Review – The House Where Evil Dwells

Okay, help me with a geometry problem. This story starts in 1870 in Japan, as a woman has sex with her lover. Suddenly her enraged husband interrupts them, kills them both and commits suicide. Because the woman is “romantically linked” to both men, we traditionally call this a “love triangle.” But if it’s a triangle, wouldn’t the two guys have to be doing it with each other too? Otherwise wouldn’t it just be a “love angle”? High school math problems aside, this is The Amityville Horror relocated to the Land of the Rising Sun. A couple and their kid move into the house haunted by the vengeful ghosts of the trio from the intro. The story isn’t bad to begin with, but the more it drags on the dumber it gets. At least the Lutzes moved out after they figured out they were sharing digs with evil spirits. This pair and the male friend who completes the geometry stay put until the bitter end. Mildly amusing

Review – The Missiles of October

The title – a twist on The Guns of August – clearly identifies this as a tale of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The production appears to be a shot-on-video recording of what was probably originally a stage production, so it’s nowhere near as slick as Thirteen Days. On the other hand, it’s fun to watch a parade of actors who went on to play creepy government types in other shows. William Devane plays JFK, with an accent-slipping Martin Sheen backing him up as Bobby. Though this doesn’t add anything particularly new or interesting to the world of Missile Crisis cinema, it’s a reasonably entertaining telling of the tale. Mildly amusing

Review – Pier 5, Havana

This movie has one interesting thing going: it was made in 1959, after Castro’s revolution succeeded but before the United States decided he had to go. As a result, the bad guys in this tale of intrigue are pro-Batista terrorists. But other than its status as a historical curiosity, there isn’t much to this. It’s a stale bit of hardboiled drama about a tough-as-nails guy trying to track down a missing friend. It has all the genre clichés, right down to the tough-as-nails love interest (and you’d have to be tough as nails to put up with having your boobs crammed into bras as ridiculous as the ones this poor actor had to wear). At least it was short. See if desperate

Review – Show Business

I’ll admit to a curiosity about what goes into a Broadway show, so perhaps I found this documentary more interesting than some viewers would. I also liked it because it covered a wide range of elements, starting with the beginning of an idea for a new musical and then going through the various steps required to turn a concept into a production. It has some rehearsal footage, sure, but it also shows planning meetings, schmooze sessions with critics, and many other details one wouldn’t think about when watching a show. The picture focuses on four productions – a predictable success (Wicked), an unpredicted success (Avenue Q), a play designed for critical acclaim (Caroline, or Change) and an almost instant flop (Taboo) – providing a range of perspectives on the experience. I would have liked this slightly better if they had included some non-musical shows as well. However, even just the musicals are interesting stuff. Mildly amusing

Review – Dead Man Walking

Sister Helen Prejean’s book about her experiences with death row inmates gets Hollywoodized reasonably successfully. Susan Sarandon plays Prejean, and Sean Penn sits on the other side of the metal screen from her, playing a combination of the two prisoners described in the book. I figured with all the California liberals involved in the production – particularly Tim Robbins in the director’s chair – that this would turn out to be an empty-headed attack on capital punishment. So I was pleasantly surprised to find the other side of the story – particularly the suffering of the victims’ families – given a reasonable amount of screen time. Indeed, the end – intercutting the execution by lethal injection with flashbacks to the original crime – was morally ambiguous, feeding the “see how wrong killing is in both circumstances” and the “see how just the punishment is for such a brutal crime” positions with equal fire. I don’t think I would have bestowed as many awards on this as it got, but I thought it was a reasonably good movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Undead or Alive

A zombie movie. A western. A comedy. Any two of those elements might have been successfully combined (zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead, western comedy Blazing Saddles, although the world may need to wait awhile longer for a good zombie western). But all three? This thing never stood a chance. Chris Kattan plays a dorky tenderfoot who joins up with a ne’er-do-well and a Native American woman to battle a plague of zombies produced by “Geronimo’s Curse.” The concept isn’t automatically doomed, but it needed a smarter script to pull it off. This plays like a mildly gory Halloween episode of F-Troop. See if desperate

Review – The Objective

Like The Last Winter, this is an indie horror picture that does a reasonably good job of taking itself seriously. Unlike Winter, however, this one lacks interesting characters as well as an overall raison d’être. A CIA operative leads a squad of mercenaries into the hills of Afghanistan in search of a dark, supernatural force. What they find – after considerable go-nowhere meandering – is a smidge too Close Encounter-y, but it does pack enough understated menace to keep things interesting. Mildly amusing

