30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 8: HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982)

Halloween III: Season of the Witch, an unexpectedly brutal but satisfyingly outrageous film, sits perpendicular to the rest of the Halloween series. It’s the only entry not to feature the ubiquitous Michael Myers, save for a few glimpses of the original film on a TV screen. That’s because John Carpenter, who reportedly disliked the traditional sequel Halloween II, said he’d only be involved in a third film if it were a completely different story. The idea was that Carpenter and crew would make Halloween into an anthology series, with a new story centered on Halloween each sequel.

The idea didn’t last long. Halloween III premiered to general distaste, and with the fourth entry a few years later, Michael was back and stabbing away. But although it certainly isn’t in line with what a Halloween audience would expect, Halloween III is actually pretty good, and unjustly overlooked.

Still, attaching it to the Halloween franchise may have been a mistake. Though Carpenter succeeds in doing something different from the two previous films, his and writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace’s approach is extremely different. Far from the spare, stark, quiet terror of the original, Halloween III is big, loud, and downright loopy, with a plot that is brazenly ridiculous. Yet it still works, because Wallace and crew play it straight, and don’t balk even when the movie is at its most ludicrous.

An old man (Al Berry) turns up in a California town, afraid for his life, apparently being chased. He’s found catatonic, clutching a Halloween mask in his hand. When a commercial for the mask company, Silver Shamrock, comes on the hospital TV, he shouts, “They’re gonna kill us all!” This prompts his doctor, Dan Chaliss (Tom Atkins), and his daughter Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) to travel to the Silver Shamrock factory to investigate just what he means.

What they discover I will leave for you to see, but I’ll just say that I was surprised. Most horror movies don’t work when they’re this plotty, but Halloween III has the courage of its convictions. Like many of Dario Argento’s ridiculous but spellbinding films, it takes itself seriously and still manages to build true suspense. Wallace takes a cue from Carpenter and builds tension from atmosphere. The film actually works in a bit of capitalist satire as the town of Santa Mira, home to the Silver Shamrock factory, is a believably barren hamlet whose laws are determined by the only company that brings it business.

Silver Shamrock’s owner, Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy, who went on to play a similar role in the Robocop series), is just the right kind of heavy: ruthless, amoral, and just silly enough to explain his diabolical plan like a Bond villain before he sends the hero to be killed (he even slow-claps at one point).

I just plain like the stonefaced goofiness of this movie. I like the mask company’s loyal army of henchmen in cheap suits. The simple, retro image of a computer-generated pumpkin, and how Wallace and Carpenter use it to build tension. The eventual emergence of snakes, bugs, and all sorts of creepy-crawlies. The involvement of Stonehenge, somehow. The ambient Carpenter synth score, which is legitimately one of the director/composer’s best.

The ending doesn’t quite work, as if Wallace and crew didn’t have a conclusion and just decided to stop, but, well, how was it supposed to end anyway? Movies like this can only be viewed on their own terms. The plot of Halloween III may be a bit out there, but if you accept it on its own logic, it works.

*** out of ****

THE ROOM (2003) and The Disaster Artist (2013)

It’s really tough for a movie to achieve greatness simply by being bad, but The Room has managed to do so, and has remained a staple of pop culture ever since it was first released in 2003, discovered by some film students and passed around on DVD and at midnight showings for ten years. It’s not merely bad, but monumentally mediocre. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it rises below mediocrity. And it has skyrocketed its writer/director/producer/star, Tommy Wiseau, to the same kind of cult status held by Ed Wood.

See the movie once, and it’s a remarkable achievement of awfulness. But see it after reading “The Disaster Artist,” an account of the making of the film written by co-star and line producer Greg Sestero, and it becomes an odd sort of victory tale. Wiseau, whose attempts to become a Hollywood actor had all failed, decided to bankroll and direct his own movie. And he did it. It’s not an inspiring rags-to-riches story. Wiseau was no struggling artist by any means, but an entrepreneur with seemingly unlimited funds. He had enough money to buy--not rent--two cameras with which to shoot his opus. He had enough money to pay the two or three crews he needed to hire after so many threw their arms up and quit. He had enough money to build a green-screen set of a rooftop in a parking lot, rather than simply film on a rooftop.

