No matter how awful they are, anthology films are always fun. If one story sucks, it won’t be long until you’re onto the next one. They always make good party films when you have some friends over. They have a special place in my heart – I wrote a fairly extensive look at horror anthologies for Topless Robot a couple years ago. The Theater Bizarre, the first film bankrolled and distributed by our friends at Severin Films (Bloody Birthday, The Baby), collects some diverse horror legends and craftsmen to weave together six tales or terror. Six tales with lots and lots of blood. So much blood.

The frame story involves a girl with runny makeup going into a closed-down theater where a slightly horrifying, robotic Udo Kier delivers esoteric intros to all six stories. It’s not really a frame “story” as it is an excuse for Kier to be a creep. I liked some of the tales better than others, one I hated so much you’ll get to read me bitch about it several times within this review.

Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) kicks off the bizarre with a mash-up of Celtic paganism and Lovecraftian mythology called “The Mother of Toads.” A young anthropologist and his annoying girlfriend are traveling through rural France when they stop at a market. The girl finds some classy pewter earrings which her man instantly recognizes as being in the shape of Lovecraft’s Elder Sign. The leathery old woman selling the earrings says her family has a copy of the Necronomicon (if you don’t know what that is, it’s over) and she’d be happy to show it to them.  It’s horribly acted and the story isn’t particularly shocking, but it does feel like a Lovecraft tale: a young student thinks he knows his shit and his thirst for knowledge of the unknown leads to his demise. And it’s super slimy!

Things pick up a bit in the next short, “I Love You”, a tense, blood-stained look at a doomed relationship directed by Buddy Giovinazzo (Combat Shock). A controlling boyfriend foaming at the mouth with jealousy tries to convince his lying whore of a girlfriend that no matter what how much she spreads her legs, he still loves her. The ending is a bit of a head-scratcher, but still enjoyable for Giovinazzo’s raw style and use of people who can actually act. Despite its violent nature (or maybe because of this) “I Love You” felt like the most personal of all the shorts.

Next up is horror make-up god Tom Savini‘s “Wet Dreams.” Thank god for Savini’s short. It’s super fun and the least serious of all the shorts. It features the goriest string of gross-outs of all the shorts, but the least substance, which is fine on this playing field. A douchebag keeps having dreams about a weird toucan-vagina monster thingy, his therapist (played by Savini) talks about raping his mother, and then a girl goes “This is my dream, bitch!”

Douglas Buck (Sisters) delivers the worst of the shorts, “The Accident.” It’s all about life and death through the eyes of a child and bikers hitting deer. It’s artiness just comes off as incompetence. Thankfully, it’s the shortest of the shorts.

Karim Hussain (The Beautiful Beast) brings a pretty interesting story to the table with “Vision Stains.” A girl gets her rocks off by stealing other people’s vitreous fluid with a needle and then injected the fluid in her own eye. Through this she gets to visit their memories. Shit gets weird when she experiments with an unborn baby’s memories. I really like the idea of Hussain’s story a lot, but after watching a needle go in an eye for about the 10th time, I got kinda turned off.

The final short is David Gregory‘s “Sweets” – a hypercolor, ultra gory tale of people who love eating. “I just love masticating!” one girl exclaims. Gregory, who directed 2008′s Plague Town, took the crown with this short. It’s super creative visually and a spot-on mixture of comedy and horror. There’s lot of detail everywhere and it just feels like he took the most time with his segment and didn’t spend all his time making a fake penis, like Savini did.

I feel like there should have been one less short in The Theater Bizarre, and that short is Buck’s “The Accident.” It feels really out of place here and sort of drains all the fun out following Savini’s wacky blood stomp and Stanley’s Frog Whore. It’s like the sober kid at a party where everyone else is wasted. So besides that small buzzkill of a short, the overall film is pretty damn fun. You can tell no cigar-chomping studio suits had anything to do with it – it was made completely outside of the studio system by horror fans for horror fans. It’s like Midnight Madness Heaven!

The Theater Bizarre is in a limited run right now. Don’t miss it if it’s playing near you or Udo Kier will crawl in your room at night and tickle your feet.

