Halloween 2015 #11: The Fly (1986) - David Cronenberg

If you or a loved one is experiencing physical or romantic attraction to Jeff Goldblum and you want these feelings to stop, watch The Fly.

I can’t believe this movie exists! Someone just thought, “What if a human turned into a fly?” and this nightmare was born. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is great, but so terrifying.

Basically, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) invites a reporter, Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), over to his apartment to show her his amazing invention. It’s a teleporter! Thank god, no more LA traffic.

But after weeks of failed experiments where the teleporter cannot properly transport organic matter, Brundle decides to drunkenly use the machine on himself. There is, however, one small problem. 

The teleporter fuses the DNA of Seth Brundle and a stowaway fly. Thus begins a very slow and horrifying transformation, which includes a sequence where Brundle actually believes himself to be physically superior because of his newfound strength and energy.

Obviously things get much much worse after that.

Veronica straddles the line between a complete rejection of the hideous monster and a lingering love that she developed for the old Brundle.

But Brundle starts to lose his mind over the course of his transformation. 

Which makes it difficult for him to engineer a solution to his problem. As he becomes more physically a fly, he becomes more mentally a fly. Veronica wants to help and also wants to run for her life.

The final scene is incredibly graphic and disturbing, and apparently wasn’t even the most gruesome scene in the original cuts. According to Wikipedia, there was a famous sequence where Brundle teleports a cat and a baboon together and then an unbelievably deformed creature emerges from the Telepod. It attacks Brundle and he must kill it with a metal pipe. But early screeners found that this caused audiences to lose sympathy with Brundle, making the rest of the film fall flat, so it was cut. Also one audience member was confirmed as having thrown up during the scene.

But the film as it is works well to keep you feeling sorry for Brundle all the way to the bitter end. Not to mention the amazing, Oscar-winning special effects by Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis elevate the film from disturbing and silly to truly nightmarish. Something about 80s practical effects is just so great. Nothing CGI ever looks as good.

The film has a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes (compared to a 95% for the 1958 original version). But this version is definitely a classic in its own right. 

Halloween 2015 #4: American Psycho (2000) - Mary Harron

A film by a female director!! I’m pretty sure this is the third film I’ve reviewed that is solely directed by a woman, after The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola) and Sassy Pants (Coley Sohn). Out of 84 reviews! 

That’s me being sarcastic.

So American Psycho, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, tells the story of a Wall Street businessman, Patrick Bateman, who is also a serial killer. His douchey self-obsessed world of investment banking clashes with his murderous tendencies, and soon his world begins to fall apart as his taste for blood grows stronger.

His first murder, a homeless man, is a manifestation of his belief that he is superior to people who aren’t as wealthy as he is, and those who don’t contribute to society deserve to die. It’s sick and nasty and very un-Batman. 

He dates Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon), despite the fact that they both cheat on each other with their other rich friends.

His interactions with his coworkers are always very strange, I felt like I was being forced to watch an overplayed pissing contest repeatedly. The characters obsess over each other’s business cards, despite the fact that they are essentially indistinguishable (even with the same title, Vice President). 

Bateman also keeps to his rigorous skin care and workout regimens, emphasizing the connection between physical superiority and supposed worth as a human being. The more Bateman sees himself as a brilliant albeit sociopathic individual, the easier his killings become.

Also Bateman’s bizarre relationship with music is interesting, because the early murder scenes are preceded by long, drawn out explanations of artists that he enjoys. He regularly prefers famous musician’s later albums to their previous ones (both Phil Collins and Whitney Houston are used as examples), which could possibly be a reference to how famous serial killers usually take a few tries to really find their own… style?

Bateman casually quotes serial killers, once with his friends when he talks about how Ed Guin viewed women in both a romantic and in a future victim sense, and then later he references Ted Bundy in front of his secretary, played by Chloë Sevigny.

I’m sorry I just keep jumping off on tangents, but I also think it’s important to talk about the way the film relates sex, violence, and vanity. Bateman is self-obsessed, and here we see him preferring to look at himself having sex rather than at the woman. He’s pretty much incapable of viewing her as a human (she’s an escort), and later he… well we don’t know exactly what he does. He is violent in some way, but he pays her and she leaves, so we’re unsure. Although he does make a porn with her and a prostitute, because Bateman loves porn. He’s always returning videotapes.

Anyway now that I’ve briefly touched on some of the subtext I noticed, I can address the ending. The violence escalates until Bateman reaches some sort of psychological breaking point, and then things get a little… crazy. His desire to kill becomes uncontrollable, and it seems almost certain that he will be punished. But the film has other ideas. You have to watch it to see what I mean. 

