Ten Days of Terror!: Watcher

Film: Watcher
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

Horror movies have a tendency to go after current fears. This is not a surprise, of course. If the movie is supposed to be scary, it makes sense to go with a common fear or something that taps into the zeitgeist. Home invasion movies are popular because that’s a common fear. Another common fear and common base plot is women being pursued in some voyeuristic fashion. Invasion of privacy, particularly this kind of personal invasion of privacy is a fear of most people, an intense fear for many women, and so it makes its way into plenty of horror movies as the base of the plot. It won’t be surprising that this is central to the film Watcher. After all, it’s kind of in the name.

I never thought that in addressing a stalker movie produced by a streaming service that I would be making a connection to one of the classic movies of the late 1940s, but there’s a huge connection to The Third Man, and it’s an awfully good one. In The Third Man, we as the audience follow Holly Martins around in Austria, and the speech of the natives is never translated for us or given subtitles. For anyone who doesn’t speak German, a huge percentage of the dialogue is simple not accessible. This throws us off-balance and makes it harder for us to feel assured of what is happening. Watcher takes place in Romania, and our main character Julia (Maika Monroe) has only a rudimentary understanding of the language. She’s alone for much of the day in a place where she doesn’t understand the bulk of what is happening around her, which leaves her isolated and vulnerable. It’s really effective.

Ten Days of Terror!: Juan of the Dead

Film: Juan of the Dead (Juan de los Muertos)
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

What happens when you make a parody of a parody? Sometimes you can get something that works well enough. The Tick—both the comic and the television shows—were started as a parody of Dave Sim’s Roach character in Cerberus, who was himself a parody of a number of comic book characters (like his Wolver-roach incarnation). Juan of the Dead is very much a new take on Shaun of the Dead. While there are some real differences, too much of this movie appears to be drawn directly from the other for it to be a coincidence. Take Shaun and Ed, rename them Juan and Lazaro, set it in Cuba, and roll the cameras.

Juan (Alexis Díaz de Villegas) and his friend Lazaro (Jorge Molina) are 40-ish slackers living in Havana. They don’t have jobs as much as they survive by fishing and petty crime. At the opening of the film, they are out on a raft and snag what they think is a corpse. When it sits up out of the water and starts to attack, and is immediately put down by Lazaro’s reflexive firing of a small speargun he uses to hunt, they decide not to tell anyone and return back to land.

Ten Days of Terror!: Citadel

Film: Citadel
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There’s a good amount of discussion (to put it in a nicer way) in the horror movie fan community about what actually constitutes a zombie. Do they need to be undead or do they just need to exhibit zombie-like behavior? Do they need to eat their victims or just kill them? It’s the sort of thing that determines if you consider the infected in 28 Days Later to truly be zombies—they aren’t undead and they don’t eat their victims. They do, however, act like zombies and infect others like zombies. Citadel offers a similar question. The creatures here are clearly zombie-like, there’s evidence that they eat their victims, but they have much more limited ability to infect others and they clearly aren’t undead.

With Citadel, there is an additional question to answer. That question is whether or not the movie is good enough to determine what the creatures actually are. Yes, I’m spilling the eventual beans on this one at the top. Citadel has some really interesting ideas, but it fails in a lot of ways. It has high aspirations, but it’s simply not equal to them. All of this said, I’m going to call the creatures “zombies” for the rest of this simply because it’s easier, and close enough for jazz.

Ten Days of Terror!: Zombie Strippers!

Film: Zombie Strippers!
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I would guess that it’s fun to make a zombie movie. There are a lot of them, and while plenty of them make money, I would guess that a lot of the appeal is the ability to do some gory special effects and splatter a lot of people with fake blood and viscera. It does, however, appear to be really hard to make a good zombie movie. Even with a fun premise and the allure of acres of naked flesh, you might wind up with something like Zombie Strippers!, and how is that going to look on your resumé?

We’re initially let in on some “modern history” that appears to be designed specifically to directly make fun of George W. Bush and his administration. Far be it from me to complain about someone making fun of W., but this is not done in any clever or entertaining way; it’s incredibly ham-handed and bargain basement. The jokes are of the “Bush named his daughter to the Supreme Court and she’s gonna hold a kegger!” variety.

Ten Days of Terror!: [REC2]

Film: [•REC]2
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

The question of what constitutes a zombie is once again important in the film [•REC]2 (sometimes written as [REC2] or even [•REC]². For ease, I’m going to write it as [REC]2, sort of the best of all worlds and avoiding dealing with that bullet). This is a sequel to [•REC], one of the better found-footage horror movies, and far superior to its American remake, Quarantine. This sequel takes place immediately following the events of the first movie; in fact, the opening moments of this and the closing moments of the first are identical.

But, it helps to be brought up to speed—it has been a few years since I’ve seen [REC]. Basically, a reporter named Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) was shadowing a firefighting team who get called to an apartment complex. It happens to be ground zero for what looks a lot like a zombie apocalypse, but when we get to the end seems to have more biblical apocalypse written all over it. Our patient zero is infected/infested with something, but is being held at bay by a priest with a great deal of religious iconography, lending some support to the idea that this is not just a plague, but a possession that is somehow spreading.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Lodger (1944)

Film: The Lodger (1944)
Format: Internet video on Fire!

There are a lot of interesting things to talk about when it comes to the 1944 version of The Lodger, not the least of these being that this is a remake of a silent Hitchcock film. There are some real surprises here, although the plot isn’t one of them. There’s nothing here that is going to be a shock in terms of the plot and how it works, but there’s a lot around the edges that is surprising.

The Lodger is a sort of macabre love triangle that involves everyone’s favorite uncaught psychopath, Jack the Ripper. What I’m going to say here is going to seem very much like spoilers, but I promise you it’s not. If you’ve ever seen a movie before, especially one of this vintage, you’re going to know what is happening long before the people in the film do.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Werewolf

Film: The Werewolf
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There are specific expectations we have with certain movie monsters. Vampires are going to have a hypnotic gaze and be vulnerable to sunlight and crosses. Frankenstein’s monster is going to fear fire. Werewolves come out during a full moon and are killed by silver bullets. So what happens when you take one of those monsters with clear expectations and do something completely different with it? That’s central to the uninterestingly named The Werewolf, a mid-‘50s horror movie that tries to latch on to the mad science craze of the Atomic Age.

We’re going to start with a drifter (Steven Ritch) who seems disoriented and unclear of who and where he is. He leaves a bar and is followed by another patron who knows the drifter is flush with cash (he paid for a drink with a $20, which is pretty good money for 1956, roughly a couple of hundred bucks). A fight breaks out, and while we don’t see the fight, we do hear the results. A local woman sees the fight, though, and our ruffian who tried to mug the drifter is dead, his throat ripped out.