Abusement Park

Last weekend, Kathy and I headed south to the Monster-Mania horror convention, hooking up with a friend we hadn't seen in years, and eventually sharing an elevator with Gary & Jake Busey. (I get the feeling that if Gary Busey crosses your path, you're jinxed, but I crossed paths with him a second time, hopefully nixing the jinx.)

While we were there, we went to the premiere screening of an as-yet-unreleased film, Closed for the Season. It wasn't remotely good. Which is fine -- sometimes (especially with horror films) "good" isn't precisely what you're looking for.

But what you're looking for is usually better than this.

It's a haunted amusement park story, with Aimee Brooks as The Girl, Damien Maffei as The Guy, and Joe Unger as The Carny. (The character's names are actually Kristy, James, and...  well, the Carny, but they're hardly names you need to know.) Apparently the amusement park is angry at being abandoned after a kid flew off a roller coaster 20 years ago and impaled himself on a tree and just lay there with a severed spine for hours (days?), and years ago Kristy lost a stuffed teddy bear there, and... hell, there's no way to explain this. The movie tries, every now and then, and when it does, it becomes impossible to focus. If you try too hard, your brain will turn into Mike and Ikes.

What's happening is that the amusement part is making Kristy and James hallucinate horrible things that they were afraid of in the amusement park when they were kids. There's the Lake Monster, the alligator wrestler, the notion that mobsters buried people under the rides. There's the giant Civil War soldier who hung people high up in trees until their flesh was picked clean and they became just bones, bleaching in the sun. And there's the creepy carny, dressed like a (creepy) clown. Sometimes he has a backup band.

All the hallucinations give the filmmaker (writer-directer Jay Woelfel) an opportunity to film all the gore scenes he wants (such as, say, an alligator ripping off someone's leg) without having to deal with any of the consequences. Problem is, when these events have no consequences, they also lose any of their effect on the audience. What's the point of watching, if nothing that happens matters? Furthermore, with all the emphasis on disorientation -- the characters are always trying to escape the park, but it never lets them -- it would be good to have some sort of handle on what the baseline reality is. Without that, the action becomes a confusing, muddled mess.

Complicating matters, at some point the characters split off into their own evil selves (in evil clown makeup, natch). In a completely unnecessary scene , we get to see Good Kristy getting raped by Bad James and the Carny, while Bad Kristy (and later, Good Kristy, because it's a hallucination) look on. (Also, her beloved stuffed bear gets kinda rape-y, as well.) This scene only exists--like most scenes in Closed for the Season, it has no bearing on the plot--because the writer/director thought it would be awesome. It's not. It's simply a gratuitous and ugly scene in what is otherwise a nonsensical, unentertaining trifle.

Plus: It's two hours long. It goes on and on, and every ending is a false one. Just when you think they've ridden all the rides and visited all the attractions, there's one more thing they have to check off their haunted to-do list. Their ride on the Ferris wheel -- earlier described as "the world's fastest" -- had all the excitement of cleaning the gutters, but none of the danger. If I'd had a box of Sno-Caps with me, I would have used the nonpareils to saw away at my own wrists.

Rob

Leftovers Again?

Blood Freak.

I can't believe I've seen this movie twice now. In the same year. I can't help but hope that it'll be the last time... but worry that I'll sit through it again, on some other late night, with some other friend.

This time, I rewound the second-to-last scene--an unwittingly ironic lecture by the Droning Cigarette Man--over and over, watching it three times, just losing it every time. It's unreal.

I haven't found it online yet, and I worry that if I do, it just won't be as funny to anyone who hasn't been beaten down by the first 70 minutes.

This may not just be the worst movie I've ever seen. This might be the worst movie there is.

Rob

Tryptophan Madness

They say if you eat a live frog every morning, nothing worse will happen to you or the frog for the rest of the day.

I saw Blood Freak at the very beginning of the year, and damned if it didn't taste like frog.

Blood Freak is a Very Special Splatter Movie. Half of it wants you to quit taking drugs and put your faith in the Lord... and the other half wants you to kick back and enjoy the mutant turkey-man bloodletting.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This guy Herschell--a big lug who looks too old for his hair--stops his motorcycle to help Angel, a pretty girl with engine trouble. Everything -- her car, his clothing -- is powder blue, so we know it's the Seventies. Herschell follows her to her pad, where her sister is having the world's tamest drug-fueled bacchanalia in her living room. Angel wants nothing to do with it, quoting some scripture about this or that. Like everything in the movie, this is all very half-hearted and obviously read from crib sheets just off camera.

