should have gotten an immediate greenlight. Universal, the studio that had released all of the previous sequels, was not interested in making the sequel Mancini pitched to them. Oddly, it was the 2003 success of Cabin Fever that saved Mancini's sequel idea. Somehow that movie doing well for Lionsgate convinced Universal to let Mancini make the movie he wanted to make... although it was put out through the genre label of a Universal subsidiary, so they still had some distance from it.
Instead of Son of Chucky, Mancini chose to make Seed of Chucky, a film that marks his feature directorial debut and was ahead of its time in some ways, as it takes on the issue of gender identity years before that really started to get attention. Since the child of Chucky and Tiffany is not anatomically correct, their offspring truly has no gender, but when the kid meets their parents they both try to choose a gender for them. Chucky wants a son named Glen, Tiffany wants a daughter named Glenda. (A nod to Ed Woods' 1953 film Glen or Glenda, a semi-autobiographical film about cross-dressing.) When I saw the birth of the child, screeching and showing off pointy teeth as it came out of Tiffany, then appearing to attack someone just seconds after it was born, I thought we were in store for some kind of feral beast along the lines of the killer babies in the It's Alive franchise. That's definitely not what Mancini had in mind. A moment toward the end implies that I should be referring to the kid as Glen for the majority of the film - and Glen (voiced by Billy Boyd) is a pacifist that does not condone the homicidal actions of Chucky and Tiffany.
Before we get to that part of the story, we find that Glen was discovered soon after the end of Bride of Chucky by a British ventriloquist who has taken him to England to perform an act called "Psychs and Shitface". Yes, the kid's name is Shitface before he's reunited with his parents. For six years, Glen grows up thinking he's Japanese, since he was born with a "Made in Japan" stamp on his wrist. While watching a TV report about the production of a movie called Chucky Goes Psycho, based on the "urban legend" of killer dolls Chucky and Tiffany, he sees the dolls being used for the film, thinks they're actually alive, and notices that Chucky also has a "Made in Japan" stamp on his wrist. Clearly these dolls must be his parents. Child's Play 2 showed us that the Good Guys, the brand of doll the Chucky doll was part of, were manufactured in the Chicago area, so I'm not sure why Chucky has "Made in Japan" on his body. Maybe Tiffany gave him an arm from another kind of doll when she put him back together at the start of Bride of Chucky.
Glen escapes from the ventriloquist and heads to Hollywood, where he finds the Chucky and Tiffany dolls and - using the voodoo necklace introduced in Bride of Chucky - manages to bring the spirits of serial killer Charles Lee Ray and his psycho girlfriend Tiffany Valentine into these Chucky and Tiffany dolls. Then starts the argument over what gender Glen should be, and whether or not Chucky and Tiffany should continue to kill people.
Seed of Chucky doesn't work for me very well. The concept could have worked if handled differently, but Mancini goes way overboard with the humor. Bride of Chucky had been more humorous than its predecessors, but the level of humor was perfect as far as I was concerned. Seed pushes it further and becomes goofy as hell. I'm also not a fan of the movie going meta to the degree that we have the characters on the set of a Chucky and Tiffany movie that's being shot in Hollywood, where the Tiffany character is being played by Jennifer Tilly, who had played the human Tiffany in Bride (and provides the voice for doll Tiffany). Here Jennifer Tilly is playing herself, hoping to get cast as the Virgin Mary in a Biblical epic that's going to be directed by rapper Redman, playing himself... And I hate when real celebrities get worked into something like this, playing themselves. Redman will end up dead by the end of the movie, and that sort of crossing the lines of realities doesn't sit well with me. Chucky also kills Britney Spears (not played by the real Britney) at one point in the movie. It just makes me shake my head. I don't get why Mancini wanted to do this.
John Waters shows up as a paparazzi, a bit of casting that fits the movie perfectly, and there's a scene where he snaps pictures of an unaware Chucky, who is busy masturbating into a cup so he and Tiffany can have another child by artificially inseminating Jennifer Tilly. That's a good indication of just how far off the rails the franchise went with this installment.
Seed of Chucky wasn't well-received when it was released, and Universal's hesitancy to make it was somewhat vindicated when it failed at the box office. It has established a fanbase in the years since, which is understandable, but I still find this movie to be more irritating than entertaining. I can't go along with the over-the-top humor and the whole Hollywood satire element, so this is by far my least favorite Child's Play / Chucky movie. The only thing I really like about it is the epiphany Chucky comes to in the end: after five movies of trying to transfer his soul out of the doll and back into a human body, he realizes: "I'm Chucky, the killer doll - and I dig it!"
Kudos to the marketing department for the ejaculation jokes, though. Sperm was featured in the marketing for this movie, and taglines included "Fear the second coming" and "Get a load of Chucky". Nicely done.
