31 Days of Horror Redux: Infested and Sting

Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux, a month-long celebration of genre filmmaking. Last time around, I made the recommendations. This time, I will be watching 31 days of films that are completely new to me. I hope you will join me on this journey of discovery.

Day 10: Infested, directed by Sébastien Vaniček, and Sting, directed by Kiah Roache-Turner

Spiders. I hate ‘em. Always have. Always will. It’s a primal kind of fear. There is no rationality to it. They’re little bugs like any other little bug, and I don’t mind other little bugs. Don’t particularly want them in my home, but I’m not scared of them. Spiders, on the other hand, pure, paralyzing fear.

With that context, I will tell you a movie I enjoyed very much as a child and have gained a greater appreciation for as an adult is Frank Marshall’s Arachnophobia. So terrifying yet enthralling to me as a child that I even had a little routine for watching it: sit on the floor, pile up blankets all around as a protective wall and stuff them under the couch so there would be no place for spiders to hide, then keep on high alert. It felt equal parts dangerous and fun, which is why I think horror movies appeal to kids. Older now, I appreciate Marshall’s film as a campy throwback to the creepy fun of ‘50s B movies.

That brings us to this double feature of spider movies, both released this year. The French film Infested was released to Shudder, while Sting, an Australian-American production, was in theaters back in the spring. Both are emblematic of the best parts of a creature feature but also have some of the same problems that often plague these kinds of movies. Let’s start with the bad because I really liked both of these movies and want to spend more time talking about their positive qualities.

What makes a spider (or spiders – Infested is, predictably, about an infestation, while Sting is about a single spider) inherently scary? To my mind, they are small and fast, they can hide anywhere, obviously there is potential danger of their bite, and there is something unearthly about a creature with that many legs and eyes that moves the way they do.

Editor’s note: I’m actually freaking myself out a little bit right now just in typing this piece. There’s a small spider on my bookshelf that I keep around for mosquitoes – see, I do recognize their value – and I’m checking on him a little more often as I write these words.

Both films understand all of these aspects and make great use of them. The problem is that Screenwriting 101 says that to hold an audience’s interest, you must continually raise the stakes or increase the threat. Unfortunately, the filmmakers in both of these cases accomplish this by making the spiders bigger. That’s a mistake.

Yes, it’s gross to see a spider the size of a dog or a bear, but it’s not that scary. Their greatest advantage is that they are tiny and could be anywhere, and our homes are filled with little places for them to be. Both films wring tremendous amounts of tension out of this basic idea, but eventually, both lean into: The spiders are getting bigger! The bigger they get, the less scary the movies. None of this is to say that if a spider the size of a car were in my home right now I wouldn’t just have a heart attack and drop dead, but on film, it’s a little silly.

Okay, that’s my complaint. Now for the good stuff, which we’ll talk about individually since each film takes a unique approach to the same basic premise: a deadly spider ends up in an apartment building.

Infested is the superior film in that it is both scarier and thematically richer. Vaniček, who has already been tapped by Sam Raimi and Co. to handle the next installment of the Evil Dead franchise, is even able to smuggle some fairly potent political and cultural themes into his fright flick. There are sequences in this movie I literally watched through my fingers, and I even paused it once to give my poor heart a break.

The film follows Kaleb (Théo Christine), his sister, and their friends as they try to survive their tower block, clearly in a lower-income area of the city, being overrun with deadly spiders. Kaleb is a lover of exotic creatures and keeps various bugs and reptiles in his room. He buys a spider on the black market, brings it home, and all hell breaks loose. The opening of the film is a nice little homage to Arachnophobia. 

Where the earlier film opens with scientists collecting specimens in a South American jungle, this film opens with smugglers in a Middle Eastern desert, a more culturally relevant reference point in France. Here, it works as a nice little metaphor for the opium trade and the way international drug rings disproportionately affect neighborhoods of color in the cities. If it seems I am reading too much into it, trust that film goes deeper into this metaphor than I am now.

