Samhain Project 5: Millenium: The Curse of Frank Black

Millenium is amongst the most underrated television series of the 90's.  A Cris Carter concoction that is a quasi-spin off of his X Files, its an FBI procedural with more than a healthy dose of creepy supernatural undercurrent. 

Many episodes operate as FBI procedurals with the lead character, Frank Black, (Lance Henriksen, in a role he was born to play) despite his broken past, investigating dark and murderous situations.  His "gift" is the ability to see what the killer sees, which help his case solve rate reach astronomical proportions.  Frank is recruited by a shady organization that uses ex-law enforcement operatives to reach their goals.  They are called the Millennium group, and their purpose is not to bring about the apocalypse as the Millennium approaches, but as Frank puts it, "Conrol it". 

However, Millennium had a knack for tossing in the occasional off-beat episode laced with humor that would be a light lift from the grim proceedings it otherwise espoused.  Included in this was the classic Jose Chungs's Doomsday Defense, among others. (Charles Nelson Reilly saw awards nominations for his brilliance in that episode). 

There's one episode that fits in the middle of the creeps and the chuckles, and that's the Halloween episode of the second season, The Curse of Frank Black.  It's a smooth-running and tension building affair as Frank goes about Halloween with his daughter and other pleasant fatherhood operations, mixed in with flashbacks to his youth in the 40's where he runs across a neighbor on Halloween night, (played with panache by Dean Winters, who now regales us with chilling chuckles in insurance commercials as the embodiment of bad luck, Mayhem. Winters is a hell of a character.  Find out why: here) who explains Samhain, (even if he pronounces it wrong) and its dark interludes.  His visage appears later in the present day, giving Frank positive advice, some of which he will obey. 

Some of which he will not.

Frank tumbles through the episode, dealing with his failed Bobby Darin CDs (who wouldn't see that as a negative omen.  Damn it, if I expect to hear If I Was a Carpenter, I want to hear it!) the repeated occurrences of numbers that have sinister meanings, demonic apparitions, ghost story telling teenage twats in the basement of his home, (Who he dispatches Sam Loomis style. I almost expected him to say "Lonnie, get your ass away from there!") and sundry situations that may or may not be real. 

Regarded in this day and age as amongst the best and most thought-provoking of series-based Halloween Television, The Curse of Frank Black would be a wonderful trick for those that have never seen the show, and a hell of a fucking treat for regular viewers, guys like me. Rack this one up with the Great Pumpkin, folks, because it's a laid-back and chilling hoot, perfect for the season. 

Samhain Project 5 : Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight

Back in the late 80's HBO slapped us upside the head with the anthology series Tales From the Crypt, and it was really a popular and celebrated affair.  So much so, that in the mid 90's they decided to take it to the big screen with a pair of films, beginning with Demon Knight. Is it a great film, or even scary?  No, but it definitely takes from its source well, with solid acting, great production design and juicy practical effects. 

Demon Knight is a strange story involving seven keys required by some hellion, that when brought together, will return the universe to its original black nothingness.  This whole thing reminded me of that 80's metal band Helloween and their weird album The Keeper of the Seven Keys.  

Thankfully, Helloween was not involved in the film.  What we have is the fact there is only one key remaining out of the hands of our villain, played by Billy Zane.  Our hero, played by ridiculously underrated actor William Sadler, is holding onto this key, which contains the blood of Christ. 

Yeah.  Read that again. 

What makes Demon Knight work is our two leads.  Billy Zane, despite being an ancient being of supreme evil, is absolutely hilarious and full of wackadoo non-sequitirs.  Try this one on for size:  "You ho-dunk, po-dunk, well, then-there, MOTHERFUCKERS!"

Genius.

Sadler's character is the supreme foil, as he plays it as straight as Robert Redford or Clint Eastwood ever did, which creates a fantastic cinematic dichotomy that really brings this film to life. These two guys really make this thing work and sell the shit out of it. 

What Sadler's goal consists of is holding onto this key, and protecting the sad-sack characters around him from Zane and his minions from some kind of gelatinous hell.  A great supporting cast is here, including a young Jada Pinkett, Thomas Haden Church, John Shuck, CCH Pounder, Brenda Bakke, and the voice of fuckin' Roger Rabbit himself, Charles Fleischer. 

Fleischer was also the famous recurring street hood/jacket dealer Carvelli, with his partner Murray in Welcome Back Kotter.  I used to watch the re-runs as an Elementary School Lad, hoping for Carvelli's appearances. Dude was flat out hilarious. 

