Triloquist

Ya know how your mother always said ,"if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." Well, if I lived by that rule I'd have to stop writing this review right here.

First of all I'm not even sure why Dimension Extreme picked this film up in the first place. There is not one single gore shot in the entire film! I suppose it's because it comes from the same creators as the Leprechaun films which would account for all of the witty one liners this film has to offer (which is the only thing it has to offer). But that is no excuse.

The film opens with a mother and her two young children Norbert and Angelina bunked up in a run down L.A. motel. The mother, whom by the way has more prosthetic parts than her ventriloquist dummy, is a heroin junkie/out of work stage performer. To make a long story short she OD's and leaves her kids with nothing but a creepy, large ventriloquist doll to remember her by. The doll, that seems to take on a sinister life of its own, fits in perfectly with the murdering brother and sister pair who grow up with zero parental guidance.

There isn't much I even want to say about this film, because even if you can sit through the whole thing, all you'll notice are the mistakes in it! AND, this DVD has absolutely no special features! The "brother" character is dressed up like a cowboy the entire film and does not muster a single word! The "daughter" character doesn't look a day over sixteen and apparently only cares about having a baby...with her brother. Ugh, this movie makes other films like Children of the Living Dead look like Oscar winners!

-Beth Puttkammer

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Posted by Beth at 03:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Salem's Lot

Salem's Lot (1979)
Every horror fan has one particular monster movie that sold him on the genre. It's usually a film he saw when he was very young, one that terrified him and kept him up long after Mom had put him to bed in his pajamas. One movie that taught him how good it was to be scared. For me this film is the 1979 adaptation of Stephen King's novel, Salem's Lot.

The film was originally intended for a theatrical run, and George Romero was supposed to direct (in fact, Romero acknowledges this in Day of the Dead, as Bub is reading the novel). Once the studio decided to shift it to TV, Romero knew he could never make the gory version he'd envisioned. Warner Bros. then turned to another goremeister, Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Tobe Hooper. With King's novel as his source, Hooper crafted an atmospheric chiller which scared me to the bone when I was 7 years old, and confirmed that I was a horror fan for life.

The movie starts in a small church in Guatemala. We meet a grizzled Ben Mears and his young charge, Mark Petrie. As they fill bottles with holy water, one lights up. When Mears says, "They found us again," the audience doesn't know what's found them, but it certainly must be something frightening. Flash back two years, to the quiet little town of Salem's Lot. Newly widowed Mears has returned home after a long absence to write a book about the Marsten House, an ominous abode that stands on a hill, overlooking the Lot. But Mears is not the only new arrival in the town. Antique dealers Richard Straker and Kurt Barlow have set up shop in town, and purchased the old dark house. When people start to disappear and die in rapid fashion, the quaint community falls under a dark cloud, casting Barlow and Straker in conflict with Mears for the very soul of the town.

Conceptually, Salem's Lot has an interesting premise. A vampire travels with his human familiar the world round, moving into small, unnoticed towns and feeding until he clears each little hamlet out. The movie suggests that Barlow has done this for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Thus, the movie stacks the deck against Mears; can the brooding author stand a chance against an evil that has survived for so long? Can he succeed where so many others surely have failed?

From this simple concept, Hooper and screenwriter Stirling Siliphant craft a rather effective chiller. The script compresses several characters (in the novel, King creates a whole town's worth of 40 or so), and alters some events that actually work better than they did in the novel (it's much better to see Barlow and Mears have their final confrontation set in the Marsten House, which plays so prominently in both print and film). Hooper shows great restraint and craft here; unlike his seminal chainsaw epic, this movie is highly stylized. In fact, for a TV production, Salem's Lot boasts lots of artistic shots, such as the opening credit sequence. As Mears holds the bottle of holy water in the opening scene, it glows blue. The light then fades to a still shot of the moon, followed by the reveal of the Marsten house; midway through the credits, the moon fades out as sunlight brings day to the town and the foreboding house. A few scenes later, as Mears stares up at the empty house in darkness, he turns and finds himself confronted by Straker. A cut to Mears reveals his shock, and then the camera swings through the air, creating a continuous shot that catches Straker's look of disdain.

