GREGORY’S DOUBLE FEATURES Presents HALLOWEEN HORRORS, Vol. 1, Entry 1: DOLLAR-STORE DROSS
Introduction
Lucky for you, this isn’t brain surgery; during Halloweek, 2021, I’m serving up five generous helpings of Gregory’s Double Features, horror style! While that premise is self-explanatory, my method merits a brief overview. Focusing on cinematic works obscure, famous, and infamous, I’m simply going with stuff I either already like, or which may interest me, all of which is within easy reach on sweet, sweet physical media. Previously I’ve toyed with the concept of reviewing 31 horror movies throughout October, but that’s a huge load of work for very little reward. Currently nobody is paying me to blather about this material on AMC, so instead you get five beautifully composed online pieces, sans commercials! Welcome to these boutique critiques.
Regarding content: everybody knows that The Bride of Frankenstein, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, The Shining, and Jason X are classics for the ages (and Young Frankenstein is perfection; and Dracula: Dead and Loving It provably exists), so, love ya, but we won’t be evaluating those titles here. Further, unlike Millennials, I’m not fond of the derivative, the idiotic, and the sadistic, so we can sidestep the many recent horror productions they in their limited experience and understanding hold dear. And with just a handful of films, there’s no way to represent every demographic in the world — I’m not so sure anyone should even try to do that. No statement is intended by omission. Bottom line: being comprehensive, even within a genre, is a fool’s errand, the list is endless, and if you want thrilling and hilarious reviews of a wide gamut of horror and other movies, I redirect you to Red Letter Media (who do the heavy lifting, and frequently delight me and meticulously counted others). But read my stuff first. Wait!
Why do this? Well, almost everyone I know is an absolute baby who has to have everything absolutely their way or they absolutely won’t play, and their infantile behavior consistently ruins my professional-yet-affable movie suggestions (among other things), but not here! Here, I’m the curator. Plus I used to get paid for my scintillating appraisals and opinions, so I’d like to see if — post-peak-pandemic and prior purgatory — I want to do this sort of thing again (in an increasingly aggressive and oversaturated market). It’s also simply a pleasure to write and publish what I want without control-freak morons trying to shit all over it. But mainly I’ve lugged this gory, grimy grindstone from the deep, dark dungeon to sharpen my merciless, terrifying . . . (wait for it) . . . critical skills. Bwah-hah-hah!
Happy Halloween (especially to the really creepy ones who choose not to celebrate it),
Gregory
P.S. Two for Tuesday! On Tuesday you’ll get two of this week’s Double Features (published separately), and we’ll wrap up on Thursday, because nobody with a life looks online on Friday, especially not on Halloweekend.
GREGORY’S DOUBLE FEATURES
Presents
HALLOWEEN HORRORS, Vol. 1, Entry 1:
DOLLAR-STORE DROSS: PUMPKINS (2018), and TRICK (2019)
In a world of bad-bad movies and good-bad movies, Pumpkins lodges itself in a lesser-known category: the quaint-bad movie. Its attempts at nastiness come across as charming, which is kind of enjoyable if you’re not too demanding. Derivative as all hell — observe herein swaths of various Halloweens, various Pumpkinheads, various Fridays the 13th, various Blair Witches, various Nights of the Living Dead, the singular An American Werewolf in London, and perhaps a few I’ve missed — Pumpkins nonetheless delivers earnest low-budget horror beset by surprisingly lavish frames, proudly lensed on the RED Dragon camera somewhere in Yorkshire and Derbyshire. (Yes, regional accents abound, so much so that the DVD reviewed, presented entirely in English, offers but one option for subtitles [not captions, per se]: English. But if you’re at least halfway intelligent, you won’t need them. On second thought…) Really no more or less sensible or silly than the plot of Halloween (1978) — from which it purloins its coveralled slasher-villain, swapping out the Shatner mask for an impressively detailed jack-o-lantern mask intended to be an organic transformation — Pumpkins offers viewers a choice: hate it, or roll with it. I found it to take itself uncomfortably seriously while relying on cheesy, barely-there effects and an unfortunate joylessness, so I can’t say I loved it, but with a solid ‘B’ for effort in what appears to have been a fun production for all concerned, I found enough in it to like to ride out its peculiarly lengthy 81 & 1/2 minutes (case says 89; case lies).
While it’s quite a narrative jumble, I’m fairly confident that I can lay out the plot of Pumpkins for discerning cinéastes. Harassed by “charver”-like hooligans incongruously wandering amidst bucolic splendour, the doddering, pumpkin-obsessed country lord (Terry Woods, to whom the movie is dedicated) of an old stone farmhouse, desolate farm, and surrounding forest, is tormented to death by the aforementioned baseball-capped baddies (who deface the scant inhabitants of his teeny-tiny “pumpkin patch” with a Sharpie, not even bothering to smash them!) — then some goop in a nearly empty paint can (“pumpkin food”?) revitalizes him and transforms him into the ingeniously named Pumpkin Man (Will Metheringham): precisely Michael Myers with a different head. Not even wavering from his former life as a human being (during which he none-too-charitably threatened to stab and shoot the Chavs), he kills one of the bullyboy caricatures by face-squirting pumpkin juice at him (!), while his doting niece (director-producer Maria Lee Metheringham, who co-writes with Will Metheringham) murders the other one by stabbing him up the arse, then she hands him the butcher knife she mysterious keeps tucked under her belt, and we’re off to the frankly kinda sluggish races. To impose an act structure on a movie far too loose for that, we basically get some of those typical late-October “survival weekend” campers (Sarah Jayne Curry, Roland Martial, Iona Mckeown, Georgia Annable, etc.) arbitrarily picked off in the second act, segueing into rustic pub regulars (Nicholas David Lean, Dani Thompson, etc.) picked off in something akin to a third act. A lone trick-or-treater (Frankie Mckeown) serves as the Marvel-esque post-credits chaser. (Kevin, since you and the Mouse are hiring all the other fledgling directors, give Ms. Metheringham a call.)