Anyway, the spider gets loose and hides in a pair of shoes that Kaleb sells to a neighbor, and this is what I mean with the tension of a little spider that can hide anywhere. We know it’s in the shoe. It must be in the shoe. The terror is in wondering how the character will learn it is in the shoe. I won’t spoil it here, but it is creepy, surprising, and effective.

When that character’s body is found, the police are called. There is talk of a drug overdose, an infectious disease, maybe, and generally a lot of conspiratorial speculation. Eventually, the building is quarantined and the residents are forcibly kept inside, despite the deadly threat within. There’s a lot of good political allegory in this around the handling of the pandemic and the use of the police to violently suppress and oppress neighborhoods of color and poorer communities.

For the final 20 minutes or so, the spiders take a backseat to the police as the primary threat, and this is right around the time the spiders start to get really big – they reproduce quickly and each successive generation quadruples in size when it feels threatened. So, the end is not quite as strong as the beginning and middle passages, but as a whole, it all works. Frankly, any movie so terrifying that I have to pause it out of fear gets an ‘A’ in my book.

Sting does not rise to that level, but it is effective B movie fun that owes plenty to Arachnophobia but is even more indebted to another famous horror film. I will say right now that I saw the trailer for this movie and the marketing materials and had no idea even about the basic premise, so if you want to go in completely blind, stop reading now. Otherwise, we’re going to talk about what went down in some detail.

Alright, everybody ready? It’s an alien. The spider is an alien. It lands in this apartment building as a tiny little meteor that arrives as part of a passing meteor shower. This suggests the possibility of a full-scale invasion, but this movie wisely confines itself to this single apartment building. A young girl finds the spider – the creature, in look and mannerisms, is exactly like a spider – and takes it home as a pet. Then it starts doing a lot of things spiders can’t do, like whistling, opening the jar it’s kept in from the inside, and growing in size every time it eats.

Eventually, it grows big enough that it’s hiding in the building’s ventilation system and sneaking from apartment to apartment, snatching prey. By this point, it’s pretty clear that the whole movie is a fairly faithful homage to the Alien franchise, particularly the first two films. We even get a chest burster sequence, and the way the spider ensnares its victims and saves them for later is exactly the same as it works in the Alien movies.

I don’t have a problem with any of that. It’s cool to set an Alien movie in an apartment building and to make the xenomorph a spider. But, like I said, the bigger it gets – and it gets big pretty quickly – the less scary it is because it takes it out of the realm of the real. It becomes a sci-fi movie, which is fun but not as frightening. The early sequences when the spider is still basically spider sized are the most effective in the movie.

There is a family drama at the center of the film about the girl and her step-father trying to get along that gives the story its emotional backbone, but it honestly probably takes up too much space. Also, the only people of color in this movie are weird caricatures handled poorly, so that’s not great. But overall, it’s a nice little B movie that’s worth the price of admission. Of course, none of this has made me like spiders more.

31 Days of Horror Redux: The Purge franchise

Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux, a month-long celebration of genre filmmaking. Last time around, I made the recommendations. This time, I will be watching 31 days of films that are completely new to me. I hope you will join me on this journey of discovery.

Day 9: The Purge: Election Year, directed by James DeMonaco, The First Purge, directed by Gerard McMurray, and The Forever Purge, directed by Everardo Gout

What is a metaphor without subtext? I don’t know, but the Purge franchise would have no trouble answering the question in about 15 different ways, all of which would be so clear as to be unmistakable. These films lack subtlety is what I’m saying – and what the films are saying every five minutes or so. So, the question we face becomes: Is that a problem? Unsatisfying as it may be, the answer is: yes and no.

I was late coming to the Purge movies. I missed all of them in theaters and never had the itch to watch them at home. I don’t know anybody who swears by them, and the premise pretty much tells you everything you need to know. But, there are now five films and a TV series in the franchise, so there must be something there. 

