In many ways, “Willard” seems like a genuine Forgotbuster. Released in summer of 1971 – back before summer was the destination for big budget blockbusters – the film became a surprise hit. The significant box office success of this killer rat thriller led to the animal horror wave of the seventies, spawning “Jaws” and indirectly changing Hollywood cinema forever. Despite that, “Willard” didn't seem to make much of a lasting impression on pop culture. The original film was unavailable on DVD for a very long time, only receiving a proper release a few years back. That certainly contributed to this movie, once a mainstream success, being forgotten by the general public.
Willard Stiles is 27 years old. He lives with his melodramatic, domineering mother in the crumbling home she bought with his late father. At his office job, he's frequently humiliated by Mr. Martin, his boss and his father's former partner. Willard is meek, pushed around, and lonely. One day, his mother instructs him to kill the rats living in the backyard. Instead, he takes pity on the animals and befriends them. He starts to train the rats and forms a special bond with a little white rat that he names Socrates. Also among the rodents is another intelligent rat named Ben. Willard uses the rats to take petty revenge on his tormentors but, after Mr. Martin kills Socrates, the young man's fury turns murderous.
While more-or-less failing as a horror movie, “Willard” is more interesting as a study of outsiderdom. Pathetic, frustrated Willard is belittled by life. The film makes him more sympathetic than the unnamed protagonist of Gilbert's book, who does many bad deeds. Yet once Willard receives a degree of power, with a huge colony of rats depending on him, he abuses it. With the exception of Socrates, Ben and all the other rats are excluded from his house, confined to the dark cellar. A pivotal scene has him yelling in anger at the rodent filled basement. He even picks Ben up and tosses him away, at one point. If the toxicity of modern nerd culture has taught us anything, it's that those who have been excluded their whole lives are eager to start excluding others. When Ben takes his bloody revenge, it's the cycle of abuse starting anew.
It's easy to assume “Willard's” box office success has to do with the public's intense musophobia. Admittedly, just seeing a bunch of rats would be enough to make some people intensely uncomfortable. This was long before the rise of the “fancy rat,” where rats are considered perfectly acceptable pets. (Roger Ebert suggested the public just really wanted to see Ernest Borgoine attacked by rats.) While not exactly a bad film, “Willard” is far too campy and overwrought in its emotions to be especially effective. Superior films about outsiders striking back at society would follow and better killer animal flicks would arise in its wake too. [6/10]
Aside from reboots of long running franchise or the occasional odd exception like “Hell Fest,” slasher movies don't show up in your big box theater chains anymore. However, the slasher film has been going through something of a revival in the independent horror scene. Last year we had several notable releases and now, this year, our Halloween season has been gifted with three brand new slasher movies based around the holiday. The first, and most low-key, of these productions is “Candy Corn.” I recall the film's crowdfunding campaign receiving some minor buzz and was happy to see it arrive just in time for the Halloween season to kick off earlier this year. And now we're at the end of the October and I'm finally watching it.
Set in the early eighties in the small town of Grove Hill, Ohio, “Candy Corn” centers on a group of recent high school graduates. Led by psychotic bully Mike, the group of friends celebrate Halloween every year by viciously attacking Jacob Atkins, a mentally ill boy. This year, Jacob has gotten a job at a traveling carnival, working under freak show leader Dr. Death. Before he can leave town, Jacob is beaten to death by Mike. Disgusted by the act of violence, Dr. Death uses dark magic to resurrect Jacob as a supernatural entity on Halloween Eve. Wearing a rotten pumpkin mask, the newly empowered Jacob seeks revenge on those that wronged him.
