Wake Wood (2011) - 2.5/4

An Irish couple's little girl accidentally feeds herself to a dog. Not the brightest kid, but her parents grieve anyway. They grieve so much they move to Wake Wood, a town of about 40 people, one of whom is Timothy Spall in frumpy fat guy clothes. Turns out Spall's one of those folk wizards who always seem to know an inordinately complicated series of actions that will result in raising someone from the dead, cursing an ex-boyfriend, or making that prostitute who fell on your cat after drinking too much gingerbeer lose a leg to leprosy. In this case, it's raising the dead, namely Little Miss Dogfood 2010. Unfortunately, mommy and daddy, trained, as medical folk, in incomprehensible prescriptions, are incapable of following instructions and so bring forth a monster in a little girl's body--and I don't mean in the hentai sense.

I suppose Wake Wood earns the peculiar distinction of being the goriest evil kid movie thus far. I guess Hammer wanted to make a comeback with a bang, so they have a lot of gooey birthing sequences, organ-removal, mutilated animals, corpse mutilation, and more. It's not just gore, it's weird gore, with strange and compelling wounds, goo, and violations. I think this was a wise decision, as the film is a bit slow-paced, with many of the early deaths being pure accident, and has a plot guessable to anyone who has seen, heard of, or buried a pet since the release of Pet Sematary. The only way to make such a film work is strong atmosphere or going wild with the grue. David Keating aims for a little of both.

As for atmospherics, Keating offers small town Irish folkiness by day and torch-lit rituals by night. The folkiness works well enough as a fantasy of Irish small towns. Of course, it's not inconceivable that this fantasy could be real. These folk wizards walked the lands, even here in Canada, within my mother's memory. I still remember tales of these folk wizards. Like the time a man fell extremely ill, baffling the doctors, and was near death. In came the bumpkin wizard with the pronouncement, "COD LIVER OIL!" "A thimble-full?" someone wondered. No! A shot glass? No! A tea cup? No, no, no! A whole goddam pitcher of the stuff! Jesus Mary and Joseph alone know how many codfish livers were squished between a rock and the dry heel of a gouty sailor to get all that oil, but it was going to be pumped down this sick man's throat whether he liked it or not. If he was going to die, it'd damn well be in a puddle of cod liver oil he sweated through his own skin. And y'know what? It worked. So, the folkiness works too. The torchlit rituals also work. They're both attractive and frightening at once, like a Goya painting or Christian Bale.

So, what Wake Wood is lacking in narrative originality it makes up for in its style. And ultimately it's always style that counts.

Notes from the Turkeyground: Reflections on a Month of Bad Movies

To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of...a painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference. - Aldous Huxley

Every year I participate in two film-viewing 'challenges'. Both are managed through the online community of the IMDb horror genre message boards. One is the October Challenge, in which one has to watch 31 horror movies in 31 days, half of which must be first-time views. This October Challenge excites us all around the board and has even spread to unrelated blogs and facebook groups. The Challenge is an opportunity to marshall one's energies toward enriching one's cinematic experience, broadening horizons, deeper education in the treasures of our beloved horror genre. For the chosen few touched by some wonderful perversion, however, the October Challenge loses its lustre midway through and we see in the distance some more perillous yet infinitely more interesting mountain to climb: the Turkey Challenge. This challenge, which lasts throughout November, consists in watching as many 'bad' (rated below 5.0 on IMDb) horror movies one can for points.

The films that challenge us to see them, and through them the world, in new ways are at the highs and lows. The great films, however, give us a paten to read the code and come equipped with a guarantee, New Way of Seeing or Your Money Back. When you come to the bad films, you're on your own: it's up to your ingenuity to make them work, your mind to find the way to see them, your will to enjoy them in spite of their own protean efforts at evasion. Here are creatures that don't want to be caught, don't want to be enjoyed; and we're the Zeus to their Europa, seizing and impregnating them with value.(1) These are the turkeys and we're the perverse who find the treasures in the rough.

This year I kicked the challenge off to a wonderful start with my girlfriend and I watching some Roger Corman and Fred Olen Ray. Yes, we watched DeCoteau's Grizzly Rage, too, and it remains one of the worst of the month. But it was easily forgotten in the delirious enjoyment of Ray's Deep Space, in which the great Charles Napier fights a slimy-tentacled alien monster, and Corman's Swamp Women, which contains women and eventually a swamp, but no real swamp women. We enjoyed it so much we indulged in more Corman with the Shakespearean and brilliant The Undead and the underrated The Wasp Women. Corman's ability to entertain and have fascinating, enjoyable characters whatever the budget proved an affable start to the challenge, imparting a feeling that we were already discovering underrated treasures in what, to the ignorant public, appears to be dungheaps. Soon even DeCoteau redeemed himself with the pure '80s vomit that is Dreamaniac.