I did a little double feature of the first two films in the series (The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy) one cold January night in New York in 2019. The first one is a nice little home-invasion thriller, and the second one leans heavily into action – these films are produced, in part, by Michael Bay. At the time, a third and fourth film in the series had already come out, but I didn’t feel compelled to go beyond where I left them. But, some inexplicable force drew me to the final three films in the franchise, which I finished in a single sitting this week.

If you are somehow unfamiliar with the premise, I would like to welcome you out from under your rock and inform you that the past 11 years have seen many changes. The Purge Universe presupposes a dystopian America, wherein for 12 hours, one night a year, all crime, including murder, is legal. They always say it that way – “All crime, including murder, is legal” – as if the powers that be are trying to goad you into murder specifically. We find out in The First Purge that this is essentially true.

This setup, of course, is rife with metaphorical and allegorical possibilities, mostly concerning class, race, privilege, and mankind’s inherent humanity or lack thereof. The thing is: None of these films operates on a metaphorical or allegorical level. They are all quite literal and become only more literal as the series goes on. Yet, that’s not what I have a problem with in these movies. Our real-life political discourse is deeply unsubtle and nearly as unhinged as the world depicted here. 

In a truly disturbing fun-house mirror way, one of our current candidates for president of the United States even seemed to suggest a Purge wouldn’t be such a bad idea, saying in reference to exaggerated reports of shoplifting (actually, the corporations can’t pay their rent but would rather blame made-up crimes and criminals for store closures): “You know, these are smart, smart people. They’re not so stupid, but they have to be taught. Now, if you had one really violent day … one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out, and it will end immediately.” That’s the Purge.

I don’t need to tell you which candidate said that, but the point is that no matter how far these movies take their reality, the real world is constantly nipping at their heels, like some gluttonous ouroboros. So, when I tell you the political commentary in these films sits firmly on the surface at all times, perhaps that is not the greatest knock. We live in times that can neither be parodied nor exaggerated. The whole damn world has lost the plot.

Anyway, we’re here to talk about movies. The consensus seems to be that these movies get worse with each subsequent entry, but that was not my experience. I will rank them all at the end of this piece, but for now, I will say that I think The Purge: Election Year is probably the best balance of horror, thrills, and vox populi speechifying.

Election Year concerns an anti-Purge senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) running for president as she and her head of security (Frank Grillo, reprising his character from Anarchy) attempt to survive the night of violence. The senator is running on a platform of, essentially, We’re better than this. Meanwhile, the ruling party, the New Founding Fathers (NFFA), will use every dirty trick in the book to stop her, including murder, which they love.

This movie came out in July 2016 and is about as close to a 1:1 for the Clinton vs. Trump election cycle as you can get without making one of those HBO docudramas. In real life, Clinton lost. In the movie, the senator wins. But, what is truly fascinating – and further evidence of how our times cannot be parodied – is the final line of the film, spoken during a news broadcast following the election of the senator:

“We’re just now hearing reports about a few scattered incidents around the country where NFFA supporters are reacting violently to this defeat. They are burning cars, breaking windows, looting, attacking police officers …”

This was a full four and half years before the Jan. 6 Insurrection. Of course, every one of those things happened when Trump lost to Biden. Those of us still in possession of our sanity are certainly fearful of what a potential loss to Harris might mean – not fearful enough to change our votes, lest the bastards win through fear (that’s called terrorism, by the way), but fearful nonetheless. But, we’ll get to The Forever Purge in a second.

With nowhere to go really after electing an anti-Purge senator whose main campaign promise is to end the Purge, the franchise went with a prequel for its fourth installment. The First Purge is the first film in the franchise not directed by DeMonaco, though he does have sole writing credit on all five installments. McMurray takes over and gives us a look at the first experimental purge, before it was called the Purge, which takes place among the poor, mostly black and Hispanic, communities of Staten Island.

The series makes it pretty clear that the underlying reason for the Purge is to kill off a lot of poor people and people of color as a way of cutting welfare roles. This is one of the series’ most overt heart-in-the-right-place-but-deeply-problematic assertions. The film is very Rich White Liberal coded, in that it is condescending and thinks it’s helping when it actually completely misunderstands the fundamental problems it is exploring. I am mostly blaming DeMonaco here, since he is the primary authorial voice of the franchise, and not the director of color, McMurray.

