Name a fantastic scene in an otherwise mediocre horror film.

Bill Cunningham - DisContent

The movie was RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3, starring an acquaintance of mine who worked for us on .COM FOR MURDER – Melinda Clarke (the “hot mom” on TV’s The OC).

In ROTLD3 Melinda did a great job being the “zombified” love interest who empowers herself by piercings and cuttings – the ultimate makeover. Suddenly, she was slicing and piercing and inserting broken glass where it shouldn’t be inserted, becoming this ultimate zombie badass (and yes, sexy) chick. It kept me from turning off the television. It probably did the same for a lot of other guys and gals.

If that scene hadn’t occurred, that movie would have been lost to memory like so many other zombie movies. As it was, I remembered the scene enough to tease Melinda about it. I also teased her about KILLER TONGUE…

Rod Lott - Bookgasm

I can think of two off the top of my head:

DEEP RED – In a masterstroke of misdirection, a quiet scene of ratcheted tension and suspense comes to a head when a ventriloquist’s dummy bursts out of a closet. Not from the middle of the frame, where the camera is focused on, but from the side. What makes it even worse is that the fucker is laughing. (I know it’s sacrilege to some to even suggest Dario Argento is mediocre, but this movie is narratively challenged to the point where it qualifies as a semi-snoozer.)

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT – People claim this movie is boring – and for about half of it, they’re right – but I’d like to think it’s all part of a master plan so it smack you over the head with the final image in the basement of that damn old house in the middle of the forest. Never has standing in the corner been so terrifying. Even though I knew what was coming, having my worst fears confirmed was utterly chilling.

Don May, Jr. - Synapse

The one scene that comes immediately to mind is the opening sequence of the recent Dark Castle/Warner release of GHOST SHIP. That sequence was so great and amazing! All those people getting cut in half. It was shocking, gory and made me smile. It really started off the movie with a bang… too bad the rest of the film is such a whimper.

Sean T. Collins - ADDTF

A pair leapt to mind, so I’m going to go with two, if that’s okay:

1) The suicide of the nanny at the beginning of The Omen. Oooh how I sighed when I saw countless articles refer to this summer’s Omen as “a remake of the ’70s horror classic”–there was very little “classic” about that turgidly staged Rosemary’s Baby/Exorcist knock-off–but that hideously monumental moment was a knockout. The nanny’s iconic positioning, her wide-eyed grin, her cheery “Look at me, Damien! It’s all for you!”, and the shocking suddenness of her demise added up to a scene far better than the movie it was stuck in.

2) The woman in room 217 from the TV mini-series version of The Shining. From start to finish this project felt like a Very Brady Shining– who wants to see a horror movie that reinforces the importance of family, for chrissakes? And Steve, my man, Kubrick never decided he could write novels better than you could, so how ’bout you extend him the reciprocal courtesy, m’kay? But when little bucktoothed Danny pulled back the curtain and saw that bright-eyed talking corpse looking back at him, my heart didn’t stop pounding until the next commercial break.

T Van - Tolerated Vandalism

I thought this was going to be an easy question to answer but it ended up being far more difficult than I imagined. I was going to talk about a scene in I Know What You Did Last Summer but after re-examining the scene I realized that I couldn’t call the film mediocre.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is a mediocre film. I enjoyed elements of it but compared to the original it really doesn’t stand up. The scene I’ve chosen to discuss is the opening sequence of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 which begins after the prologue and runs for approximately 9 minutes.

This scene focuses on two douchebags who are on their way to Dallas for the weekend. These guys totally epitomize 1980’s stereotypes of preppy jocks; from the Mercedes they are driving to their neatly coiffed hairstyles. These jerk offs call the local radio station and tie up the phone lines much to the chagrin of Stretch the DJ. They end up running a pickup off the road and head on down the highway. Day turns to night and Stretch wisely plays the Cramps and Oingo Boingo’s “No One Lives Forever.” Our two heroes have continued harassing Stretch and end up on a deserted bridge where they are confronted with the pickup they ran off the road. The driver wisely quips this classy line, “Back off pig fucker.”

The Mercedes moves forward and the chase is on. The pickup barrels across the bridge backwards when a shadowy figure in the pickup bed rises. The preps are disillusioned and the figure rises again, with a chainsaw in his hands. The Buzz is Back…and so is Leatherface. Stretch is still listening and ends up broadcasting the murder of these dicks on live radio.

