Editorials
Best & Worst ’10: HORROR GUY KEENAN’S TOP 10 OF 2010
It was a rough year finding good horror films in theaters. The last two years seemed to have some great gems. Not to mention a lot of theaters pulled some great horror movies out way to early (but I won’t go into that whole shenanigans right now). I had to look elsewhere for decent horror and stumbled upon a few I think will be soon to be classics. So read below and check out my top list of 2010.
BC (Best/Worst) | Micah (Best/Worst) | Keenan (Best/Worst) | Theo (Best/Worst)
Best One Sheets | Worst One Sheets
Most Memorable Moments | Top Trailers | Memorable Quotes
HORROR GUY KEENAN’S TOP 10 OF 2010
The first Paranormal Activity was huge success in theaters, it was no surprise a second installment would get green lit. People all over demanded this film just as much, if not more than the first. The film promised more scares then the first and it delivered. What I really liked about this film is that it takes place during and after the first film, so you get to see certain scenarios intertwine with scenes from the first film. It also really delves into Katie’s family history a bit more but doesn’t give too much away. This installment also plays with the audience. Knowing when the sun goes down the scares come out. Or when someone’s talking a scare cannot happen. Paranormal 2 really learns what worked and what didn’t in the first film and plays off that. Paranormal 1, to some people, is the scariest film they have ever seen. It’s great to see a second installment in a series keep the scares cracked up to eleven and then go beyond that.
This is a film done by Edward Douglas the composer of Midnight Syndicate. His music has been playing in haunted attractions for years now and he finally gets to take a dip in the vast directing pool. The Dead Matter is just as haunting and creepy as the gothic soundtracks Ed puts together every year.
The film tells the story of a woman who wants to contact her deceased brother and stumbles upon a relic that can control the dead. She ends up getting mixed up with two warring vampire lords who want to control the power of the relic, where as one vampire hunter wants nothing more than to just destroy it. The Dead Matter feels like a story right out of the popular role playing game ‘World of Darkness’ bringing different fictional creatures together into the same world. I hope to see more installments in the Midnight Syndicate series in the near future just as good as this one.
The Wolf Man had a slew of problems getting a solid release date. Pretty much pushing the film back almost two years later. I wouldn’t say the outcome was the best but, I certainly enjoyed what I watched. Just as long as The Wolfman did not turn out to be another CG adventure romp like Universal’s last take on the classic monster series with Van Helsing, I would be ok with it. This Wolfman’s story is quite different from the original 1941 classic. It had a strong Victorian/gothic feel to it which I really enjoyed. Throwing Talbot’s father into the mix was really something new and enjoyable for the story as well. Rick Baker’s make-up FX on the Wolfman was nothing short of amazing. Even the gore was amped up way more than I ever thought Universal would allow. A lot of problems dealt with the score which Danny Elfman composed. But the end result was flat out magnificent and is now my favorite score of 2010. As I said before, I know this film wasn’t perfect but I enjoyed the hell out of this in the theaters. And if anything just watch this for the medical scene. You won’t regret it.
When I heard Martin Scorsese was doing a supernatural thriller I about shat myself! Though, once I watched the trailer I was a bit concerned. Could I already know the twist before even seeing the film? It looks that way at first but this is really a smart film that takes you one way and turns you another. I’m not a huge Leonardo DiCaprio fan but he was really captivating in this film and made me a fan. Also starring in the film is Jackie Earle Haley who stars in the film for just a short moment but really does a wonderful job portraying a psycho patient in the asylum and really became the face of Shutter Island for me. Scorsese does a great job with the writing material he was given and really came along way in executing the film beautifully. The outcome may not be what you expect but you are still floored by the journey. A real work of art in my opinion.
Now I watch a lot of the ‘8 Films to Die For’ movies and they all end up being pretty low key. Nothing memorable, and nothing to rant and rave about. Which is why I was amazed by this film. Dread was directed by up and coming director Anthony DiBlasi. DiBlasi works closely with Clive Barker on a lot of his short story adaptations, such as The Midnight Meat Train, Book of Blood and even the up and coming Hellraiser remake. Dread is a story about three college students who set out to document what other people dread most. What sets Dread apart from a lot of Clive’s other stories is that it takes place in the real world, which really creeps the crap out of me. The story expands more than just what scares people and really starts to mess with the students conducting the studies. Making certain characters go off the hinge and start doing some really horrible and disgusting things to each other. You can’t expect anything less from a horror master like Clive Barker with DiBlasi by his side.
