The C. Dennis Moore Horror Movie Guide, Vol. 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Asian Invasion:

Bestseller * Ju-On: White Ghost/Black Ghost

Loner * Meatball Machine

Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait * Pulse

Blaxploitation:

Abby * Blackenstein * Blacula

Charles Band Attacks:

Doll Graveyard * Ragdoll

Dollman * Demonic Toys

Dollman Vs. Demonic Toys * The Dollman/Demonic Toys Box Set

The Gingerdead Man * The Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust

The Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver

Decadent Evil * Skull Heads * Killer Eye: Halloween Haunt

Witchouse * Witchouse 2: Blood Coven * Witchouse 3: Demon Fire

Midnight Horror Collections:

Blood Predators

The Vampire Conspiracy * Fist of the Vampire

Curse of the Wolf * Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned

Bloody Slashers

Room 33 * Hoboken Hollow

Curtains * Secrets of the Clown

Road Trip to Hell

Sheltered * The Craving

Feeding Grounds * Hell’s Highway

Netflix Queue (& misc. DVDs):

100 Million BC * Alien Abduction * ATM

The Bell Witch Haunting, * The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari * Creep Van

Crooked House * Dark Touch * Death of the Virgin

Exorcism: The Possession of Gail Bowers * For Sale By Owner * Frankenstein’s Army

Giallo * Halloween Night * Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron

I Am Omega * Isolation * Journey to the Center of the Earth

Madison County * Midnight Movie * Monster Brawl

My Little Eye * The Open Door * Series 7: The Contenders

Stoker * The Surge * S&Man

The Tall Man * Toad Road * V/H/S

V/H/S 2 * Walled In

Paranormal Entity:

Paranormal Entity * 8213: Gacy House

Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes * 100 Ghost Road: The Return of Richard Speck

Asian Invasion

Know what I love about Asian horror movies?  There’s no Hollywood involved.  Now, I don’t know what the Asian equivalent of Hollywood is, if there even IS an equivalent, but I don’t see any hints of things like focus groups and studio intrusion like you see in pretty much every movie Hollywood churns out.  I can’t imagine a focus group of randomly selected individuals having any input on the success of these movies.  What kind of focus group would even want anything to do with a movie like MEATBALL MACHINE?

These just aren’t those kinds of movies.  Or maybe they are.  Hell, what do I know?  But Asian Hollywood or not, these are some brave movies, as are most of the movies I see coming from the Asian market.  There’s so much more focus on the look of a movie, on making sure it’s visually striking, than there is on whether the guy gets the girl in the end or on who’s got the better one-liner.

Good or bad, there’s more true art in an Asian horror movie than in anything Hollywood has turned out in the last ten years.

This is a very small sampling of the Asian horror in my Netflix queue, and, to be honest, I only watched and reviewed them when I did because I had a week to do so before they came off instant streaming, and I didn’t want to miss them.

However, being forced to watch them sooner doesn’t negate the effect they had or the enjoyment I got from them.  There are plenty more Asian horror reviews to come from me, but for now, this is a sampler.

Bestseller:

The funny thing about Jeong-ho Lee’s 2010 movie BESTSELLER is that it’s a movie about a bestselling writer who is accused of plagiarism and, when she finally manages to write another book two years later, is accused of it a second time.  Yet the entire second half of the movie—an hour’s worth of material—is pretty much copying the movie A STIR OF ECHOES with Kevin Bacon (I’m tempted to say it’s copying the Richard Mattheson story, but I’ve not read it and don’t know how similar the original story is to the eventual movie.  So anyway...), which, that right there is about the biggest spoiler you can get.  That’s not to accuse Lee of anything.  But it’s worth noting.

In this movie, writer Hee-soo retreats to a villa in a remote town in order to try writing a new book.  It’s been two years since her last one, which brought ruin to her career when she was accused of plagiarizing a novel she had previously read as a judge for a writing competition.  But now it’s time to get back to work, so, along with her daughter, she tries again.

She is having trouble, though.  Writer’s block, self-doubt, fear, it could be any number of things that’s keeping her from being able to write a new book.  Her daughter, however, has a story to tell her about a woman who came to this house once to meet with a man who wanted to take her away.  But something went wrong and the girl died.  Her daughter says her friend told her this story.  Only there’s no one else in the house.

Desperate, Hee-soo writes the story and it becomes a bestseller.  Until four weeks later when another novel shows up, published several years before her, that not only tells the same story, but has the exact same ending.

She didn’t plagiarize it, Hee-soo insists.  Her daughter told her the story, and there’s no way her daughter would have read that novel, she’s barely old enough to read as it is.

And this is when the twist comes in and BESTSELLER moves from one type of movie to an entirely different one.  And if you ask me, that second half was the better movie, even if it was stolen...

Once that first big mid-movie twist happens, one you definitely won’t see until it’s right there, the rest sort of falls into place and the last half of the movie is pretty easy to figure out.  And normally, while that would spell boring, writer/director Lee is skilled enough with the camera that he keeps things interesting and holds your attention even after you’re suddenly no long invested in the backstory or in what’s coming next.