Tom Savini does some great makeup work. Leatherface does a fantastic little dance with the corpse of the Hitchhiker from the first film. Tobe Hooper injects some humour into the scene and the actors pull it off. You don’t care about these guys and you’re glad to see Leatherface do his dirty work. Overall, this is a great scene because Leatherface is absolutely insane and it is a terrifying way to open the film. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 disappoints on some levels but the opening sequence is definitely worth a look for any horror fan.

David Zuzelo - Tomb It May Concern

My pick…The TrainSmashedFace of THE CHURCH.

Michele Soavi’s flick The Church is one of those films I’ve always wanted to like more. It has a good score, and a few nice touches, but it underwhelms me in that it so obviously wants to be a higher brow version of Demons and fails. Hell, it should be swatted for trying to plop artsy (and Boris Vallejo rips) on top of Italian Gore. BUT, it does have one of the all out best moments of the late cycle Italian Horror Film before it collapsed and became TV film-centric. As the hapless victims trapped inside The Church find their ways out, a couple decides to go digging through the bottom of one access tunnel. The girl is hung through the hole to take a look around and find that hoped for freedom. A light appears…two lights appear…and PLAP…her head turns into what appears to be a heavily frosted slab of face cake hitting a windshield as a frakkin’ TRAIN crushes her. Logic defying? Sure…but it makes me want to go back and watch the entire film again just to get to this sequence. Truly a fantastic moment in a film that meanders and wanders around-triumphing in a scene that rips the “stylish atmosphere” down and pounds the viewers eyesockets in the tradition of Fulci and yes…Lamberto Bava. Worth your DVD dollars for this alone.

Red Hawk - Happy Horror

I gave this a lot of thought over the past few days, and I decided to go with the movie “Asylum of Terror”, and the scene where the killer kills one of the two annoying kids in the movie. Before I saw this movie, the only time I could remember seeing a kid get killed in a horror movie was in Mimic. The movie in question was a super low budget one, with bad acting, bad sound, just all around bad, and the two little boys in the movie were extremely annoying. However, the movie somewhat redeemed itself by having one of the boys get tossed off of a staircase and onto what I think was a piece of rebar. Although one of the major sources of the movie’s downfall was removed, it still didn’t save it completely.

GlowStormLion - Fright Hounds

In Rachel’s Attic (which was good, but you know… a bit on the mediocre side in many respects) there’s a scene where a Dominatrix puts her submissive in a closet. His safe word is “orange crush”. Now the movie rolls on and the Dominatrix is killed and long after we’ve forgotten about him, the guy in the closet is suddenly heard screaming “ORANGE FUCKING CRUSH!” It’s so utterly ludicrous and disturbing on so many levels at the same time that it’s become somewhat of a catchphrase around my house. Good stuff!

Paul - Canuxploitation

Squrim (1976)
Jeff Lieberman’s run-of-the-mill killer worm flick has two brilliant moments that make it more memorable than it probably deserves to be. The first comes when buck-toothed cretin Roger (played by Tony Dow, better known as Wally on Leave it to Beaver) is out fishing and a couple of creepy nightcrawlers unexpectedly launch themselves at his face and burrow under his skin, sending him running away screaming in pain (and giving you in faint feelings of nausea). But don’t worry about ol’ Rog–he returns in time for the mind-blowing finale, in which a cabin is jammed so full with millions of icky, sticky worms that it’s literally bursting apart–an absolutely unforgettable image.

Warren - 150 Days of Sodom

Steven - The Horror Blog

Gravedigger looks great on paper. Ethan, a young man whose father is killed by a pack of assassins, seeks out and trains with an old kung-fu master in order to exact his vengeance. The twist is that the old master is an undertaker, and he teaches Ethan a brand of gravedigger kung-fu utilizing zombies as sparring partners.

In reality, Gravedigger is a grind. The characters’ fighting styles are weak, the dubbing is little more than mumbling, the pacing veers from horror to entirely inappropriate Benny Hill-style comedy, the music is a mix between 80’s synth-pop and filty polka, and the visual editing is so bad that there were times when characters were cut out of the scene and all you could see was a bowl of rice while the two hurl inaudible threats at one another from off-screen. Gravedigger’s greatest crime is that, despite everything I just said, it’s still not deliriously bad enough to be entertaining.

