Missing Midnight Monster Madness

I am a fan of the classic horror monsters. Yep, I love Dracula, The Wolfman, Frankenstein’s Monster, and even The Creature. Throw in The Phantom, Black Cat, and a good dose of “The Twilight Zone” and you have a huge chunk of my pre-teen and early teen years. The old cable channels at my grandparents’ house kept me up until three or four in the morning, learning all the Hollywood details of the supernatural. I never felt such a connection to slasher films, but the supernatural I was just head over heels for.

I miss the demons, ghosts, and powerhouse singular monstrosities, but I think I miss the atmosphere more. The old black and white and grainy color flicks that relied so much on not knowing where the threat was and how they built carefully culled anticipation were magnificence. Maybe it was oversaturation, but I feel so let down by the modern horror flick and how jump scares are either predictable or just downright weak. I feel like the villains are less villainous simply because there is an expectation to see the bad guy, to connect the visible threat to the psychological when the truth is so much the opposite.

It all boils down to the psychology, methinks. I feel we actually felt more when we didn’t know what to be afraid of. I also feel that the lack of saturation played a big part in building anticipation, oh, and the fact that people actually treated horror as an art form instead of a game to get their name in the bucket. Yes, I feel that is a solid argument.

See, horror is pretty basic, hell, let’s look at the old slasher classic, “Halloween.” The primary prop was-as I hope you all know- a painted Captain Kirk mask with modified eyes and blue-white paint on it. Many of the actors wore their own clothes and rumor has it that Ms. Long Legs herself got her wardrobe from a JC Penney for about a hundred bucks. Yea, that’s right, the lead ACTRESS got her clothes for the equivalent of about three-fifty at a local department store. It doesn’t get much more low-budget than that, ladies and gentlemen. And yet, it was a landmark film that gave birth to the supernatural slasher films that have hit theaters almost every Halloween Season, Friday the 13^th, Summer Blockbuster Season, and no, even for most Holiday Seasons.

We get slammed with the next great unstoppable, or comically unbeatable human, threat so often we just roll our eyes. Why? Well, I think when the formula is literally based on, “Hey, we can film this at the local community college and hire nobodies as long as there’s the super slutty hot chick and the pretty good girl,” it’s just too damn tempting to try to get the ridiculous returns that many of the originals grossed. And with production costs that low, there’s practically no risk. So you see dozens of them a year, or at least it feels that way. (If you’re looking for proof, go look at the Horror selection on Netflix.)

Oh, and the legendary supernatural monsters that I fell in love with are treated even worse. It seems studios have adopted the same low budget but big return perspective for werewolves, vampires, and now zombies. It is a sad day when the groundbreaking Count Dracula has been turned into everything from a marketing scheme to a bunch of spoofs and satires that range from somewhat funny to downright spiteful. Then there are the attempts to do something clever that get the green light just because the title has Dracula in it.

Granted, every once in a while a film comes along and surprises the crap out of me. For instance, “Van Helsing,” that joke of a movie with Wolverine in it, turned out to have some of the best portrayals of the great classic horror films. The vampires were creepy, inhuman, elegant, beautiful, and dangerous. The werewolves were beasts, perfect killers, and yet majestic, just like a wild wolf, but bigger, meaner, and more eerily humanoid. Even Frankenstein’s creature was honest, terrified, emotional and yet capable of great anger and as a result, also terrifying in that capacity. How did that happen in what was little more than corporate sanctioned fan-fic? Probably love.

See, I am a firm believer that there are definitely people that love these characters, ideas, tropes, and settings. You can see it in the good bits of “Hemlock Grove” and “Supernatural” and in movies like “The Others” and the latest “The Wolfman.” You can feel the appreciation for the terror and the attempt to hold on to the feel of the old films and shows. You can get the warm fuzzies from days of yore when people knew how to blend creepy and sexy and make you terrified of both the creature and the thing in the mirror.

Still, there are too many instances that fall well short of the mark. It’s these, where the love doesn’t cut to the final product or the product was never intended as a labor of love, that you find the ultimate weakness. They fall flat, leave you hollow, and die out with a whimper. I find myself noting that a trailer looks good, then quickly glancing back at it sideways, asking myself, “What do they really thing they’re going to do to impress me?”

I’m bored with torture porn, I was right after the first Hostel movie. A slasher has to be damn good to keep my attention. Supernatural horror films are so much more disappointing because I once loved them. I remember being twelve and watching hours and hours of A&E documentaries on Dracula, Dracula’s Castle, Vampirism, and Bram Stoker. Then flipping over to USA to watch the movies that made people watch the silly documentaries. I remember even then I had no stomach for knockoffs and second rate crap. The Carmilla-esque lesbian vampire flicks were complete let downs. I knew what they were really for, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I want my vampires with a whole lot more terrifying than sexy, sorry.