And Dick Miller.  The Great One.  In a scene where Billy Zane's Satanic Shitface uses the Miller character's alcoholism against him to try to claim his soul is made absolutely heartbreaking.   An amazing moment performed by the cinema legend that the legendary Joe Dante gave a second leg of a career to, and thank God for that.  You've all seen him.  It's Murray Futterman from Gremlins!

Demon Knight is a lot of fun.  It swings the same stick as its parent series, and works well for it.  A great choice for Halloween. 

Samhain Project 5: Pumpkinhead

Aidan and I were huge fans of the Misfits album Famous Monsters, even if it was about 5 years after it was released.  There are many great punk/metal tunes on this record regardless of what Danzig devotees will say.  It's a fact that I'm no real fan of either Glenn Danzig or Michale Graves' personalities, so I've no skin in this game.  One of the album's more memorable tunes is Pumpkinhead, inspired by the Stan Winston film of the same name, with lyrics pulled straight from the legendary poem that was the spark for the film itself.   

Aidan and I would frequent an exchange, Vanguard Video, a nostalgia store that specialized in used DVDs, for sale and rental.  This was back in the mid oughts, and sitting on one of the shelves was the disc  pictured up top.  Being that myself and Aidan (who still shops there, it's still standing.) were also fans of the star of the film, legendary actor Lance Henriksen, we picked up the disc without thinking.  And we never regretted it. 

It became a favorite of both of ours, and it was a movie we pulled out every September and usually watched at least once throughout Spooky Season.  Pumpkinhead, for Aidan and I, felt every bit as much like Halloween as candy corn, creepy masks, the fall bite in the air, scarecrows and corn mazes. 

Pumpkinhead was unique unto itself, a fairy-tale styled legend of loss, retribution, witchery and demons.  It's directed by Stan Winston, special effects wizard that we lost way too soon who was responsible for masterful effects like those in Jurassic Park, The Terminator films, and Edward Scissorhands, among many others. 

This may be the only film Winston directed (leaving the bulk of the effects work to his proteges, Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr.) but you wouldn't know it.  There are some beautiful shots, excellent pacing, and reasonable acting, besides that of Henriksen whose brilliant performance can be both frightening and heartbreaking in this film.  Much like George Clooney and Michael Caine, he possesses the ability to show dramatic emotional shifts using only his eyes.  If you think that's easy, stand in front of a mirror and give that shit a shot. 

It may be telling a simple story, adorned with top flight monster effects and really good production design, but it has long since become a Halloween staple.  A low budget, monster-kid flight of fancy, I highly recommend Pumpkinhead to any and all looking for a movie that grabs you at the outset and keeps you locked in until the end. 

Oh, and watch out for frequent John Carpenter collaborator Buck Flowers, who plays a wizened hillbilly.  One who seems like king of the rednecks at the outset, but shows of all involved in Pumpkinhead's tornado of violence, he was the one that knew what was up. 

Check out Pumpkinhead. You'll see in short order how its become a cult classic and Halloween rite of passage. 

Samhain Project 5: Werewolves

Frank Grillo is not suffering from a shortage of work these days.  This is mostly a good thing.  Steven C. Miller's low budget Werewolves, which saw a limited theatrical run,  is an example of the good side of that fact.  This is the second werewolf movie I've written about in a short time period, and if you have complaints, you'll have to take it up with grievance department of the Samhain Project.  But they're busy this time of year.  Keep that in mind. 

This is actually a sci-fi sorta werewolf movie however.  Some sort of lunar issue has developed, so that whenever there's a supermoon, all exposed to the moonlight become werewolves.  Now the world has some other global shit to worry about.  This species just can't win.

In what could have been a positive light, can you think of anything else that's uniting us?  Well, actually, the gun-nut neighbor to Grillo's character, who lives with his widowed sister-in-law and her daughter, is a major problem in and out of human form, so I guess that we remain divided.  But I digress. 

Doomsday prepping on a Purge-style scale takes place as the supermoon approaches, and Grillo is a CDC pandemic expert who looks like the Punisher, so much like Jimmy in Mi Familia, he's "got shit to do".  The shared home is a fortress, priority one.  His other priority, under the supervision of Lou Diamond Phillips, Grillo and crew are working on an answer to this freakish biological-lunar problem. 

There is some nice character development as Grillo's character and sister-in-law are still united in grief over his firefighter brother, her husband, who died during the first supermoon event.  She has an adorable daughter she has to protect, while her brother-in-law is off saving the world, and Ifenesh Hadera makes a hell of an action mom when it comes down to the blows being exchanged. 