Review – Nine Hours to Rama

This fictionalization of Nathuram Godse’s assassination of Mohandas Gandhi doesn’t actually take nine hours to watch, but at some points it seems like it does. The plot – assassin maneuvers into place as overworked cop struggles to locate and thwart him – reminded me of The Day of the Jackal, a movie that came along later and did a better job of keeping things interesting. On the other hand, this one did have an advantage or two. For example, Gandhi is actually a character in the story, played by an actor who does a reasonably good job in the role. The victim’s appearance as more than a target makes the ending all the more tragic. Mildly amusing

Review – To Have and Have Not

Despite the source story by Ernest Hemingway and the script co-written by William Faulkner, this is primarily a Humphrey Bogart vehicle evocative of some the actor’s previous successes, particularly Casablanca. Bogart plays an American expat running a business in French territory, thumbing his nose at authority and trying to straighten out his complicated love life. Sure, it’s fishing charters rather than a club, Martinique rather than Morocco, and Lauren Bacall rather than Ingrid Bergman. Still, it’s somehow all too familiar. On the other hand, it packs enough fresh, Hemingway touches to make it stand up on its own. Mildly amusing

Review – September Dawn

This account of the Mountain Meadow Massacre is none too charitable to the Mormon church, though if it’s accurate then perhaps the church doesn’t deserve much mercy. Certainly the settlers who fell victim to the massacre didn’t get any. The slaughter of innocent folks just trying to make their way to California might have been the subject of a solid, tragic tale, but this production swiftly bogs down in clichés and over-simplifications. For example, all the Mormons are fanatics and polygamists, except of course for the young hero who forms a Romeo-and-Juliet relationship with a young settler woman. When the impact of a picture depends on its veracity, sometimes it’s better to work on showing both sides of the story. Mind you, I hate vicious religious fanatics as much as the next person. But here it comes across as too easy an explanation. Mildly amusing

Review – The Chair

There must be at least two movies with this name, because the description on the DirecTV directory – James Coco stars in a movie about a ghostly prison warden – had nothing to do with this Chiller offering. Instead, the chair in question is a torture device triggered by the breathing of the victim seated thereupon. A young woman who’s fine as long as she takes her pills discovers the thing in her attic and ends up possessed by the evil spirit of the sadist who created the thing. Perhaps the Coco picture was better. See if desperate

Review – I Sell the Dead

Though I’m on the record many times complaining about the horror comedy as a sub-genre, every once in awhile one catches me at just the right time and in just the right way. Dominic Monaghan plays a criminal condemned to death for murder and grave robbing, denying the former charge while admitting the latter to a curious monk (Ron Perlman) who wants to hear his story. And what a story it is. It starts out as standard grave robbing stuff, but before the end we get vampires, zombies, space aliens, mummies, and at least the suggestion of sea monsters. To be sure, a lot of the humor is too broad by far. But some of it cleverly sends up older horror movies, particularly the Hammer catalog. Worth seeing

Review – Dread

Though I strongly suspected this would turn out to be yet another pathetic parade of torture, I was lured by the power of the first paragraph in the source story by Clive Barker. It’s strong stuff, almost as good as the opening to Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu.” But the rest of the story is the tale of a psychotic grad student who likes to find ways to uncover people’s secret fears and use their phobias to torment them. So my guess about the content of a low-to-mid budget production based thereon was that it would be the umpty-millionth entry in the big catalog of torture porn. To be sure, it had that flavor. It also sported some dreadful filter work, ping-ponging back and forth between NIN video amber and Hollywood absinthe green. But it also included some minor character development and a plot twist or two. Mildly amusing

Art and Horror: An introduction to The Night Gallery

The connection between art and horror is as old as the connection between literature and horror. Indeed, arguably it’s even older. If the animals and were-creatures in the paintings at Lascaux and other prehistoric sites represent creatures that the painters’ society feared at least a little, then in a sense they’re the world’s earliest horror comics.

Thus it’s odd that writers, producers and directors so seldom exploit this natural relationship. Both the movie and book review sections of 8sails are piled with horror stories, but I can count the number of art- or artist-centered tales that come readily to mind without running out of fingers. Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model.” King’s “The Road Virus Heads North.”

And of course Rod Serling’s The Night Gallery.

Perhaps I should be more precise. The three segments that make up the pilot (later packaged as a stand-alone movie) all involve works of art. Though the painting in the Steven Spielberg / Joan Crawford segment is incidental to the plot, the other two chapters make excellent use of their canvases.

And for many years I assumed that the rest of the series did the same. The series originally ran from December 1970 to May 1973, and back then I was a little too young to stay up late and watch it. So for years all I knew about the series as a whole came from watching the pilot when it aired on Friday Fright Night (once I was old enough to stay up for it, of course) and the ads in monster magazines for the poster reproductions of the paintings from the rest of the series. So naturally I figured that the whole set was a series of stories with art at their cores.

No such luck. Serling uses the art gallery theme to introduce stories, but beyond that the paintings seldom play roles in the tales. Indeed, some of the pairings have little obvious connection to each other.