One nagging question the film does helpfully answer, though, regards the obsession with murder. Throughout the entirety of the first three films, the biggest question I kept asking was: Would people really turn to murder instantly in a lawless world? I would think theft would be the biggest issue, but the Purge Universe posits a world where everyone carries a murderous instinct (see our piece on Cure from earlier in this series). I don’t really agree with that. Neither does The First Purge.

Here, the NFFA is left disappointed by the early returns of the Purge when it turns out, rather than kill each other in the streets, most people are content just to party with their neighbors. This feels right. So, the government sends in mercenaries to boost the kill numbers and justify the continuation of this practice. By the way, Marisa Tomei is in this movie as the Architect, the social scientist who first conceives of the purge night. She is sorely underutilized. The good guys mostly survive, but we know this is the first purge, so the victory is pretty hollow. Those folks are going to have to survive a lot more of these.

Which brings us to The Forever Purge, which does away with any remnants of subtext, turning them into text, written out in big, bold, all-caps letters. This time, the reins are given to Mexican-American filmmaker Gout, though as mentioned, DeMonaco remains the sole credited writer. This largely city-bound series moves to the vast expanses of Texas for this installment, which follows a group of Mexican immigrants and the racist ranchers they work for as they join forces to survive.

Briefly, America goes (further) to hell as radical Purgers decide that 12 hours of lawlessness just aren’t enough to eliminate the undesirables. They need a Forever Purge, read: a license to kill non-white people any time and place they see fit. The only recourse left is to seek sanctuary across the Mexican border, but due to increasing danger, Mexico eventually closes its border. And, this is where my eyes rolled into the back of my head.

The film’s final sequence involves smuggling a pregnant white woman over the border into Mexico so that she might give her child a better life, free from the constant violence and terror of the US. This is what I mean when I say subtext is out the window. Maybe it was watching all three of these in quick succession, but by this point, I was exhausted by the obviousness of every political idea espoused in these films. And, I largely agree with all those ideas. I just like my films presented with more intelligence than an internet message board.

One last thing, and this is not unique to this franchise, but it bears pointing out: The overarching message of the series is meant to be one of anti-violence. This is great. But, in virtually all of these movies, the hero survives by being the fabled “good guy with a gun.” That’s where you can feel the Bay of it all most acutely. For movies that specifically call out the negative influence of the NRA on our political system, it seems wrong that the good guys often win by shooting the bad guys.

My ranking of the Purge movies:

1. The Purge: Election Year (2016)

2. The Purge (2013)

3. The Purge: Anarchy (2014)

4. The First Purge (2018)

5. The Forever Purge (2021)

31 Days of Horror Redux: Spider Baby

Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux, a month-long celebration of genre filmmaking. Last time around, I made the recommendations. This time, I will be watching 31 days of films that are completely new to me. I hope you will join me on this journey of discovery.

Day 8: Spider Baby, Or the Maddest Story Ever Told, directed by Jack Hill

I like the alternate title to this film a lot. Spider Baby is truer to the actual events of the story, but The Maddest Story Ever Told feels appropriate for the emotional reality of the world. This is a gothic freakout of epic proportions, with every performance turned up to 10 and the darkly comic joy of the filmmakers bursting through every frame.

I didn’t know anything about this movie going into it and had no expectations. I suppose I thought it might resemble something like Robert Wise’s 1963 adaptation of The Haunting or, a step down from that, perhaps one of those Roger Corman-produced, Vincent Price-starring Edgar Allen Poe adaptations like The Raven or The Pit and the Pendulum. And, it is all that, but from the opening moments of the film’s incredible theme song, we recognize it as something else, too.

There is a knowing campiness to everything about this movie. The comparison I kept coming back to while watching the movie was the original The Munsters TV show, which aired from 1964-1966. Hill’s film, which came out in 1967, is clearly in conversation with that aesthetic, up to and including the theme, which plays like a mashup of the The Munsters theme and “The Monster Mash” from 1962.