I am definitely not a big spoiler guy, but you didn't expect the lab work to come off without a hitch, did ya?  Katrina Law makes a good foil to Grillo who has to help ol' Frank battle across a werewolf infested city to get home to his unconventional family.  It's a solid pairing, well illustrated, as the whole low budget affair actually is, in its short run time. 

There's just a little bit of non-irritating CGI used during the transformation sequences, but otherwise the creature work is accomplished by monster wunderkinds Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr.  These dudes have won awards and did yeoman's work here. 

Werewolves has some excellent creepy shots, keeps the intensity rolling, and for its limited scope, gives you a lot of bang for its buck. 

Samhain Project 5: Rust Creek

Rust Creek is a backwoods survival thriller, but not one that truly fits in the horror movie category like Wrong Turn or even Deliverance. What it is is very intense and well acted for a low budget affair from IFC Midnight.

A lot of terrible shit goes down, brought on by the male gaze perpetrated by your basic white redneck shitheads. Unnecessary evil.  Our heroine, Sawyer, heads from her college confines to attend a job interview in Washington, D.C. over the Thanksgiving week and ends up sidetracked by a less than helpful GPS in the fall Kentucky forested netherworld.  Once lost, (of course) she's accosted by a pair of dipshits who should be named Bubba and Cletus, and whose intentions are less than gentlemanly.  

Sawyer is an unassuming hardass, and a convincing one thanks to a grounded performance from Hermione Corfield. Blessed with martial arts skills, she separates herself from these goons, and heads off into the forest, but not before being wounded.  The local police are well, the local police.  And hence, corruption rears its ugly head. 

While Sawyer may have black belt defense ability, she's not a survivalist, and Kentucky in November is not friendly.  The elements are not able to get to her before salvation and protection come from an unexpected place, and a heck of a quiet and haunted performance from Jay Paulson.  An unexpected and believable partnership develops, and along the way you learn more than you want to know about meth.

Written and directed by females, two gifted ones in Jen McGowan and Julie Lipson, respectively, Rust Creek is a tight, intense and fast moving little thriller that deserves a lot more credit than the streaming burial it seems to have received.  It's highly recommended, and available from AMC+ and Tubi

 

Samhain Project: Late Phases

Nick Damici is one of my favorite people involved in film. He frequently partners up with Jim Mickle to make some wonderful films including the incredible Joe Lansdale based piece, Cold in July among others. He also worked with Mickle to produce the top-flight Hap & Leonard, the series for Sundance. 

He’s fairly well known for his role as Mister in Stakeland and its follow up. But in Late Phases: Night of the Lone Wolf,  he stretches in a role that is absolutely fucking hard to believe. He plays a 70+ year old war veteran who has a strained relationship with his son played by an equally effective and heartbreaking Ethan Embry. 

Damici’s character moves into a different old folks home, one that seems to have a problem with local murders every 30 days or so. He is not stupid and decides that his final battle is going to be against the obvious; The Full Moon Killer.  Late Phases is extremely underrated and overlooked, and in a way that kind of pisses me off.

It’s that fucking good, folks.  Kudos to the Spanish director of the nightmarish Here Comes the Devil, Adrian Garcia Bogliano.  I think his film ranks up there with Joe Dante's The Howling, and An American Werewolf in London as top-tier werewolf films.  I dig my lycanthrope cinema and Late Phases is a good one, kids.

Fantastic performances, scary practical effects, and dry twisted humor make this a Halloween must. Particularly for those who dig their monster movies with a little fur and a lot of teeth. The bites aren’t just bloody, they go for the heart, as folks who have unfinished business in their relationships can really relate.

Plus you got Tom Noonan and Larry Fessenden and Dana Ashbrook, he of Return of the Living Dead Part II and Twin Peaks.  I'd like to thank Rue Morgue's John W. Bowen, penman of the It Came From Bowen's Basement segment of the George Romero issue from last year, for reminding me of the gloriousness of this film.

Samhain Project 5: Being Scared of "Eight is Enough"

Now, I'm no stranger to being frightened by what would normally be saccharine television.  Check this shit out:  A Very Brady Nightmare.  

But!  I wasn't alone!  Observe: Kindertrauma.

Always nice to have corroboration.  

Anyfrigginway, when I was a young tyke,  Eight is Enough, as cornball as it was, was adored by the female members of my family, and thusly I remember catching more than my fair share of episodes, so I got an Eight is Enough contact buzz. Thanks, Linda.