A while back my compatriot Casper posted about a wonderful short film called Roid Rage, directed by one Ryan Lightbourn. Concerning a gentlemen with a certain mutated butthole malady. His hemorrhoid is sentient, angry, and hungry for human brains. Now, thank goodness, there’s a holiday themed sequel, Roid Rage: The Christmas Special. It is, in a word, fantastic.

Featuring the ‘roid killer as a contracted assassin with a dark past and a bloody future, Christmas Special casts Santa Claus as a perverted meth manufacturer with a propensity for bald midgets, and an all around bad dude who needs to be stopeed. Enter ‘roid, and arrows the eye, skulls cleaved in twain, intestinal nooses, and oh so much more. Can we get a full length?

Remember Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark? Remember being truly terrified for the first time in your life? Remember trying to sleep but being unable to get the image of the girl with the spider sac on her face cleaned from the back of your eyelids? I do! And I imagine a lot of you folks out there in internet-ville do too. I treasure those quivering, night-lited memories. You know who doesn’t? The fucking establishment man. Big brother HarperCollins is here to shit on all your terrified childhood wonderment.

For the 30th Anniversary Edition of Alvin Schwartz’ widely read story collection (which has probably single handedly payed for many therapist’s new cars), the publisher is replacing Stephen Gammell’s art. WHAT?! Bastards! Those drawings were the absolute best part about that book. The stories were fine, but those drawings were brilliantly twisted. That weird human balloon, the aforementioned spider girl, the rat dog, Harold the bloody scarecrow: all gone now, replaced by some bland bullcrap. The next generation of kids are gonna be real pussies. Is George Lucas somehow involved in this?

Hey there readers. I hope everyone’s been tapping into their extrasensory abilities while I’ve been on hiatus because this here video is a reel paranormal doozy so to speak. Directed by my college cohort Taylor Cohan, Psychic Cheerleaders: Dawn of the New Age strings one’s (sub)consciousness along a cosmic continuum through the lives of two very gifted girls. This student film is something to behold and it doesn’t hurt that these high school hotties sport their cheerleading uniforms throughout.

Tones shift effortlessly from that of a charmingly campy teen dream to a paranoid REM night terror and back in the blink of your mind’s eye, as Courtney and Sarah learn the true meaning of their powers. The short tips its hat to auteurs like Lynch and Polanski as the mundane, helped along by deadpan dialogue and a droning score, metamorphoses into a psychological free-for-all. It’s an acid-laced after school special that, between you and me, will most likely be getting the feature-length treatment.

But alas I shan’t spoil anything else! Enough jaw-flapping then, I’ll let the images speak for themselves. Check his Vimeo page for past, present, and future work from this promising young filmmaker. Until next time.

For some reason, nearly four decades after the release of The Wicker Man, British director Robin Hardy decided it would be a fantastic idea to revisit the world of horrific Celtic paganism. The Wicker Tree, which Hardy is calling a “spiritual sequel,” is getting limited release this weekend but just like the 2006 remake of the original, it’s best to stay far away from Wicker Tree and go put on a bear costume and punch some women instead.

Before tearing into the film, I do want to say that Hardy, who’s been more or less out of the film business for two decades, remains really confident behind the camera. There’s nothing technically wrong with The Wicker Tree at all and some of the scenes feel really inspired. It’s hard not to make the Scottish countryside look amazing and Hardy and his director of photography Jan Hester do a great job of capturing its cinematic aesthetics. The interiors of the castles and cottages are nice as well. But then there’s the story.

While The Wicker Man saw a good moral policeman investigating the missing of a young girl on a Scottish isle, The Wicker Tree dumps two born again Christians in the middle of a village of murderours pagans. Too easy, right? Evangelical country singer Beth (Brittania Nicol) and her fiance Steve (Henry Garrett) travel to a village in Scotland to spread the word of the Lord. The villagers and the leader Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham MacTavish) welcome the naive couple with open arms and even invite them to be the belles of their May Day Festival. You see where this is going.

Beth and Steve are filled with wide-eyed enthusiasm and that dreadful Born Again Gusto, but none of the villagers ever come off as menacing. Not even when all Hell breaks loose at the Festival. There’s no primal pagan fervor like in the 1973 film. The entire ritual and its participants come off as a bunch of sluggish lazybones. Where’s that ol’ macabre pagan spirit?! Much of the film suffers from this chronic laziness. There are a lot of throwaway bits that could have led to something either creepy or funny, but go nowhere. Like when Beth catches one of her pre-Christian music videos on television (what a whore she was!) and Steve gets excited. This could lead to some great gags and drama later on, but it’s dropped then and there. Even the 60 second cameo by Christopher Lee is lazy.