Or read the book, I don’t know. It’s only been about half a day since I watched it, so I don’t really know how I feel just yet. My gut reaction was “What the what?” and my brain was kind of like, “Let it sink in and try not to overanalyze.” Basically, if you want Wolf of Wall Street meets Dexter, this is for you. Everything Christian Bale says is cringeworthy but also dripping with irony, satirizing capitalism and materialism and everything about Wall Street. So that part is good.

Halloween 2015 #3: An American Werewolf in London (1981) - John Landis

Still a sucker for a good title card gif. 

Okay well I guess I have to thank Amazon’s streaming service for helping me find this one. I actually studied one scene from this movie in a horror film class two years ago and was always upset that I had never seen it, because it looks crazy and awesome.

An American Werewolf in London begins with two boys, David Kessler and Jack Goodman, backpacking across the Yorkshire moors in the dead of night. They stop in to a pub, where an uninviting group of men persuade them to keep going, which leads to the first attack.

Unfortunately Jack dies. But David survives with just some claw marks! Then, during his long recovery in a London hospital, he is visited by Jack, who tells him that he will become a werewolf and he should kill himself.

He also has some crazy visions.

He quickly falls in love with the nurse, and when he is discharged from the hospital two days before the full moon, he stays at her place.

They totally do it. And then everything goes to hell when the full moon comes the second night.

This has to be one of the craziest, most drawn out transformation sequences I’ve ever seen. If I had to pick a close second though, it would be Freddy Krueger clawing his way out of Jesse in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge.

But this scene goes so hard!

If there was every a super gritty Animorphs adaptation, it would look like this. Literally everything, from the paws to the snout to the ears to the hair, gets its own sequence of transformation shots. And all practical effects! But poor David does NOT seem to be enjoying it. I mean… the second the light of the moon hits him, he rips off his shirt and jeans in a violent rage.

I wasn't kidding.

An American Werewolf in London won the first EVER Academy Award for Best Makeup at the 1982 Oscars. I have to wonder if they made up the category just for this movie.

So poor undead Jack keeps coming back to remind David that the only way out is death, and David doesn’t listen, and things go VERY wrong. 

Watch out for some cheesy 80s horror movie special effects. Even with sound effects, cutting, and tons of blood… these are still the least realistic wolf attacks I’ve ever seen. But it’s okay.

An American Werewolf in London is the perfect blend of comedy and horror, because it really doesn’t try too hard to take itself seriously. And like any horror movie with young people, ideas of gruesome violence, monster transformations, and sexuality are interwoven to give us a horrifying understanding of the sexual repression in 1980s America. I mean… one of the final scenes takes place in a porn theater… so yeah.

Fall 2014 #5: The Exorcist (1973) - William Friedkin

Alright so I was beyond excited to put this on my list. I feel like I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t scare easily, which took about… 21 years of desensitizing myself to horror movies by growing to absolutely love them for cinematic purposes. I still stay away from slasher films, but in the past two years or so I saw Carrie, The Shining, Nightmare on Elm Street, Night of the Living Dead, The Grudge, Silence of the Lambs, The Ring, Scream, and The Exorcist for the first time. I guess you could say

But I knew I had to get this one off my list before Halloween, so I sat down and let myself get taken away… to the 1970s.

I know, I know, scary. The film follows a 13 year old girl who is suddenly possessed by a very disturbing and cruel demon. After what seems to be weeks of hiring doctors, therapists, and running tests, Chris MacNeil (played by Ellen Burstyn) decides that to save her daughter she will need an exorcism.

To get to this point of desperation, Chris sees her daughter, Regan, do some pretty horrifying shit. 

When the priest, Father Karras, is contacted, the church also sends the help of Father Merrin, one of the only priests they know to have performed an exorcism before.

This is when the movie gets really good.

I should also probably mention that I had seen Scary Movie 2 before, so I knew a lot of these special effects were coming before they happened. This didn’t in any way affect my enjoyment of the movie. I loved every minute of watching Regan transform from a normal girl into the most hideous, foul-mouthed demon I had ever seen.

From that into this.

The process is pretty incredible. 

The film is also based on the events of a real exorcism, performed in Maryland in 1949. Supposedly most of the events that take place in the film actually happened, although the head-spinning-around is probably the most disputed of all.

Last fun fact: Adjusted for inflation, the film is the highest grossing R rated movie of all time. It also was so horrifying to viewers, that several injuries occurred due to audience members fainting in the theater.

The film won two Oscars, Best Screenplay and Best Sound.