Ten Days of Terror!: Blood Creek/Town Creek

Films: Blood Creek (Town Creek; Creek)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen

One of the reasons that horror movies are a lot of fun is that a lot of people who end up being famous get their start in horror movies. Dig back far enough into some stars’ filmographies and you’ll find some B-level ridiculousness. When I came across Blood Creek, there was no way I couldn’t watch it. First, it’s directed by Joel Schumacher. Second, at the time, the clear star of the movie was Dominic Purcell, but today, the fact that Purcell’s brother is played by Henry Cavill and the big bad is played by Michael Fassbender is the selling point.

We start in 1940 with a professor named Wirth (Fassbender), sent from Germany to the farm of an emigrant German family who discovered an ancient Viking rune on their property. Surprise, surprise, Wirth is a Nazi who wants to study the magical properties of the rune, which include the ability to temporarily raise the dead. The family discovers Wirth’s goals and essentially traps him with a ritual that requires a steady stream of human sacrifices and blood. This keeps Wirth alive but weakened, and meanwhile, the family essentially stops aging.

Wednesday Horror: The Lost Boys

Film: The Lost Boys
Format: DVD from Cortland Public LIbrary on The New Portable.

There are certain movies that define particular points in time. There are, for instance, movies that feel like they belong to specific decades. With that in mind, I present to you The Lost Boys, arguably the most 1980s film in the history of movies. If it’s not the most 1980s film ever, it almost certainly is the most ineffably 1980s horror film, and I say this as someone who loves both Fright Night and Night of the Comet. Seriously, what other horror movie has a shirtless saxophone player?

Recently-divorced Lucy Emerson (Dianne Wiest) moves herself and her two boys Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) to the California beach town of Santa Carla to move in with her father (Barnard Hughes). The boys are less than enamored with the move, while Lucy starts looking for work on the boardwalk. She picks up a job at a video store (See! Pure ‘80s!) run by Max (Ed Herrmann) while the boys try to figure out how to fit in. For Sam, this means hanging out at the local comic book store where he meets the Frog Brothers, Edgar (Corey Feldman) and Alan (Jamison Newlander). For Michael, it means pursuing Star (Jami Gertz), who he sees on the boardwalk.

Off Script: Flatliners (1990)

Films: Flatliners (1990)
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on various players.

When I started this blog, I made the decision that every review I posted would be a review written based on a recent viewing of the film. There have been cases when I’ve posted a review more than a year after I wrote it, but that writing occurred immediately after the viewing. There are reasons for doing this. The main one, in fact the one that is probably the only relevant one, is that opinions change and people change. The person who reacted to a movie in a particular way in 1992 is not the same person watching it today. With Flatliners from 1990, this rewatching is important, because this is a very different review than I would have written based on memory.

The idea of Flatliners is that a group of medical students decide to experiment into the realm of near-death experiences. In truth, the idea is to go a bit further. Rather than coming close to death and experiencing the “tunnel of light” phenomenon, the goal is to make themselves temporarily brain dead to see if there is anything after death, and then come back. It is, after all, the final frontier in many ways.

Lawyering Up

Film: The Client
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

Courtroom drama is its own special thing. I tend to like courtroom dramas, or at least I’m predisposed to give them the benefit of the doubt. With The Client, we’ve got an hour of getting to the courtroom and then the courtroom, and just as soon as we’re in the courtroom, we’re out of it again. I suppose that makes The Client more of a legal thriller than a courtroom drama. We’ve also got mob hitmen, a dead lawyer, and a truly surprising cast. The Client is based on a novel by John Grisham, which means we’re in for high drama and lawyers being both villains and heroes. So let’s jump in with both feet, shall we?

Young Mark Sway (Brad Renfro) and his younger brother Ricky (David Speck) are out in a forest outside of Memphis killing off a summer afternoon smoking cigarettes Mark stole out of the purse of his mother (Mary-Louise Parker). Not too long after they arrive, a mob lawyer named Jerome “Romey” Clifford (Walter Olkewicz) shows up with the intent to kill himself by running a hose from his tailpipe into his car. Mark removes the hose, and when he tries to do this a second time, Romey catches him and drags him into the car. While Mark does manage to get out, he also manages to leave a number of traces of himself inside the Cadillac. He also learns the location of the body of Louisiana Senator Boyd Boyette, missing for about a month.