Blood in, Blood out

Film: The Living Dead Girl ( La morte vivante)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

In many movies involving the dead coming back to life, the fact that this is happening is far more important than why it is happening. Sometimes, as in Night of the Living Dead, it simply happens and we don’t get an explanation. Other times, we do, and it doesn’t really matter that much if it matches anything completely ridiculous. Toxic waste, weird bacteria, whatever. It’s toxic waste in The Living Dead Girl (La morte vivante in the original French), which feels unique in the sense that our living dead girl in the title is not a Romero-style ghoul who creates other undead, but more of a reanimated vampire who requires blood to survive.

First things first—we need to get some toxic waste in position to revivify a corpse. We get that from a pair of men apparently delivery toxic waste for disposal. Rather than do their jobs, they stop at an abandoned crypt to put the waste there. While they are there getting rid of the waste and taking a few moments to rob the graves of the people buried in the crypt, a minor earthquake causes the toxic waste to leak, which causes one of the corpses to wake up and attack. Since this corpse, who we eventually learn is named Catherine Valmont (Françoise Blanchard) has been dead for a few years, it’s a bit of a surprise that there is not a bit of decay or decomposition. Must be the favorable atmosphere in the catacombs.

Religious Trauma Syndrome

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

There are a number of topics that split the average horror movie fans. Gore, for instance, is loved by some and shunned by others who look for a more cerebral horror (and of course there are those who accept it when it’s needed). Another is the concept of the slow burn film. Horror that is going for the quick thrill doesn’t do a lot of slow burn. It’s about showing the audience a terrible spectacle. The slow burn is often about the idea of creating something much deeper than mere shock or disgust. The slow burn is about the build of terror and, hopefully, a payoff of something truly terrifying, a lasting scare that seeps into the audience’s bones. That’s definitely the goal with The Lodge.

The Lodge very much plays with an idea I heard Wes Craven bring up in an interview about Scream. According to Craven, if you give the audience a good scare in the first 15 minutes, you don’t really have to scare them again until the end. The film opens with our introduction to Richard Hall (Richard Armitage) and his two children, Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh). The kids are going through the “separated parents trade-off” and Richard tells his estranged wife Laura (Alicia Silverstone) that he wants to finalize the divorce because he is going to marry Grace (Riley Keough), someone he met while researching his latest book. Laura takes that news poorly; she goes home and shoots herself through the mouth.

The Dirty Half-Dozen

Film: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

I’ve said before on this blog that I grew up in part on war movies. What I mean specifically is that I watched a lot of World War II movies when I was a kid along with some World War II television like Combat! with Vic Morrow. I didn’t specifically love the war aspects of those movies, but I did like the inherent sense of adventure in them. Propaganda films from the war years were cliched but I loved them, and also the more openly violent films of the 1960s and 1970s. Had something like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare been around when I was 10, it would have been one of my favorite movies.

This movie, which for convenience I’m going to call TMoUW, tells something like a true story of Operation Postmaster, undertaken shortly after the entrance of the U.S. into World War II. The problem at the time was the German U-boat command. Massive shipping losses prevented the Americans from sending troops to Europe by ship, and air travel was not at a stage where it was feasible for large troop movements. Subs needed to be shut down, but the Germans were smart enough to keep their resupply ship in neutral Spanish waters. Desperate and on the verge of surrender, Churchill (Rory Kinnear) rolled the dice on a secret mission that violated the accepted practices of war. Essentially, send in an expert but disposable crew and destroy the ship.

Dissociative Identities

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

There was a period of three or four years when I collected comics. It started when I had a couple of college roommates who were active collectors and ended about six months after I got married and needed to start saving money to buy a house. Suddenly, $30-$40 per week no longer made sense. I say this because during that time, one of my favorite series was called The Badger. It featured a superhero who also had about eight distinct personalities, one of which was a world-class martial artist who went toe-to-toe with demons, aliens, and more. I say this because it’s relevant when looking at Split from a few years ago.

I don’t know if it’s unique in movies, but Split is a sort of parallel film with Unbreakable. What I mean is that the film Glass is a direct sequel to both Unbreakable and Split. This odd trilogy is an exploration by M. Night Shyamalan (who I tend to call M. Night Shame-about-your-last-film) into the idea of superheroes and the supernatural. At least that’s what I presume it’s about; I haven’t seen Glass.

What I've Caught Up With, June 2024 Part 2

On the television front, I finished some shows in June. I made it to the end of The Boys, but I haven’t started the fourth season yet—I’m waiting until it’s all posted, so it’s likely I’ll watch the whole thing in July. I got through Gen V as well, mostly to stay current with The Boys. I also finished Red Dwarf, as mentioned yesterday. I watched Fallout, which was fun and finished the Peter Capaldi seasons of Doctor Who. I’m still watching Farscape, but now more or less when I want; White Collar is my new workout show.

What I've Caught Up With, June 2024 Part 1

If there's a theme to the bonus movies I watched in June, it's that most of them have a longer-than-average name for some reason. I don't know why it worked out this way (and it's not all of them, as will be evident tomorrow), but once I started, it just became sort of the thing that was happening. Some good stuff this month. While there were a few that I didn't love, there were plenty that I enjoyed a great deal. More coming tomorrow.

Sub-Mission

Film: Below
Format: DVD from Lena Community District Library throught interlibrary loan on basement television.

Submarine movies are their own particular little subcategory of war films. Most submarine movies have an element of horror to them in the sense that they are almost inherently claustrophobic. So, while “horror” might be a stretch in a lot of cases, at the very least, there’s an element of fear involved in them. That makes a film like Below an interesting proposition, as it is both a war/submarine movie and overtly a horror film. It essentially billed itself as “Poltergiest on a submarine,” and honestly, there’s no way it could live up to that hype, and it frankly doesn’t. There’s a story here, but in large part, this functions like a long episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

In 1943, in the dead middle of World War II, the submarine USS Tiger Shark is patrolling the Atlantic and, due to its position, is ordered to pick up survivors spotted by a British plane. There are three survivors of a British hospital ship recently sunk, and because we need some tension right away, one of the survivors is a woman. The survivors, who have been in the water for a couple of days, are brought on board just as a German destroyer shows up, so we’re going to get a little cat-and-mouse and the sub will take some depth charge damage before escaping. During that attack, the sub gets targeted specifically because a record player starts up out of nowhere. After the encounter, the sub’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Brice (Bruce Greenwood) discovers that one of the rescued people is a German, and he shoots him.