The Room is the culmination of a fight against not the boundaries of money, but the boundaries of talent. Wiseau had no directing experience, no writing experience, and little acting experience, and it shows. But here is his movie, as he conceived it, as he wanted it.

Wiseau plays Johnny, a good American boy (with an unexplained thick European accent) with a good job, who takes good care of his fiancee Lisa (Juliette Danielle). He even pays the tuition for Denny (Phillip Haldiman), a young boy who lives in his apartment building. Little does he know that Lisa actually hates him, and is cheating on him with his best friend Mark (Sestero).

Wiseau claims to have been inspired by Tennessee Williams for his screenplay, and it sometimes does feel like a poor man’s gender-reversed Streetcar. Williams’s plays usually did identify with genuine but put-upon characters who are eventually beaten down by the society they’re thrown into; “sympathy for the fragile people,” he called it. But I think even Williams might have been a little queasy about the unfettered worship that Wiseau lavishes upon his own character. He takes great pains to show us that Johnny is such a decent, nice, honest man who’s preyed upon by his witch of a girlfriend. Blanche Dubois may not have deserved what she got, but she was never meant to be perfect.  Johnny is a veritable superhero.

Most of the film is set in one apartment, with characters entering and exiting on a whim. A few perfunctory locations--a rooftop, an alleyway, a coffee shop--are concocted, but in no scene does the setting really matter. In fact, the only location that actually contributes to the plot is a now-legendary 19-second scene set in a flower shop, which tells us all we need to know about how Johnny is portrayed.


The heart of The Room and its badness lies mostly in the writing. At the time he wrote it, Wiseau very clearly had a less-than-firm grasp on the English language, and as a result everyone in the film talks like an ESL student. Characters spout botched idioms that Wiseau likely insisted be kept as written: “Hey Denny, two’s great but three’s a crowd.” “Hey Mark, XYZ.” “Just give me five [minutes].” It must be the optimistic view of America from someone who grew up behind the Iron Curtain that leads Wiseau to make his characters sound so cool, hip, and passive: “Don’t worry about it” is probably the most spoken line in the film. That also must have led to the prominent use of footballs in the film: not the sport of football, but merely the act of throwing them around as a source of bonding among men (a scene in which Johnny and his friends don tuxedos and pass a football around is inexplicable).

The bad writing also leads to some unintentional greatness. Plot strands are introduced and then immediately dropped. Lisa’s mother (Carolyn Minnott) has one of the film’s most memorable moments when she makes a severe revelation early in the film that is never, not even once, mentioned again. One actor (Kyle Vogt) leaves the film at the midpoint and is clearly replaced by another (Greg Ellery). A scene on the roof involving a gun and a drug dealer named “Chris-R” (Dan Janjigian, who according to Sestero was the only actor having any fun on the set) comes out of nowhere and is never referenced again (though the film faithfully follows the rule that a gun introduced in the first act must be fired by the third).  In a masterstroke of lazy writing, most scenes begin with characters greeting other characters.


The acting is, well, not that bad. Wiseau for the most part hired professional actors who took the film seriously on screen, even as they knew what a turd it was. Danielle does what she can with a thankless role, and is a trooper through numerous gratuitous steamy love scenes which require her to disrobe frequently but are mainly there to show off Wiseau’s physique (for some reason). Sestero tries hard as well, though like all the other actors he struggles with Wiseau’s goofy dialogue. He is required to shout the weirdest line in the film (“Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!”) and his heroic conquering of that piece of linguistic mush is recounted in detail in the book. All things considered, he nails it.

I think my favorite player is Mike Holmes, who plays Mike, a friend of Johnny’s and Lisa’s who for some reason goes to their apartment to make out with his girlfriend (Robyn Paris). Mike is the “comic relief” character, and in his several scenes has obviously been directed to “be funny.” A scene in which he does nothing but retell what happened in his previous scene is side-splitting.