Perhaps even more so than the visuals, the score lends an ominous touch to the film. Watching this film when I was young , for the first time I learned just how much the music can make or break a horror film. Driving and loud at points, ethereal and airy at others, the track is downright foreboding throughout.

But what really terrified me most with this film as a child, and still does each time I watch it, were the scenes with the vampires. These are some genuinely terrifying bloodsuckers. One boy appears at his brother's window and floats in, yellow eyes and white fangs glowing. When grave digger Mike Ryerson and a friend transport a box that moves on its own in the truck, tension is through the roof. Later, Ryerson jumps into the open grave of a victim, to dreadful consequence (leaving me to this day questioning this rather fatal move). But most frightening of all is Barlow himself. He isn't revealed until the film is more than half over, but when he finally arrives for a handful of scenes, the effect is powerful. His battle with a priest over Mark's life is an impressive showdown between dark faith and light. Though many critics knock the way his look throws back to Count Orlock of Nosferatu fame, he's certainly more frightening than had he looked like a mortal with fangs (as the novel sells him).

In short, Salem's Lot holds up for me. But will Salem's Lot frighten today's audiences? Probably not. That's not a knock on the film itself. It's just that horror fans nowadays, who've grown up on fast food horror franchises with MTV editing, are unlikely to sit through a three hour long vampire story that's light on blood and takes its time in setting up characters and plot points. I'm not even sure if the payoff scenes would entice fans of more modern horror. That's a shame, as this really is a well made horror flick.

Unfortunately, Warner Bros. does not have the same reverence for Salem's Lot that I do. A long trailer for the film is the only extra; as the film had a theatrical run in Europe, I think this trailer actually ran in theatres overseas. Much like the movie, it starts slow but builds to an intense finish, and it uses the film's music to great effect. There are English and French subtitles for the hard of hearing, and... well, the French. One oddity occurs on the disc: the scene selection is bunched into six chapters each. So you can select Chapter 1, 7, 13 and so on. As this disc came out not long after the DVD format arrived, I'm not sure if this happened because Warner Bros. was new to the game or just apathetic about the movie. Either way, Salem's Lot deserves better than this bare bones effort.
Salem's Lot still ranks in my top 10 horror flicks of all time, and that's not just out of a sense of nostalgia. It's got some real scares and just the right atmosphere for a horror movie. It may not be for all tastes, but I highly recommend it at 35 years old, just as I would have at 7.

-- Phil Fasso

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Posted by Phil at 02:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The Burning

Or, Friday the 13th Part 1 1/2.

After the success of Sean Cunningham's financially groundbreaking film, there was a great demand for two things: cheap slasher flicks, and the services of Tom Savini on cheap slasher flicks. Enter Bob and Harvey Weinstein, two concert promoters who were ready to make a splash in Hollywood with their newly formed company, Miramax. The company that would dominate the Oscars race for Best Picture 15 years later started off with a much more meager goal: to make a Friday the 13th knockoff, and to use that film's special makeup artist to draw in the audience.

The Burning begins with a group of boys at camp. They've decided to punish the caretaker Cropsy (though the reason for their venom is vague). The prank goes wrong, and Cropsy suffers serious burning. Released from the hospital five years later with no job or family but a whole lot of anger still in his system, Cropsy makes a quick kill in the city before heading back to the summer camp to get his revenge.

Herein lie a few problems. First off, on whom is Cropsy going to get revenge? Why does he stop to make a quick kill in the city? The woman he murders doesn't even know him. Same for the kids at the camp, who are not the ones who burnt him. Okay, one is (I'm not really spoiling anything here), but the rest have never done anything to Cropsy. The killer's motivations are muddled, which weakens the movie. As does the fact that after Cropsy gets to the camp, nobody gets killed for a long time. Once the killings start, the movie picks up, but it's a tedious affair for about 45 minutes in the middle.

So what does The Burning do right? Amazing special effects. Savini copies some of the same effects from his earlier films (he remakes the Kevin Bacon arrow effect from F13, with a change of murder weapon), but the gags are impressive. A very early performance from Jason Alexander is very good; in fact, the acting is decent across the board. Also, there's a lot of nudity (female fans should appreciate that it's not just girls getting naked). And Cropsy is a cool variation on what Jason Vorhees could have looked like had he died by fire instead of by water. All in all, The Burning is an entertaining slasher that overcomes its deficiencies.