The only memorable thing about Gravedigger is the part of the training sequence where Ethan is forced to run across hills and splash through rivers with a coffin full of rocks on his back. Like an Asian mash-up of Rocky and Django, this was the only moment in the entire movie where what was shown onscreen fufilled the promise of the film’s concept. I will carry that image of a man learning kung-fu by carrying a coffin on his back within my heart for all my days.

My thanks to all the contributors. If you enjoyed their replies, please make sure to check out their blogs for more.

And if you’d like to join in the discussion, feel free to comment below.

Haunted Memories, makers of creepy changing portraits, has comissioned a new picture based upon macabre cartoonist extraordinaire Gahan Wilson. Scroll down to see it change before your very eyes!

Freddy Krueger special. A hairdresser in Australia has developed a workable scissor glove for trimming peoples’ bangs.

I wonder if Lion’s Gate will get in trouble for the new Saw poster like they did the last time. This one seems to be just as gruesome, if not moreso.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon’s underwater player, Ricou Browning, receives the first Film Florida Legends Award for his role.

Apparently, the percentage of romance novels with paranormal themes has grown from 14% to nearly 20% since 2004, and it continues to rise.

Slither director James Gunn takes a break from writing the script for Scratch to explain to the world exactly why Pixar’s movie Cars caused him to freak right the fuck out.

And tomorrow I will be forgoing my usual posts for a new weekly feature featuring the best and bloodiest bloggers on the horror scene. A kind of horror potluck, if you will. So pop in tomorrow and meet your neighbours.

I won’t be posting on Saturday, so i’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy Canada Day! And what better way to celebrate than with some good ol’ down and dirty Canuxploiation, eh?

Canuxploitation is by far the greatest place to find out everything you need to know about Canadian B-movies, and is one of my all-time favourite sites. Site creator Paul Corupe’s dedication to these throwaway films makes my heart swell with patriotism. Not only can you find reviews on practically every obscure no-budget Canuck film ever made, but Canuxploitation also has an excellent Downloads section, which includes snippets of dialogue from the aforementioned Rock ‘N Roll Nightmare to songs like the end theme from My Bloody Valentine.

Oh, Canada, We Stand On Guard For Thee!

The long-awaited, much-anticipated DVD release of Rock ‘N Roll Nightmare has finally arrived. This sweet slice of hair metal heaven is a Canuxploitation legend and worthy of the attention of the Gods themselves!

Don’t take my word for it. Synapse Films, the masterminds behind this special edition, have compiled a handy list of reviews for your perusal. But wait! Even more exciting is a link to an interview with Writer/Producer/Actor/God of Metal Jon Mikl Thor, the steely hand behind Rock ‘N Roll Nightmare! This is a man who was immediately placed on my top friends list on The Horror Blog MySpace as much out of awe and fear as respect.

But my hammer’s gotten more developed over the years, as well as the costuming, more leather and studs, and the hammer have gotten bigger and more powerful.

Intercessor Rides…Through The Night!

David Cronenberg is helping curate an exhibit on Andy Warhol at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in a few weeks. The AGO blog has an interesting quote from the director on Warhol’s influence.

“Andy was making underground films when I was making underground films, and I was more inspired by him than by Hollywood. He created himself: He was an outsider, a Slovakian, Catholic, gay, an artist, poor; an outsider in his own family, a triple outsider like Kafka, with his nose pressed against the New York window. And, he became the ultimate insider, the center of his own world, and drew people to him. He became a huge example of the invention of an identity.”

I may be passing through Toronto around the time of Cronenberg’s lecture. It might make missing The Woods screening at Fantasia easier to take.

Bookgasm recently showed some Kaiju love by reviewing the Marvel Monster collection. This book contains both the recent parodies/homages of the sub-genre released last year, and the atomic age comics that inspired them. These were the creatures that stalked the pages of Marvel Comics before the advent of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Avengers and most of the characters that made the company famous. In fact, in many of those early super-hero comics you can see Kirby and Lee easing into the super-hero racket by featuring bouts between the new-fangled heroes and the brutes that came before.

To whet your appetite for four-colour monster mayhem, may I suggest The Monster Blog, which not only tracks every monster comic Marvel produced back in the day, but is also home to every Kirby monster comic not yet reprinted in the modern era. From Monstro… The Menace From The Murky Depths to I Accepted The Deadly Challenge of Zarkorr, we’re talking 39 wonderful stories by the man who would become what many, including this author, believe to the greatest superhero artist who ever lived.