THE WIND (1986)
The same year he filmed the "paintball enthusiasts vs. rednecks" horror film The Zero Boys at the same cabin that was the main location in Friday the 13th Part III, director Nico Mastorakis took the horror back to his home country of Greece for The Wind, a simple little thriller that takes place on an extremely windy night in the island town of Monemvasia.
Meg Foster stars as Sian Anderson, an American author who has gone to Monemvasia to write her latest novel. The home she rents is owned by an old man named Elias Appleby, and Robert Morley does an awesome job of bringing Appleby to life during his brief screentime. Appleby is an eccentric fellow who doesn't offer to help carry Sian's bags because he supports feminism and has never learned to speak Greek even though he has been living in Greece for a long time and is married to a local. His wife has never learned English, because Appleby thinks too much communication is bad for a marriage.
It's a good thing Appleby makes such an impression while showing Sian around the property, because he doesn't live much longer than that. By the 25 minute mark, Appleby has been murdered by his American handyman Phil (Wings Hauser) - and the remaining hour of the movie is simply about Phil going after Sian while she desperately tries to get someone to help her. Her significant other, played by David McCallum, knows right away that Appleby has been murdered and Sian is in trouble, but he's back home in Los Angeles and finds it difficult to get Greek authorities to the scene. At least he doesn't let the stress keep him from taking a swim while he waits for international operators to figure this out.
So the stalking thrills go on and on... and maybe they go on a bit too long. I can't say I was engrossed for the entirety of The Wind's 88 minutes, it could have either been slightly shorter or it could have used a bit more substance. Thankfully, Steve Railsback stops by along the way as yet another American who's in Monemvasia, a sailor stranded on the island by the weather. This gives us someone else to watch, and someone for Sian to talk to, for a little while.
The Wind is a decent movie, it was just a little difficult to keep my attention on it the entire time.
FEAR STREET PART 2: 1978 (2021)
Director Leigh Janiak's Fear Street Part 1: 1994 set up the idea that the spirit of a witch named Sarah Fier has been possessing people in order to carry out murders in the cursed town of Shadyside, Ohio ever since 1666. One of those murder sprees happened at Camp Nightwing in 1978, and that's the focus of this sequel that Janiak directed from a screenplay she wrote with Zak Olkewicz - based on a story they crafted with Phil Graziadei, and of course on author R.L. Stine's series of Fear Street novels.
Friday the 13th is my favorite horror franchise, and because of that I love to watch summer camp and backwoods slashers in general, so Fear Street Part 2: 1978 is the entry in Janiak's Fear Street trilogy that I have been looking forward to the most ever since these movies were first announced. While watching it, Friday the 13th was on my mind in a major way, and not just because it was filmed at Hard Labor Creek State Park in Rutledge, Georgia, the same place where Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI was filmed. The Friday the 13th movie it made me think of the most was one we never actually got to see, as it never went into production. It's one that director David Bruckner and screenwriter Nick Antosca were developing a few years ago (I reviewed the script here), with their approach being to make their film "the Dazed and Confused of Friday the 13th movies"; which is to say, it was going to be a period piece (set in the '80s) and would focus heavily on the characters while featuring a lot of awesome music. We'll never get the movie they were planning, but what Janiak has delivered with Fear Street Part 2: 1978 is very much along the lines of what they were going for. It's a summer camp slasher, a period piece, it focuses heavily on the characters, and it's packed with awesome music fitting for the time it's set in. If you watched 1994, you know Janiak is definitely a fan of needledrop tunes, there were times in that movie where it felt like there were too many songs being used, and the needledrop party continues here.
While the sounds of David Bowie, Neil Diamond, Foghat, Captain & Tennille, The Runaways, Cat Stevens, Blue Oyster Cult, Buzzcocks, The Velvet Underground, Thelma Houston, and Kansas (some may shy away from using "Carry On Wayward Son" after its fifteen year association with Supernatural, but not Janiak) fill the air, we're introduced to troubled camper Ziggy Berman (Sadie Sink), an outcast at Camp Nightwing and the sister of "stuck-up priss" counselor Cindy Berman (Emily Rudd); straightlaced counselor Nick Goode (Ted Sutherland), who has a secret interest in Stephen King novels and that weird girl Ziggy; Cindy's wild former friend Alice (Ryan Simpkins), who now considers Cindy to be a narc; Alice's drug expert boyfriend Arnie (Sam Brooks); and Cindy's boyfriend Tommy Slater (McCabe Slye). There are over fifty kids at the camp, a mix of youths from Shadyside and their supposedly higher class neighbors Sunnyvale, so there are also some prominent side characters played by the likes of Chiara Aurelia, Jacqi Vene, Dylan Gage, and Drew Scheid from Halloween 2018, with Jordana Spiro making an appearance as the camp nurse, who has a connection to one of the other Shadyside killing sprees. Spiro has done a lot of work in the last twenty years, but she'll always be Reece from From Dusk Till Dawn 3 to me.