I, like most horror fans was very skeptical about the remake to Tomas Alfredson 2008 instant classic Let the Right One In. It was a beautiful story already and I felt it had no reason to be remade in the first place. But I have to remember we live in America and Hollywood doesn’t have any original ideas anymore so they have to go and steal other great films from around the world and remake them. I felt the same way about [Rec] and the soon to be remade, Martyrs. But Let Me In does something most other foreign remakes don’t. It improved on the story and added certain elements from the book written by John Ajvide Lindqvist that the Swedish film adaptation skipped over. Now I’m not saying that the remake is better than the original. But both have their own great qualities. By all means don’t limit yourself to just the remake. Go out and watch the original. Both child stars in the remake do a remarkable job at making the relationship between Oskar (Owen) and Eli (Abby) believable. Even the violence is more on par to the book then in the Swedish version. All in all, I’m just happy to see that Cloverfeild director Matt Reeves did not butcher such a beautiful story. It’s also nice knowing more people have a chance to see one of the best vampire stories of all time.
After the success of Adam Green’s 2006 slasher flick Hatchet, Green went scouting to the snowy mountains of Utah looking to film his next big thriller Frozen. The story is very simple. Three twenty something’s go skiing and con a ski lift operator to let them ride the slopes up for free. Once on the lift the operator switches out with someone else and a bit of confusion is set in that ends with one of the operators shutting down the lift for the weekend, leaving the three kids stuck high in the freezing cold.
Think Open Water but a lot less boring. Green does a great job of investing time in getting to know the three characters and helping you relate to them. So when certain horrifying obstacles come their way you really fear for these kids. The whole time I was watching the film I would ask myself “What would I do if I were in that situation?” And pretty much all the outcomes are played out magnificently! I definitely think Frozen is the best ìstrandedî type film I have ever seen. I personally cannot stand the cold (hence why I live in Florida) so this flick was painful for me to watch. And I don’t see myself ever going snowboarding again. Thanks Adam Green.
A lot of Australian horror films have been coming out in the last year. They really have been putting out some Grade-A horror over there. Now I wouldn’t call Coffin Rock a horror as much as I would call it a suspense thriller. But if the scenario that played out in the film happened to me then hell yeah I’d call it horror! The film follows a married couple who are trying to have a baby with no luck. The young woman goes out drinking one night stressed about her situation when she runs into a young stranger and makes the mistake of sleeping with him. Little does she know that the young man is bat shit crazy and is going to pull the Fatal Attraction card on her. Coffin Rock is a really intense film till the very end and never gets dull. It also has few real disturbing scenes involving animals as well. Coffin Rock really makes you think twice about sleeping around with just anyone. Who knows what kind of skeletons they may hide in there closet.
Remember that girl who asked you out to prom and you politely turned her down because you were already going with someone else? Well what if she wasn’t going to take no for an answer? That’s the case in this intense Australian horror film. Though, there is much more to this film than that. It really has everything from pristine and painful to watch gore to beautify set up shots. I would really love to say more about this film but I may give too much away. You really should just see it for yourselves when it releases state side early next year.
Director Alex Aja has been very hit or miss as of late. The Hills Have Eyes remake was far better than the original, delivering amazingly brutal scenes and intense gore. Whereas Mirrors lacked in storytelling, it had one of the most brutal death scenes I had seen in theaters last year. I wasn’t really sure what to think when going into see the remake to Roger Corman’s 1978 classic? I mean the original as fun as it was lacked quite a bitÖeven if it was film about killer Piranha’s. Well this remake really knocked me on my ass. Piranha 3D was MADE for fans of gore. I mean people’s faces get ripped off; they get torn in half, upside down, inside out. The list just goes on and on. You can’t really look to much into the plot seeing as how it’s a film about god damn prehistoric man-eating fish killing people, so that is already out the window. Not to mention we get to see great actors like Richard Dreyfuss and Christopher Lloyd come back to the big screen just to have fun. But the movie centers on the kills and it does it splendidly. The make up team killed it on this film! If you missed the 3D version of the film, it’s really ok. The 3D is just as good as the 3D in Clash of the Titans which was horrible. But the great thing about Piranha is that it doesn’t even need the 3D to be good. It’s already a fantastic blood soaked film all on its own!
This was possibly the best documentary on a film series I have ever seen. It blows away docs like His Name Was Jason and the Halloween 25 years of Fear documentaries. Never Sleep Again really gets down into the nitty-gritty reality of making the nightmare movies from how certain shots were really done, who hated who on set, what certain underlining messages really meant in the films and so on. Not to mention pretty much everyone involved in these movies (besides Johnny Depp who couldn’t make the recording) is in this thing. I’m talking everyone from Gaffer #2 to Wes Craven. And you get your monies worth. This 2 disk set is LONG and enjoyable till the very end.