When I was in high school, the very first attempt at a screenplay I ever wrote was about a bullied teenager being murdered by his tormentors and coming back to life to deliver bloody vindication. I think every weird kid into horror probably imagined a similar scenario. “Candy Corn” reminds me a lot of that script, though it's a lot more polished than my deranged, half-scribbled first attempt at screenwriting. A problem with this premise is its hard to be too invested in a group of juvenile delinquents that enjoy hazing a sad loner. The victims in “Candy Corn” range from obnoxious – like the cartoonish evil leader or the adult sleazeball who hangs out with them – to total non-entities. The film tries to make the token girlfriend in the clique remorseful, as she feels bad about what happens and tries to tell the cops, but she never attempts to actually stop the brutal beating. Hard to be too sympathetic to her. Further not helping matters is that most of the acting is stiff or overdone.
Normally, when telling these types of stories, filmmakers will develop the outsider into a fully-formed character, so the audience relates to their strife and finds the eventual revenge cathartic. “Candy Corn,” weirdly, doesn't do that. Jacob Atkins is barely a character at all. He's introduced eating the titular treat - the only role it plays in the film, by the way - out of a Halloween pail while watching a static-screened TV. He doesn't have any dialogue. Jacob is clearly mentally ill and I think we're suppose to be freaked out by that, since the local sheriff discovers the horrible secret in his house. So are we suppose to cheer on Jacob's retaliation or be afraid of him? It's hard to know because the killer has no personality. The film instead builds up the carnival performers as these mythic defenders of “outsiders.” That doesn't really work either, since Dr. Death is the only one developed much and his actions are rather cartonish.
So does “Candy Corn” have anything going for it? Well, writer/director John Hasty – a protegee of Rob Zombie – does capture that dreary, late October feeling several times. (He also dips his toes into Zombie-esque grotesquery, by making us privy to one guy's masturbatory fantasies.) Shots of the sideshow performers going on-stage for an empty audience have a sense of mid-western isolation I like. However, Hasty's direction is also melodramatic. He employs too much slow-motion. The attack scenes are all awkwardly framed, weirdly focusing on the squirming victims and not the special effects. Maybe that's because the film didn't have much of a budget for gore. The death scenes usually amount to uninspired ripping and gouging, with most of the red stuff showing up afterwards. There's even some embarrassingly bad CGI blood. You'd think a film so clearly indebted to seventies and eighties slasher flicks would know better than to do that.
The film is peppered with homages to “Halloween.” Such as in the on-screen font, the low-key synth score, or Hasty putting his name above the title. The cast includes convention regulars like P.J. Soles, who wears a ridiculous wig and plays a very Lucy-from-”Twin-Peaks” style police secretary, and Tony Todd, who does nothing but brood silently in the back of several scenes. Going into “Candy Corn,” and knowing how micro-budget horror flicks like this usually turn out, I didn't have high expectations. However, the film has won some positive reviews. I'm glad some folks were able to get something out of the film but, sadly, I wasn't so receptive. It's a nice try, and I think Hasty next film will be better, but “Candy Corn” is mostly empty calories. [5/10]
If you were a kid horror fan in the nineties, you were definitely exposed to “Goosebumps.” The Y.A. horror anthology books, cranked out via a tried-and-true formula monthly by R.L. Stine, were a full-blown kiddie phenomenon during the decade of my youth. I was a fan, of sorts. I loved Tim Jacobus' vivid, grotesque cover art but, even as a kid, I found the actual stories to be rather campy. I felt much the same about the TV show adaptation, which ran on Fox Kids at the peak of the books' popularity. Yet I watched practically every episode and happily ate up the merchandise, because I was always hungry for spooky bullshit. Fox frequently treated the series as an event, debuting several episodes in prime time. Including the forty-minute series premiere, “The Haunted Mask,” which just happens to be set on Halloween.
“The Haunted Mask” follows Carly-Beth, an easily frightened ten year old girl. As Halloween approaches, Carly-Beth gets increasingly fed up with the taunting and pranks from bullies Chuck and Steve. Tearing up the cutesy duck costume her mom made her, she instead seeks out a spooky mask shop that has popped up in town overnight. Despite the objections from the shop owner, she buys a spooky, green-skinned ghoul mask. Upon wearing the mask, Carly-Beth's behavior becomes more mischievous and unhinged. She goes around on Halloween night, scaring other kids, including Chuck and Steve. But then she finds she can't remove the mask, that a malevolent persona seems to be overtaking her own.