The reason I like The Maddest Story Ever Told is because the film’s framing device is that we are hearing the tale told by a survivor of the incidents portrayed, Peter (Quinn K. Redeker). Of course, to an outsider, this would absolutely be the maddest thing that ever happened. However, despite the bookends, much of the story is told from the point of view of the eccentric Merrye family, whose dark secrets we come to learn. It’s the same lesson as The Munsters or The Addams Family: If you tell the story from the POV of the weirdos, the strangest things seem normal.

The Merrye (pronounced Mary) family suffer a genetic curse that causes some members of the family to mentally regress as they physically age, like a reverse Benjamin Button. Those afflicted are Liz (Beverly Washburn), Virginia (Jill Banner), and Ralph (Sid Haig). Their minder is Uncle Bruno, played by the legendary Lon Chaney Jr. The first thing that happens in the movie is Liz murders a delivery man while playing a game of spider, wherein she catches an unsuspecting victim in a net, then uses a pair of knives as makeshift fangs to kill the victim. So, we know we’re in for a wild ride.

The actual plot of the film involves some distant relatives arriving to make a claim on the Merrye estate, given the perceived mental incapacity of Liz, Virginia, and Ralph, while Uncle Bruno tries to get his clan to act normal enough for long enough to get these people to leave. That doesn’t happen.

Chaney, who would appear in just four more films after this, is excellent as the put-upon caretaker of these murderous psychopaths – he made a promise to their father to look after them, you see – and it’s a fun bit of horror history to have Chaney and Haig on screen together. Haig was a Hill favorite, appearing in a number of the director’s films, and of course went on to be a recurring player in the Rob Zombie universe of movies in the 2000s and 2010s. So, in a very real way, this film serves as a bridge across roughly 75 years of horror filmmaking.

One last note, in researching this film for this piece, it appears the house where all of the main action is set is located less than a mile from where I am typing this. The famed Smith Estate in Highland Park is a scant 15 minute walk from my own home. Perhaps I will make a little sojourn over there before this month of horror delights comes to a close.

31 Days of Horror Redux: Cure

Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux, a month-long celebration of genre filmmaking. Last time around, I made the recommendations. This time, I will be watching 31 days of films that are completely new to me. I hope you will join me on this journey of discovery.

Day 7: Cure, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Who are you? This is the central question of Cure, and it is repeated over and over to various characters throughout the narrative. Nearly everyone responds with his profession. I am a policeman. I am a detective. I am a doctor. People define themselves by what they do, which begs the further question: Are all of these people murderers?

Kurosawa’s landmark 1997 feature concerns a hypnotist serial killer who murders through the power of suggestion, turning seemingly normal people against their families, coworkers, and countrymen. At one point, a psychologist working with the police tells our lead detective (Koji Yakusho) that a person cannot be forced under hypnosis to do anything he wouldn’t do in his real life. This means that while none of these people would answer the question of ‘Who are you?’ with, ‘I am a murderer,’ in some dark part of their souls, they are.

What makes Cure so disturbing, then, is not that the killer uses some vaguely supernatural psychic power to force good people into committing unspeakably horrific acts, but rather the suggestion that there are no good people. With the right push, everyone is capable of murder. So, what do we call the man who is unafraid to push? Who is he?

That’s the rub. He doesn’t know. At least, he presents himself as an amnesiac. He is nobody from nowhere, which means he could be anybody from anywhere. This blankness, this emptiness is a repeated motif throughout the film. The detective’s wife appears to be suffering from a kind of early-onset dementia – its own kind of amnesia, slowly transforming the woman he loves into nobody from nowhere. The killer speaks of an emptiness within himself, which he says allows him to see what lies within others. A blurred, faceless form recurs throughout the end stages of the film.

The question becomes: If we don’t know the disease, how can we cure it? But, isn’t the killer the disease? No. The killer is a symptom that lets us know there is a disease. The true illness is whatever it is festering in society that would lead a happy husband to kill his loving wife, a good policeman to kill his partner, and a talented doctor to kill a stranger. What in the culture put this bitterness and resentment there inside these people, allowing a monster to exploit them?

