This is somewhat of an impromptu post. I recently was taking a look at some early examples of photography and it naturally progressed into early motion pictures. I really remembered why I had become so enthralled with early film in the first place.
The link here will bring you to the very first adaptation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. The film was released in 1910 and produced by Edison (as in Thomas) Studios. It’s primitive and difficult to follow but it is just a short. It’s beautiful, and I really just got this overwhelming calm watching a film that is over a hundred years old. What we have here is a bunch of early pioneers that helped shape our world. I urge you to watch it and consider that the people who saw this hadn’t seen anything quite like it before. In a short twenty years Universal would create one of the best horror movies ever made but before that there were a handful of people shooting what amounts to twelve minutes of footage over three days.
I can’t help but wonder what life was like when this film was made. What kinds of things did the actors do after the fact. Did the audiences freak out at the creation scene? So many questions but I am just glad this important piece of history isn’t lost like so many others. I had always heard of this movie before but never took the time to watch it until today. I’m really glad I did. I hope you will too.
Over the last decade or so, the concept of a slasher movie has become pretty broken. I’ve discussed in earlier posts before that when it comes to the slasher-genre people are quick to point out its flaws.
In the 80’s there was a huge slasher boom with studios trying to cash in on the popularity of franchises like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm St. Endless sequels and knock offs followed up until the very early 90’s. Then it dried up for a few years until Wes Craven revitalized the concept with Scream. Being self aware was in vogue in horror after that point. The slasher formula was mocked and picked apart by not only the characters in the movie but the actors and directors during the press junkets.
The problem with Hollywood is not only how stubborn they are to move outside the box but how quick they are to over saturate the market once they do. I personally never liked scream or movies like it but it seems that after we got out of the 90’s and into the mid 2000’s the self aware horror finally found it’s legs and made for some fine cinema. Not too long ago I discussed the horror Mockumentary Behind the Mask: The rise of Leslie Vernon, the film was fantastic with a wonderful blend of horror and comedy.
Today we’re going to be discussing another film that treads in the familiar waters of the self-aware-horror; The Hills Run Red.
The Hills Run Red was released straight to DVD in 2009. It stars a bunch of relatively unknowns with the exception of William Sadler who you might remember from films like The Mist. The film also stars Tad Hilgenbrink who I recognized from one of those direct to DVD American Pie movies. The whole thing was directed by Dave Parker.
The basic plot is that Tyler (Hilgenbrink) is a slick young film student that’s obsessed with this horror movies which is titled The Hills Run Red. It’s supposedly the most frightening horror movie ever made but the problem is that the only thing that anyone can find of it, is a trailer and a few screenshots. Tyler wants nothing more than to watch the movie and film a documentary about it. He finds the directors daughter who also had a role in the film. It turns out she’s a stripper now and has a pretty bad heroine problem. After a really bizarre sequence where I guess she gets off the drugs over a period of a few days she agrees to take Tyler, his girlfriend and his best friend to the locations where the movie was filmed in hopes of maybe finding a long lost copy of the original reels.
The whole movie within a movie thing works well for this flick. The Hills Run Red (the movie in the movie) is about a slasher named Babyface which is just a big Mongoloid woodsman with a doll mask on. That alone wouldn’t really be much to make me take notice. The thing that sets this killer apart from being just another Jason knockoff is that he’s an actor. See the thing you start to realize is that the reason this film was hidden and supposedly the most shocking horror ever made was because it was real. The Babyface killer is real and the deaths on camera are genuine. Of course our protagonist find this out far too late and are now dealing with a deranged director who wants to make the perfect horror film, and the ultimate method actor of Babyface.
The parts where the killer breaks character and shows signs of intelligence is pretty entertaining. One scene would have his victim facing off with him with a lit flare in either hand goading him into a hand to hand scuffle. Babyface just pulls out a gun and shots him (Indiana Jones style.)
