I came to the disturbing realization the other day that Halloween is only about two weeks away and I still haven't watch a single Frankenstein movie this year. Time to change that! As a budding monster kid, I checked the Crestwood Monsters book on Frankenstein out of my school library. This was the first time I read about a somewhat obscure television movie called “Frankenstein: The True Story.” The title has always stuck with me, over the years. Aired in two ninety parts a few years before the prestige television mini-series would really become a thing, the project claimed to tell a more faithful version of Mary Shelley's much-adapted book. Speaking as someone who has seen a lot of Frankenstein movies, this is one rock I haven't overturned yet. Time to fix that.
Despite being sold on its fidelity to the source material, “Frankenstein: The True Story” is only closer to Shelley's book in comparison to other Frankenstein movies. In this telling, Victor Frankenstein's teenage brother drowns and gives him an obsession with conquering death. He soon meets up with Henry Clerval. They conspire to stitch together a body from dead parts and revive it with solar energy. After Henry dies unexpectedly, Victor completes their experiment. He attempts to integrate the handsome, but mute, creation into society. This is complicated when its good looks begin to degrade. Further deviations from Shelley's writing occur in the second half, as a sinister genius named Dr. Polidori convinces Henry to build a bride for the male creation, who is now beastly following a suicide attempt. About the only thing the second half of “The True Story” takes from Shelley is its icy climax and the monster learning to speak from eavesdropping on a blind man.
The handful of interesting ideas the movie has are not enough to overcome the flaws of seventies television. “The True Story” has nice production values, on par with the fancier Hammer movies. Yet the photography is still fairly flat and bland, with some distracting zooms. Furthermore, its pacing is incredibly slow. I'm not sure this needed to be three hours long. At the end of the first half, I had this feeling that not a lot had actually happened. The second half, meanwhile, is padded out with the suggestion that the female creation is mildly evil. More than anything else, the focus on being slow-paced and classy doesn't create an effective atmosphere for horror. When the movie finally veers towards horror in its second half, when the deformed monster rips someone's head off, it doesn't feel right at all.
I appreciate that a movie, much less a TV movie from the seventies, was willing to take a topic like “Frankenstein” seriously. A prestige mini-series adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel isn't a bad idea. One that actually attempted to stick closely to the novel would be better though. It would also have to balance out the period drama element of the story with its darker themes and more grotesque moments. There's enough cool ideas here that I don't regret watching it. The overly long run time and slow pacing does make me curious about the two hour long cut that played in theaters. Despite whatever flaws it has, “The True Story” has a cult following and has received a couple of nice DVD/Blu-Ray releases over the years. I can definitely imagine this one hitting some people the right way, especially if they saw it as a kid, but it's never going to be my preferred version of “Frankenstein.” [6/10]
They wouldn't have kept making “Wrong Turn” sequels by 2012 if they weren't selling. I don't know who they were selling to. I can only imagine piece-of-shit movies like the third and fourth in this series appealing to the most non discriminating RedBox renters and horror fans that eat up anything. Yet money talks and it was clearly working for 20th Century Fox's home video department, so they saw no need to shake things up. Declan O'Brien was invited back to both direct and write yet another sequel, with filming once again taking place in Bulgaria. “Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines” would arrive on DVD on October 23rd, 2012, giving the people who liked the last two more of that kind of thing.
Sometime after the events of “Blood Beginnings,” but before the original “Wrong Turn” I guess, Three Finger, One Eye, and Saw-Tooth move out of the Glenville Sanitarium – I guess they were living there – and into the backwoods of Fairlake, WV. They are currently habitating with Maynard Odets, prolific serial killer and distant relative to the Hillicker brothers. The little town is getting ready to celebrate the Mountain Man Festival, a huge music festival that people travel from all over the country to attend. The local police force is stretched thin, preparing for the festival. That's when Odet is captured, locked up at the station. The brothers head out to capture their guardians, tormenting two separate groups of college students and the town's sheriff on their way.