We then embarked upon a course that we would be on throughout the Turkey Challenge: the viewing of every Jerry Warren horror film. Here we were delighted. How could we be having so much luck? Even the maligned films of Jerry Warren were exciting and fun. They all had unnecessary, and unnecessarily long dance scenes, islands, looped sound effects (listen for the "Boo yeah! Boo yeah!" in Terror of the Bloodhunters), but I'll be damned if the stories weren't interesting in a zany way and the characters likable. I'll also be damned if we didn't just have the luck of picking the only original Jerry Warren films in our first three tries, kind of like winning the lottery twice. From there on, we found the hideous depths of Warren's Conquistador tendencies, pilfering the treasures of the Aztec peoples, overlaying awful narration, and inserting endless scenes of fat men receiving massages. What a guy.

Meanwhile, on my own time, I'd been educating myself in Andy Milligan. I was already familiar with, and charmed by, Milligan from previous Turkey Challenges. But this was the first time I decided to watch as much Milligan as I could. I began with a total dud, the wretched Carnage, possibly the worst film of Milligan's career. Even Surgikill, written by rejects from a Jewish fraternity and directed by Milligan for the money, is more enjoyable than Carnage, if only because it elicits some emotion (primarily embarrassment) from the audience. Still, much of Milligan is enjoyable and original. His ability to create intense drama, dwell amongst the dysfunctional, and sympathize with the deformed certainly gives his work distinction.

One of the finest ideas in the Turkey Challenge is the 'trifecta', whereby we gain extra points for watching three turkeys by the same director. Trifectas allow us to enjoy a large sampling of a frequently-unappreciated director's oeuvre and receive rewards for the dedication. My girl and I were on the lookout for new trifectas, ideas others hadn't thought of yet. So we went with Sam Newfield and Roberta Findlay. Newfield's films, all with PRC and two starring George Zucco, were mysterious, atmospheric, well-written pictures whose only flaw was having a low budget. But for 1940s horror, all a low budget really means is that the sets weren't as impressive as Universal's. I really can't say Dead Men Walk is significantly inferior to Tod Browning's Dracula, because it isn't. Nor is Newfield's The Monster Maker at all inferior to any of the highly-respected spectacle horrors from Universal, like The Hunchback of a Notre-Dame, a film whose only real merits are in the sets and Lon Chaney. IMDb ratings can be so puzzling; persistance in the Turkey Challenge will have one losing faith in them entirely. So, no surprise, we found Roberta Findlay's films to be quite good as well, all of them concerned with the same idea: a woman in a relationship begins relating to the supernatural and has to struggle against her boyfriend/husband for her autonomy in doing so. Her best film, Lurkers, slightly twists the formula in that the woman wants to avoid the supernatural, but her controlling boyfriend manipulates her into it. More wonderful discoveries! I feel we're explorers in an alien land! Why have so many observers failed to see what we see if they haven't been viewing it with the telescope of preconceptions?

We were now coming to an inevitable point in the Turkey Challenge: we were stuffed. I haven't asked my girl where she thinks it happened, but I think the last film on which we had that early thrill, that sensation of being discoverers and that we were seeing what no-one saw, or at least seeing it in a new light; the last film on which we had that elation was Witchtrap, which we watched in the second week of November and from which we learned the truly remarkable term 'neanderfuck'. The first week is always one of exhilaration. Then the abnormal becomes the normal, heaven starts looking a little like earth. We were planning to take breaks and watch a normal film now and then during the challenge, but it didn't really happen; I was too keen on beating other participants who were beginning to outstrip me. So, we were tired, but we pushed on. We continued our Kevin Tenney trifecta, started a new Corman trifecta, and even started a Freddie Francis trifecta. Sure, we encountered some good films. The Cormans were good, we enjoyed the Jeff Burr films, and William Fruet's Blue Monkey reminded us of Fred Olen Ray's Deep Space. But we'd had too much of a good thing. Our tastebuds were exhausted.

On my own time, I'd more or less given up on Milligan, puttered around with Donald Farmer films, the best of which is Scream Dream for its costumes and jokiness, but finally, despite vowing David DeCoteau, as director of Grizzly Rage, is too horrifying a prospect to return to, I plunged into the homoerotic nightmare depths of The Brotherhood. And I haven't looked back. Seven DeCoteau trifectas later, I find myself exhausted, but not regretful. I actually enjoyed the first eight or so DeCoteaus. Then it got to be too much. No, of course I never tired of the young studs in tightie-whiteys; I tired of the rigorously-pursued blandness that is DeCoteau's non-trademark.