That was a shame, because the art almost always suggested some good horror potential. Even the abstract stuff could have been twisted around into something interesting. The scripts, on the other hand, frequently came up short. Even the well-crafted ones – such as Emmy-nominated “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar” – were often far too sentimental, strange or just plain dull to work as horror stories. Still, every once in awhile one would really work.

For many years The Night Gallery lived only in syndication. For the first two seasons of the series the episodes lasted an hour, but for the third season the shows were 30 minutes. For some reason – presumably to make it easier to wedge into gaps in schedules – in syndication the half-hour format was selected. So some of the stories from the 60 minute seasons were either butchered to make them fit or beefed up with extra footage to make them longer. Further, segments from a short-lived series from 1972 – The Sixth Sense – were also cut in.

The advent of the DVD was a real boon to many old shows, including this one. As of this writing, both the first and second seasons are available on disc in their original broadcast formats.

Review – Saint Sinner

I could see the elements of what could have been a good story buried deep under the crap that infects this picture. A tag team of vicious succubae wreaking seamy havoc on mankind is classic Clive Barker. But the effects are bad. The script is weak, full of characters and subplots that could easily have been replaced with a few good scares. The whole time-travelling monk thing was likewise bad as a main story line, a bit too Warlock to work in this context. Once again a Barker-based movie falls short of the source material. Indeed, the closest it comes to entertaining are the occasional sub-references to other Barker pictures (such as the background voice in the county lockup scene yelling the “get them off me!” line from Hellraiser 2). Mildly amusing

Review – Blow Out

This is vintage Brian DePalma, complete with plenty of awkward editing, clunky script and Nancy Allen. A movie sound expert (played by John Travolta back when he was still capable of playing roles other than John Travolta) is out in a park recording night noises when he witnesses a car accident involving a prominent politician and a call girl (Allen). His recording of the incident reveals that the car’s tire was shot out by an assassin (John Lithgow). And on things go from there, our hero trying to get the truth out while keeping himself and his new girlfriend out of the clutches of the killer. Some of the sound editing sequences were fun in a trip-down-the-pre-digital-memory-lane way, but the rest of it is mediocre stuff. Mildly amusing

Review – Dark Rising

Gee, another horror comedy that’s neither scary nor funny. A group of the usual morons camping in the woods accidentally summon a demon, and their only hope is an axe-wielding bikini babe from another dimension. Not for the first time (and probably not for the last) I found myself wondering why people waste their time making movies this dumb. See if desperate

Review – Pontypool

Coincidentally, this is the second movie in a row I’ve watched about people trapped in a radio station besieged by zombies. This one’s an IFC production, which makes it a bit more upscale than Dead Air. Plus it has a weird twist: the zombification agent is transmitted via the English language. This gives the filmmakers the chance to do all kinds of strange things with the plot, such as the zombies’ creepy tendency to repeat whatever they hear. Indie innovations notwithstanding, however, this is still mostly just another small-group-of-humans-vs-rampaging-zombies movie. Mildly amusing

Review – The Pumpkin Karver

This stinker’s ghostly slasher’s MO is an obsession with carving people like pumpkins. Strange fetishism aside, however, there isn’t much to this. Just the usual parade of idiots being ever-so-slowly butchered by a guy in a Halloween mask. Snore. See if desperate

Review – Dead Air

Night of the Living Dead meets the Howard Stern Show in a combination that’s actually a little better than it should have been. After terrorists release a madness-inducing gas, a handful of people working on a late night radio call-in show try to make sense of the situation and fend off the armies of crazies swarming in the streets. The script is weak, and the picture loses direction in the third act. But it has a few entertaining moments, not to mention more of a point than most mid-budget Romero wannabe productions. Who would have thought Corbin Bernsen would turn out to be a better director than he was an actor? Mildly amusing

Review – Hang 'Em High

The parts of this movie when Clint Eastwood is shooting people are solid stuff. The rest of the picture is somewhat uneven. Eastwood plays a would-be rancher lynched by a group of hotheads who mistakenly think he’s a cattle rustler. Of course he survives, and after a series of misadventures he’s deputized as a marshal, cloaked by the law in his search for his would-be killers. Along the way the picture manages to make a good point or two about the nature of justice and vengeance. Though this isn’t the best “spaghetti western” Eastwood ever made, it’s a reasonably good effort. Mildly amusing

Eight series that should have died after the second one

Oddly enough, this list was easier to produce than eight series that should have died after the first one. While it took us considerable work to come up with a solid list of one-hit wonders that should never have tried to keep going, discussion of two-hitters almost instantly yielded dozens of potentially good examples.