Because I've had bad experiences with meeting Savini, I'm loath to admit it, but the best of the limited special features on the disc is Blood 'N' Fire Memories. It serves as an 18 minute discussion with him about his effects for the film. Because the special make up field passed him by a long time ago, it's easy to forget that Savini had some real cache in the early 1980s, producing effects for a whole slew of films in a very short period of time. It's also easy to forget that Savini had some real talent back in the day, and deserved all those jobs. Here, he draws back the curtain and talks about the tricks behind the effects. He also displays an utter disdain for the Friday the 13th films, but seems to like Jason Alexander and Holly Hunter. It's a short piece, but Blood 'N' Fire Memories is definitely worth a look.

The commentary is a little less interesting. Director Tony Maylam sits down with fellow Brit Alan Jones, "international film journalist" as the special features screen claims (to which I say, Who?). Maylam discusses how his direction of a concert movie led the Weinsteins to hire him. One problem is that he doesn't seem to have much interest in the horror genre; the job appears to have been a work-for-hire for him, and so he doesn't seem to be too enthusiastic during the commentary. Jones seems more than enthusiastic about the film, but he leads Maylam to rather circular discussions, so things get repetitive quickly. The two men address just about all the production stuff one would expect on a commentary, so it's informative. But it's far from great.

As for the other extras, the film's trailer gives away a little too much. The photo gallery is just a collection of still from the film, which makes it superfluous. Trailers for MGM horrors and the two Jeepers Creepers flicks round out the extras. I was hungry for a little more, but it's a decent package for a low budget horror flick.

If you've seen the first few Friday the 13th's, you've already seen The Burning. But that doesn't mean you should shy away from the DVD. The movie stands up as an entertaining knock off, with some superior work by Savini, and the disc sports a great conversation with him. Definitely worth a look, if only as a reminder not to abuse poor campground caretakers.

--Phil Fasso

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Posted by Phil at 01:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

As anybody who read my First Look of Diary of the Dead can attest, I walked out of the theatre with a lot of venom for the movie. It seemed that George Romero had taken the zombie concept and "rebooted" it for a generation he knew very little about; in the mix, he'd created a really bad movie. On the train home, I pondered: Had the Godfather of all zombie movies lost his touch? Arriving home that night, I sat down and wrote a scorching review. Icons of Fright posted it, and I thought I was done with Diary forever. If Romero was not willing to close the door on his zombie films, I most certainly was.

But when Diary came out on DVD, I reread my First Look. Embarrassingly, I realized it was a poorly written and badly edited piece, a work of raw anger that the film perhaps may not have deserved. I knew as I read the First Look again that I owed it to myself, Romero, and most of all Icons readers to look at the movie with fresh eyes and a clear perspective. I owed the film, in essence, A Second Look.

Let me be clear before I discuss details: Diary of the Dead is still not a good flick. It continues to suffer from many of the problems I addressed in my First Look: the acting is beyond bad; the movie is too intent on being funny at times; the characters for the most part are a dull group, and even the tolerable ones become unlikable because of their obsession with the camera; the dialogue is atrocious; worst, the film's biggest sin remains its sledgehammer preachiness. But it's not just the message that gets overstated. I realized Romero seems too intent on using dialogue to overstate everything. One scene makes this glaringly apparent. When Debra and the group reach her family home, she reaches into a potted plant next to the front door and says, "They always hide a key." Does she really need to explain this detail to the group, or the film's audience? As a master filmmaker with 40 years experience, Romero should understand that film is a visual medium, even if his filmmaking characters don't.

Another thing that struck me while watching the DVD was something I mentioned in my First Look: the lack of a strong black male. Yes, the students meet up with a militant black who's leading a survivalist group. But his time onscreen is too fleeting. I think Romero would've made a much more interesting film if he had followed this group and its leader, than the group of fledgling filmmakers he chose as his protagonists. I could have routed for that group. As with much of the movie, this seems like another opportunity squandered.

