Countdown to Halloween: What have you done to him?! You MANIACS!!

Well, that’s one reason not to have kids.

Countdown to Halloween: Scalpel …

If you can get Billy Idol’s crooning out of your head long enough, you’d find 1960’s Eyes Without a Face to be a moody and surprisingly disquieting kind of movie.

Say what you want about the French (je t’aime, France), but they know how to make some weird movies. Even their mainstream films tend to be off-kilter and it’s not unusual for comedies to have a body count. It’s a tradition and style of filmmaking that goes way back, and watching this clip it’s obvious director Georges Franju had a firm grip on style and horror in equal parts.

In Eyes Without a Face, a doctor’s daughter is disfigured in a car accident, badly enough that Dad tells her she needs to wear a mask from now on. Soon enough, Dr. Génessier decides he’s going to restore his daughter Christiane’s face by pioneering the field of face transplants. He also decides he’ll find his own donors — whether they’re willing or not.

It’s creepy and atmospheric and considering it was 1960 it’s not surprising that this movie made people go nuts, with half of the audience lauding it and the other half wanting to tar and feather it. This scene alone probably had people swooning in the aisles.

Countdown to Halloween: And now, a word from our sponsors

I fell a little behind today, which means no movie clip. Instead I thought I’d share this commercial for the Toyota Prius, which is apparently an ad for the hybrid vehicle of the damned and a clear attempt to fuck with my head. Am I the only one who thinks of Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities” when they see this? What the hell, Toyota?!

Countdown to Halloween: In order to live, it is necessary … to kill

It should go without saying that horror in the United States isn’t the same as horror in other parts of the world. And while I hate to say it, the U.S. isn’t always the best at it, especially lately. Grab a handful of horror from the past, oh, 15 years or so and you’ll be able to track its lineage back to Japan or Norway or some other place that might as well be fictional to most Americans.

Going back to the originals is always a good idea. Concepts and scenes are often watered down by the time they reach these shores, delivered on the backs of bland actors whose main talent is to be generically good-looking. This wasn’t always the case. Back in the 60s and 70s, producers  and distributers sometimes wanted to bring the undiluted sauce to the States, preserving their terrible visions for new audiences. And sometimes they just wanted to be cheap, because, hey, we’re still trying to make our money back on this movie, y’know? Which is one reason hallmarks of  60s and 70s foreign grindhouse movies often include a new name, some bad dubbing and cultural mysteries in strange locales that will never be resolved.

Personally, I love it. So does my wife, who suggested today’s entry — 1974’s Las Garras De Loreley (The Loreley’s Grasp), a Spanish film set in Germany known in the United States by the title When the Screaming Stops. The film — about a scaly monster ripping out women’s hearts — is the first horror movie she remembers ever seeing, and “it freaked me out. (The main character) was a pretty lady, and it was the first time I realized something that shouldn’t be scary could be really scary.”

I’ve never seen The Loreley’s Grasp, but judging by the trailer it’s something I want to watch in all its bloody, rubbery-limbed glory. The movie is written and directed by Amando de Ossorio — who also wrote and directed the “Blind Dead” quartet of films — and it really looks like a well-preserved artifact of its time and genre. It’s got an ominous hippy right there in the trailer, for God’s sake. Oh, and of course it all takes place in a girl’s boarding house.

It’s something I HAVE  to watch.

Countdown to Halloween: What’s the matter, Mr. Pratt – buuuggs got your tongue?

I’m going to go out on a limb and make a declaration: Creepshow is one of the best comic book movies ever made.

Granted, it’s not based on any one particular comic, but it is a love letter to the old E.C. horror comics to a point that it wears its rotting heart on a bloody, stump-filled sleeve. And no, it’s not a particularly “good” movie in the most accepted definition — most of the acting is hammy and played broad, marrying well with the often bargain-rate sets and special effects.

But that’s kind of the point. The horror comics that inspired Creepshow were over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek violent and playfully grisly in ways that were nightmarish and fun. The movie gets it perfectly right with a tone that makes viewers giggle while covering their eyes. As an added bonus, crazy camera angles and garish splashes of retina-burning color are a nice homage to Creepshow‘s unapologetic comic book ancestry.

There’s a lot to like about this movie, and some genuinely hair-raising vignettes. One of them featured Adrienne Barbeau, for God’s sake, which should sell you on it right there. Another — about an embittered millionaire germaphobe holed up in his hermetically sealed penthouse — stars character actor E.G. Marshall trying to kill some cockroaches. Lots and lot of cockroaches.

Countdown to Halloween: Mommy!!

Gah, only a week in and I’ve already missed a day — don’t worry, kids, it’s all downhill from here.