I’m not sure exactly why that is. In some of the sets listed below, the studios appear to have gotten nervous about marketing the same thing over and over and killed the magic by departing from the formula. Indeed, sometimes a departing director is at least partially responsible. But in others they stick faithfully to the recipe and still end up baking something unpalatable.

 

Frankenstein
This is the great-grandmother of all series that should have died sooner than they did. Though Bride of Frankenstein isn’t as tightly plotted as the original, in the second go-around the characters – especially the monster – develop more dimension. The visuals are more innovative. And overall it’s just plain spookier than the first one.

Ah, but then Universal figures it has a cash cow on its hands, and suddenly the monster blossoms into a series of mediocre-to-dreadful tales of mad science, match-ups with Dracula and/or the Wolfman, and other nonsense designed to do little beyond selling tickets.

Alien
Aside from Sigorney Weaver and aliens, the first two movies in this set don’t really have all that much in common. The original is a grim bit of horror and a key moment in the early days of gritty realism in science fiction cinema. The second is lighter on the horror and heavier on the action, but it’s still plenty entertaining.

Then for some reason the studio hired some music video hack with severe delusions about the quality of his vision to direct episode three. The result is some of the most boring, bizarre, filter-intensive crap ever committed to celluloid. After that they tried to get the series back on track by hiring popular actors for the fourth effort, but then they repeated the big mistake from number three by hiring an art movie director. And that was that, unless you count the Alien vs. Predator things.

Lethal Weapon
I admit that I liked the first one. Sure, it was formulaic. But at least they seemed to be having a bit of fun with it. Danny Glover’s understated performance was a great combo with Mel Gibson’s over-acted crazy. And who thought up the whole Three Stooges thing? Still, my favorite part was Gary Busey – back when his elevator still went all the way to the top or at least managed to clear the ground floor – as the creepy mercenary Mister Joshua. They should have kept him around for the sequel.

Instead, the second one did just about everything it could to stink. It’s wall-to-wall clichés. Suddenly Gibson’s character’s back story needs to be a significant part of the drama. And don’t get me started on the decision to add Joe Pesci to the mix. Still, there’s just something about watching Apartheid-era South Africa taking it on the chin. That by itself was enough to make this a fun watch.

Without that, however, the leftovers became inedible. Sure, they try some new spices here and there, such as cop-killer bullets and Rene Russo. But that just can’t disguise the fact that it’s the same stuff yanked out of the fridge and given a couple of minutes in the microwave.

Hellraiser
To be completely fair, this is a series that should have died after two and a half. The first one was flawed but innovative. The second worked well as an extension of the original. And as long as the third one stuck to exposition and back story, it did fine. But once Pinhead goes in search of new sidekicks – cobbling cenobites together from victims selected more-or-less at random – the relentless logic of the series gives way to poorly-written comic book action. It was a wrong turn that never comes close to being righted in any of the rest of the pictures in the set.

Oh, and like the battery-powered rabbit in the ad, this series just keeps going and going. As of this writing there are eight of them, which has to be some kind of record for distance traveled after brain death occurs.

Star Wars
Obviously this series couldn’t have stopped after the second (or if you’re going by Lucas numbering, the fifth) episode. The story had to reach its natural conclusion. It just didn’t have to do it the way it did.

The first one rose above mere movie and became a cultural phenomenon. Though the second one wasn’t as ground-breaking, in many ways it was a better movie. The characters are more interesting. The plot – freed of the need for a lot of explanation and exposition – was actually able to be a story. And above all, it was a lot of fun to watch.

Ah, but then along comes Return of the Jedi. Now we have loose ends to tie up. We have an empire to smash, a galaxy to save, and just a couple of hours to get it done. So where oh where to we get time for Ewoks? With the first two I wanted them to go on far longer than they did. In number three it was hard not to notice points where cuts could easily have been made. So even though this series had to go to three, it stopped being good after two. And it certainly didn’t need to go to six. The new ones are almost exclusively special effects showcases and unending parades of character and plot mistakes.

Major League
I have long been of the opinion that the first two pictures in this set could be edited down to one really good movie. If all the girlfriend nonsense and other time-wasting sub-plots were cut out, between the two of them would lie a genuinely hysterical baseball comedy.

But number three contributes absolutely nothing. It’s a purely dreadful straight-to-video sports sitcom, connected to one and two only by the re-appearance of a handful of cast members. The first two weren’t exactly immortal classics of the silver screen, but if they had to have a follow-up at all, they deserved better than this.

Batman
What is it about superhero series that makes them die after the second round? These things should be able to go on forever. Particularly with heroes such as Batman and Superman, film-makers have decades worth of comic books full of plots and characters that can be pirated. But for some reason superheroes only seem to supply enough juice for two pictures. Spider-Man 3, Superman 3, X-Men 3 – heck, even Robocop 3 – just aren’t as good as the first pairs in their sets.