Even Wiseau isn’t a terrible actor; though he reportedly struggled quite a bit with dialogue on the set, his acting isn’t bad in any way that isn’t the fault of his writing or directing. He throws himself into the role headfirst. It’s clear he’s trying to emulate the emotional power of, say, James Dean, which explains why he pirates a famous line from Rebel Without a Cause, which has been made infamous by this film on its own.

The Room may be a legendary bad movie, but it is no failure. By all accounts, it is exactly the movie that Tommy Wiseau wanted to make. Is he troubled that no one else seems to take the film at face value like he does? If a movie is this widely enjoyed, can it still be bad?

Don’t worry about it.

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 7: MANIAC (2012)

William Lustig's 1980 slasher Maniac is not a film that needed a remake, or to be made in the first place, for that matter.  It was one of those hack-em-up pictures that were a dime a dozen in the early '80s, in which insecure men with mommy issues carved up innocent women for our enjoyment.  All that set that one apart were the gore effects, decently done by Tom Savini, of Living Dead series fame.  I remember a ridiculous scene in which Savini played both a victim and the stand-in for the killer, and technically shot himself in the face.

This slick remake stars Elijah Wood as the killer, Frank, a mannequin shop owner who stalks and murders women by night, and adds them to his collection.  Though it's about as perfunctory as the original, director Franck Khalfoun and writers Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur handle the characters with surprising sensitivity and sympathy.  The murders here are just as grisly, the victims also mostly women, but while the first film objectified women, this one is about the objectification of women.

The gimmick that this remake throws in is that the entire movie is seen from Frank's point of view.  We see each murder through his eyes as he commits it.  We rarely see him except in mirrors, and in a few carefully placed shots in which the point of view seems to drift away and observe him, as seemingly does his own mind.

This motif works because Khalfoun commits to it and never cheats.  He also never shies away from any of the graphic murder scenes; as Frank watches his own actions, we must as well.  The gore, created by "The Walking Dead's" Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger, are astonishingly real and effective.

There is an overarching story in which Frank meets and falls in love with an artist (Nora Arnezeder), whom he believes might be more than just another mannequin.  Otherwise, the film is mostly a series of vignettes in which Frank seeks to satisfy his homicidal urges.  There's a silly sub-plot about the Oedipal origin of Frank's obsession, a holdover from the original film that's unnecessary here.  It runs out of steam after a while, as the murders grow a bit repetitive.

Still, Maniac is substantially better than the kind of brutal slasher from which it draws its inspiration.  Wood is flawed and appealingly pathetic as the killer.  The women he obsesses over aren't merely knife fodder, but appear to lead lives that exist off screen.  This is a movie about a man who stalks and kills women, but its women surprisingly are not there merely to be killed.

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 6: THE SHINING (1980)

I've just rewatched The Shining for the first time in about ten years.  The first time I saw it I was a kid, and I didn't quite get it; it was my first Stanley Kubrick film, and I hadn't quite learned how to watch one yet.  I gave it another go as a teenager, after having seen and loved Kubrick's other work, and warmed to it more.  Now I've seen it a third time, and I'm ready to say it's one of the most terrifying films I've ever seen.

It's also the first time I've seen it after reading Stephen King's novel on which it's based.  King is one of the film's toughest critics, had disagreements with Kubrick while it was being made, still insists that it does not represent his own vision, and scripted his own version (a TV miniseries starring Steven Weber) in 1998.

I've now read the book, seen the miniseries, and seen the Kubrick film fresh, and I've reached the conclusion that King is wrong.  It's not that Kubrick has better ideas than King does, but the Kubrick film is a much more accurate representation of his book than the miniseries is.  Kubrick does change certain plot details of the book, but it all adds up to the same thing.  It's the story of a deeply disturbed man who is driven mad over one horrible winter, and a vast, empty hotel that brings out the worst in him.