Have been a huge fan of Robert Kirkman’s comic series since issue one and I am still current to this day. I was very excited to see “The Walking Dead” get picked up by AMC. Not only do I get a fantastically original zombie episode every week on cable tv, but it’s done by non other the Frank Darabont who worked on The Mist film adaptation along with a slew of other amazing films. The series has really taken shape so far this season since it aired on Halloween night and is growing by each episode. The great thing about “The Walking Dead” is that sometimes you may not even see a zombie one whole episode, but that the undead are almost an afterthought with the characters holding amazing performances. In a zombie apocalypse if you take everything away from someone, how do they cope with that? We get to see these people go off their rocker and have to deal with life. And to me that is the most frightening thing next to zombies. “The Walking Dead” is currently airing on AMC, Sunday nights and is already in preproduction on season 2 after all the positive feedback it has gotten this last season.
This film is pretty much everything I expected out of the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. Amazingly creepy dream sequences! When you have Hollywood backing a million dollar franchise and the CGI we have today, you would think Platinum Dunes could whip up some awesome and frightful scenes. Nope, we get some kids turning into dust and a few of the same shots from the original movie redone. Parasomnia really goes that distance in the dream world and is visually pretty freaky.
Soon after the New Hollywood generation took over the entertainment industry, they started having children. And more than any filmmakers that came before—they were terrified. Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), Eraserhead (1977), The Brood (1979), The Shining (1980), Possession (1981), and many others all deal, at least in part, with the fears of becoming or being a parent. What if my child turns out to be a monster? is corrupted by some evil force? or turns out to be the fucking Antichrist? What if I screw them up somehow, or can’t help them, or even go insane and try to kill them? Horror has always been at its best when exploring relatable fears through extreme circumstances. A prime example of this is Larry Cohen’s 1974 monster-baby movie It’s Alive, which explores the not only the rollercoaster of emotions that any parent experiences when confronted with the difficulties of raising a child, but long-standing questions of who or what is at fault when something goes horribly wrong.
Cohen begins making his underlying points early in the film as Frank Davis (John P. Ryan) discusses the state of the world with a group of expectant fathers in a hospital waiting room. They discuss the “overabundance of lead” in foods and the environment, smog, and pesticides that only serve to produce roaches that are “bigger, stronger, and harder to kill.” Frank comments that this is “quite a world to bring a kid into.” This has long been a discussion point among people when trying to decide whether to have kids or not. I’ve had many conversations with friends who have said they feel it’s irresponsible to bring children into such a violent, broken, and dangerous world, and I certainly don’t begrudge them this. My wife and I did decide to have children but that doesn’t mean that it’s been easy.
Immediately following this scene comes It’s Alive’s most famous sequence in which Frank’s wife Lenore (Sharon Farrell) is the only person left alive in her delivery room, the doctors clawed and bitten to death by her mutant baby, which has escaped. “What does my baby look like!? What’s wrong with my baby!?” she screams as nurses wheel her frantically into a recovery room. The evening that had begun with such joy and excitement at the birth of their second child turned into a nightmare. This is tough for me to write, but on some level, I can relate to this whiplash of emotion. When my second child was born, they came about five weeks early. I’ll use the pronouns “they/them” for privacy reasons when referring to my kids. Our oldest was still very young and went to stay with my parents and we sped off to the hospital where my wife was taken into an operating room for an emergency c-section. I was able to carry our newborn into the NICU (natal intensive care unit) where I was assured that this was routine for all premature births. The nurses assured me there was nothing to worry about and the baby looked big and healthy. I headed to where my wife was taken to recover to grab a few winks assuming that everything was fine. Well, when I awoke, I headed back over to the NICU to find that my child was not where I left them. The nurse found me and told me that the baby’s lungs were underdeveloped, and they had to put them in a special room connected to oxygen tubes and wires to monitor their vitals.
It’s difficult to express the fear that overwhelmed me in those moments. Everything turned out okay, but it took a while and I’m convinced to this day that their anxiety struggles spring from these first weeks of life. As our children grew, we learned that two of the three were on the spectrum and that anxiety, depression, ADHD, and OCD were also playing a part in their lives. Parents, at least speaking for myself, can’t help but blame themselves for the struggles their children face. The “if only” questions creep in and easily overcome the voices that assure us that it really has nothing to do with us. In the film, Lenore says, “maybe it’s all the pills I’ve been taking that brought this on.” Frank muses aloud about how he used to think that Frankenstein was the monster, but when he got older realized he was the one that made the monster. The aptly named Frank is wondering if his baby’s mutation is his fault, if he created the monster that is terrorizing Los Angeles. I have made plenty of “if only” statements about myself over the years. “If only I hadn’t had to work so much, if only I had been around more when they were little.” Mothers may ask themselves, “did I have a drink, too much coffee, or a cigarette before I knew I was pregnant? Was I too stressed out during the pregnancy?” In other words, most parents can’t help but wonder if it’s all their fault.