However, the Batman series supplies us with a failure that’s easier to trace to its roots. The first two are classy, quirky, Tim Burton productions. But as soon as Burton bails, the set takes a distinct turn for the Adam West and Burt Ward. The change wasn’t absolutely essential. Neither Val Kilmer nor George Clooney was exactly born to play Bruce Wayne, but then neither was Michael Keaton. Jim Carrey was practically born to play the Riddler, but that’s sorta symptomatic of the problem. It all just becomes too cartoony.

The Godfather
This is the all-time godfather of reasons why you should quit while you’re ahead. The first one was a cliché factory, a picture brimming with iconic moments and characters. The second one cheats a bit, splitting into two separate but integrated sub-movies. But I’m willing to forgive a little chicanery because together they make a movie even better than the first one.

Oh, but then comes number three. Shot and released more than a decade after the first ones, it contains almost none of the magic that made its older brothers soar. The cast is weak (even though many of them are repeating roles they should be long familiar with). Al Pacino in particular seems to have lost the ability to act. And the story has replaced street-level violence and political dogfighting with squabbles at shareholders’ meetings. The pain of the first two is in watching Michael Corleone get dragged under by the tide of crime. Here he suffers mostly because he’s lived long enough to see himself become irrelevant. What a bathetic end to an otherwise wonderful series.

Review – Welcome to Macintosh

Here’s another 30-minute documentary stretched out to three times its natural length. The subject – the birth and growth of the Macintosh computer – is interesting enough. But most everything that needs to be said can be passed on in a few minutes. Letting tech nerds ramble on and on, however, requires a lot more screen time. I’ll admit to being enough of a Mac nerd myself to have my attention held for most of this production, but PC users everywhere can probably give this a miss. Mildly amusing

Review – Labyrinth

This fantasy flick would make a good double feature with The Dark Crystal. Muppets. Brian Froud’s design work. Of course this one has David Bowie and a young Jennifer Connelly as well. A teen stuck with babysitting duty wishes the Goblin King would come take her squalling brother away, which unfortunately for her he does. He gives her 13 hours to navigate a massive maze, and if she fails the child will become a goblin forever. Terry Jones’s screenplay has a little Python flavor here and there, but for the most part this is reasonably good kids’ entertainment. For a picture that takes place almost entirely in a fantasy realm, it has a strong 1980s flavor (especially the musical numbers). But it isn’t too dated to enjoy 30 years later. Mildly amusing

Review – Mongolian Death Worms

They should have called this Nebraskan Death Worms. Or Montana or Wyoming or wherever they shot this (Syfy shrunk the credits so I couldn’t check the actual location). That way they could have saved themselves the trouble of finding Asian actors for the supporting roles. A heartless oil company’s unsafe operations stir up a nest of giant, people-eating worms, and it’s up to a ne’er-do-well treasure hunter and a doctor from a charity clinic to put a stop to them. Come to think of it, the location was more likely to have been Alberta or British Columbia, because this thing has Canadian tax write-off written all over it. See if desperate

Review – Down Came a Blackbird

This is an interesting perspective on political torture, though a little more focus would have made it a better movie. Laura Dern plays a reporter who was tortured by an unnamed totalitarian regime. Having trouble readjusting to normal life, she decides to do a story about a clinic for people like herself run by a Holocaust survivor (Vanessa Redgrave). And of course she soon finds herself more patient than reporter. That alone probably would have made a reasonably good picture. But then a disturbed-yet-charming professor (Raul Julia) joins the group. Turns out he’s being pursued by a team of mysterious men with guns, which works an unwelcome transformation of the story from psychological drama to cheap thriller. Likewise I didn’t care for the twist at the end. On the other hand, the good parts were reasonably good. Mildly amusing

Review – April Fool's Day (1986)

Yes, the ending is just as lame as the title implies. Sorry for ruining it for you. On the other hand, at least that saves you from an hour and a half of pure boredom. Seriously, this is one of the dullest slasher movies I’ve ever seen. A standard group of annoying 20-somethings gather in an isolated mansion, where … well, you can probably fill in the rest for yourself. See if desperate

Review - Ferngully: The Last Rainforest

If you have to have a ham-handed message in a kids’ movie, it might as well be pro-environment. A fairy, a miniaturized human and a cast of supporting creatures gang up to thwart a pollution monster’s scheme to destroy their home using a massive logging machine. Though the animation is bad by current standards, it was reasonably good stuff at the time. The musical numbers are purely dreadful. Tim Curry does a good job voicing the villain, but his positive contribution is quickly offset by Robin Williams as a predictably spastic bat. Overall this comes across as an off-brand attempt to pull off the Disney formula. Mildly amusing

Review – The Spirit

When I was a kid I tried reading the Will Eisner comics upon which this thing was based. I remember swiftly concluding that the whole thing was some kind of strange joke I didn’t get, so I swiftly retreated to the comfort of Batman and Spider-Man. This stinker left me with a similar inclination. Anyone who liked Sin City but thought that previous Frank Miller effort had too much plot and character development might find this more to his taste. Visuals aside, however, this hovers consistently somewhere between offensive and just plain dull. Wish I’d skipped it

Eight series that should have died after the first one

Some movies cry out for sequels. Others actively resist them. But if Hollywood has one inviolate rule, it’s this simple creed: if it works, do it again and again until it stops working. And by “working” of course we mean “making money.” If it ain’t broke, remake it.