Herschell just sits there like a lump. He's not going all Bibley like Angel, but he doesn't take any of Anne's drugs, either. Yet. (He should have saved us some time and went right to 'em, but he hems and haws for a few scenes.)

I should mention the Narrator. He's a chain smoker, and he appears on camera periodically like Vincent Price, gone to seed in a velor shirt. He, too, is reading from a crib sheet, pausing at unpredictable times, trying to mask it with a drag of his cigarette. Toward the end, he has a coughing fit that the director decided to keep in the final cut. He expounds on the evils of things like peer pressure and chemical dependency (thank you, Mr. Cigarette Man) and eating experimental turkey meat.

Yes. You Read That.

So Herschell, on the Straight And Narrow, gets a job with Angel's dad at his turkey farm. Then he hangs out at a backyard pool with Anne, who persuades him to have some weed. It's powerful stuff that her pusher boyfriend, Guy, gave her to hook Herschell when the big guy spurned her advances. Herschell takes a few tokes, and soon he's leading a life of debauchery with Anne, smoking up and getting it on and whoa! He's late for his job at the turkey farm!

When he gets there, he's shown around the farm, with a lot of long, slow shots of turkeys all gathered together. Then he's introduced to two turkey scientists, played by possibly the worst actors in the English-speaking world. They convince Herschell to eat their experimental turkey ("it's just government regulations that it be tested, it's no big deal, really") by offering to sweeten the pot with plenty of drugs. Turkey and drugs. They're like chocolate and peanut butter. How many of us have been led to the needle by our cravings for turkey?

So Herschell tears into a turkey for lunch, and before long is having the gobbler of all seizures. So the science-boys, like any responsible researchers, decide to dump the body where no one will find it: Somewhere else.

Naturally, Herschell wakes up with the head of a turkey and a thirst for blood. And because he still needs his fix, only junkie blood will do. After some tender moments with Anne (chicka-bawm!), he goes from place to place (I can only be vague here. The movie showed him walking over the same field a dozen times, and then suddenly he'd be somewhere else, sometimes even indoors) killing drug fiend after drug fiend. And by drug fiends, I mean somewhat attractive teenage girls, whom he hangs upside down to slit their throats and drink their blood. Somehow. With his awkward turkey beak.

Eventually, Anne meets a bad end and Herschell goes for revenge. He lumbers through a familiar field while her murderer runs for his life. Suddenly, he's behind the creep in a storage facility, and after a bit of wrangling, cuts his foot off with a power saw. Watching blud spurt from that stump is the feel-good moment of the movie, to be honest.

Then Herschell leaves the building (and crosses the field) and comes face to face with two stoners. Who, when Herschell kneels down in front of them and begs for mercy, chop his head off. (The director opts to cut to an actual turkey decapitation for this event, as the sight of a crappy mask on the ground might be too much for the squeamish.)

Then there's a quick, unsettling shot of everyone eating turkey, and then Whoa! What a crazy drug trip! Anne and Angel's dad rescues Herschell, who never went all turkey after all. Angel, working at a helpline of some sort, picks Herschell up in her car, where she teaches him to pray. And then he overcomes his addiction and winds up embracing Anne (alive again!) at the seashore. The End.

What's the moral here? Is it that the good girl never gets the guy? Is it that some funding comes with strings that might make you shoehorn a Christian anti-drug message into your horror movie? Or is it simply the Parable of the Frog?

2009. From here on out, all movies are genius.

Rob

This Is The Sound Of My Jaw Dropping

In retrospect, that Titans ad looks pretty good. This one (the cover for issue #3) has so much stupid packed onto a single page that it's hard to know where to start. Chin-sucking Starfire? Rubbery Flash? All the cheesy Photoshop lens flare effects?

Naw, it's gotta be Sharper-Image Cyborg. He looks like something you dangle over your flower pots to make your weed grow faster.

Rob
(Remember, you can click the image to enbiggen the awfulness!)

Coal For Your Stocking

Celene Dion. Singing what?

You don't wanna know.

Merry Christmas, everybody. Try to behave next year, willya?

Rob
(Via TPM, believe it or not)