At one point in the film, Frank goes to the elementary school where his baby has been sighted and is escorted through the halls by police. He overhears someone comment about “screwed up genes,” which brings about age-old questions of nature vs. nurture. Despite the voices around him from doctors and detectives that say, “we know this isn’t your fault,” Frank can’t help but think it is, and that the people who try to tell him it isn’t really think it’s his fault too. There is no doubt that there is a hereditary element to the kinds of mental illness struggles that my children and I deal with. But, and it’s a bit but, good parenting goes a long way in helping children deal with these struggles. Kids need to know they’re not alone, a good parent can provide that, perhaps especially parents that can relate to the same kinds of struggles. The question of nature vs. nurture will likely never be entirely answered but I think there’s more than a good chance that “both/and” is the case. Around the midpoint of the film, Frank agrees to disown the child and sign it over for medical experimentation if caught or killed. Lenore and the older son Chris (Daniel Holzman) seek to nurture and teach the baby, feeling that it is not a monster, but a member of the family.
It’s Alive takes these ideas to an even greater degree in the fact that the Davis Baby really is a monster, a mutant with claws and fangs that murders and eats people. The late ’60s and early ’70s also saw the rise in mass murderers and serial killers which heightened the nature vs. nurture debate. Obviously, these people were not literal monsters but human beings that came from human parents, but something had gone horribly wrong. Often the upbringing of these killers clearly led in part to their antisocial behavior, but this isn’t always the case. It’s Alive asks “what if a ‘monster’ comes from a good home?” In this case is it society, environmental factors, or is it the lead, smog, and pesticides? It is almost impossible to know, but the ending of the film underscores an uncomfortable truth—even monsters have parents.
As the film enters its third act, Frank joins the hunt for his child through the Los Angeles sewers and into the L.A. River. He is armed with a rifle and ready to kill on sight, having divorced himself from any relationship to the child. Then Frank finds his baby crying in the sewers and his fatherly instincts take over. With tears in his eyes, he speaks words of comfort and wraps his son in his coat. He holds him close, pats and rocks him, and whispers that everything is going to be okay. People often wonder how the parents of those who perform heinous acts can sit in court, shed tears, and defend them. I think it’s a complex issue. I’m sure that these parents know that their child has done something evil, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are still their baby. Your child is a piece of yourself formed into a whole new human being. Disowning them would be like cutting off a limb, no matter what they may have done. It doesn’t erase an evil act, far from it, but I can understand the pain of a parent in that situation. I think It’s Alive does an exceptional job placing its audience in that situation.
Despite the serious issues and ideas being examined in the film, It’s Alive is far from a dour affair. At heart, it is still a monster movie and filled with a sense of fun and a great deal of pitch-black humor. In one of its more memorable moments, a milkman is sucked into the rear compartment of his truck as red blood mingles with the white milk from smashed bottles leaking out the back of the truck and streaming down the street. Just after Frank agrees to join the hunt for his baby, the film cuts to the back of an ice cream truck with the words “STOP CHILDREN” emblazoned on it. It’s a movie filled with great kills, a mutant baby—created by make-up effects master Rick Baker early in his career, and plenty of action—and all in a PG rated movie! I’m telling you, the ’70s were wild. It just also happens to have some thoughtful ideas behind it as well.
Which was Larry Cohen’s specialty. Cohen made all kinds of movies, but his most enduring have been his horror films and all of them tackle the social issues and fears of the time they were made. God Told Me To (1976), Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), and The Stuff (1985) are all great examples of his socially aware, low-budget, exploitation filmmaking with a brain and It’s Alive certainly fits right in with that group. Cohen would go on to write and direct two sequels, It Lives Again (aka It’s Alive 2) in 1978 and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive in 1987 and is credited as a co-writer on the 2008 remake. All these films explore the ideas of parental responsibility in light of the various concerns of the times they were made including abortion rights and AIDS.
Fifty years after It’s Alive was initially released, it has only become more relevant in the ensuing years. Fears surrounding parenthood have been with us since the beginning of time but as the years pass the reasons for these fears only seem to become more and more profound. In today’s world the conversation of the fathers in the waiting room could be expanded to hormones and genetic modifications in food, terrorism, climate change, school and other mass shootings, and other threats that were unknown or at least less of a concern fifty years ago. Perhaps the fearmongering conspiracy theories about chemtrails and vaccines would be mentioned as well, though in a more satirical fashion, as fears some expectant parents encounter while endlessly doomscrolling Facebook or Twitter. Speaking for myself, despite the struggles, the fears, and the sadness that sometimes comes with having children, it’s been worth it. The joys ultimately outweigh all of that, but I understand the terror too. Becoming a parent is no easy choice, nor should it be. But as I look back, I can say that I’m glad we made the choice we did.
I wonder if Frank and Lenore can say the same thing.
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