Don’t ask! Just click it!

As everyone already knows, a new Snakes on a Plane teaser trailer has hit the internet. I’m still excited about the film, but the teaser trailer left me a little cold. With all its quick cuts, sloppy pacing and weak score it felt more like a gangly teen fumbling open a bra than the second coming of cool. And if you’re introducing Samuel L. Jackson as the most dangerous mother fucker on the plane, show a close-up of his snarling, bleeding face, or a shot of him punching a snake, not a long shot of him walking through a door and giving a guy a high-five. That shit’s whiter than me.

In other Snakes on a Plane news, upon the advice of Snakes on a Blog I took a peek in my local bookstore to see if they had mistakenly placed the novelization on the shelf prematurely. They had. I am now the proud owner of the Snakes on a Plane novelization. For a sneak peek at the first exciting paragraph, click the link above.

“Trapezoid’s kisses burn.”

I caught the premiere episode of the previously mentioned stop-motion cartoon What It’s Like Being Alone on CBC last night. The show is of the cutesy gothic variety exemplified in Slave Labor Graphics titles like Lenore and Gloomcookie and the animated ouvre of Tim Burton. It revolves around a group of freakish orphans, including a pint-sized version of the Creature From The Black Lagoon, a child who is constantly aflame, a cyclops kid with no mouth, a two-headed baby and many more, as they attempt to find a way to escape their orphange.

As I’ve said before, I’m a huge fan of stop-motion animation. I love the how tactile and improvisational it appears. What It’s Like Being Alone has some wonderfully subtle acting, with most of the best gags being visual in nature. There’s one little bit with a worm and a creature in the rafters, and another with some dead bunnies, that lend the show the little details that make it just watchable. However, nearly everything else falls short.

One of the main problems with the show was that there were, as I’ve already mentioned, far too many characters competing for airtime, with the result being that I had forgotten about nearly half of them by the show’s end. In addition, What It’s Like Being Alone seems to be covering too many comedy bases, with an overabundance of fart jokes ruining what little quirky charm manages to be conveyed. By far the worst offence in the show is the grating voice acting for many of the characters. Special mention has to be made for the main character of this episode, Princess Lucy, who is so incredibly annoying that I was hoping the rest of the characters would feed her to the lake monster.

As someone who is all too aware that sometimes a show needs a few episodes to work the kinks out, and who was impressed by the concept, setting, character design and animation, I’m willing to give it another shot. I’d certainly like to see more of Aldous, Seymour Talkless, Armie and the rest of the gang, but if they’re going to be hanging out with bad apples like Princess Lucy, maybe they’re better off being left alone.

The crew at Lion in Zion have crafted one unsettling little short. A man visits his friends at their flat before heading out for a night on the town and slowly discovers that something is very, very off about the entire situation. The animation consists of large computer-generated heads grafted onto live-action bodies, a technique that I would normally abhor but which works wonderfully to give the entire thing an off-kilter, anxious look.

The longer I write this blog, the more I become convinced that the internet is just one big game of ‘Telephone’. The latest incident to provoke this theory is the recent news that a soon-to-be-released book on the making of Lady In The Water digs up some dirt on the executives at Disney. The article linked above details some of the more salient parts we can expect from The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, including a dinner conversation turned nasty between Shyamalan and Disney executives Nina Jacobson and Dick Cook.

When she told him that she and her boss, studio Chairman Dick Cook, didn’t “get” the idea, Shyamalan was heartbroken. Things got only worse when she lambasted his inclusion of a mauling of a film critic in the story line and told Shyamalan his decision to cast himself as a visionary writer out to change the world bordered on self-serving.

The verdict is pretty much evenly split among movie pundits as to whether this book means that Shyamalan is striking a blow for creative types everywhere or just acting like a little baby. One mistake that nearly everyone seems to be making is assuming that this really is exactly what happened. Even worse is the assumption being made that Shyamalan wrote the book himself, or at least brought it to fruition. Though the article states that Shyamalan is supportive of the book, other articles have made it clear that this is an unauthorized account. Perhaps the most shocking thing about both the article and reaction to it is that the words of the author, Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger, are being interpreted as quotes by Shyamalan himself.

In an interview, Bamberger said that in that section — like in several others — he was channeling Shyamalan’s deepest convictions, even though the book usually does not quote the writer-director directly.