Where Kubrick and King have differed most vocally is in the portrayal of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a recovering alcoholic who's not far from falling off the wagon and into insanity.  King, I think, saw Jack as a flawed but generally good-natured man whose alcoholism and violent tendencies have made it impossible for him to be the good father he wants to be.  But what stands out about Jack is not his good intentions, but his failure and frustration.  At the beginning of the film and book we learn that Jack has had many violent outbursts, the most notable of which is an "accident" which resulted in the breaking of his four-year-old son's arm.  Well-intentioned or not, Jack is a dangerous force, and Kubrick seizes upon that as the crux of his film.

When Jack and his family move as caretakers into the haunted Overlook Hotel, a gargantuan castle abandoned for the winter months, the setting only exacerbates Jack's disease.  It's not the story of a good man being driven bad by ghosts, but a dangerous man who's given permission to act on his most destructive instincts.

It's why Nicholson is perfect for the role.  King has long criticized the casting of Nicholson, claiming that we know he's going to go berserk right at the beginning.  But his performance is much more subtle than that; his restraint in early scenes depicts someone trying extremely hard to be nice and to avoid lashing out.  As the film goes on, the hotel gradually unravels his facade and drives him to murder.

Shelley Duvall, as Jack's wife Wendy, is the picture of wifely support.  She's unwaveringly positive until she begins to realize that her husband is fading fast.  A scene in which she explains an act of domestic violence to a pediatrician is frightfully eerie: not because of the act she describes, but because of her optimistic dismissal of it.

The extrasensory ability of their son Danny (Danny Lloyd) is played obliquely by Kubrick, as it should be.  His conversations with his "imaginary" friend Tony, who warns him to stay away from the Overlook, are just strange enough to be worrying.  We have the occasional glimpse into Danny's mind: we hear a brief connection between him and Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), the hotel cook, and we see bits of a horrific precognition early in the film, but for the most part we only see what an outsider sees.  This is a better translation of King's book than the one he spells out in the miniseries, in which Tony is portrayed as a benign teenage ghost rather than the unexplained, possibly malevolent force that he is in the book and Kubrick's film.

What sets the film apart is the empty space.  The running time is 146 minutes, long for a horror film, but not a moment of it is wasted.  It's allowed to occupy its setting and take its time.  Seemingly contentless scenes, like one in which Jack bounces a tennis ball off the wall in a huge lobby, set up a quietly maddening tension.  The sounds, like the echo of Danny's big wheel rolling through a part-carpeted, part-hardwood hallway, enhance the isolation.

Slowly but surely Kubrick allows the tension to build.  Jack hallucinates (maybe) a hotel bartender who gives him a drink.  He has a terrible vision in the infamous Room 237.  By the time he picks up an axe, we see how he has gotten there.  Danny telepathically contacts Dick for help, in a scene that might have been impossible to film, but Kubrick does it, in one long shot of Crothers's face that is unforgettable.

I can see why King was dissatisfied with Kubrick's film.  It doesn't bother with many of the elements of his novel.  Much of the checkered history of the hotel isn't dealt with, though a scene of roaring-twenties excess is enough to give an idea.  In the novel, King had the hotel guarded by large animal-shaped topiaries which moved, or maybe didn't; Kubrick replaces them with a labyrinthine hedge maze which is just as forbidding (in King's miniseries, the giant animals look a lot sillier than they seem when described in the book).  The cathartic, easy ending of King's novel is also absent; Kubrick opts for something more ambiguous.

Much of King's work to date has been extremely cinematic, not terribly difficult to translate to film.  But The Shining is the exception, since much of its action occurs within the characters' heads, in memories, in introspection, in conversations with ghosts who may or may not actually be there.  That's why King's more literal adaptation is less effective, while Kubrick finds a way to translate it into the language of film.  Look closely and you realize that Kubrick hasn't changed the novel much at all; he has merely converted it.  Of the two screen adaptations of the novel, Kubrick's is actually the more faithful, in essence if not literally.  King may know his own work, but Kubrick knows film better.

**** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 5: THE HOWLING: NEW MOON RISING (1995)

The seventh in a long, fairly stale series of werewolf films, The Howling: New Moon Rising is certainly the strangest of the bunch.  Maybe one of the strangest movies ever made.  I can't imagine how it was conceived, if it was conceived, if the end result in fact represents the director's intention.  I think it does.  It's mostly the work of one man: Clive Turner, an Aussie who wrote and produced entries 4 and 5 in the Howling series, and has produced a few other noteworthy films, like the dumb-but-fun The Lawnmower Man.