Even with all that said, I didn't hate Diary the second time around. Sure, it wasn't good, but it wasn't worthy of venom either. Romero simply took a new approach that I don't appreciate. And I'm not quite sure who this approach was meant to please. Older fans of Romero's zombie legacy will be put off by the younger cast and the focus on technology. The younger fans are the very bloggers and Myspacers that Romero attacks with the film. In the end, he may end up satisfying no one.

The nice package of extras that Dimensions Extreme put together will satisfy fans, however. Foremost is the commentary. Considering the broad swipes the film takes at technology, how suitably ironic is it that Romero sat down in Paris, France to make his comments, while DP Adam Swica and editor Michael Doherty collaborate on the track from Toronto, Canada? Romero is always a joy for me to listen to, as he's such an intellectual and a down to earth guy at the same time. Here, he discusses his critiques of society, as well as the ingenuity needed to make a low budget movie. His social views come across much better in the commentary than in the film itself. He even got me to appreciate the practicality of CG blood effects, though I still don't like the effects themselves. Swica and Doherty are a lot less prominent than Romero on the track, but this is really Romero's baby, so it's forgivable.

Character Confessionals differs from most movies' extras. Four of the students sit down individually to discuss their reactions to the zombie apocalypse, as if they're in the middle of it. The First Week covers filmmaker's visit to the set during the film's first week of production. It's brief and doesn't offer much. The Roots offers Romero's rebooting of his Dead series. It's about 2 minutes long; at that length, it can't help but be shallow. Familiar Voices offers the uncut recording of three celebrities whose voices appear in the film as those of newscasters. It's a neat little piece. Also, the winning filmmakers of Romero's Myspace contest are on the disc. I again question just how seriously anybody can take Romero's critiquing of the media age if he uses a Myspace to promote the film.

Then there's For the Record. The disc breaks this doc down into 5 pieces. Master of the Dead is a 13 minute discussion of Romero's work on the film. It includes the film's producers, and Romero himself. George discusses why he returned to small budget filmmaking with Diary. He originally wanted to shoot it for $250,000 with a student crew. He also attempted to adopt Diary to the television series format. I wonder how different that would have been from the final product. It's an interesting view into Romero's mindset. Into the Camera takes a look at the cast. None of these people interested me, though they're all complimentary to Romero. You Look Dead and A New "Spin" on Death look at the special make up and visual effects, respectively. These pieces drag on for much longer than they should; the highlights are the comments of Greg Nicotero, especially the anecdote on why he's playing a zombie doctor. A World Gone Mad discusses the logistical problems of photographing a film with only hand held cameras and very few cuts. It's an intriguing piece about overcoming the hurdles of filming like this. All in all, the disc boasts a comprehensive, if uneven, set of extras.

In the pantheon of Romero's Dead saga, Diary of the Dead was never destined to be a classic. Maybe over time it will find its audience, if only because it's got Romero's name on it. But exactly who that audience is, I can't say. I can say that it didn't deserve the scathing critique I gave it in my First Look. But a Second Look confirmed its many problems. Perhaps Romero's next look at the zombie universe will offer better.

-Phil Fasso

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Posted by Phil at 01:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Welcome to the Monster Club! Where the ghouls get down, the vampires vamp it up, and werewolves watusi. Okay, that last one was a stretch. But it's no stretch to say that The Monster Club was one of the joys of my childhood, a mixture of creeps and laughs that I always stopped to watch when it used to show up on channel 9, back in the days when channel 9 would show the Kong movies on Thanksgiving and a triple bill of Godzillas the next day.

The premise is weird, albeit simple. Real life horror author R. Chetwynd-Hayes, played here by haggard monster movie veteran John Carradine, is walking the deserted streets at night when a rather ill looking man accosts him and begs for help. The man is actually the vampire Erasmus, essayed with ghoulish glee by the great Vincent Price, who taps into his neck for a quick nightcap. It turns out Erasmus is an avid fan of Hayes' work, and insists on repaying him by bringing him to the exclusive Monster Club, of which he is a prominent member. Reluctantly, Hayes goes along with the appreciative bloodsucker.