This is a brilliant, brutal film, unafraid to dive deep into this question. Perhaps the closest we come to an answer is in the scene when the detective visits the killer (Masato Hagiwara) in the makeshift hospital prison where he is being held. When Yakusho first enters the room, Kurosawa frames it in such a way as to make the room look empty. The detective then starts talking, and it appears as if he is speaking directly to a wall. Kurosawa finally moves the camera 90 degrees and reveals a tremendous negative space, an open bathroom that is as big as the room itself. This is where the killer lives – in the empty space we so often fail to see.

Thus begins a confrontation that is entirely verbal but bathed in tension because we have seen what the killer can do with just his words. The killer’s trick is to get people to admit aloud their pain and hatred and resentment so that he can prey upon it and ultimately suggest the easiest solution. It’s a trap, and the detective falls right in. He reveals everything about the discontent he feels at having to care for his sick wife, at working a job that at its best, shows you the worst of human nature, and at being a faceless man in a sea of nobodies from nowhere.

It is interesting to watch this film for the first time after recently seeing Osgood Perkins’ popular horror thriller Longlegs, which came out earlier this year. That is also a film about a serial killer using the power of psychic suggestion to force others to carry out his crimes. Apart from some game performances and an atmosphere of dread, that film largely fell flat for me. I didn’t feel it played fair with its deployment of the supernatural elements, and the quasi-religious nature of the murders makes it too easy to dismiss the killer as mad or delusional. 

In other words, Longlegs took the easy way out. Kurosawa is not interested in easy answers and provides none. There is no cure. His film is far more disturbing and unsettling for it. After all, if anybody can kill and nobody is to blame, then how can we ever be safe?

31 Days of Horror Redux: An American Werewolf in Paris

Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux, a month-long celebration of genre filmmaking. Last time around, I made the recommendations. This time, I will be watching 31 days of films that are completely new to me. I hope you will join me on this journey of discovery.

Day 6: An American Werewolf in Paris, directed by Anthony Waller

There is really only one place to begin here: the CGI monsters. This is a cardinal sin. It is unforgivable. Frankly, a lot of the CGI in this movie is bad, but I understand a mid-budget fright flick faking a scene on the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower. I even understand some of the silly ghost effects. This is, after all, in a lineage of horror comedies, so some silliness is fair enough.

But, what I don’t understand is taking the defining feature of the original film – indeed, the defining feature of all great werewolf movies – and tossing it right in the trash. We speak, of course, of the practical makeup effects used since the beginning of cinema to transform actors into monsters. I don’t want to ignore the great time-lapse effect in 1941’s The Wolf Man, but really, when we talk about this, we are talking about Rick Baker’s industry-altering work on An American Werewolf in London.

If you have not seen that film, stop reading this, and go watch it. I wrote about it in my initial 31 Days of Horror 10 years ago, which is why it felt fitting to do the followup this time around. I remember the ad campaign for this movie when I was 9 years old. I remember wanting to see it, and you know, I might have enjoyed it as a child. I might not have noticed just how atrocious the effects are, and I would have had no historical context for the great practical effects that came before. Now, however, I do.

One imagines excitement from the filmmakers at the possibilities of CGI, possibly similar to the calling Baker felt to the original film to summon up all of his talent and skill as an artist in service of something grand. Perhaps they even thought this film would do for CGI what London did for makeup effects. But, the result just isn’t up to snuff. It’s not just the fact of using CGI, though that would be bad enough; it’s how bad the CGI looks. The werewolf is the most important part of a werewolf movie, and they blew it.

I don’t want to harp on it. Plenty have written about it before me. It’s jarring and unfortunate. Two words that could also be used to describe the soundtrack. As someone who owned a number of late ‘90s movie soundtracks on CD, trust me when I say this is the most late ‘90s soundtrack of all time. It’s not just that it features songs by Bush, Fastball, and Better Than Ezra, as well as a lengthy montage set to Smash Mouth’s “Walkin’ on the Sun.” It’s the whole sound and vibe of it. A techno-goth rave atmosphere that would come back into vogue with The Matrix two years later but somehow feels horribly dated here.