The film is intentionally funny in some parts – Hardy meant for this film to be comedy/horror. The problem is, I was never sure what I was supposed to be laughing at. It’s a sloppy script that could’ve used some serious tightening up. There’s a whole subplot about contamination from a nuclear power plant that is way overdone. Right when the climax has a great chance to make an impression, it fizzles and sighs. Just rewatch The Wicker Man instead.

Huh. That was… not what I was expecting? I’ve been hearing about the partly crowd-funded Nazi/Sci-Fi/Retrofuture movie Iron Sky for what seems like 2-3 years now, and a trailer finally dropped for the now completed film. The tone is way (WAY) different than I thought. I was expecting something that was po faced and epic, like Sky Captain, but this is more like one of the Grindhouse mid-film trailers expanded to feature length. I guess I’m down with that.

About halfway through I said to myself “holy shit, Udo Kier has to be in this movie” and lo and behold, there he was. So we got Udo Kier, that never hurt anyone. I guess the story is that a cadre of (immortal?) Nazis have been living on the dark side of the Moon since the end of WWII, constructing a massive space base that they will eventually use to fuck America. In its face. I’m in! It premieres next month at the Berlin Film Festival, and will hopefully land in America (direct to DVD I’m gonna assume) soon.

Another call back to my early days on the Mishka Bloglin, here’s another edition of the awesome cassette series Video/Horror/Show. Video/Horror/Show is a series of music mixes set to chopped up old horror movies and sold on limited edition VHS tapes with awesome exclusive cover art. This time it comes from Psych-DJ collective/label Six Ton Armor, and is titled Time Is Now.

Six Ton Armor co-founders Rimrimrim and Olsun have put together 30 minutes dark black psychedelia, and then matched it to imagery from their favorite Giallo films. All of that, plus an awesome box, for only $15 bucks. That’s a dark deal if I’ve ever heard it. Remember, they’re only limited to 70 copies so hurry up, and check out the trailer above!

Listing can be really hard. Five? Only a measly five? Maybe I can slip in an Honorable Mention or two if I’m feeling saucy but still. How am I supposed to distill the career of seminal American filmmaker John Carpenter down into a handful of films? The 64 year old mustachioed Texan (who looks quite a measure older) emerged from USC film school in the early Seventies with almost no money and a shitload of drive. Since then he’s directed over 20 movies and is, without a doubt, one of the most underappreciated filmmakers of our time.

Often pigeonholed to pure horror, which is a pretty great place to be pigeonholed, Carpenter is also a master of suspense, action, humor, Sci-fi, and yes, even drama. He’s a deft social commenter who also never lets his message get in the way of pure unbridled entertainment, not the least of which comes from his numerous and iconic self-composed scores. Tough list. Very tough list indeed.

Honorable Mentions: Big Trouble In Little China (1986) & In the Mouth of Madness (1995)

Gosh, even by getting to this point I’ve already had to leave off like 3-4 real stingers, but oh well. First up in the also-rans is Big Trouble In Little China, one of the most gleefully goofy and unabashedly bizarre movies to come out of the 80s. And that’s saying something. One of many winning combinations between Carpenter and star Kurt Russell, Big Trouble is a laugh-a-minute “wtf is going on here” action adventure that takes you below San Francisco and beyond. Way, way beyond.

Next up is In The Mouth Of Madness. If you’ve been reading the blog for a while you’ll know that I’m a real Cthulhu nut, and Madness is secretly one of the best filmic adaptations of the Cthulhu mythos. “Do you read Sutter Cane?” is one of my favorite Carpenter moments (watch the movie, please) and having rewatched this recently I can say that it is genuinely frightening. Plus, I mean, who doesn’t love Sam Neill in a horror movie?

5. Starman (1984)

What a strange little (well, not that little) movie this is. This is not one, to be honest, that I warmed to the first time I saw it. Compared to his other works its much quieter, which is not usually what you say about a country-spanning alien adventure tale. Except it’s not really an adventure tale, is it? It’s a love story. Bawww. But seriously though it’s a really affecting love story.