I've seen 1994 get some pushback for the amount of attention it paid to the romantic relationship at the heart of the story, but spending so much time on relationships proves not to be unique to that particular Fear Street film, because a whole lot of time is spent focusing on the relationships in this one - the sisters that don't get along and come from a broken home, the friends who have hit a rough patch, the potential romance between Ziggy and Nick. So much attention is paid to these character interactions that the axe-wielding maniac doesn't even enter the picture until more than 40 minutes into the running time. Sure, some of the early minutes are spent showing the survivors of Part 1 seeking the help of the surviving Berman sister (played as an adult by Gillian Jacobs), but still... 40 minutes is a long time to wait for the first slashing in a slasher. There are definitely some moments that could have been trimmed throughout the film that not only could have allowed it to get to the action sooner, but also would have kept it from reaching the overly long running time of 110 minutes. On the bright side, the cast handles all of the drama very well.
Having a slasher loose in the camp with over an hour of movie left to go does allow for a good amount of mayhem, but don't expect to see much along the lines of inventive kills. The Nightwing Killer doesn't do much more than swing his axe; it's a shame that nothing in this camp slasher comes anywhere near the standout death in the previous Fear Street film. The Nightwing Killer is certainly no Jason Voorhees, and he's hindered further by the fact that it takes him a while to get the mask we saw him wearing in 1994. But even though the killer has shortcomings and lacks variety, there are some good gore effects along the way.
And while Fear Street Part 2: 1978 is kind of slow to get going and has a bit too much chit-chat before and between the kills, it is an entertaining movie that adds some interesting twists and turns into the overall story Janiak is telling with this trilogy. It really got me with one of the swerves it takes, and it was fun to be surprised in the way that this movie surprised me. If you really like old school slashers, this one is worth checking out. You might not find it to be on the level of favorites from past decades, but it's nice to see a modern movie that plays in the camp slasher sandbox getting a healthy budget put into it and being sold as a major "event" release.
I'm on board to see how this is going to get all wrapped up in Fear Street Part 3: 1666, even though the 1666 time period holds very little appeal for me and I have to assume that one's going to be severely lacking in the music department.
The review of Fear Street Part 2: 1978 originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
THE BUTTERFLY ROOM (2012)
Although the first screenings of director Jonathan Zarantonello's The Butterfly Room were held in 2012, I didn't see the movie until years later, when blog contributor Priscilla showed it to me. I think it was streaming on Netflix in Brazil at the time. Despite the fact that the cast is packed with horror icons and regulars, I can't say I went into it with a high degree of anticipation or hope - but I ended up being surprised at how good and twisted it was.
Barbara Steele stars as Ann, a very strange woman who stocks up on acid and chloroform, and keeps having interactions with a young girl named Alice (Julia Putnam), who apparently visits Ann in secret and lied her way into the woman's life. Now Ann pays her for the opportunity to be a sort of grumpy, harsh mentor to her. It's revealed early on that Ann is a murderer, so we're on the hook to stick with the movie for its 87 minutes to find out why she has this set-up with Alice, and to see if she's going to be brought to justice for the murders she commits.
Alice isn't the only kid Ann's life. She also befriends the neighbor girl Julie (Ellery Sprayberry) and earns the trust of Julie's mom Claudia (Erica Leerhsen) to such a degree that Claudia even leaves Julie at Ann's place while she goes on a trip. That's a not a very good place to spend time in. The film is called The Butterfly Room because Ann has a collection of preserved butterfly corpses that she keeps in one room of her apartment, but when a visitor takes a look into that room they react with shock and fear, so there's something more than butterflies in there. Zarantonello just makes us wait to find out what it is.
Zarantonello wrote the screenplay with Paolo Guerrieri and Luigi Sardiello, basing it on a short film he had made and a novel he wrote that doesn't appear to have ever been published. He and his co-writers did a fine job of putting this captivatingly weird story together, and even though he clearly had a small budget to work with, he turned it into a solid, unnerving movie.
Aside from Steele and Leerhsen, the family faces that show up include Heather Langenkamp, Ray Wise, James Karen, Camille Keaton, Adrienne King, P.J. Soles, and Joe Dante. While Langenkamp and Wise have substantial roles, the others pass through rather quickly - Karen is the taxidermist Steele gets her supplies from, Keaton is a victim, King and Soles are women Ann encounters in a mall, Dante is a taxi driver who picks up one of the characters. Regardless of their individual screen time, it's cool to see them all in the movie.
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