Sometimes that actually works out okay. After all, what makes one movie good stands a decent chance of working a second (or third or fourth and so on) time around. On the other hand, some movies should have been only children. These eight, for example.

 

Halloween - To this day I’m a little surprised that they ever tried to make a series out of this. I know sequels make money and all, and the success of the Friday the 13th franchise must have provided some impetus. And to be completely fair, the second one probably did look like a good idea. The original left some genuinely unanswered questions, though leaving things hanging actually added to the spookiness. But then all it does is tie up loose ends. It’s got a twist or two along the way, but it’s still just a laced-up shoe at the end. Then the series drives completely off the road. And even after it returns to the original path, it’s pure Slasher Flavored Hamburger Helper.

Rambo - Imagine you’re a high school teacher and the movies in this series are kids from the same family who show up in your classes. Everyone assumes the first one is stupid, so he has to work really hard to prove that he actually has a brain. The second one makes the football team. He’s a talentless player, but the team does well enough that through no merit of his own he becomes the hero of the high school. The third figures he can coast by on his big brother’s popularity, so it comes as a real shock to him when everyone thinks he’s just a douchebag. The fourth one just sits in the back of the class and draws heavy metal band logos in his notebook. In other words, if she’d known what they were going to grow up to be like, Mama should have started taking the pill after number one.

Pirates of the Caribbean - Blame this precipitous plummet almost exclusively on the quality – or lack of same – of the scripts. The original defied my best guess about a movie based on a theme park ride by actually featuring witty dialogue and clever plot twists. But boy did two and three ever live down to my expectations. The sequels are effects-heavy monsters full of mailed-in performances, petty machinations and enough quibbling over rules to make them (especially number three) play like segments of Pirate C-Span. For what seems like the millionth time, let me ask once again: does good writing really cost that much?

Darkman - Unable to secure the rights to The Shadow, Sam Raimi made this Shadow-like-object that worked fairly well for the first round. But once the set-up is in place and the initial drama played out, the rest of the series never goes much of anywhere. The second one was passably entertaining without approaching the fun of the first one. And the third one was just pure crud.

The Amityville Horror - The whole “true story” thing worked the first time around. The fact that it was actually made-up nonsense really didn’t detract all that much from the fun. Indeed, the major failing of all the rest of the movies in the set was the absence of the pretend-it’s-real angle. By midway through number two, audiences could tell that demon-possessed houses in middle-class neighborhoods were one of those things like unexplained lumps or IRS audits. It might be scary if it’s actually happening to you, but watching it happen to someone else doesn’t make for particularly entertaining cinema. And yet they kept right on making them.

Creepshow - Unlike most of the other movies on this list, there’s nothing about Creepshow that automatically made it un-sequel-worthy. It’s a simple anthology piece with a bracket that would have been perfectly easy to reproduce. The comic books this movie apes have been doing it for decades. All Creepshow 2 had to do was select from Stephen King’s vast catalog of short stories and adapt a handful for the screen. I’ve no idea why that was so hard, but apparently it was. Of course if they’d let it lie after #2, I wouldn’t be picking on it now (a good original and a failed sequel don’t exactly count as a series). But then somebody needs money, so the Creepshow name gets vended to a pack of inept amateurs who produce a muddled mess that actually makes the second one look good.

Psycho - Classic movies in general were never meant to be more than one. Would anyone ever consider bothering with Citizen Kane II or Return to Casablanca? So why oh why did we have to have more than one Psycho? The drama is complete within the four corners of the original. Nothing about it screams out “Hey, let’s follow the further exploits of Norman Bates.” I suppose in theory Norman’s release from the funny farm might have had some potential. But what we get from Two, Three and Four is pure marketing, our anti-hero reduced to a bargain-basement serial killer on par with Jason or Freddy.

