Heaven Is a Place On Earth (guarded by Fred Durst)

Between Tooth and Nail  and 9 Dead, it seems like I’ve been watching a fair share of mediocre to terrible direct-to-Instant Watch thrillers built on promising premises. Population 436, a 2005 film about a middle American hamlet and its cheerfully grim secrets, improves upon this trend with an intriguing and solid enough execution.

Quick Plot: Census taker Steve Kady (the always reliable when curly haired Jeremy Sisto) busts his tire just outside of Rockwell Falls, a small town dubbed by its 436 residents as “the most perfect place on earth.” Any grammar Nazi with an ear for redundancy knows better than to trust unnecessary adjectives, and sure enough, it doesn’t take Steve long to discover something fishy: for the past 100 years, Rockwell Falls has maintained its population count. 

Is it something in the water? Too much Shirley Jackson in the library? Whatever the problem, you can get a research montage that it won’t end well.

Population 436 is a neat little mystery, a Twilight Zone throwback that calls to mind the Jason Robards ruled underworld in A Boy and His Dog  crossed with the simpler bleakness of The Lottery. While director Michelle Maxwell MacLaren (who would go on to helm some of Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad's best episodes only to raise and crush my hopes when she left the big screen Wonder Woman film) doesn’t pull too many surprises once the plot gets rolling, the story is solidly suspenseful to keep us interested for the expected 90 minute running time. More importantly, little touches--such as the Stepford-ish costume design and all-out good folksy charm of its performers--work fairly seamlessly to pull the whole film together.

There's no earth-shattering shocks or philosophy-changing revelations, but this is a film that makes good on its mystery with competent storytelling, compelling characters, and a few 'whoah!' moments that make the trip worth taking.

High Points

Sisto’s character doesn’t really get the arc we’d like to see, but the actor works hard to ground the story in something we can relate to and care for

The first major horror element isn’t totally surprising, but the moment is staged with such fantastic tension and macabre humor that it truly shocks and takes the film into a whole new direction

Low Points

While I appreciate its bleakness, the ending ultimately feels somewhat empty

Lessons Learned

Any town guarded by Deputy Fred Durst is not a place to be trusted

Talkin’ Crazy is the only fever that matters

If you fear that everybody in town is out to get you, perhaps you should avoid macking on the one friend you have’s intended

Between Hannibal Lector and Rockwell Falls, census taking appears to be a career fraught with hazards

Stray Observation

This marks Jeremy Sisto’s second genre film to lead him to a makeshift graveard of the stolen cars of murdered visitors. I’m sure there’s some sort of Da Vinci Code-like significance to that.

Rent/Bury/Buy

Considering the crap I tend to watch, Population 436 is a tasty little treat. Though it never really ascends from Instant Watch caliber, this is a well-told mystery that fares better than your average mid-to-no budget thriller. Worth your full attention, just not your weekly allowance. If my research is to be trusted, the DVD is bare, save for what sounds like a wisely vetoed alternate ending. Stream one day when you’re in the mood for something lightly dark, like a an X-Files episode served with skim milk.

Boys Are So Icky

Aside from James Cameron, most of us mere mortals can easily be named our own worst judges. Need proof? Take the fact that Roman Polanski, if Googling is to be believed, doesn't think much of today's feature, 1965's Repulsion.

Oh, Roman. Chill. You’re a perfectly incredible filmmaker who made at least three masterpieces and your false humility is hardly endearing. You’ve got other problems. We’ll just enjoy your films.

Quick Plot: Famed ice queen Catherine Deneuve plays Carol, a Belgian manicurist living in a London flat with her older, sassier sister. Pretty as a picture and blond to boot, Carol is overwhelmingly apprehensive when it comes to the opposite sex, an inconvenience when you happen to be, by conventional standards, an absolute fox. Even those with more gentle approaches, such as her chief suitor who seems genuinely concerned (and clearly, emotionally masochistic), do nothing to calm her nerves.

For about the first 45 minutes or so, Repulsion is a slow, tenuous journey through Carol’s daily life. Clearly, this is a damaged woman with emotional issues, but this being 1965 and Carol simply being a pretty beauty salon employee, nothing seems especially out of the ordinary. When her sister leaves town for vacation with her married boyfriend, however, Carol is left to her own crippling psychosis.

It doesn’t take long for the world to cave in on our virginal headcase. Between sexually abusive nightmares, a rotting skinned rabbit, and helping hands that occasionally grope through cracking walls, Carol creates her own male-dominated hell in her lonely low-rent apartment. 