The characters are all pretty self aware of the irony of heading out to the isolated woods in search of a horror movie and often cite things, like the use of cellphones or not bringing a weapon of any kind with them. Of course regardless of all of their planning they are stuck in the confines of a horror movie so things inevitable fail. The ending was alright, but nothing I would consider very interesting and one of my big complaints was how some of the actors hammed it up pretty bad in certain scenes which made them a lot less effective.
Despite some over the top acting The Hills Run Red is a worthy addition to the slasher genre and deserves a look from anyone interested. As always thanks for reading!
For some reason the year (1999) when the remakes of The Haunting and the House on Haunted Hill sticks out in my mind a lot. My brother really wanted to go and see the latter. So we went and I really enjoyed it. It was the very first time I had ever seen that 32 frame per second type ghost effect. You know where it ends up looking really frigging weird, and unnaturally fast?
It wouldn’t be until years later that I would finally sit down and watch the original. The house on Haunted Hill was released in 1959. The film was directed and produced by B movie legend and shameless promoter William Castle. The film stars Vincent Price (I swear this is just a coincidence) and Carolyn Craig.
The basic plot is this. Fredrick Loren (Price) is an eccentric millionaire who hosts a party at a supposedly haunted house. He gathers together a group of virtual strangers and tells them that he will pay them each ten thousand dollars if they would spend the night in the mansion. He says he is doing this because his wife had the idea of throwing a “ghost party”. He informs the guests that the servants will be leaving the grounds and locking all of the doors and they won’t be opened again until 8 AM the next day. Anyone who makes it, will be given their money. This is all treated as light hearted at first and each of the guests seem to be enjoying themselves.
None of the guests are very remarkable. Waston Pritchard is the current owner of the property is there who knows the most about the place. He tells the others that his brother and sister-in-law were murdered in the house and he is legitimately terrified of the place.
Nora Manning (Craig) is just a secretary for one of Lorens companies. Ruth Bridges is a columnist; Lance Schroeder is a pilot and finally Dr. David Trent is the resident psychiatrist. I honestly had a hard time telling some of them apart. The one thing they all have in common is that they need money and this seems like a golden opportunity.
It seems that spooky things start to happen to Nora only who freaks out and hysterically screams at numerous different situations. One of the moments that stood out for me is when she encounters the creepy old hag with the long fingernails that scares her half to death. The movie relies for sudden shocks and special effects for their scares, but it’s a pretty typical case of Nora seeing something and everybody arriving too late. That all changes when the body of Loren’s wife is found hanging from the staircase and everyone seems dumbfounded. At this point it isn’t really clear what happened. They had shown scenes of Loren and his wife fighting and it’s reasonable to assume she had killed herself. The movie takes a swift turn to a whodunit motif that carries it for the rest of the story.
Castle was well known for his use of theatre gimmicks and this movie was no different. During the films final moments a skeleton rises out of an acid bath and starts to stalk it’s prey. Apparently when that moment happened in the movie the theatre goers were treated to a plastic skeleton flying over their heads. It was things like that which elevated this B horror movie into the cult classic that it is today. The famous macabre director Alfred Hitchcock was so impressed with the movie that it was said that it would inspire him to make the classic Psycho. Among the skeleton gag the movie also breaks the forth wall both at the very start and the very end. It’s not too often that this happens anymore (probably for the best).
Well, since its release this movie has become public domain, so it’s free to watch in a variety of ways. I recommend that people check it out when they got a chance. It has some great thrills and special effects so cheesy they become genius. Plus, it has the unforgettably talented Vincent Price. Okay I promise this will be the last Price movie for awhile.
There is a lot of horror out there, and I mean a lot. No scratch that. There is a lot of cinema out there. The sheer number of films that get made a year is staggering. Especially if you consider every film that gets released, not just the stuff that makes it to theatres. We just don’t have enough time in a day to watch everything.