Once there, Hayes questions Erasmus about a genealogy chart on the wall. Erasmus explains that all monsters emanate from three sources: vampires, werewolves and ghouls. Cross-breeding has led to a number of variations, and a few mutts. This leads to the first of three horror shorts that make up the bulk of the movie's running time.

The first short tells the tale of a shadmock, the lowest form of hybrid. It begins with a man in an asylum, and then flashes back to a couple in their dingy flat, where they discuss how to scam money. The woman applies for work at the shadmock's ancestral home, where he has secluded himself; seeing him step out from the shadows, she runs off, vowing never to return. But her greedy lover is convinced there's a fortune they can steal without the shadmock noticing, and so he sends her back. He doesn't realize that there's a price to pay for everything, especially in breaking a monster's heart. This is the best of the three shorts, because it manages to offer up a new monster, and yet holds to some of the tried and true genre staples, such as the dark, empty house. And I felt worst for the woman, who clearly is afraid to wrong her employer, and later comes to sympathize with him; yet she's beholden to her avaricious lover, and both pay dearly.

The second tale rides along in more traditional territory, with the story of a vampire. But it's spun on its ear into a comedic piece. Donald Plesence leads a group of undead hunters, intent on bringing a monster down. Clearly the boy in the story, a nerdy sort, has no idea his father is a creature of the night, and his mother has accepted the downside of a marriage to one, all the time shielding the boy. When Plesence and the boy cross paths, there are some interesting twists. Suffice it to say, some people will hold to the duties of their job no matter what the consequences. This is my least favorite of the three shorts; unlike the tales that wrap around it, this one is very obviously fang-in-cheek, and the humor really drags it down. And yet, I can't help but find the irony in this: the framing device with Price and Carradine is very cheeky, and so this tale logically fits the overall tone best. Perhaps I just don't find this vampire tale particularly funny.

The third story returns to traditional territory, but again with a twist. Humegoos are the result of cross-breeding between ghouls and humans. According to Erasmus, they don't do much of interest outside of eating carrion, but when he warns Hayes "Oh, but their relations do have some fascinating habits," it foreshadows some really ghastly things to come. The tale starts off with a horror director working on a scene. Unhappy with the actors' performances and just about everything else on the shoot, he takes it upon himself to scout out a new location. When he veers his sports car off the highway, down a road that's not on the map, bad things are surely on their way. He ends up in a ghoulish town, just the atmospheric setting he's searching out for his movie. But the terrors in this town are not to be held solely to celluloid. The rest of the story deals with his attempts to escape and return to the main highway. This short was a bit predictable, and the acting's a little hammy, but it captures the tone properly, and has a wicked twist at the end that still to this day I love.

Nobody would mistake The Monster Club for an A horror movie. But anybody who holds the horror genre in high regard will appreciate the film for what it is: solid B class entertainment that does a number of things right. The casting is foremost in its approach; Price is brilliant, especially given the limited screen time. Carradine looks worn out, the same haggard old man who appeared in The Howling that same year. But he plays Hayes with just the right twinkle in his eye, as a man who's spent his whole life creating horrors, and now has just the right sense of wonderment when faced with real ones. Genre stalwarts such as Plesence, Britt Eklund and Stuart Whitman play this movie for exactly what it is, and yet raise its level because of their performances. The scenes in the club are hilarious. Spruced all over the dance floor, the monsters all wear obviously fake monster masks, and yet it works. A number of different bands perform monster-themed songs in the club, and the tunes are surprisingly catchy. Even the direction has more than a bit of class to it, as certain scenes stand out: as Hayes walks quietly through the night, Erasmus' hand pops into the frame as if to grab him; the way the third tale looks like it's beginning in some monster's lair, and then the camera reveals it's a movie set; and by far the best scene in the film, where a stripper removes more than her clothes. Even the minor details impress; the table at which Hayes and Erasmus sit is a lit up coffin lid, with a grinning skull atop it. Roy Ward Baker, a veteran director of many Hammer horror films, turns what was obviously a low budget affair into a respectable film.