While I’m pretty sure it hasn’t won any Oscars, Pumpkins is ambitious and weird, imbued with a sinewy synth score (by Will Metheringham) offering more catchy motifs than Hans Zimmer delivers in ten pictures, plus a few amusing songs, and for these qualities I commend its makers. However, since I graduated from the world’s greatest film school, and therefore know everything about something I’ve never actually done (i.e. making a feature film), I offer the following suggestions: 1. Get your actors (non-actors?) past the point of vaguely uncomfortable rehearsal/“pretending” before you roll camera; they scream a bit, but nobody here seems really invested, or even quite ready. 2. If your movie is called Pumpkins, then your pumpkins must impress; they cannot merely sit there inert while your performers play-act their few-and-far-between “attacks” out of frame. 3. Related: When establishing an all-important pumpkin “patch,” you need to show more than four or five of the things, and they need to be on the vine, not with their stems visibly pre-cut! 4. Maybe you grew up burdened by Tarantino shit, but lose the guns. They suck. And 5. What I want from this sort of production is wit (gallows humour is fine), whereas Pumpkins suffers from a complete lack thereof. Lighten up. Kudos to Ms. Metheringham and her crew and cast for making a movie — you did it! pretty cool! — but next time, to borrow one of your many “badass” f-bombs, make it as fookin’ great as your DVD cover art!
*
Stuck in a tone between The X-Files and a bazillion procedural shows, Trick elicited from me a constant sense of “Why am I watching this?” — but I also found it familiar enough (its makers grew up in video stores) to keep watching. To be fair, the performances here are solid, and the plethora of Halloween décor easily exceeds that of most Halloween movies, including the Halloween movies: which blatantly served as initial inspiration for this brutal and bloody body-count rager. Exit Michael Myers and his simple, only mildly varying mask; enter Patrick “Trick” Weaver, an American high-school senior, who, at a Halloween party in 2015 (the years are noted onscreen, climaxing in the then-present of 2019), plays “spin the knife” and has to kiss a boy, instead opting to eviscerate him and several of their costumed cronies. Hospital, doctors, cops, brief but violent standoff, impossible escape, then, with each new Halloween, more bodies, but no clues. Trick himself proves to be an enigma: starting off in a beaky jack-o-lantern mask with two faces (which returns as one of many little plot points later in the movie), but generally revealing a preference for any highly detailed creepy mask, always with his face painted up scary underneath: either as a precaution against being identified, or to show his fondness for Caligari or “The Undead” from Phantom of the Paradise. Oops, I’m making this more complicated than it already is.
Trick looks and moves like a real studio movie, with professional design and lighting, lots of costumed extras, some nice crane and drone shots, and mostly fluid camerawork apart from a bit of that intentional shaky-cam trash I find intolerable (intermittently exacerbating the mediocre-TV comparison). This slickness is due to both director Patrick Lussier (edited for Wes Craven, proceeded into those Dracula 2000 movies and My Bloody Valentine 3D, etc.), and his co-writer Todd Farmer (screenwriter for the classic Jason X, among other horrific treats), two serious movie nerds who clearly love every ’80s horror trope, endeavoring to the best of their budget to replicate and revere as many as possible. The problem is there’s too much stuff and too many twists (Scream here, Saw there, whatevs), as if they’re constantly trying to, um, trick their audience or perhaps each other, and as a result Trick feels bloated and convoluted (guys, you could have cut the cutesy Cocktail reference). Unlike the critics who insta-panned it two years ago while it was making like five bucks at the box office (again being fair: hey, almost $50K in pre-pandemic cash!), I add that, upon reflection, nothing about Trick is really confusing, but rather, just like ol’ Mike himself and his many foes, the characters’ motivations and abilities rarely jibe with plausible human behavior.
Countering the dodgy plot is an able cast, headed by a duo of Omar Epps as a determined detective perceived to be possessed of a Cassandra complex, and Ellen Adair as the town’s actually astute sheriff, with Kristina Reyes as their vital third and Trick’s former classmate. The diverse cast of supporting characters feel real and natural instead of like some contractually imposed Benetton ad à la contemporary Hollywood, which adds considerable value to the production. There’s even horror stunt casting, including brief appearances from Jamie Kennedy (Scream), and featuring Tom Atkins — who just might appear in a review later this week — as the town’s sort of maître d’, who hosts a screening of Night of the Living Dead in an old church, bless him. (Work that public-domain material!) But primarily this is Mr. Epps’ show, and both his obsessed actions and his pregnant pauses prove effective throughout. During one tense exchange, he spits out a mouthful of dialogue concluding with, “he’s the poisonous fog that rolls in and kills everyone without rhyme, reason, or remorse,” with a straight face that would’ve made Leslie Nielsen proud. Yet, given the context, he doesn’t play the howler for howls. That’s a gifted actor.
*
Note: This Halloweek my Double Features are all in the horror genre, however I’ve decided not to drop them into “battle” against each other, nor to rank them, as I find ranking, and every lazy article topped by a headline concluding with “Ranked,” to be pointless and trite. Today the viewings and their respective reviews worked best as separate entities — barring shared Michael Myers references and pleasingly seasonal opening titles emulating those of Halloween 4 — but some movies may be woven together into one piece. Above all, this process is not about some extremely subjective and usually unexplained ranking system, but about the countless details of which motion pictures are composed, even motion pictures such as Pumpkins and Trick. And let me tell you, Inconstant Reader, for a dollar each, with these two I got my money’s worth.