One January in 1979, ABC aired an episode of the program entitled Horror Story.  Seems all kinds of creepy shit happens to the Bradford family, just scattered about town instead of all of them being sequestered in Tom & Abby's house to face these dangers.  The crux of what spooked me was that one of the daughters, I believe Nancy, has a blind date arrive who strikingly looks like Tony Perkins. 

Now I guess I wasn't ready for horror quite yet, as my dip into Stephen King filmwork began with Salem's Lot, which was 11 months down the road.  I guess in that stretch, I somehow developed the gearwork for scary programming.  

But here there was horror imagery, meant to be an homage, I guess in a comic sense.  However, it was as George A. Romero said of Frankenstein, "bothering me a little bit, there".

Not a lot sticks out in my mind in terms of details, other than a pair of sisters walking down the stairs with a candle in the dark, as there is a storm-induced power outage.  The coup de grace, the silhouette of a massive butcher knife highlighted against kitchen curtains from outside by a flash of lightning, was the money shot that stuck with my poor little eight-year-old brain for quite some time. 

It's slightly less stupid to be frightened by an episode of Eight is Enough than The Brady Bunch, but kids are kids and their minds operate a certain way.  You can't blame them for the way their brains process things.  I just remember this particular episode of family TV scaring the shit out of me. 

They should have aired this in October. I've believed that for years.  Check out this fuckin' promo.  It's like the trailer for a Friday the 13th movie for chrissakes.  Maybe that planted the seed, so that I had no choice but to be scared once it ran. 

The episode is available on Tubi.  IF YOU DARE!!

The Samhain Project 5th Anniversary: The Monkey

In the summer of 1988, whilst living in Wausau, Wisconsin, the setting of the SYFY channel's engaging Revival, (oddly enough, also Stephen King novel title) my sister Pee-Wee and I hit a bookstore much like Kenosha's long-gone but core memory, The Paperback Exchange.  I waxed nostalgic about that joint here. 

I bought a hardcover copy of Steve's Skeleton Crew, a short story collection. I decided my beat-to-shit paperback wasn't holding its water anymore, so I bought a beat-to-shit hardcover.  

                                     

I know, it sounds stupid, but there's a logic there. A ROB logic. Anyways, when I opened it up, a leaflet fell out, which was one of the short stories from the book, The Monkey.  

It was from one of those magazines that you wouldn't want your mom to know you look at.  I didn't know what to make of it, but I held on to the leaflet for a while.  Eventually it got beat-to-shit in nature, (tired of that hackneyed terminology yet?) and had to be tossed, and I didn't really think much of it.  Now, the damned thing is selling online for an ungodly amount.  (I'm not of a mind to discuss specifics).   It draws up negative emotions not unlike the time that I gave a box of basketball cards to my adored nephew, a box that just happened to contain that legendary Fleer Michael Jordan rookie card...

I'm gonna change the fucking subject now.   Ahem.

So, Frani and I watched Osgood Perkins' recent The Monkey.  As you well know, the entertainment world is engaged in Phase Two of the Stephen King filmic explosion.  A renaissance of the highest order. for the last eight years or so, the man (and I literally mean THE MAN) has had a cinematic and small-screen renaissance.  I really hit that hard in last year's Samhain Project.  The Monkey is brilliant.  It is not a mimeograph of the short story, but contains enough of the original's creepiness to own up to its pedigree.  

Perkins is the son of legendary Anthony Perkins, and the talent for the eerie has definitely been passed down. His brief appearance here is also a chucklefest. (Way back in the Anchor Bay days, his supporting turn in the zom-com Dead & Breakfast was pretty amusing, too.) Filmography wise, he's responsible for the chilling The Blackcoat's Daughter, and the absolutely menacing Longlegs.  He tells a great story in general, but here he mixes in a generous sprinkling of jet-black humor that makes you laugh while (at least, if you're like me, feeling slightly guilty) looking around the room to see if anyone else is. 

The concept of two brothers and their connection to a wind-up stuffed monkey that bangs his cymbals together with results from hell is retained here, but given modern sentiment, and severely twisted characters, and a comic glue that holds it all together.  I loved The Monkey, while Frani was hoping for less goof, more oof, she still enjoyed it.  As it is wrapped in uniqueness, I thought it would be a great start for this year's Samhain Project, which I'm sure you'll notice if you pay any attention to this thing of mine, I'm starting a tad early this year. 

Why?  Because I love it, and the longer what's now become known as Spooky Season lasts, the happier I am.