Speaking of techno-goth rave atmosphere, that’s as fine a transition as any to talk about the story of this film, which I actually didn’t mind. It follows the Alien to Aliens rule, which is: If one werewolf is good, surely more must be better. In this case, the villains are a cult of Parisian werewolf supremacists who see their curse as a gift and take it upon themselves to cleanse the human race. In the middle of all of this are Tom Everett Scott, the titular American, and Julie Delpy, the tragic werewolf girl he falls in love with.

By this time in her career, Delpy had already become queen of the arthouse with movies like Europa Europa, Before Sunrise, and the Three Colors trilogy. She had also made a stab at crossover popcorn fare already with Stephen Herek’s The Three Musketeers. So, I’m not sure what would have compelled her to make this movie. I hope the answer is: a big check.

No one in this movie does the things a real person would do, even when confronted by unreal circumstances, so it’s hard to get too invested in anyone’s story. Scott is likable and Delpy is wounded, and since they are both very winning actors, we root for them. But, that’s not by virtue of anything going on with the plot. Things happen because they need to happen, people always have just enough information to get from point A to point B, and rules are made up and discarded pretty much on the fly.

None of it holds together very well. Did I have an okay time for less than 100 minutes? Sure, but there are better ways to have a better time. It was always going to be a tall order to drop a belated sequel to a cult classic, and this movie is not up to the task.

31 Days of Horror Redux: Alligator and Humanoids from the Deep

Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux, a month-long celebration of genre filmmaking. Last time around, I made the recommendations. This time, I will be watching 31 days of films that are completely new to me. I hope you will join me on this journey of discovery.

Day 5: Alligator, directed by Lewis Teague, and Humanoids from the Deep, directed by Barbara Peeters

There are two unwritten rules of form and taste in horror movies: You don’t kill kids, and you don’t kill dogs. Either risks alienating the audience and turning them against your film. As we know, however, the ‘80s were not exactly a bastion of form and taste. So of course, both of these creature features, both released in 1980, feature heaps of dead dogs and at least one dead kid.

In fact, the very first victim in Humanoids from the Deep is a child, and Alligator is premised on the effects of eating a mountain’s worth of furry friends. The other thing these two films have in common is the way they are so clearly cut from the Jaws cloth, though they take wildly divergent approaches to the basic idea. Alligator is much closer to Jaws in plot, while Humanoids from the Deep is much closer in structure, but the bones are there in both.

Teague’s film is about a city beset by a genetically modified alligator that stalks the sewers, an urban legend come to life. The Chief Brody of this film is Det. David Madison, played by a game Robert Forster, who has seen the creature, but because of a checkered past, no one believes him until it is too late. Michael V. Gazzo of The Godfather Part II fame plays the chief of police, and Robin Riker is the alligator expert and love interest.

The film is written by John Sayles, who may be the preeminent Jaws ripoff artist, which I say with affection. In addition to Alligator, Sayles also wrote the Roger Corman-produced 1978 Piranha, which is shamelessly, unabashedly Jaws in style, structure, and intent. More on Corman later. Sayles, who also wrote The Howling the year after this, would move on to prestige pictures later in his career, writing Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 and writing and directing my favorite baseball movie, Eight Men Out. I also have a ton of appreciation for Piranha. What I’m saying is Sayles is no slouch at the keyboard, and Alligator benefits immensely from his involvement.

By no means is Alligator a great film. The love story is shoehorned in and nonsensical. A lot of leg work is done to set up a plot about animal testing and growth hormones and corporate malfeasance, but none of it adds up to anything more than creating human villains we’re excited to see the alligator eat. Speaking of which, the movie’s greatest flaw is that it fails to learn the most important lesson from Jaws: the less we see the creature, the better.