Raiders of the Lost Ark - Spielberg movies just don’t lead to good sequels. He’s come close a time or two, such as with Jurassic Park. Most of the time he doesn’t even try (I’ll bet the studio brass would have let him screw all their trophy wives in exchange for an ET 2, but nothing doing). Obviously Jaws wasn’t going to turn into anything re-sellable. But why not Indiana Jones? He’s patterned off the old pulp tales and matinee serials that were by definition series pieces. And yet every attempt to capture the magic and fun of the original has come across as crass, witless, strange or all of the above. It’s like the guy just ran out of charm. To be sure, they followed the formula fairly faithfully. But perhaps that was the problem. Rather than branch out and make something with a life of its own, they just kept hitting the corpse of the first one with a defibrillator. No wonder it never worked.

Review – Return to Oz

Has this ever worked? Seriously, has anyone ever come along decades after the release of a classic movie and made a successful sequel? No? Well, if they all turn out like this then the consistent failure should be no surprise. Most of the money Disney spent on this picture appears to have been squandered on the sets. Had it been shot a couple of decades later computer graphics could have been used to make up for the shortcomings in the effects budget, but back in the 80s cheap mechanicals just looked cheap. The story – Dorothy escapes a quack doctor in Kansas only to find Oz trashed by the Gnome King – was likewise weak. Good kids movies need a certain measure of magic, but all this production musters is the cinematic equivalent of cheap card tricks. See if desperate

Review – The Darkroom

A demon-haunted amnesiac escapes from an asylum and goes in search of his missing memory. Unfortunately, everywhere he goes he’s haunted by visions of bloody murder committed by a walking mud pie with a skull face. He befriends a lonely teenage boy with a creepy stepfather, and things unravel from here. The production wastes an extraordinary amount of screen time, making it yet another movie that might have been good in a shorter format. Also, the title location plays almost no role at all in the drama, which was disappointing. Mildly amusing

Review – Lonely Hearts

With all the big Hollywood names in this, I’m surprised it wasn’t more popular than it was. On the other hand, it was pretty boring, especially for a movie about sex and murder. A homicide detective (John Travolta) becomes obsessed with tracking down a pair of killers (Jared Leto and Salma Hayek) who prey upon lonely women who answer personal ads. The crimes themselves are a dull blend of greed and jealousy, becoming more brutal and senseless as the story progresses. The voice-over from James Gandolfini doesn’t help matters any. Overall this is slick but insubstantial. Mildly amusing

Review – Reeker

If a pile of shit like this has a name like that, it takes all the sport out of insulting it. This thing leads off with the deaths of a deer, a dog (who suffers a painful, protracted demise) and a kid’s parents. And downhill it goes from there. The monster stalking the usual band of useless 20-somethings manifests itself as a big cloud of stench, which again makes mocking it a bit too easy. Then about midway through one of the girls gets killed in an outhouse and dragged into the “basement,” which is what it’s like to watch this movie … oops, again it’s too obvious a slam. Indeed, the one thing this whole production practically begs for is a sub-zero rating, which I all too willingly bestow upon it. Avoid at all costs

Review – Survival Island

The one with the piñata was better. Actually this was closer to the plot of Tanya’s Island only with less ape and more Billy Zane. A wealthy businessman and his the-only-outfit-I-have-is-a-bikini wife are shipwrecked and stranded on a deserted island with a handsome young stud who used to be one of their servants. After a considerable number of pretty ocean vistas and cheap sex scenes, the whole thing comes to an ugly head. If you like your soft-core exotic and stupid, you’ve come to the right place. See if desperate

Review – The Crow: City of Angels

For something this purely second-verse-same-as-the-first, this works a little better than it should. To be sure, Vincent Perez is no Brandon Lee. As a result, the fight sequences are nowhere near as good. In compensation, the plot is a bit more even, with more screen time devoted to the vengeful spirit’s brutal revenge on the bad guys (including an old Iggy Pop and a young Tom Jane). Otherwise it’s a familiar parade of gritty ghetto-scapes mercilessly filtered and haphazardly spliced together. Mildly amusing

Review – Flash Gordon

This movie from the birth of the 1980s is approximately one third run-of-the-mill action movie, one third loving tribute to the original Buster Crabbe serials from the 1930s, and one third pure camp. Indeed, the whole thing is oddly evocative of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, though that might be due in part to Richard O’Brien’s presence in the supporting cast. Our hero, his new girlfriend and their wacky scientist companion take on the forces of Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow, the only good actor in the whole production). By all means come for the over-the-top soundtrack by Queen, but don’t feel like you have to stay for anything else. Mildly amusing

Review – Dracula: Dead and Loving It

With Leslie Nielsen in the title role and Mel Brooks in the director’s chair, I was expecting something a lot better. Brooks in particular left me wondering if this was even the same guy who made Young Frankenstein. Though Dracula provides virtually limitless possibility for parody, this sad effort is little more than a witless parade of jokes so lame that the punchlines can be groaned at before they’re even delivered. What a disappointment. See if desperate

Masturbators of Horror: Genre pioneers vs. formula filmmaking

One of the most singularly satisfying experiences in life is beholding a work created by an artist doing what she or he wants to do. The painters and sculptors we study in Art History classes are almost universally the people who stopped one day, put down the brushes and chisels, and said to themselves “y’know, I don’t think I’m going to do this kind of work anymore. I think I’m going to create something I want to look at, not something just like everyone else is doing.”

