“Get Your Money’s Worth” Vol. 5
We’re amid a horrendous stretch of films being released to theaters in February.
At the local AMC or Cinemark in Waco, your options for “new” releases are Argylle and three episodes of a television show. Thankfully, there is a wide world of streaming and options for those who want to get weird with it.
Watched this week:
The Elephant Man, David Lynch, somewhere streaming I can’t remember
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, Akiva Schaffer & Jorma Taccone, Hulu
Escape From New York, John Carpenter, Criterion Channel
Sexy Beast, Jonathan Glazer, Criterion Channel
Fateful Finding, Neil Breen, Youtube
Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Amazon
Messiah of Evil, Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, Amazon/Blu-Ray
Sweet Home, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Youtube
It’s been a while since I’ve just watched a handful of horror movies in the same week. It’s a real joy getting to embrace the sick and twisted.
Pulse dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Kiyoshi Kurosawa presents the feel-bad movie of 2001. Pulse at a base level is a ghost story if the location the ghosts were destined to haunt was the internet. Through an unnerving website, visitors are asked “Do you want to see a ghost?” and are taken down a rabbit hole of despair. What these visitors see and experience in the ensuing days leads them to take their own lives one by one, often on the internet for others to see. There’s a lot to mine there, room for plenty of scares and easy ways to elicit audience reactions through extreme violence. Instead, Kurosawa tones back jumps and violence in favor of an unbearable feeling of loneliness. I understand that everyone I know and love will die, but that creeping or haunting feeling is heightened when they begin to disappear one by one in quick succession. It added even more to that feeling of dread for me in the moments of characters expressing that supreme fear, gripping each of their throats until their dying breaths. It’s not “scary” but damn if it isn’t very upsetting. I’d recommend! After you watch Pulse, go ahead over to the Criterion Collection and pick up a Blu-ray copy of Cure, one of my five favorite films of all time, directed by Kurosawa and released in 1997.
Messiah of Evil dir. Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz
Fans of horror movies never let the dead stay that way. 1974’s Messiah of Evil is no exception, being filled with some less-than-human characters and having been somewhat “lost” to time for the better part of three decades. It’s been released under five separate titles including Return of the Living Dead, Dead People, and Return of the Screaming Dead, and did not have a home video release until 2003 in which it was included in a double feature. I mention the release and odd nature of where you could find this film because weirdly enough, I think it contributes to the effectiveness of the movie quite a bit. Messiah of Evil is about a young woman who travels to a sleepy California town in search of her father who has gone missing. The eerie nature of the townspeople, the lack of police, and the way that it seems there are very few people walking the streets during the day, it all feels like a place that has been lost and in some ways better left undiscovered. It just has a vibe to it that is best experienced rather than explained; the closest comparison I could reasonably make would be a cross between John Carpenter’s The Fog with something like Dario Argento’s Deep Red. The production feels cheap and scrappy but filmmakers Huyck and Katz stretch that budget effectively, creating a couple of great set pieces that will keep the sickos satiated and match the excitement of something like Deep Red. It isn’t particularly frightening, it doesn’t have a series of amazing performances, and it doesn’t have an indelible final shot à la Texas Chainsaw Massacre; but it just has this amazing feeling that you can’t shake and you don’t want to. It’s indescribable, but the people who rewatch Halloween every year and have big opinions on “elevated horror” will get it. I highly recommend it, a real good time at home.