I’m still looking for a good werewolf story that isn’t “The Wolfman” re-edited. I really want to see a landmark, blockbuster werewolf flick. Please, someone out there get on that, I promise it could be amazing. Hell, any monster or slasher flick could be, just show us the love.

Why “Ghostbusters” Was a One Shot Deal

As you may have heard, there are plans to release a new Ghostbusters movie. It hurts, it really hurts. Ok, maybe it won’t be horrible but there are at least a few reasons that the franchise will never pull the audience it did the first time around.

First of all, there’s the obvious. Three comedic geniuses at the top of their game and the apex of their notoriety worked together to write the first film. The result: Absolutely amazing! The witty banter, the solid but natural jokes, and the hilarious visual comedy were astounding. But there was more to it than that. These three had been working together and around each other for years, honing their comedy to fit each other. They were destined to do something huge.

Of course, the main writer, Mr. Harold Ramis, didn’t just show up to write a comedy. Maybe he did at first, but when the gears got turning, we ended up with several of the most noted plot lines ever derived combined. Now, stick with me here. The first and most obvious is the hero journey. There is an obvious trend from mundane to fantastic, taking steps to reject the journey, then embracing the quest, then discovering the tools and how to use them, culminating in a crazy, multidimensional showdown. Pretty standard fantasy/sci-fi hero journey material.

But did anyone notice the coming of age tale? Yeah, it’s not horribly obvious because these three schmucks are what, friggin’ 40? But, that’s just it, they are schmucks. The incredible Mr. Murray portrays Dr. Peter Venkman who is truly a big high-schooler. Think about it, when we meet him he’s using his government sanctioned research money to get phone numbers. He makes a reference to being in the private sector like it’s a living hell and then in the same breath discusses taking wing to reach their potential. These guys are frat boys who never really left the house, like some kind of perpetual Van Wilders with research grants.

Yet another typical mainline plot is the meaning of life theory. It’s the movie where Jim has been doing one thing all his life and things finally get bad enough to break out and do your own thing. This is where Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz really is a crucial device. Stantz thinks the guys are doing the right thing and then wham, bam, the world goes topsy turvy and there’s Venkman with his crazy, childlike wonderlust saying just jump and find out who we are. Stantz fights it at first, but like every other movie average-joe turned Amazo, he falls in love with the potential he has for his newfound life.

These three plots form the basis for the witty back and forth, and just so we could see it a little bit better, they introduce Zeddmore so we have an ordinary guy off the street to see how these three loopy, zany nuts really are. It’s a perfect reference point and gives most people a down to earth perspective to relate to.

These alone give it the right fuel to connect to a wide audience but what pushed it over the top? Why can’t you top this film? Well, it has to do with how it was written. The powerhouse minds behind it wrote it as a one shot and really only wanted to do it once.

Yes, I say that with confidence and I’ll even explain why.

In the midst of making every ghost a one-liner from the fat slob to the asshole cabbie, they threw everything at the table. They pulled the right cameos and pegged the right venues. They connected across the spectrum of comedy, film, and music. When a movie gets Casey Cassum to do a piece you know it’s gonna be big. The marketing was massive. Yep, let’s face it, when the commercial for the movie was also in the movie you know it’s going to be everywhere.

And then there’s the ending. After all the joke-ghosts the world is about to be destroyed by the cutest, silliest kaiju ever. That’s right, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was a joke on Japanese monster movies, it had to be. Try to picture the most harmless thing ever destroying one of the world’s largest cities and you end up with sugar puff Godzilla. Then you lose both the main love interest and the corny side kick which is a plot double whammy against the heroes of any story. And the finale actually has the protagonists risk the existence of two realities to save the day. Let me say that again, the flippin’ good guys decide that instead of just letting bubbly, lightning tossing chick rule the world they will chance blowing her reality and ours to absolute nothing.

That ending says it all, no, I mean it, it says this is the absolute end. You can’t go anywhere after throwing all that in. You cannot top it. Ok, maybe you could but it would require a group of iconic geniuses, a studio that really trusts them all, a killer storyline that hits on a bevy of different chords, a venue that crosses the old triple-threat entertainer threshold, and a plot with a climax so high it makes Voldemort seem like a whimper in the dark.

So, I leave you with the reason we will never have the Ghostbusters sequel we all want. And to the guys who pulled off damn near perfect the first time around I can only say, “Nice shootin’ Tex!”