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.
MIRROR MIRROR (1990)
Four months after her father passed away, goth teen Megan (Rainbow Harvest) and her mother Susan (Karen Black) move into a new house - which happens to have a nasty piece of vintage furniture in one of the rooms. The room that ends up being Megan’s bedroom. The move also requires Megan to be “the new kid” at her high school, and she finds it difficult to fit in, quickly catching the negative attention of the popular Charleen (Charlie Spradling of Puppet Master 2, among others). But she also manages to make a good friend in Nikki (Kristin Dattilo), who is running for class president against Charleen.
Strange things start to happen around Megan. Like her mom’s dog mysteriously dying when it enters her room. Charleen getting a gusher of a spontaneous nosebleed. A teacher played by Stephen Tobolowsky having an asthma attack in class. But by the time blood starts running down the mirror, Megan is so deeply under its spell that she just licks it up. That’s when things get really dangerous for the people Megan feels wronged by...
Directed by Marina Sargenti, who assembled the script with Annette Cascone, Gina Cascone, and Yuri Zeltser, Mirror Mirror is a decent teen horror movie that missed out on the ‘80s heyday but is still very much an ‘80s horror movie, despite being released in 1990. It has that unmistakable ‘80s style and atmosphere – and it was filmed at the end of 1988, so it was an ‘80s production. I first watched this movie when I was six or seven and didn’t like it at all, despite being an established horror fan by that time. My dislike for the film could have been due to the fact that Susan’s dog dies early in the running time, so the movie could have lost me just 18 minutes in. Revisiting it thirty years later, I found that it’s actually pretty good. Rainbow Harvest did a great job playing Megan, Kristin Dattilo handles the heroine duties well, Karen Black is always interesting to watch, Charlie Spradling is always awesome, Ricky Paull Goldin from The Blob (1988) gets some screen time, William Sanderson from Newhart makes a brief appearance, and The Munsters’ Yvonne DeCarlo has a supporting role as a woman who figures out exactly what’s going on with that mirror.
When Mirror Mirror was first announced (under the title The Black Glass), it was said that Zelda Rubinstein from Poltergeist would be playing a role. That didn’t pan out, and I guess the role ended up going to DeCarlo, because DeCarlo’s character is just the sort of person you’d expect to see Rubinstein play.
BOARDINGHOUSE (1982)
Writer/director John Wintergate’s low budget horror flick Boardinghouse doesn’t appear to be anything special when you’re watching it, but it actually has some historical significance. This was the first horror movie to be shot on video. It’s also an interesting study due to the circumstances of its production and distribution, as Wintergate intended the movie to be a horror company, but the distributor demanded that any moments of overt comedy be removed. So it was released as a straightforward horror movie, albeit one where we see some absurd things... and since we’re given the impression that everything is supposed to be played straight, these absurd moments make the filmmaker look rather incompetent. Although I doubt Boardinghouse was much better before the intentional humor was removed.
Wintergate stars as Jim Royce, a strange dude / fit bachelor who has a strong interest in meditation and the powers of the mind. He moves into a house where the mutilated bodies of a couple that were considered to be the leading authorities on telekinesis and the occult were discovered ten years earlier. They were survived by their 13 year old child, who was institutionalized as a result of their parents’ apparent double suicide. The place they left behind has ten bedrooms, so Jim puts out an ad for roommates: he wants to share the place with up to nine girls, age range 18 to 25, and will charge each of them $100 a month for rent. Soon enough, Jim is surrounded by “hot numbers” in his new place... and it isn’t much longer before the residents of this place start getting injured and/or murdered. Has an evil spirit been set loose in this place, or is there another explanation for these mysterious incidents?
You have to have a high tolerance for bad horror movies to sit through Boardinghouse’s 88 minutes – and of course, I do. (Google currently claims that Boardinghouse has a running time of 157 minutes, but thankfully that estimate is way off.) If you do have a tolerance for bad horror and stick with the movie, you might get some “so bad, it’s good” entertainment out of it. The intentional humor may have been whittled out, but the result of that whittling still has its amusing moments. It’s a horror movie with all the style and atmosphere of your average 1980s shot-on-video porn – and if that sounds like a good time to you, check it out!
TRILOQUIST (2008)
Writer/director Mark Jones’ 1993 film Leprechaun may not be a particularly good movie, but it did spawn a franchise and gave Warwick Davis an iconic character to play. And in comparison to his 2008 film Triloquist, Leprechaun looks like an immortal classic.
Triloquist is another entry in the “tiny terror” sub-genre. This time the small killer is wooden ventriloqust dummy who seems to have somehow been imbued with a life of his own - and he’s quite horny. When the “triloquist” he performed an act with dies of a drug overdose, the dummy remains in the lives of the women’s two offspring; Paydin LoPachin as the trashy, homicidal Angelina and Rocky Marquette as the developmentally disabled Norbert. When they hit the road on a killing spree / trip to Las Vegas, the dummy is riding shotgun. And helping increase the body count.
This movie is about as bad and sleazy as it gets. The dialogue is often wildly inappropriate, and there’s something in here to offend pretty much everybody. As the lead trio travel along, Angelina gets it in her head that they need to abduct a woman for Norbert to impregnate (since he isn’t likely to be able to seduce a willing woman) to keep their magical bloodline going... and when that doesn’t go so well, you can predict where the situation is going to end up. The movie has been so irreverently inappropriate up to that point, of course it would verge into that territory as well.
Triloquist is so bad and appalling, viewers who aren’t flat-out insulted may be able to get some “so bad it’s good” entertainment out of watching. I have to admit that I did. I was even impressed by how well LoPachin was able to play such a trashy, detestable character. This definitely isn’t something I’ll be returning to on a regular basis, I’m not even sure if I’d ever watch the movie again, but there was fun to be had when watching it with some friends.
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