It’s got a lot of fun alien stuff in it too (who doesn’t love those silver spheres. C’mon.) but at its beating extraterrestrial heart this is a great acting job by Karen Allen and especially (so especially) Jeff Bridges. People don’t really talk about this movie ever. Shame. Tenderness yo.

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4. Prince of Darkness (1987)

Donald Pleasance, Alice Cooper (??), and a tube of sentient green liquid that is actually the devil star in this, the second installment in Carpenter’s Apocalypse trilogy. This movie is intensely claustrophobic, as the science team realizes just how trapped they are, despite being in the middle of Los Angeles. That’s actually one of my favorite parts of the movie, how a place that seems mundane and safe slowly reveals itself to be quite the opposite.

This one also has a great score, with just wall to wall tones on it. So. Many. Tones. Maybe it’s Carpenter going slightly over the top (sonically) but I dig it, it kinda keeps you one edge the whole way through, never letting the tension deflate. There’s also some more abstract sections of this move that I dig a whole lot. Check that space beyond the mirror realm.

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3. They Live (1988)

Well there’re books about this satirical gem. This is where it starts to get wild how a movie this great and this iconic can still be number three on someone’s list. In the hands of anyone else, this movie is a disaster. A total disaster. I mean consider it at face value: it’s almost impossible to explain why this movie is so great, but it just really is. The imagery is so memorable. The one liners. Roddy Piper is an amazing cipher. The alley brawl.

The first time he puts on the glasses is one of those “where in gods name did this all come from?” moments. Definitely Carpenter at his most brazenly satirical, They Live is one of those movies that’s just a little different (a little better? yes) each time you watch it. One of my favorite “cult classics” if you will.

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2. Halloween (1978)

This list actually started out as a “Best Slashers” list, but I very quickly decided that Michael Myers was the clear and obvious winner, which got me thinking about how insanely great Halloween is and… well here we are. I love slasher movies. Love’em to death. This is the best one. Hate to say it, but almost all the others are cheap imitations of the dude Myers. Even you Jason.

The part about this movie that’s so fucking great is the really genius amount of restraint Carpenter has with his scares. He may stab a bunch of people, but Michael Myers (special shout out to that mask. That fucking mask) is never scarier than when he’s lurking quietly in the shadows, slowly moving in and out of frame. The shot composition in this film is really incredible. As is the, once again, totally iconic score. What could be better than this? Oh wait…

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1. The Thing (1982)

Duh! Sorry if this wasn’t much of a surprise, but I had to do it. I’ve said enough broad shit about this movie in the past, so lemme throw out some of my favorite moments. The whole thing. Just kidding! The nightmare-haunting shot of Bennings getting assimilated by the thing, the first of the crew to fall. The testicle tightening sequence of Fuchs getting left alone in the dark, and later the quiet and melancholy discovery of his self-immolated body. The head crab, of course.

Blair begging to be let back into the main encampment, the already tied noose lingering in the background. The outrageous amount of snow that covers MacReady’s face as he threatens everyone with the dynamite. Donald Moffatt’s delivery of “tied to this fucking couch!” Then, finally, the silent, motionless, ambiguous-but-not-really ending. He coulda just made this one and he would’ve been one of the greatest. Good thing he made all the rest.

The longevity of Half-Life 2 and the other games it has directly and indirectly responsible for since its release way back in 2004 is almost unbelievable. First off there’s the game itself, and then the two episodes that followed, not to mention TF2, which was originally released on The Orange Box, and of course Portal (which ran on the Source engine). This is to say nothing of the truly overwhelming amount of mods that sprouted up in Steam once the public got their hands on Source, not to mention Garry’s Mod. Which brings me to Dear Esther.

Dear Esther was a successful Source mod released a couple of years ago, which has since been polished up by the team responsible for the original plus some guys who splintered off from DICE (Battlefield) and is now prepping for release on February 14th. I’m very excited for it. Much like Flow and Flower, Dear Esther doesn’t necessarily have a “play mechanic” but is instead a lightly interactive ghost story that is apparently strikingly beautiful and moving. Never something I would want from a full length game, but a $9 downloadable title? Count me right the fuck in. That’s the first trailer above.