With my girl, I still managed to enjoy a good number of the films we watched. Somehow penetrating into DeCoteau's depths left me more satisfied with non-DeCoteau turkeys and rejuvenated me a little. The Anaconda series was fun, but I clearly got more out of it than she did. The same happened with Rage of the Yeti. But we shared some DeCoteau moments at the end with Final Stab and The Frightening, and closed this year out with a bang in the form of Andy Milligan's very talky The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! together, myself with the Master, Fred Olen Ray, and she with a Wynorski double-feature.

We both found a lot to enjoy this month, though it feels like far longer than a month now that I look back. Can it be only a little over a week ago, I thought as the month ended, that we watched Anacondas: Trail of the Blood Orchid? Can it really have been but 28 days ago that we watched Swamp Women and Dreamaniac? Somehow the Turkey Challenge is outside of the ordinary laws of Time and Space. 100 movies in 30 days, countless treasures tangible and intangible; I invite everyone reading to participate next year and find yourself, as well as your relationship to movies, transformed for the better.

(1) - On the subject of viewing movies, especially bad movies, in new ways, I've already written at some length in The Question Concerning Watchability.

Rage of the Yeti (2011) - 2.5/4

Actually, this film should be called Starvation-Motivated Hunt of the Yerin, but what can ya do? I like to imagine the SyFy channel operates a bit like RKO used to. RKO would give Val Lewton a preposterous movie title that they thought would bring in an audience, like I Walked with a Zombie, and Lewton had to get his writers to come up with a story to fit the title. Lewton was a genius, so he made it work. But SyFy is kinda short on geniuses. Well, enter David Hewlett, a hard-working, long-suffering, and talented Canadian actor--y'know, the sorta guy who never, ever gets a big break--who's given the big break of directing this whopper of a title. Maybe they needed a Canadian to give it that Northern touch. And by St. Athanasius of the Trinity Enthroned, he gets it right! What a guy.

It's not that Rage of the Yeti is transformed into an art film, commenting on the abuses of the Inuit by White Man or making us realize we have to learn to respect nature or it will consume us; no, it's not that. It's not that Rage of the Yeti has a compelling, engrossing plot with rich characters that illuminate the complexity of humanity either; don't get Rage of the Yeti confused with Henry James's Rape of the Yeti--that's a totally different story. It's that everyone involved in this movie doesn't seem to be aware that this is a cheap SyFy movie filled with silly CGI monsters or, if they are, they don't care. The actors don't hold back at all. You'd think they were doing Tennessee Williams. And in a way I can't ever justify or explain, they are.

The cast re-unites the leads of Witchblade the TV series. Remember that one? I do. It wasn't great, but, well, my mom liked it. Yancy Butler still looks good, though her voice sounds like an overweight lesbian who drinks whiskey every night to forget she's in a loveless heterosexual marriage that's given her the one meaningful thing in her life, her kids. David Chokachi also still looks good; in fact, he may well have been stored in formaldehyde since Witchblade was cancelled. At any rate, the rapport they developed in that series is on display in Rage of the Yeti. They work very comfortably together, and both seem to really be having fun with their parts. Credit also goes to Hewlett himself, who plays an eccentric billionaire intent on Yeti-collectin', and to Matthew Kevin Anderson as Chokachi's brother and partner. The brothers and Hewlett have this Brendan Fraser-in-The-Mummy kinda banter--of course, that banter goes back to the Indiana Jones movies, where Harrison Ford perfected the style. At any rate, it's enjoyable.

As far as the plot is concerned--haha, plot--you have two eccentric billionaires after an ancient document about a 'missing link' known as the 'Yerin'. 'Yerin' is, in that rich language Asian, the term for 'Yeti', apparently. Not only do they find the document, they find the Yerin themselves. And the Yerin are hungry for human flesh. Did you know yetis have bullet-proof skin? Did you know they can outrun a snowmobile? Did you know they can crash into a landing plane and not be damaged? These are the facts they don't give you in your community college biology books. Turns out you have to shoot 'em in the eyes, blast 'em in the head with a rocket launcher, or slice through 'em with a concrete-cutting torch. So the movie's action is a balance between yetis assaulting douchebags in the snow and Butler and Chokachi blowing the everloving crap out of computer-generated yetis while making witty repartee.

You don't watch Rage of the Yeti for the plot or the production value. You have to be content with fun. And the characters, the game actors, and Hewlett's lighthearted direction keep this movie very fun. It's a classical b-movie done right.