Many of the directors employed to create episodes for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series have had moments like that. Take Tobe Hooper for example. Texas Chainsaw Massacre was – to put it politely – rough around the edges. But despite its technical weaknesses, it marked a significant moment in the development of the horror genre. If nothing else, Hooper showed what could be done without ceding creative control to a studio in exchange for studio money.

That isn’t necessarily to say that one must be an outsider artist in movie-land in order to produce a horror picture that’s worth a look. John Carpenter and Joe Dante both did much of their better early work with significant financing. Still, one can’t help but walk away from Escape from New York or Gremlins with the notion that it was the picture the director intended, not just some piece of purely commercial crap designed by a committee based on marketing data.

And that’s what makes Masters of Horror so deeply disappointing. Series creator Mick Garris does an outstanding job of assembling many of the directors who made the genre what it is today. Hooper, Carpenter and Dante are joined by other luminaries such as Stuart Gordon, John Landis and Dario Argento. While I don’t universally love these guys – in fact, only on a good day can I even stand Argento’s work – I recognize how important their contributions are.

But there’s nothing important going on in this set. Indeed, most of the entries are formulaic to a fault. Start with a story that’s either already familiar (such as Richard Matheson’s “Dance of the Dead” or Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing”) or at least easy to digest. Hire some familiar actors in order to get a “hey, that’s that guy from Phantasm” reaction from the audience. Throw in some gore. Throw in some partial female frontal. Call it done.

The nudity drew my attention more than anything else. Lord knows after three or four decades watching horror movies, I’ve grown accustomed to the boob shot. But particularly in the first season, they’re included whether they make any sense or not. Obviously plots such as “Dance of the Dead” and “Haeckel’s Tale” need some measure of nudity. And you can’t ask Argento to make anything that doesn’t include at least one naked woman being brutalized (well, you can ask for it, but you ain’t gonna get it).

In other entries, however, the sex is at best an awkward graft. For example, the plot of “Pick Me Up” has to be given an unnecessary twist in order to work in anything risqué. Ditto for “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road,” where the ugly rape goes way farther than it had to just to make the plot point that needed to be made. And H.P. Lovecraft managed to get all the way through “Dreams in the Witch House” without any female characters – nude or otherwise – less than a couple centuries old.

I understand the thinking at work here. Even if you aren’t the world’s biggest pickle fan, you still want them on a Quarter Pounder. You’d miss them if they weren’t there. After all, you paid for them so you ought to get them. Likewise when you turn on a horror picture you expect some blood, some guts, and at least one woman with her shirt off.

This approach does a disservice to the story-telling process. If McDonald’s, impressed by consumer demand for burgers with pickles, started sticking pickles into everything it makes, you’d get unpalatable crud like Chicken Pickle McNuggets, Egg McPickle Muffins, and Hot Fudge Pickle Sundaes.

Worse than making productions at best odd and at worst unpalatable, formula filmmaking completely robs the “food” of its flavor. Aside from the inclusion of “See you next Wednesday,” Landis is indistinguishable from Carpenter, who in turn is hard to tell from Garris, and so on. Takashi Miike’s uniquely Japanese look and feel is distinct, but everyone else could have traded scripts and shot more or less the same productions.

The result is a bit like watching Picasso do a paint-by-numbers or beholding Rodin’s Chip-a-Way figure of a football player. If you’re going to go to all the trouble of hiring the people who made horror movies what they are today, at least give them a bit more room to work their magic. If all you want is formula hacks, there are lots of guys out there willing to simulate movie-making rather than actually doing it.

To be sure, the second season branched out a bit. And to be completely fair, I should admit that Netflix marred the viewing experience for “Pro-Life” and “Right to Die” by screwing up the sound on the Instant View versions. The discs also feature extras such as PDFs of the scripts that commend them over instant viewing.

Overall, however, there’s no getting around it: these are cookie-cutter productions from people who are capable of much better work.

Review – Lady Jane

All England ruled by a pair of idealistic teenagers? No wonder Jane Grey’s reign only lasted nine days. Helena Bonham Carter does an acceptable job in the title role, though early on her sulking and stomping around are reminiscent of Melanie Lynskey in Heavenly Creatures. Along with her formerly loutish husband Guilford Dudley (Cary Elwes), our heroine is thrust against her will into the world of Tudor politics. Even though we know things will end badly for her, it’s still interesting to watch events play out. Mildly amusing