Will today's audiences be scared by The Monster Club? Probably not. Having survived through the torture porn era, I'm afraid many horror fans will find it dull, as there's very little blood. But anyone who listens to Erasmus' final speech and doesn't get a chill down the spine is totally desensitized. Trying to get the club to accept Hayes as a member, he draws a terrible picture of why man is the greatest monster of all. Powerful stuff.

Not so powerful are the special features. In my review of I Walked with a Zombie, I mentioned how that disc housed the second worst commentary I've ever suffered through. The Monster Club commentary somehow manages to outlame that one. Luke Y. Thompson, some geek with a website, and Gregory Weinkauf give atrocious statements that don't qualify as insights. Just who these two men are, I have no idea, but they have no place discussing a movie they know nothing about. Often they lampoon the flick, and their comments slap the face of its fans. Patherfinder, the company which released the movie on DVD, would have done better to avoid a commentary, than to pay these two buffoons for one.

The Monster Club

A number of minor extras appear. Oddly, a section labeled Production Credits is actually a static ad for other Pathfinder releases. The trailer is in the same vein as the movie itself, though a little thick on the cheese. The biographies are thorough. Music from the Film allows access to just that; the songs play over a static screen. The stills gallery from the film and production notes are exactly what one would expect. The disc also features an essay on the background for the film, by George Reiss (color me biased, but I like my movie review better!). As with the guys who did the commentary, I have no idea who George Reiss. Let's be honest. Not a great set of extras, but for a movie like this, I'd usually expect no extras at all. So for 6 bucks, I appreciate that Pathfinder put together any extras package. And they respected the ratio! Having only seen The Monster Club on TV before, I realized the first time I watched this disc that it had a theatrical release, in 1:85 to 1.

Much like I did with Maniac, I bought The Monster Club because of nostalgia. And those fond remembrances paid off. Sure, it's not The Omen. But it is, as the tagline on the front cover states, "A tongue-in-cheek trilogy of terror!" one I enjoyed watching today just as I did on channel 9 in my youth. Do yourself a favor and head on down to the Monster Club. It's worth the price of admission, even if you are a mere human.

--Phil Fasso

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Posted by Phil at 01:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a man who teaches for a living, I qualify as an authority on school. And like so many horror fans of my generation, I have a great appreciation for old school. Toss out all these poorly made remakes; I want Betsy Palmer running around killing campers! Cast aside all these computer monsters; I want Savini or Rob Bottin making latex creatures in a garage! Fortunately for me, Ryan Schifrin has the same love of old school that I do.

Let me explain. As I was watching Schifrin's Abominable, I realized that this flick should have come out not in 2006, but in 1986. After all, it has all the trappings of a Reagan era horror flick: isolated location; 5 nubile teenage girls with hot bodies; lots of bloody deaths; and a guy in a monster suit! And though not particularly scary, more often than not Abominable does it right.

The plot even screams nostalgia, though the main thrust of it goes even further back to Hitchcock's Rear Window. Our hero Preston Rogers lost his wife and the use of his legs in a mountain climbing accident. Six months later, his doctor has ordered him to return to his vacation home to face his demons. Unfortunately, the doctor placed him in the care of a rather self-serving, annoying caretaker. The same day Rogers arrives, so does a group of five girls for a weekend getaway. Sensing a fresh food source, Bigfoot snatches one of the girls. Rogers tries to intervene, but both his wheelchair and a number of disbelievers hamper that idea.

Schifrin freely admits he copped the plot of Rear Window and turned it into a creature feature. Though I think Hitchcock is vastly overrated, I do love the Jimmy Stewart classic. Unfortunately, we don't get Stewart here. In his stead, we get Matt McCoy, star of such terrifying flicks as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Police Academy 5! He does a decent job in conveying fright and tension, and let's face it; overacting in a flick of this sort is forgivable. He does fare much better than his two main co-stars. The female lead is a fairly weak actress, and her name is Haley Joel (no, not that little twerp hiding under covers with a flash light and whispering about dead people; that's Haley Joel Osment). Even worse is Christien Tinsley as the caretaker. Hired on as the special makeup effects guy, he asked Schifrin for a role, and the director cast him as one of the leads. His acting is so atrocious, his character so frustratingly annoying, that he almost brings down the whole movie. But hey, Schifrin makes up for it in spades. Who would've expected Abominable to boast performances from Smallville's Martian Manhunter and Principal Vernon from The Breakfast Club? I can't help but find this oddball casting quite a joy.