Undeniably, “The Haunted Mask” is campy bullshit. The acting is ridiculous, most notably from the young kids. The special effects are unimpressive, especially anytime the masks come to life. The writing is highly compressed and overwrought, the emotions being oversized for the youthful audience. The show was produced in Canada and this is obvious every time someone says “sorry.” R. L. Stine, with his droll voice and distinctive forehead mole, appears as host in a very silly wrap-around segment. The writer claims his books don't contain moral lessons but “The Haunted Mask” is obviously trying to teach kids about self-worth, to value the opinions of their friends and family more than those of their snot-nosed peers. This becomes especially overdone during the sappy conclusion. And the episode contains a dumb-ass twist ending, like everything Stine wrote. It's about what you'd expect from a horror show targeted at ten year olds.
And yet... There is something about “The Haunted Mask” that gets under your skin. Carly-Beth is sick of always being scared. She's sick of her own failings. She sees Halloween, and the admittedly creepy titular mask, as a way to bury the version of herself she hates. (A concept literalizes when she buries a sculpture of her head her mom made.) And yet, by venturing so hard to change the elements of herself she dislikes, she also looses the parts of her personality she values. Though it's stricken with kid-friendly goofiness, there is something bracing about the scene where Carly-Beth forces her bullies to repent. Or the way the shop-owner's face is turning into a moldy, diseased mask. You could take this same premise and write a far more disturbing horror movie about kids behaving badly. And, yes, the episode is steeped in the warm glow of nostalgic childhood Halloweens, making it far more entertaining to my weary, grown-up eyes than anticipated. [7/10]
After thirty years as one of the premiere monster makers in Hollywood, Greg Nicotero – the “N” in KNB Effects – decided to try his hand at filmmaking. He started his directional career with 2010 short “The United Monster Talent Agency,” produced for AMC's website during their annual Fear-Fest marathon. Presented as a 1940s entertainment industry newsreel, it takes us inside the United Monster Talent Agency. That would be exactly what it sounds like: A scouting and managing agency that specializes in monsters, creatures, freaks, and abominations. Going under the premise the monsters are real actors, we see how stars like the Gillman, the Wolfman, Frankenstein, and others are corralled for motion picture stardom.
“The United Monster Talent Agency” is about what you'd expect from a monster kid special effects guy who has decades worth of connections in the industry. The short features beautifully faithful recreations of all sorts of classic monster characters. Frankenstein, Gillman, and the Wolfman all get notable roles. Moments from the original “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” “The Thing from Another World,” or “Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein” are recreated in obsessive detail. More obscure critters like the Hideous Sun Demon or the Alligator People are also referenced. Despite its 1940s-style setting, newer creations like the ants from “Them,” the shark from “Jaws,” Dr. Zaius, the “Dawn of the Dead” zombies, or John Carpenter's the Thing all show up as well. Recognizable faces like Cerina Vincent, Eli Roth, Jeffrey Combs, Derek Mears, Robert Rodriguez, Frank Darabont, and Bob Burns all have cameos.
Are there any actual jokes here or is it all a game of spot-the-reference? Well, a few. There are tiny, mildly amusing gags like a maid whose responsibility is to dust the mummy. Or the cheesy narrator cracking jokes about agents being “bloodsuckers.” Seeing how the Wolfman is controlled on-set is mildly amusing. But mostly this is a breezy, goofy act of homage for other folks obsessed with the long history of the horror genre. And I happen to fall into that category, so I appreciate the effort. Nicotero has since directed episodes of “The Walking Dead” and Shudder's new “Creepshow” series and seems ready to move into features. [7/10]
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