Teague, who later directed the Stephen King adaptations Cujo and Cat’s Eye, does everything he can to put the alligator front and center as often as possible in the final two thirds of this movie. When the gator finally busts out of the sewer and onto the city streets, all is lost because the creature effect just isn’t that good. It’s so poor, in fact, that any time it kills someone, Teague plays the attack in a series of incomprehensible extreme closeups. Steven Spielberg left the camera on the surface and forced us to imagine the carnage below. Here, Teague would love to show us some carnage but is limited by budget.

Despite this, it’s still fun when the alligator attacks a wedding party, there is a lot of tension rung out of the idea of not being able to open a manhole cover, and the labyrinth of a sewer system is a wonderfully creepy setting for any horror sequence. Alligator is a good time and a fine addition to the post-Jaws creature feature canon.

So, what of the Corman-produced Humanoids from the Deep? Well, for starters, if I didn’t tell you Corman produced it, I think you could have guessed. The title, the poster, the creature effects, the gratuitous nudity – it all adds up to a New World Pictures production. I say that with no derision, only affection.

In this small seaside town, the locals are very excited to bring a new cannery to the area, while the scientists who work for the corporation promise advancements that will lead to bigger salmon in the surrounding waters. This will be accomplished by, you may have guessed, some fictional growth hormone, which has the side effect of producing super-intelligent, rapidly evolving fish people. These would be the titular humanoids from the deep.

Let’s pause and examine the connection here: two movies from the same year with vaguely similar plots set into motion largely by genetic testing, shady corporate machinations, and specifically growth hormones. Now, hormone additives in food have been around in the US since at least the 1950s, but one gets the impression that something must have been going in the news around this time that producers felt they could capitalize on. That’s what horror does best, right? It taps into the subconscious fears of the audience by making the figurative literal.

In this case, what we are literally dealing with is a horde of fish people who greatly resemble the Creature from the Black Lagoon, another obvious antecedent of this picture. Within the first 10 minutes (I checked the time stamp), these fish men have killed a child and a whole bunch of dogs. This leads to a misunderstanding in which a group of locals, led by Vic Morrow, accuse an indigenous man of killing the dogs. The indigenous man opposes the cannery, so they have other quarrels, as well.

I should note that Morrow appeared in just two more films after this before his tragic death in an accident on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie.

The mutants eventually make their way onto the land and beginning killing the men and raping the women, which is less graphic than it sounds but more graphic than you might expect. It’s worth noting the scenes of nudity and violence toward women were insisted upon by Corman to ratchet up the exploitation bona fides of the movie, and they were filmed behind Peeters’ back and without telling most of the people involved in the picture. The first time many of them saw these scenes was at the premiere. Most were rightly angry.

Anyway, wouldn’t you know it: The fish people’s chosen day of insurrection just happens to coincide with the town festival. This means plenty of people in the streets and an opportunity for maximum carnage and mayhem. And, in fairness to Peeters, who tried to disown the film over her clash with Corman, this sequence is truly bonkers in the best way.

Let’s bring Alligator and Piranha back into the discussion here. All three of these films feature a climax in which the creature or creatures disrupt a major event. In Humanoids, it’s the town festival; in Alligator, it’s the wedding; and in Piranha, it’s the opening of a new lake resort. In many ways, this makes perfect structural sense. Save your big set piece action-horror sequence for the end.

This is what sets Jaws apart from so many of its imitators. For the entire film, all of the characters stress the importance of the Fourth of July, and the mayor’s only mission in life is to ensure the beaches are open on the Fourth. The beaches are open, and people die. In any other movie, this would be the climax, but remarkably, Jaws still has 40 minutes left, and they’re the best 40 minutes of the movie. It’s a classic case of “You sing the words but don’t know what they mean.” Jaws is about people. Its imitators are about scary creatures.

At the end of the day, Humanoids from the Deep is fine. It is certainly not the worst picture Corman ever produced. But, if you’re looking for your creature feature fix, Alligator is the superior film here. Of course, Jaws and even Piranha are superior to that, but go with what your heart tells you.