If you remember, Stephen King sued Turner and company to have his name taken off of that film, which bears no resemblance to his short story of the same name.  Similarly, a werewolf might want to sue Turner for this film, which features several peripheral references to werewolves but isn't really about them, nor is a werewolf ever visible on screen.

Turner writes, directs, produces, edits, and stars as Ted, a drifter whose motorcycle pulls into a small desert town in California.  He takes a job and befriends the townspeople, but he may have some secrets, possibly connected to a series of grisly murders that have been happening in the desert.

Earlier films in the series prided themselves on depicting bloody deaths and gory werewolf transformations in graphic, occasionally goofy detail.  This one, apparently made on the budget of an Applebee's dinner, can't afford to do so.  It instead gives us sloppy first-person attack scenes, seen through a red tint so we know it's a werewolf.  To give us an idea of what a werewolf looks like, the movie has to use archive footage from earlier films in the series.  The one time we get to see a werewolf for real, the effect is shoddy enough to make "Manos": The Hands of Fate look like Avatar.

But never mind that the film is awful.  This we know from the beginning.  Though Turner has failed at making a Howling movie, he's certainly made something.  I don't know what it is, but it's something.

In certain scenes it looks as if Turner is trying to make the Nashville of werewolf movies.  He devotes a heavy percentage of the running time to establishing the atmosphere of the setting.  We get to know the local characters, most of whom are played by actual local non-actors (it shows).  They drink, line-dance, crack silly dad-jokes, and sing country music.  A lot.

It's not long before we realize that this isn't a werewolf movie with musical interludes, but a musical with werewolf interludes.  Some of the music, dare I say, is pretty good, most of it written by the actors in the film.  There's even room for a campfire melody about the dangers of drug use (though it still extols the pleasures of beer-drinkin').  The acting is bad but the people in the film seem genuine, like ensemble players in a community production of Oklahoma!.  Werewolf or no werewolf, the town seems like a pleasant place to live.  Turner, brazenly casting himself as the movie's anchor, is no great actor himself, but he has a certain goofy charm.

The movie alternates between the drinkin' and dancin' of the town and a nearby police station, where a priest (John Huff) explains the plot of the film to a detective (John Ramsden) for what appears to be several days straight (the continuity of the film is not flawless).  It's here that Turner attempts valiantly to connect the plot of this film to that of Howlings 4 and 5: no small task, since the previous two films weren't made with any connection in mind.  The way in which he ties them together is positively labyrinthine, and it culminates in a last-minute connecting-the-dots scene that Keyser Soze would find too complex.

This movie is awful, yes.  But it is awful in a truly fascinating way.  Many directors make bad werewolf movies, but this one is a beauty.  It's as if Turner started to make a werewolf movie, hired some locals on the cheap to act in it, then was so charmed by them that he decided to make them the focus of the movie instead.  What a strange, unique occurrence The Howling: New Moon Rising is.  As bad as it is, I hadn't seen it before and I doubt I'll see anything like it again.

THIS WEEK IN CINEMASOCHISM: Movie 43 (2013)

Just why Movie 43 exists is a good question.  A middling collection of short sketches starring A-list actors might have been a novelty in the time of Kentucky Fried Movie or Amazon Women on the Moon, the obvious inspiration for this strange anthology spearheaded by Peter Farrelly.  But with the rise of Funny or Die, it's not out of the ordinary to see the biggest of names turn up in short films and sketches online.  A movie full of them is kind of like a VHS full of Blu-rays.

Because the movie is a collection of sketches from different directors with little connection and no continuity, they by nature range from the very funny to the not funny at all.  Kind of like the recent horror experiment The ABCs of Death, when it is good, it is very good.  When it is not, it's at least short.