There are more intriguing casting choices. Unfortunately, Schifrin squanders performances of genre vets such as Jeffrey Combs, Lance Henriksen, and a personal favorite of mine, Dee Wallace Stone. Sure it's great to see these stars and fondly remember them in classics such as Re-Animator, the Alien series, The Hills Have Eyes and The Howling, but they simply don't garner much screen time. Combs' character in particular, with his oxygen tank, wild spectacles and knowledge of Bigfoot, would have been a joy to have around more, if only because he's so weird. Instead, these three stalwart horror pros end up as glorified cameos whose names may draw to Abominable fans who will be sorely disappointed.

But Schifrin does plenty right to satisfy throwback fans of my generation. Flying in the face of watered down PG-13 fare, he adheres to Joe Bob Briggs' 3 B's: Blood, Breasts and Beasts. There's plenty of gore in this flick; particularly fun was watching a character get his face eaten off, and all with practical effects. Tiffany Shepis gets naked and takes a shower on film, and looks just fine in doing so. As for the beast, yes, it's cheesy. The Bigfoot in the flick looks like the retarded brother of Harry from that John Lithgow classic Harry and the Hendersons. But even that fits the whole tone of the flick (after all, does anybody remember Jason's potato sack head piece in Friday the 13th Part II?). Schifrin makes it clear both in the film's documentary and the commentary that he is a fan of old school horror, but this is evident just by watching the movie.

The documentary and commentary make up the base of a rather extensive package of extras on the disc. Anchor Bay once again gives a low budget horror flick the royal treatment (though I really wish someone in that company would figure out how to encode subtitles!). "Back to Genre: Making Abominable" runs 37 minutes and proves what a labor of love this movie was for Schifrin. Oddly, he admits that the idea for Abominable came to him on a beach during his honeymoon (I wonder what that marriage is like). Schifrin chronicles the hassles of low budget filmmaking, but also ventures into interesting territory when he discusses how he called in all sorts of favors for the film; the son of famed movie composer Lalo Schifrin, Ryan was able to lean on all sorts of contacts within the film community. Most of the actors comment on how fun it was to make the film; and although that sounds like standard fluff for a making-of, I get the sense it's true here. Sadly the doc reveals that director of photography Neal Fredericks died in a plane crash during post production; the movie is dedicated to him.

The commentary is a bit less of a joy. Schifrin's compendium of film knowledge is impressive, and he discusses some entertaining topics. But McCoy is a bore, making jokes that fall flat and genuinely dull comments. Oddly, Combs shows up only to cover his two scenes, alongside editor Chris Conlee. Did McCoy lock them in the basement for the rest of the film? Listen to it if only to see just how many movies Schifrin references within his own film.

The deleted and extended scenes add nothing to the film, and deserved their place on the cutting room floor. Also easy to pass on are the outtakes and bloopers. I generally don't like outtakes, but here they're even worse than usual, as one scene takes up the bulk of the four minute running time. The two trailers are interesting, especially because of their contrast. Galleries of still sand storyboards round out the package, as well as a DVD Rom copy of the screenplay; I never bother with Rom screenplays, so let me know if you find anything interesting there.

One more extra of note appears. Schifrin's student film "Shadows" from his days at SC is worth taking a peek at. It's a nifty little piece that states that sometimes paranoia isn't such a bad thing.

Had I watched Abominable on its own terms, I probably would have buried it in a darksome hole with so much Sci Fi channel fare. But with the entire decade of the 1980s behind it, Abominable gave me reason to rejoice. Ryan Schifrin loves the splatter fare I grew up on, and in imitating those movies, he certainly did not create a masterpiece (after all, those "run around a camp and slash up the teens" movies were never high art to begin with). But he did produce a fun little monster flick that has a sensibility nearly 20 years past due, and I dig that. And what better way to rock on with this 80s throwback than the inevitable... Abominable 2! Jason Vorhees should applaud.

--Phil Fasso

Posted by Phil at 01:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)