Filmed in black and white and scored to insane beats of angry jazz, Repulsion is your signature Criterion feature. Unarguably a classic worthy of impressive vocabulary filled essays, but also genuinely fascinating and an intriguing example of what cinema can do. As Carol loses more and more of her grip on reality, Polanski’s camera becomes a terrifying barometer of her insanity, jerking along with fierce percussion beats. It’s haunting, painful, thoroughly unsettling, and ultimately, a fine example of classic cinema holding up forty years, new colors, and creepy sex crimes later.

High Points

While I would probably never want to turn it on the background, Chico Hamilton’s expressionistic jazz score does incredible things when paired with Carol’s fraught mind

Much like her similar turn in Belle du Jour, Catherine Deneuve delivers a striking performance as a woman that must connect to the audience even though, by her very nature, she comes off as a cold and distant mess

Low Points

A constant pet peeve gets renewed in black and white:

How can you be a ‘special guest star’ in a film? Especially when you have multiple scenes and play an actual character? Why, opening credits, whyyyyyyyyyyy?

Lessons Learned

Never trust a manicurist who bites her nails

There is more than one way to pay your rent, especially if you’re an attractive young woman with mental problems

Not just in Clue: Candlesticks can be effective murder weapons 

Rent/Bury/Buy

Repulsion is a must-see for any genre film fan or cinema snob, a masterfully crafted thriller that draws you into a woman’s head, then shakes it around like an excitable maraca. The DVD includes a few featurettes well worth investigating, so buy at the right price and enjoy with prestige.

I Want to Ride My Bicycle

Not surprisingly, May is National Bike Month and even less surprisingly, that reminds me of a few good--or just entertaining--horror films.

1. And Soon the Darkness

A bicycle holiday through the French countryside sounds like a lovely idea, but the two lovely ladies at the center of Robert Fuest’s 1970 thriller have some pretty serious troubles ahead, and only part of that stems from the fact that both are wearing chafe-inducing hot pants. After a cranky are-we-there-yet squabble, the good girl Jane and flirty Cathy go their separate ways and a mysterious underwear thief pops latter’s bicycle tires. Yes, that’s literal, but let it lead your mind down a much darker path and enjoy this tense little cat-and-mouse tale unwind.

2. Demonic Toys

In the early 1990s, one could always count on Full Moon Entertainment to deliver something entertaining to VCRs across the country. Enter Demonic Toys, a messy--albeit enjoyable--horror featuring foul-mouthed baby dolls, hungry jack-in-the-boxes, satanic rituals, and, most relevant, rude little blond girls in gas masks on tricycles. Yes, that last part does send a significant chill upon first glance (particularly if, like me, you’re a tad uncomfortable around...you know...little blond girls in gas masks on tricycles) and like most Full Moon films, the scares don’t quite take themselves seriously long enough to merit any lasting effect but still...rude little blond girls in gas masks on tricycles. 

3. The Shining

Is it possible to walk through an antiquated motel with ugly carpeting and long hallways and NOT find yourself bemoaning the absence of a hot cycle? It just seems like the best possible mode of transportation to help navigate a haunted mansion. Maybe not the fastest escape from drunk daddy and his ax, but at least it takes you back to childhood. 

4. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Who knew Stanley Kubrick was such a bike enthusiast? Witness his second (or chronologically first, but set in the then-future, so...you get the idea) foray into bike horror in a more conceptional manner with 2001. The idea of tandem bicycles is already a tad unsettling--something about romantic exercise in a weirdly long vehicle just seems off to me--so hearing H.A.L. sing so coldly about “A bicycle built for two” in his dying cyber breaths lands on already chilled ears. Especially when you picture a lovely lass named Daisy riding a two-seater with a surly computer. The visual is a challenge in itself. 

5. The Wizard of Oz

Jaws. Darth Vader. The Wicked Witch of the West.

All supervillains. All equipped with incredibly iconic musical themes that speak to the very terror they instill in children, drunken sailors, Jedis, and Munchkins. Though it’s Mrs. Gulch--not the green-faced sorceress--who spends an extended time on a banana seat, children of all ages (and of all generations for 60+ years) have felt the hairs stand up on their trembling arms when those fast-paced notes blow by like a biker caught in a tornado. After all, this is a woman who wanted to kill one of cinema’s most efficient mutts!

6. The Toxic Avenger

Hey kids, tired of your mom forcing an ugly, socially unacceptable bike helmet on your sensitive adolescent head? Throw a little Troma her way and help yourself in the process with this 1984 splatter classic, wherein naughty drunk driving teens make serious sport out of running over pedestrians and cyclists. The best victim? A passing preteen (double points) whose safety gear can’t protect his noggin from the heavy skidmarks of a full-speed tire.