Any one of these ideas could've supported a decent sequel. Because O'Brien is a writer/director of such limited imagination, he mashes them all up without much rhyme or reason. Randomly combining so many premises also leaves the movie with an extended cast of characters. We have two separate groups of college kids attending into town for the Mountain Man Festival. Among them are a few romantic couples and a rich kid who is caught with drugs but that's about it, as far as depth goes. The police station also includes a tough female sheriff and a town drunk. While all of these characters have the vaguest crumb of a personality, the film can't devote any real time to any of them. They're all just introduced to pad out the body count, meaningless face and names shoved into the movie so they can be gorily killed off later. The only character that's distinct at all is Maynard. But that's just because he's played by Doug Bradley, who makes a very strange attempt at a West Virginian accent and is given some truly ghastly dialogue.
As with the fourth film, “Wrong Turn 5's' status as a prequel to the first movie means it ends with no catharsis. The villains go unpunished and the movie just ends when everyone is dead. As if this sequel wasn't sloppy enough, it provides yet another possible origin for the Hillicker brothers. Apparently, a hillbilly clan performed a massacre a hundred years ago and then ate the victims. Once again, I find myself mildly offended by the suggestion that the hills of West Virginia are populated exclusively with inbred cannibal killers. Yet more insulting is a scene where the sheriff reaches out to a radio operator in New Hampshire, who suggests a police forces in northern Virginia can help the people down in Southern West Virginia. None of these places are close to each other! “Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines” is another pathetic attempt at a horror movie, vile and sloppy and utterly hollow. I'm regretting my decision to watch all of these. [4/10]
British television's long history of horror anthology show would continue in 1995 with “Chiller,” a five part series made for ITV. While the entire program was critically acclaimed, the second episode seems to be regularly singled out for praise. “Toby” follows married couple Louise and Ray, who are expecting a child they've already named Toby. After being involved in a car crash, Louise has a miscarriage. Overwhelmed with grief and guilt, the couple move into a new home and endeavor to try again. Soon, Louise seemingly gets pregnant again... Except an ultrasound shows no fetus inside her. She “gives birth” to nothing but blood. Afterwards, she hears a baby crying and feels a ghostly suckling on her breasts but no child is present. Frightened by the haunting, Ray burns the crib. They move on and successfully become pregnant again... But the ghost of “Toby” is determined not to be forgotten.
“Toby” has to overcome the rather silly premise of a vengeful ghost baby. It does this with some success by creating a creepy atmosphere. Most of the sequences focused on Louise's phantom pregnancy are unnerving, as she seems totally devoted to the non-existent baby. The multiple scenes revolving around a baby crib swaying on its own, with a ghostly laughing or crying heard, generates some spooky vibes. The scene where Louise contacts a medium, and he slowly realizes that the spirit of a malevolent child is about, makes it clear that the spectre is a symbol of the guilt she feels about the miscarriage. When Louise collapses in a supermarket, after the ghostly Toby begins to kick her pregnant belly, is an effective scare. Another highlight is when the boarded-over doggy door pulls itself out of the wall, the crazy cat lady's feline friends flooding into the staircase.
Here's an amusing little nugget I stumbled upon online recently. “Ashes of Doom” is a two minute long PSA produced by Canada's Department of National Health and Welfare. Modeled after Hammer horror, the short concerns a woman in a low-cut nightgown. She sits in her bedroom as a thunderstorm rages outside, chain smoking. The evidence of her nicotine addiction is all around her, as several piles of spent cigarettes butts decorate the room. Finally, a vampire very much in the vein of Count Dracula appears. The maiden faints from fright, he takes a bite of her neck and, well, you'll have to watch it to see what happens next.
“Ashes of Doom” essentially tells a single, very silly joke yet the conviction with which it tells that joke is admirable. It begins with extensive credits, making up about half of its two minute long run time. There's dramatic organ music on the soundtrack, a fancy title sequence, and extensive production crew listed. The credits even claim the movie is based on a novel! It's all an attempt to trick some late-night television watcher in seventies Canada into thinking this is a feature length movie. The production design is impressive, with even the color grading matching an old Hammer movie. (Though that might just be a benefit of this PSA being as old as some of those movies at this point.) That all this effort was expended on a goofy dad joke can't help but strike me as impressive. Director Grant Munro also made classic animated short “Canon,” showing he had a real knack for meticulous production design and camera movement. [7/10]
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