Most of the films aim for pure grossout effect, and seeing famous actors doing decidedly grotesque things is one of the movie's redemptive joys.  Farrelly directs two sketches himself, both about blind dates gone wrong.  One of them, "The Catch," is awfully easy once the premise is revealed, but it moves briskly, gets laughs and ends early, and Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman are good sports as the two people in question.  He also directs the wraparound sequence, in which Dennis Quaid pitches the anthology to movie producer Greg Kinnear; this segment overstays its welcome quickly, though Quaid's outfit alone is good for a laugh.

Some sketches wring themselves out before they're over.  Real-life couple Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts are funny as parents homeschooling their son, though the sketch has limited gas in it.  A love story in which Anna Faris has a strange request for boyfriend Chris Pratt is a little too obvious, though the performances are genuine, particularly from JB Smoove as Pratt's best friend.  Griffin Dunne's sketch, about a weird grocery store romance (Kieran Culkin and Emma Stone), and Brett Ratner's, about a couple of guys (Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville) who catch a leprechaun (Gerard Butler), are pretty much swings-and-misses.  An overlong sketch about Batman (Jason Sudeikis) ruining Robin's (Justin Long) chances on a date is painfully labored, though it does feature a welcome appearance by John Hodgman.

The sketches that work best are the ones that have something up their sleeves other than grossouts.  Best is Elizabeth Banks's, about a young girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) on a date getting her first period, and the men around her having no idea what to do.  Steven Brill's, in which a room full of corporate executives are unable to determine why their product is injuring so many young men, is very funny, and contains some great deadpan work from Richard Gere and Aasif Mandvi.  James Gunn's is a wonderfully disgusting story about a woman (Elizabeth Banks) who's a bit upset at her boyfriend's (Josh Duhamel) relationship with his housecat.

And Rusty Cundieff, a veteran of "Chappelle's Show" and director of Tales from the Hood, a great and underseen socially conscious horror-comedy, delivers a faux sports reel about an African-American basketball team about to be the first to play against a white team, and a coach (Terrence Howard) who seems to be the only one not worried.  The sketch's one joke is a well-worn one, but it works, because of the time at which it takes place, and how the white team is portrayed, and how the inevitable punchline is executed.

** out of ****

Is it really that bad?: No.

Pain level: Beginner, though some of the longer sketches breed impatience.

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 4 / THIS WEEK IN CINEMASOCHISM: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2011)

Fans instantly chirped at the news that Jackie Earle Haley had been cast as Freddy Krueger, that irreplaceable haunter of dreams, in the new redux of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Some, having seen Haley’s exceptional work in Little Children and Watchmen, eagerly awaited his take on the well-known villain. Others poo-poohed the casting, insisting that the only real Freddy is the original, Robert Englund.

It has been interesting seeing Englund’s performance of Freddy evolve over the many sequels: from a powerful evil presence in the first film, to a jokester in the third film, then just a joke in later efforts. Casting another actor stops Freddy in his tracks, and only works if the filmmakers have a new direction to take the character in. In this case, they do not.

Not only does the casting of Haley—who’s far too talented an actor to be involved in the first place—bring nothing to the film, but the new Nightmare is poorly written, badly acted, and amateurishly directed to boot. I remember making movies like this with my VHS camcorder when I was 12. The Be Kind Rewind guys would have made a more professional-looking film than this.

It follows the plot of the original film fairly closely. Teenagers in Springwood have been having graphic nightmares in which a man with a burnt face, a striped sweater, and knives on his fingers stalks them. Soon they begin to notice that when they’re cut in their dreams, they bleed in real life. The parents seem to have some idea of what’s going on, but stay suspiciously silent. It all ties back to Fred Krueger.

Freddy’s backstory is well-known at this point, but this movie dwells on it as if it’s a surprise. Each detail is spelled out as if the movie aspires to be an encyclopedia of movie monsters for nerds. The 2009 Friday the 13th remake was no classic, but it at least began knowingly, with a prologue that assumed we knew who Jason was and then moved on quickly.

Everything that the new Nightmare tells us about Freddy is something we know from the original film. The only new step the movie takes is to focus uncomfortably on Freddy’s pedophilia, so that we’re rewarded with several flashback scenes of Mr. Krueger asking young girls if they want to know a secret. Barf.