Jeong-hwa Eom as Hee-soo gives a great performance as the struggling writer.  I was disappointed that more time wasn’t spent on the writer aspects of her character.  They showed the struggle and even that moment in the story when something happens and even the writer didn’t expect it—which happens frequently and it’s always a nice surprise—but the writer in me just wanted more of that.

But while I’m asking for more of something, I also think the movie, at an hour and fifty-seven minutes, is too long.  I understand all of that first hour build up was necessary to get the proper impact when things start to happen.  It’s the second half of the movie, the part with action where things are finally happening and getting really exciting, that I think could have been trimmed down.  It’s the action-packed half of the movie, but I still think a good 10-15 minutes could have been shaved off, especially during that last half hour, which is funny because the last half hour was almost nothing but action.  Still, it felt like overkill and I started getting bored since all of the pieces had already fallen into place and it was then just a matter of wrapping things up in a satisfactory manner.

Sure, the end WAS satisfying, but anyone who didn’t see it coming a mile away was busy playing on their phone or dozing off.  As an experience, though, I enjoyed BESTSELLER, if for no other reason than that mid-point twist.  It’s nice to watch a movie that still has ability to surprise.  Since this was his first movie, I’d be curious to see what Lee comes up with next; he’s obviously got talent.  Hopefully the next one won’t leave me saying Yeah, I’ve already got this movie, and Kevin Bacon doesn’t make me read subtitles.

Ju-On: White Ghost/Black Ghost:

I usually watch movies on my laptop, in my office with the lights out and my headphones on.  It’s not often—and by that I mean never—that something freaks me out so bad I think about getting up to turn on the light before I finish the movie.  But JU-ON: WHITE GHOST/BLACK GHOST did it within the first five minutes.

Unfortunately, it didn’t keep that momentum and I made the other hour and fifty-five minutes just fine.

This movie is actually a collection, featuring two hour-long short films titled White Ghost and Black Ghost, set in the world of Takashi Shimizu’s JU-ON series (THE GRUDGE for US readers), released to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his franchise.  In the series, they make up the 5th and 6th installments.

The first story, White Ghost, starts with a delivery man (Japanese names are hard for me to keep straight, so looking back at the cast, I have no idea who played what part in the story) bringing a Christmas cake to a house one morning only to find the place is full of dead bodies.  In the kitchen, he’s confronted by one of the best jump scares I’ve ever experienced as one of the spirits confronts him.

Cut to a taxi and a father is dropping his daughter off a few blocks from school because showing up in a cab is asking to be bullied, she says.  She notices something in the back seat has gotten on her backpack and after she leaves, her father, who says it must have been left by his previous customer, starts to clean the mess when he’s confronted by something that attacks him.

Several years later, the daughter is grown up and in high school when she begins having visions of an old classmate from when she was nine, a girl whose family was slaughtered.  And this brings us to the main story.  The slaughtered family, consisting of grandmother, father, step mother, failure of a son, daughter with an illegitimate child, and the child herself (classmate of the girl in the cab) have moved into a house where forces begin to have a negative effect on the son who, after countless attempts, still hasn’t passed his bar exam.  This is where things may get confusing because if I’m understanding it correctly, the voices that drive him to do what he does come from the future?

This is the thing that’s always got to me about the JU-ON movies, the timeline is so twisted, stories folding back on themselves, the narrative weaving between three or four different stories all at once until you get to the end and finally—hopefully—see what the full picture looked like.

White Ghost, for me, was a great success.  And that grudge ghost, holy crap.  Jeeze!

As for Black Ghost, maybe it’s best to quit while you’re ahead.

This one is way simpler in terms of basic idea, but way more complicated in terms of execution and making sense of it all.

Fukie is a young girl in the hospital with a mysterious illness until a scan reveals she has cysts near her ovaries, which turn out to be her unborn twin, with apparently has a grudge against its parents for not giving birth to it.  So the Ju-on curse is born and everyone who comes into contact with the girl is killed.

The biggest failure of this short, for me, was in the ghost.  The apparition in White Ghost was seriously terrifying, a classic ju-on style ghost with a few modifications that make it all the more horrible.  The one in Black Ghost, however, just looks like that rubbed come black paint on a girl and called it a day.  She’s not even a scary-looking girl.

Meh.

Also, the story just seemed silly.  The ghost is angry because her parents never gave birth to her?  Like it was their fault.  What’s to hold a grudge for?  There was no violence or extreme pain involved when the fetus was absorbed by its stronger twin, so how does that fit into the guidelines already established in this world?

The acting was pretty good, but I spent most of my time reading the subtitles, which always distracts from the performances.  Production qualities looked pretty decent, too, with both movies having one big effects moment each—while White Ghost was the better movie, Black Ghost had an exorcism effect that was so awesome I wouldn’t be surprised to find out the entire story had been written around that one image.