To make up for it, today’s entry will be a double-feature. Unfortunately, both clips will be from terrible, terrible movies. First up is Grizzly, a 1976 movie that was obviously trying to cash in on some of the sweet Jaws ripple while jettisoning all the “plot” and “character” noise. Instead, Grizzly gave everything the title promised, and nothing more — a big-ass bear slashing people like in the woods like a fur-covered Jason at Crystal Lake.

This movie didn’t scar me like other movies from the time did, but it still managed to leave an impression. I had what adults would call an over-active imagination, and I’m sure everything in Grizzly seemed bigger and bloodier and louder than it really was. Otherwise, I can’t see how I could have missed the awful acting, the biggest wooden gate in the world and the multiple deaths-by-bear-hug.

Up next is a film that really did freak me out, even though I really remember only one scene and, a little research uncovered, it was actually a made-for-TV movie. Regardless, even though it kept within the constraints of early-80s television, This House Possessed managed to have plenty of weird to pass around. Starring Parker Stevenson and a bunch of people you’ve never heard of (the notable exceptions being fantastic character actor Barry Corbin and Slim Pickins), the movie tells the story of a house that really isn’t possessed at all. After a lot of confusion, misunderstandings and outright house-on-person killings, it turns out the house is sentient, and thanks to a technology update it’s able to show its affection for Stevenson’s girlfriend by murdering anyone who tries to take her away.

Honestly, that’s all you need to know. The movie is pretty ridiculous but it redeems itself by joyfully pulling out all the stops television Standards and Practices would allow. As I said earlier, there’s only one scene that made a lasting impact, but what an impact it was. Thanks to this, I got into the habit of showering with one eye open for longer than I care to admit. If I think of it even now, I’ll painfully peek through suds just to make sure my water is still just water.

Thanks a lot, Parker Stevenson.

Countdown to Halloween: You know what to do. Now do it.

I’ll be on the road today, so I thought it would be a good time to get reacquainted with The Hitcher (the 1986 original). And no, I will not be picking up any hitchhikers on the way.

Countdown to Halloween: Special anniversary edition

I’ll be honest with you — Needful Things is not a scary movie.

Sure, it’s based on a Stephen King story about the Devil himself coming to a small New England town, offering people what they want and exacting a little murder and mayhem as the price of doing business. There are some “Boo!” type jumps here and there, and Max von Sydow delivers a cheeky performance as an appropriately devil-may-care Satan. For the most part, though, there isn’t much scare there.

But I will always have a soft and treasured spot in my heart for this film because it was the first movie I went to see with my then-future wife. Today is our 16th wedding anniversary, and those years together have been anything but a horror movie.

Countdown to Halloween: Where … ?

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. It gives us a lifelong love for things that can be shared passions or complete crap to other people. Sometimes that love is reinforced by being re-experienced – watching a favorite movie over and over, or faithfully showing up for 80s night at the club.

But sometimes it makes you wonder what the hell you were thinking.

I was lucky enough to see 1976’s Food of the Gods in the theater (I was six — my parents had a very open-minded view on kids and movies). Naturally, it scared the cheese out of me. Giant rats, giant bugs, giant chickens … have you ever been chased by a chicken? I have, and I can tell you that as a fairly high-strung kid, this wasn’t helping.

But looking at it now … well, Food of the Gods is kinda charming, what with its trying-as-hard-as-it-can special effects and goofy dialogue (and the ending, which I won’t spoil, is still killer). Speaking of goofy dialogue, be sure to stick around until the end of this clip — it’s worth its weight in giant rubber chickens.

Countdown to Halloween: It’s a real good thing you did, Anthony

Growing up in El Paso at a time when cable was still a relatively new thing, I was lucky that one of the small number of channels we got was KTLA, a longtime and fairly well-known station broadcasting out of Los Angeles. At the time I didn’t know anything about KTLA except that it was more than happy to give me regular fixes of the Three Stooges, Little Rascals and old Popeye cartoons.

Most importantly, though, it was the first pusher responsible for my lifelong addiction to The Twilight Zone. So many of those iconic episodes are the reason I got into sci-fi and horror in the first place, giving me a solid foundation in the weird. Of course, Twilight Zone also creeped me right out and I learned to look sideways at talking dolls, ventriloquist dummies and signposts up ahead warning that the next stop might be an ironic comeuppance.

This series of clips from “It’s a Good Life” stars the kid from Lost in Space (another show I watched thanks to KTLA) as a nearly omnipotent brat with a cruel streak who terrorizes the people still left in town. The episode is peppered with icky bits — three-headed gopher, anyone? — but the part that got me was the “jack-in-a-box.”

You’ll see what I mean.