The casting of Jackie Earle Haley might have easily led the film in a new direction. Haley was no doubt cast because of his excellent Oscar-nominated performance in Little Children, in which he played a convicted pedophile who was sick and afflicted, and garnered our sympathy. Are we ready for a sadder, resigned Freddy Krueger, who’s a monster simply because there’s nothing else he can be? Apparently not; Haley’s take on Freddy is pretty much the same old stuff, and at times he even seems to be parroting Englund. Even Englund’s snappy jokey dialogue from the later sequels would have been welcomed here. Instead we get this:

Teenager: “You’re not real.”
Freddy: “I’m real.” 

There are other actors in the film going through the motions. One is the delightful Rooney Mara, whose work in The Social Network had already lifted her above junk like this. Connie Britton appears as one of the moms, but her performance as a standard plot-deliverer only reminds us of Ronee Blakley’s brilliant off-the-wall portrayal of the same character in the original.

So much more could have been done with this plot. With the steep takeoff of ADD drugs in recent years, something might have been done with the fact that kids actually are awake all night nowadays. There’s one scene involving a video blogger that might have been expanded upon, but is quickly dismissed. There are ways to update A Nightmare on Elm Street for the times without simply rehashing it.

What an incredible bore this movie is. There’s not one legitimate scare in it. Not one. It carbon-copies the original but sucks out everything that made it work. The characters are turned into lame teen soap stars, the plot is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, and Freddy is made inert. One of the writers is Wesley Strick, who has written some very good thrillers over the past twenty years: Arachnophobia, Wolf, Return to Paradise, Doom, the Martin Scorsese Cape Fear. His draft for A Nightmare on Elm Street should never have left the bottom drawer.

* out of ****

Is it really that bad?: It's excruciating.

Pain level: Advanced. 

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 3: PUPPETMASTER (1989)

I had the unfortunate experience of journeying into a Wal-Mart around 10pm on a Sunday night (all the other grocery stores were closed) and found this in a $5 discount bin.

I didn't even know that the cheapie Full Moon-produced series had half that many sequels.  And this is not even all of them, as the collection excludes 2004's Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys and last year's Puppet Master X: Axis Rising, in which it looks like the puppets are fighting Nazis.  Or maybe they're on the Nazis' side, I dunno.  This, I thought, is not a bargain.  This is a challenge.

The first Puppetmaster, directed by Full Moon regular David Schmoeller, is a challenge indeed.  For a movie in which a bunch of puppets come alive and kill people, it's unimaginatively directed and distinctly poorly acted.  And in a movie called Puppetmaster, for the acting to be noticeably bad is no small feat.

The plot, so far as there is one: a bunch of psychics, led by Alex (Paul Le Mat, who lists American Graffiti among his credits but here proves about as effective a leading man as Arnold Stang), visit a mansion where Toulon (William Hickey), an old puppeteer (Hickey was only 62 when this film was made), killed himself 50 years earlier.  Soon his puppets come to life and attack them all.

The puppets were created by David Allen, responsible for some wonderful Harryhausen-esque stop-motion animation on films like Q: The Winged Serpent and The Howling, and they're pretty good.  I especially like the ringleader, a white-faced ghost with a wide-brimmed hat and very large knife.  There's also a lady puppet who vomits giant leeches, and a tiny-headed one whose big strong arms prove none too helpful when characters just pick him up and toss him across the room.

The puppets would make for an interesting premise, if the movie around them weren't so stiff and boring.  Schmoeller points and shoots without much care, and lets dialogue scenes drone on and on.  He even botches the final shot, which might have been clever but feels like a joke where the punchline is revealed too soon.

* 1/2 out of ****

COMING SOON: Puppet Master 2, directed by Allen himself and hopefully featuring a lot more of his creations and a lot less filibustering.

