Showing posts with label Alan Ormsby. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alan Ormsby. Show all posts

Thursday, December 8, 2016

Off Script: Popcorn

Film: Popcorn
Format: Internet video on The Nook.

The traditional horror movie puts a group of people in a specific location with someone or something that wants to kill them. Often, the thing that is trying to kill them is what makes the movie different. Every now and then you get something like Popcorn that really tries to do something interesting with the premise. Popcorn is all about the premise, because what follows the premise is pretty standard slasher fare.

We start with Maggie (Jill Schoelen), a film student at a college that has a fledgling film school that frequently gets the monetary short end of the stick from the rest of the school. Maggie has been plagued with strange dreams that she is taking notes on in the hopes of turning it into a film. At school that day, the film professor Mr. Davis (Tony Roberts) and a student named Toby (Tom Villard) have come up with a plan to raise funds for the department. They’re going to stage a triple horror feature at a theater a few weeks away from demolition. The idea specifically is to select films that were marketed with gimmicks (one involves electrified seats as in The Tingler). The work gets easier thanks to Dr. Mnesyne (Ray Walston), who had a long career in theater and a huge collection of old timey props to use to decorate the theater.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Ten Days of Terror!: Deranged

Film: Deranged
Format: DVD fromNetFlix on laptop.

The NetFlix disc I watched yesterday with Motel Hell on it happened to be a double-sided disc. The flipside was a rare 1974 horror film called Deranged (sometimes called Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile) that just happens to be on one of my horror lists. Lucky break, right? Without going into too much detail at the start here, let me just say that this is one of the most disturbing 82 minutes I’ve spent in front of a screen in a long time. This film is memorable in the same way that a film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is memorable. That’s fitting, too, since this was released in the same year and is based even more strongly on the same source material. I mean it—this is one fucked up movie. It gets twisted early, and when it gets really twisted, it’s still got a half an hour to go.

We start by being introduced to Tom Sims (Leslie Carlson) who claims to be a journalist who covered the story that we are about to see, a story we are told is the unvarnished truth. Tom, acting as a narrator who frequently stands in the frame and talks directly to us introduces us to the Cobbs. Ezra Cobb (Roberts Blossom) is the somewhat childlike son of Ma Cobb (Cosette Lee). Ezra’s father dies when Ezra is 10. Following this, he and his mother become increasingly dependent on each other. Eventually, Ma gets sick and Ezra takes care of her until she dies.