A lot of my friends like to say that I seem like the type of person who’s seen or heard of everything; especially in regards to horror. Let me tell you that it couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s a tonne of stuff out there that I haven’t seen. Every time I slip open a genre magazine, like Rue Morgue or VideoScope I am seeing advertisements or reviews of stuff I’ve never even heard of let alone watched.
One of the reasons I started this site was so that I would have an opportunity to see horror that I normally wouldn’t be able to. It’s equal parts research and dumb luck that leads me to a lot of the stuff I end up watching.
I recently was visiting a friend of mine; he’s always had an impressive and varied taste in movies. Really his collection has something for everyone. Mine is pretty genre specific and as time goes on it only gets more so. While looking for something to watch my finger passed over the Movie Cronos, it looked interesting, I checked the back. “Whoa this movie was directed by Guillermo Del Toro?” I kept reading “Whoa this movie has Ron Perlman in it” I read further “10th anniversary special edition?” How did this movie completely blow past me on all fronts? Apparently this film, by a director I love, and containing an actor I enjoy, was released or rather re-released without my knowledge. Now, let’s be clear about something.
Guillermo Del Toro is an excellent director, and I have yet to find a movie he did that I dislike but like most people, I had no idea who he was until things like Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth. The latter being a particular favourite of mine. Also, since another Del Toro horror flick is set to be released this month, it seems oddly appropriate.
Cronos was released in 1993 and is a Spanish language film. It stars Frederico Luppi and Ron Perlman, funnily enough he speaks English through most of it.. It also has Tamara Shanath, to round out the immediate cast.
The film starts off explaining that hundreds of years ago an alchemist created the Cronos device, it would enable the user to live forever provided they keep using it. The Alchemist himself dies about four hundred years later, through a massive chest wound when his house collapsed in on him. After that the device goes missing and nobody is able to find it.
We then meet a kindly old antiques dealer named Jesús Gris (Luppi) and his granddaughter Aurora (Shanath). They discover inside of a statue the Cronos device and while trying to figure it out, Gris winds it up and accidentally sets it off, having no idea what it will do to him.
It’s never really explained how the device works, although it eventually is revealed that inside of it there is some kind of insect that apparently can survive just fine inside of it. The insect is fused with clockwork of the device and the solution it creates is what grants the user eternal life.
Nothing comes without a price and Gris soon realizes that he is changing, not only is he getting younger and more energetic he is also starting to crave blood.
Also, unknown to him is that there is another man who is looking for the device for his own use; Dieter de la Guardia played rather well by the late Claudio Brook. He is sick and dying and wants to use the device to cheat death. He sends his Nephew Angel de la Guardia (Perlman) all over the place looking for it. It’s obvious they hate eachother, and their interactions are some of the highlights of the movie.
The device seems to have an addictive quality to it and Gris can’t help himself but keep using it, despite the fears of his granddaughter Aurora. Throughout off of this she is basically what is grounding him to humanity; she seems to love him unconditionally and will do anything to help him, so long as he doesn’t leave her.
Because he seems to be becoming addicted to using it he also is unwilling to hand it over when De La Gaurdia finds out he has it, they have a series of interactions but eventually out of desperation Gris is murdered for the device. This prompts his resurrection and at this point he is so far gone from this kind old grandfather he was in the first half of the movie that it’s really remarkable.
His skin rots and falls off to reveal a pale undead look underneath; he has an aversion to sunlight and needs blood to…wait a minute. Don’t all of these things make him a vampire? Well yup, it does. Cronos is a well hidden vampire movie, to be sure but it’s pretty subtle and he doesn’t seem to have supernatural powers aside from not being able to die without destroying his heart.
The pacing of the film is kinda slow, and I could have done with a little bit more on the horror side, but if you liked Pan’s Labyrinth I really can’t imagine not liking this, because they are pretty similar in tone.
I have a lot more for you guys in the near future so stay tuned and thanks for reading!
This is somewhat of an impromptu post. I recently was taking a look at some early examples of photography and it naturally progressed into early motion pictures. I really remembered why I had become so enthralled with early film in the first place.
splatterpictures 