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 2: TWIXT (2012)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt is a small gem of a ghost story, an ode to the director’s roots in horror. Though he’s made some of the best films of all time, Coppola has always had an appreciation for all things spooky and creepy and crawly. He produced the Jeepers Creepers series (the third of which has been unforgivably long delayed), and his first film, Dementia 13, was a micro-budgeted shocker that hinted at what he was to become. Twixt, which he wrote and directed, has a preposterous and convoluted story that I wasn’t quite sure I’d grasped at the end, but I was surprised at how much it didn’t matter.

This is a movie about atmosphere, and Coppola creates a living, breathing setting in the small ghost town of Swan Valley. Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a semi-successful horror author who’s forever lived in the shadow of Stephen King, drives into town for a book signing which attracts distressingly little attention. The exception is the sheriff, Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern), who’s interested in partnering with Baltimore on a book about the mysterious deaths of 13 young girls, and their connection to a group of devil-worshipers that have set up shop at the outskirts of town.

As Baltimore walks through the town at night, it begins to take a different shape from the boring, nearly abandoned town he sees during the day. He speaks with several inhabitants, some of whom may no longer be alive. It provides a pensive escape from the daytime, when he battles with his estranged wife (Joanne Whalley, Kilmer’s real-life ex-wife) over money, fends off the sheriff’s ambitious advances, and investigates the strange occurrences in the town’s history.

The story is difficult to follow. I’m not even sure that Coppola intends for us to do so. The past blends with the present, and characters seem to weave back and forth in time, and neither Baltimore nor we are quite sure what year it is. The film inhabits Baltimore’s mind as he explores the town and sees it through the filter of a ghost story. He meets a young girl (Elle Fanning) who by all accounts existed in the 19th century but appears to know who he is. And in the film’s weakest sub-plot, he carries on conversations with a dour, humorless spectre of Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin).

But never mind the plot. Look at the joy Coppola takes in visiting classic horror traditions. The heptagonal clock tower that for some reason broadcasts seven different times. The oddball clock repairman (Don Novello—yes, Don Novello) who seems to exist at all times in history. The body in the morgue with the stake driven through its heart. The small-town strangeness of Dern’s performance as the opportunistic sheriff, and his relationship with the Renfieldesque deputy, as well as the kid who hangs out at the station and plays games.

Kilmer’s strong performance is an anchor for the film’s traverses. He’s believable as the down-and-out author, and provides something to follow even when the film goes off the rails. (He also finds occasion to revisit the impressive Brando impression he showcased in The Island of Dr. Moreau.)

Twixt is overcrowded and goes overboard a little too often, but it’s also made with the subtle attention to detail that inhabited Val Lewton’s films. Most ghost stories nowadays throw in more gimmicks than they need. This one is what it is.

*** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 1: V/H/S/2

V/H/S/2, the followup to last year's uneven but occasionally brilliant horror anthology, is in some ways a more satisfying collection of short films than its predecessor.  It's shorter, leaner, and less self-indulgent than the previous film, and the directors are always having fun with the film's gimmick.  The premise--a collection of five found-footage films from different directors--was strained in the original, but here is kept fresh in each entry.

Each of the four films finds an interesting way to tell its first-person story. Adam Wingard’s (You're Next) is shown through a bionic eye that records a little more than it should. Gregg Hale and Eduardo Sánchez, the producer and co-director of The Blair Witch Project, use a GoPro helmet camera in a way that I’d never seen before. Jason Eisener’s (Hobo with a Shotgun) segment, a very funny Goonies-like account of a sleepover gone wrong, is told partially from the point of view of the family dog.

The best segment belongs to Timo Tjahjanto (who made the notorious "L is for Libido" segment of The ABCs of Death) and Gareth Huw Evans (The Raid: Redemption), about an Indonesian religious cult that agrees to let a camera crew into its compound for the first time. This is the most suspenseful and the looniest of the series, and the off-the-wall performance from Epy Kusnandar as the pompous cult leader is a standout.

The only weak link in the film is the wraparound story by Simon Barrett, which strains to be spooky but doesn’t leave much of an impression. Still, the opening scene, in which a peeping tom gets a surprise, is clever, and the gory punchline is good for a laugh.

*** out of ****

NOTE: It might be silly, but I really enjoy the song that plays over the end credits.