7. Maximum Overdrive

So a comet is nearing your planet and anything running on electricity wants to kill you. Hope you got a 10 speed! Because how else can you escape a clown-faced mack truck, determined lawnmower, and homicidal soda machine shooting out Pepsi cans as if they were bullets? The very thought makes me want to sign up for spin class in order to prepare.

8. Uzumaki

Ah, the innocence of young love, perfectly captured in Higuchinsky’s surreal J-thriller by an amorous couple’s daily bike rides through the town. The makings of a lovely relationship expected to bloom into prom dances and tenuous hand-holding...if only it wasn’t for the village-wide infection that renders residents suicidal or snail-like. 

9. In the Mouth of Madness

It was a dark and lonely night on the highway heading into Hobb’s End, and though he may have conquered T-Rexes and played the antichrist, even Sam Neill got skittish when a John Carpenter lookalike in washed-out denim peddles by in the wee hours of a haunted morning. 

10. Prince of Darkness

Despite an assumed short wind from years of chain smoking, I think we can safely assume John Carpenter appreciates a pleasant bike ride from time to time.  Witness this 1987 horror, the second entry in his loose Apocalypse trilogy, wherein a homeless Alice Cooper uses half a bicycle for a casual back alley impalement. 

11. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure

Not necessarily horrific, but the inclusion of sharp-fanged clowns with suspect medical degrees is enough to terrify anyone, and considering their main motive in Tim Burton's classic 1985 film is to destroy the coolest bicycle ever to grace the silver screen, I'd say they more than earn a place in this list.

Clarissa Explains Why It Sucks

Oh, Saw. You’re such an influential little franchise, aren’t you? Between popularizing torture porn (and all the debates that come with it) and giving me reasons to post serious photos of Costas Mandylor looking smarmy, you somehow found the time to birth knockoffs produced by and starring Sabrina, the Teenaged Witch.

That’s impressive. I work full-time, speak on a podcast to which my cohostess does all the tech work for, keep two mentally challenged cats alive, and write this blog and those busybee activities are enough to excuse me from ever cooking, cleaning, or do my own laundry more than once a month.

That was a tangent, yes, but Nine Dead is a rather awful film that, if nothing else, merits such detours. The movie does it itself by teasing us with the credit of “Daniel Baldwin” in the opening list, giving the (admittedly lesser) super brother an early line, then proceeding without his further involvement, thus leading the audience to occasionally wonder when bored (i.e., often) if he’s ever coming back.

Quick Plot: Nine strangers of various obnoxiousness are kidnapped by a masked man disguised as a knockoff performer for the Blue Man Group. In a deep, vaguely familiar of a much better television show voice, our mysterious mastermind explains that he has gathered these people in a Jigsaw-leased basement for a very specific reason. When the group figures out exactly what that is, they will be free to go home. In the meantime, Not Blue Man will return to kill one person every 10 minutes.

And so, like so many films before it, Nine Dead gives us a batch of unlikable characters shouting at each other for 90 minutes. Nobody really stands out, but I did wisely record them by type: White Guy, Lax Christian Guy Conveniently Named Christian, Chinese Woman,  Greasy Loan Shark Strip Club Keeper, Priest, Sweater Vest, Child Molester, Sabrina, and Black Guy Who Accuses All the Others of Being Racist, Yet Makes Me Have to Refer to Him As ‘Black Guy’ Because He Refuses To Tell the Others His Name For 30 Minutes.

There’s a lot of arguing, mini revelations, and dull red herrings that seem to exist more to pad the running time than add insight to character or story. Hearing Melissa Joan Hart recount her past trauma of sexual abuse is probably supposed to garner her some last minute character depth, but considering I had spent the previous hour hoping her name was next on the death list, I just didn’t care. The final revelation--no spoilers, I promise--isn’t overly far-fetched, but it’s also not very interesting. Much like the entire film itself.

High Points

The fact that the character I first dubbed ‘Stache proved to be a child molester allowed me to then alter his name to the catchy and convenient ‘Molestache’

Low Points

A sample of why some of this film’s writing is atrocious: 

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is...the lord is...DAMN! I can’t remember the rest!”  moans Christian. 

I’m not complaining about a character praying in a time of need or forgetting the words, but if you think logically, most people memorize these kinds of chants by line, not each individual word. Would anybody really forget “with thee?” No, they would forget the next verse.