As a whole, I’m glad I got to see both films; they add to my general fund of knowledge and both are inspirational in their own ways.  But taken individually, White Ghost is the one to look for.  For fans of movies that actually have the ability to scare you, White Ghost does a great job, is very high on tension, and, in the end, tells a better, more comprehensive story.  I do, however, recommend seeing both if you can.

Loner:

I’m not sure what I was expecting going into writer/director Jae-shik Park’s 2008 movie LONER, but I guarantee you it wasn’t this.

The synopsis tells us a teenage girl, after the suicide of her best friend, becomes a recluse and starts talking to someone no one else can see, until the family hires a psychiatrist to talk to her.

That’s not exactly the case.

Soo-na is devastated over the suicide of her best friend, Ha-jeong, and she does lock herself in her room, and she does have a friend no one else sees.  As for the psychiatrist, Soo-na’s uncle is dating a psychiatrist, and they don’t exactly hire her, she goes to the bedroom door and tries to talk to Soo-na on her own—that is until a drill bit pierces the door and almost her ear.

There’s a lot more to it than that, though.

Soo-na has spent 17 years believing her parents are dead, but when she discovers the truth, she begins to lose all hope for happiness.  Meanwhile, the presence in her room with her is dragging her further and further down a path from which there will be no return.  And Soo-na’s uncle, who has raised her her entire life, is getting more and more desperate to bring her out of her depression.

Add in a series of murders in the house—first the maid, then Soo-na’s grandmother—and it certainly seems as if the entire house is falling under the shadow of Soo-na’s mood.

Park squeezes a lot of tension out of every scene by giving us only a small part of the story and letting our own imaginations provide the rest.  And when the twist ending came, I didn’t expect it at all.  I like that in a movie, as long as the twist is plausible.  This one definitely worked.

The acting and effects were also very good—minus some really bad CGI cockroaches.  In fact, I only had two problems with LONER.  First, it’s too long.  At an hour and forty-five minutes, twenty of those feel like filler.  I know Soo-na’s friend’s suicide is the motivation for the rest of the story, but there was just too much detail there, most of which could have been summed up a lot quicker.

Second, the subtitles.  Whoever wrote those things obviously does not count English as their first language.  Nor was there a spellchecker involved.  At one point, stop is spelled stp and mentioned is spelled meantioned.  But the spelling wasn’t the biggest problem.  The broken English was.  Half the lines had to be deciphered while reading them.  At one point, the psychiatrist tells a friend, I’m not stupid, but I just jealous the past of a woman.  At another, someone says, You don’t know the pain of being hurt so nakedly.  I was being low profile and took the pain quietly.

Yeah, you can figure out what these lines are actually saying, but should you have to?  For me, that was really the biggest problem here, and one it was very hard to look past.  If think if the first half hour to forty-five minutes was edited down to half that time, then someone who spoke English retyped the subtitles, LONER would be a much better film.  It’s certainly got the makings of a better film, and deserves to be enjoyed.

This is Park’s first and only movie, so far.  I’d like to see what else he can do after this.  LONER wasn’t the movie I was expecting, but for the most part I liked what I saw.

Meatball Machine:

2005’s MEATBALL MACHINE can best be described as David Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME meets DRAGON BALL Z.  Written by Jun’ya Kato (DEATH TRANCE) and directed by Yudai Yamaguchi (THE ABC’S OF DEATH, segment J) and Jun’ichi Yamamoto (on whose original 1999 version of the same name this film is based), MEATBALL MACHINE is sort of a love story at heart.

Machinist Yoji has a crush on a girl, Sachiko, who works next door to the machine shop where he works.  He stumbles upon her one night on his way home, she’s out with a group of people and the man she’s talking to manages to get her alone so he can seduce her.  She tells him no, but the guy insists she wants it anyway.  Yoji steps in, gets a beat down, then the would-be rapist stalks off.  Sachiko helps Yoji get home where they are just about to reveal their mutual crushes on one another, but Sachiko becomes emotionally overwhelmed when she begins to suspect Yoji won’t want her because she’s scarred up from an abusive childhood.

The emotions awaken the thing Yoji has hidden in his closet.  The night before he found something in the garbage.  He doesn’t know what it is, but it looks like it’s made of metal and is, as far as he can tell, indestructible.  In reality, it’s a carrier for an alien parasite, which is attracted to negative emotions, so when Sachiko gets upset, the parasite latches on.  The process involves changing a person’s physical makeup, integrating a kind of biological metal the sprouts from Sachiko’s chest and arm.

The alien takes over and Yoji passes out, only to wake some time later in the home of a man who, with his daughter, has been hunting the parasites.  He explains what they are, to the best of his knowledge, then explains the parasites always seek each other out and fight to the death, the winner eating the loser.  He’s been breeding them in a back room because his daughter, while not taken over, has been infected nonetheless.  So he infects Yoji because, as previously stated, they eat each other.  And his daughter is getting hungry.

Yoji, however, is more concerned with Sachiko and saving her from the parasite.  He fights back against the parasite, kills it—but is