“Night really let me get inside his head,” Bamberger said. “He told me what he was thinking, and I wrote it.”

Does that seem ridiculous to anyone else? There appears to be only one direct quote attributed to Shyamalan in the entire article, and if the brief snippets are anything to go by, the majority of the book will run the same course. Bamberger claims that he spent a large amount of time with the director, yet he has to resort to using his own interpretation of Shyamalan’s inner monologue. There are even “quotes” attributed to people from conversations from nearly a decade ago, and others that couldn’t have been taken at the time because the person quoted was presumably alone.

So what we have here is a number of people making judgements based on fragments printed in an article on an unpublished book by an author who is himself gathering second or third hand evidence when he isn’t producing them out of thin air. Add to this the fact that no one seems to have finished the article to see that in the end Shyamalan supposedly apologized for his conduct and admitted his mistake, all of which diminishes the cases both for and against him.

As for myself, i’d be a lot less hard on Shyamalan for any behaviour which isn’t yet attributable to him than I would for his alleged support for such incredibly florid writing.

“Sometimes Night would close his eyes and see little oval black and white head shots of Nina Jacobson and Oren Aviv and Dick Cook floating around in his head, unwanted houseguests that would not leave. The Disney people had gotten deep inside his head, interfering with the good work the voices were supposed to do — and it would be hell to get them out.”

Someone’s been borrowing from their old high school poetry again.

Not long ago various horror blogs engaged in a debate regarding increasing “realism” in current theatrical horror films. This blog came into the debate a bit late, but one thing I noticed is that the attributes attached to the films in question didn’t really pertain to them at all (and they probably wouldn’t have reached the neighbourhood multiplex if they did), but could probably be applied to lesser-known indie films. Another area in which this hyper-realism in horror movies occurs is in educational shorts, like the California Highway Patrol’s Red Asphalt series which was recently profiled in the Los Angeles Times.

“This is not a Hollywood movie as can be readily seen. The quality is below their standards. However … nothing has been staged. These are actual scenes taken immediately after the accidents occurred. Also, unlike Hollywood, our actors are paid nothing. Most of the actors in these movies are bad actors and received top billing only on a tombstone. They paid a terrific price to be in these movies, they paid with their lives.”

It’s funny that educational films are among the few things I can’t stomach to watch.

With the rise in mp3blogs and vinyl sharity, it’s become remarkably easy to find obscure horror soundtracks. Most of these treasures are collected together under a specific film which, while great, has the disadvantage of not giving a very diverse sampling of various composers’ styles. It’s rare to find a site which has that kind of diversity, but the Giallo Index is one such animal. While the sound quality isn’t the greatest, it does have the advantage of letting you sample tracks from 26 different gialli before committing yourself. Click on the CD covers to dowload the mp3s. Enjoy!

I’m not usually concerned about things being safe for work on The Horror Blog. The pictures accompanying posts are typically small and inoffensive, and odds are anyone visiting here is allowed a little bit of gruesomeness on their monitor at work or they probably wouldn’t be visiting a horror site at all.

That said, the following link is ABSOLUTELY NOT SAFE FOR WORK!

Cinema Sewer maven Robin Bougie has posted a number of scans from vintage men’s magazines he recently purchased, and they’re glorious. One of the scans is an excerpt from a story on survival, which includes boner-inducing depictions of cannibalism. Even more shocking is that this isn’t the weirdest thing he has to offer on his site. Go take a peek, perv.

The Onion’s AV Club has created a list of The 15 People You Meet Listening To DVD Audio Commentaries. It’s worth a look if you’re like me and plow through the special features, even though it spreads the joke a little thin. Of special interest to readers of this blog is number 10, The Smoker.

Listen to the clinking of lighters. Hear the satisfied exhalation of the first drag. Notice the slight mumbling caused by clenched lips. The Smoker can’t get through a track without indulging, and doesn’t care whether you notice. This type is especially common among the great horror directors. George Romero tends to cough his way through tracks, while it’s almost a pleasure to hear how much John Carpenter enjoys his smokes. Almost. (See also Kevin Smith.)

Maybe it’s just me, but this is the only type on the list that is given some small amount of respect.

A classic. An addled Crispin Glover shows off his mad kung-fu skills and tries to kick Letterman in the head. Any further commentary would be superfluous.