While any attempt at creative killing would have further drawn the Saw rip-off criticism, gunshots to the chest just aren’t that interesting, especially by the ninth shot

Lessons Learned

A math quiz: You must connect 9 people (6 of whom are deceased) in order to survive. Ff there is a 30% chance that you will be shot dead in 10 minutes and a 70% chance that someone else with information will be shot in 10, followed by a 50% chance that you will be shot in 20 plus a 50% chance that someone else with key information will be killed instead,  and a 100% certainly that you will die in 30 if you haven't figured convoluted plotting out, then how stupid are you for allowing the annoying DA to slowly tell her dramatic rape story, complete with inconsequential details about her feelings of power?

Never underestimate the importance of mastering the game of Pictionary

When planning on raping a spunky DA, remember to keep your baseball equipment out of reach

Rent/Bury/Buy

Eh. Instant Watch or not, there’s hardly anything in Nine Dead worth recommending. Not exploitive enough for trashy fun and nowhere near suspenseful for an actual good viewing. I imagine digging into Daniel Baldwin’s imdb catalog will yield something more interesting. Let’s see:

Yup. Lots better to choose from.

It's a Contest!

In recent times, the sad fact has dawned on me that as much as I squeeze all the juice possible out of my Netflix rentals and library membership, there are still a whole lot of films I’ve just never seen. Among them:

Diabolique

The Innocents

Psycho 2/3/4

Phantasm 2/3/4

Alien 3

Piranha 

Orca

Tenebre

Opera

Black Sabbath

Alone In the Dark (either one...they’re related, yes?)

Feast

The Eye

What Have You Done to Solange?

House By the Cemetery

Gates of Hell

Cat People (original)

Sugar Hill
Riki-Oh
Santa Sangre
Street Trash
Dead Birds
2000 Maniacs

The Howling (any of them)

Ichi the Killer

Black Scorpion
The Tenant

Necromantic

Cape Fear (original)

Ringu
The Bird With the Crystal Plumage
Torso

Deep Red

Ghosts of Mars

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

I Stand Alone

Solaris

Silent Running

Ms. 45

Trog

The Wolfman (original)

Invaders From Mars (original)

The Vanishing

The Changeling

Maniac

The Poughkeepsie Tapes

Reanimator 2/3

Black Sunday

Blood Feast

Miller’s Crossing

Blood Simple

The Corpse Grinders

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

Terror Train

The Thing (original)
Angel Heart

Dirty Harry

Death Wish (any of ‘em)

The Omega Man

Naked Lunch

The Abominable Dr. Phibes
Alucarda

Wrong Turn 2

Lifeforce

The Terror of Tiny Town

Clearly my definition of “classic must-see movies” is not necessarily right.

Also, I’ve got an extra issue of the latest issue of Paracinema  (complete with my article on Who Can Kill a Child?  and Tom Shankland’s The Children ) burning a hole in my kitchen table and thus, I’ve decided to finally run a contest!* 

*Note that I’m normally terrible at these sorts of things.*

*Note that ‘these sorts of things’ basically refer to me walking to the post office during open hours and mailing something. We all have our talents (mine include badminton and ear wiggling) and sadly, weaknesses (cleaning, walking in heels) but I will vow to make this shipment happen!

So where do you come in? Here are the rules!


Take one of the films listed above and send me an email explaining why I should see it yesterday. Whet my appetite. Tease my demure Blu Ray player. Make me want to drop my fork of nachos to log onto Netflix, rearrange my queue, and wait patiently for its delivery in my mailbox. Write as much or little as you want, just say whatever you need to say to make me want to watch a movie I should probably have seen a long time ago. Send your email to deadlydollshouse@gmail.com by, I don’t know, June 9th, ‘cause that’s an easy date to remember because there’s a film with the same title. 

Now ideally, most of you have already pre-ordered your own non-contest issue of Paracinema (and if you haven’t, go here  to do so) so I’ll attempt to sweeten the pot with another surprise goodie stuffed inside a manila envelope. It may be slightly used movie from my personal collection or perhaps, a burned, probably only playable in your computer disc of something special. It may be an extra pair of socks. Not quite sure yet, but it will exist and find its way into the home of whoever gives me the best damn movie recommendation ever.

No pressure though. I've got a backup plan. 

Also, I promise to review ALL of the movies written about in the near future, so even if you don’t get a few of my Duane Reade receipts stuffed in an envelope, there still will be a little something in it for you, complete with your recommendation introducing my eventual review. 


Can't wait to hear your contributions!