Halloween 2024: September 30th

Achoura (2018)

To the 1.9 billion people who identify as Muslims, the concept of the djinn is a well-known one. These invisible creatures, with insubstantial bodies made of smokeless fire, are mentioned 29 times in the Quran. They remain a consistent presence in the folklore of Muslim majority countries. Though the Quran is clear that djinn have free will, as capable of good or evil as human beings, myths usually portray them as mischievous or sinister figures that possess or trick people. In the Anglo world, the concept is still best known through the bowdlerized idea of the wish-granting genie. The morally ambiguous, spirit-like djinn of traditional lore has been making more in-roads in pop culture lately though. In the last decade, they've been the subject of a big budget Hollywood movie and multiple low budget horror flicks from around the world. An example of the latter is "Achoura," advertised as the first monster movie made in Morocco. French-Moroccan director Talal Selhami's film was completed in 2015, released locally in 2018, and found wider distribution in the English-speaking world in 2021. 

Long ago, during the Islamic festival of children, a young girl named Bashira was abducted by an otherworldly creature. Decades after that, a group of four kids – Nadia, Ali, Stéphane, and Samir – were lured into an abandoned house by her spirit. There, they unknowingly unleashed a child-eating djinn known as Bougatate. Samir was made the unwilling host for the creature, taken by the man devoted to keeping it trapped. Years pass and the four grow up. Ali becomes a cop, marries Nadia, and fathers a son with her. Stéphane uses his childhood horrors as inspiration for his career as a painter. When Bougatate is unleashed and Samir comes back into the group's life, they band together again to stop the monster before it takes Nadia and Ali's son. 

The opening scene of "Achoura" shows Bashira, who looks no older than twelve, being the child-bride of a much older man. Ali's specialty in the police department seems to be hunting down child molesters and pedophiles. This does not prevent him from being cold, or physically violent, towards his own son. Stéphane, meanwhile, remains locked in the headspace of his childhood trauma, painting the monster that attacked him over and over again. The anomalous antagonist is unleashed when a young boy approaches Samir, who has been reduced to a crouching, slurring vagrant after years of carrying an evil spirit in his belly. This scene obviously brings scenarios of kids being abducted or abused by random weirdos to mind. The way the script constantly references how the evil creature preys on and devours children – clearly inspired by the Bouchenka and other boogeymen of Morrocan lore – makes the intentions clear. "Achoura" is a film about how our childhood trauma molds us, how it creates both our strengths and our weaknesses. The ending makes it clear that the heroes hope to break this cycle, of abused kids turning into abusers themselves, before it is too late. Wrapping such a premise in fairy tale-like terms is a potent idea. 

It's also a story that bears more than a passing resemblance to Stephen King's "IT." "Achoura" was filmed before the release of the hugely successful 2018 adaptation of King's book. However, the similarities are still hard to ignore. Both stories are about adults reuniting with their tight-knit group of childhood friends, in order to banish the child-eating monster they faced before in their youths. Both groups forget about the horror they fought as kids, except for one who becomes an expert in the subject. King's eldritch terror taking on the form of a clown brought obvious suggestions of kid-diddling perverts to mind, a subtext "Achoura" engages with in ways both more and less direct. King's book, its cinematic adaptations, and "Achoura" all have the heroes entering into a spooky old house to confront the beast. Most obviously, "Achoura" and the literary "IT" cut back and forth between the protagonists' current adulthoods and their childhood days to tell their stories. This presents the biggest problem for Selhami's film. King's book is a sprawling epic that spans over a thousand pages. It has more than enough room to develop its wide cast of characters, digging into their backstories and histories. "Achoura," meanwhile, is only a little over ninety minutes long. It doesn't have time to properly establish its cast as either adult or kids, as well as tell its story of confronting a demon. The result is a film full of thinly developed characters facing off against a mythic villain who never seems to be more than a vague concept. I almost always believe that horror films are best kept short but this is one that very much needed a longer runtime to properly tell its story. 

Since the characters are never more than archetypal, it's difficult to be invested in which ones live and die. Stéphane is only a neurotic artist. Ali is only a hard-ass cop, while Nadia is nothing but a wife and mother dealing with a difficult husband and son. Samir's bizarre circumstances leave him as a walking plot device. Without characters we can attach to, "Achoura" is unable to create any foreboding ambiance. Selhami and cinematographer Mathieu de Montgrand create some decent looking gothic atmosphere, especially once the creepy old house becomes the primary location. However, the central monster is mostly brought to life through CGI of wildly varying quality. Sometimes the creature – whose face resembles a plague doctor mask, a rabbit skull, or an insect with especially yonic mandibles – looks okay. When lurking in a dark corner or under a bed, it's a decent effect. Other times, however, the beast appears as a deeply unconvincing computer-generated model, that never seems to be on the same plain or existence as the performers or sets it interacts with. Instead of keeping the thing in the shadows, the filmmakers thrust it into the light far too often, leaving little chance for it to spook or unnerve the viewer. 

Dismissing "Achoura" as a foreign knock-off of King's work isn't fair. It is steeped in too many culturally specific ideas for that to be the case. However, it seems unlikely that King's book didn't at least inspire center aspects of the movie. Aiming for that universality means the film isn't as distinct as it could have been either. Mostly, a script that doesn't develop its characters enough and some truly mediocre special effects keep this otherwise decently produced motion picture from being more enjoyable. Selhami and his team are talented and I look forward to what they might do in the future, provided they focus less on middling CGI. Ultimately, "Achoura" left me hoping that the next monster movie that gets made in Morocco is better. [5/10] 

The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955)

Earlier this year, we lost a titan of the genre. I can only be referring to Roger Corman, the man whose ability to spot talent while always understanding what an audience wanted made him a pioneering independent filmmaker and a grand elder statesman of the genre. Of course, that's not what Corman is truly famous for. Instead, his ability to stretch a penny as far as he could and crank out B-movies at an astonishing rate was his most notorious talent. Corman's first movie as producer was “Monster from the Ocean Floor” and his first horror movie as director was “Day the World Ended.” Officially anyway. After making his first two pictures of a three picture deal for the nascent American Releasing Company –  not yet known as American International Pictures – the still learning Corman overspent a little on “Five Guns West.” This left the third movie, “The Beast with a Million Eyes,” only 29,000 dollars to work with. Running into issues with the unions, Corman took over directing from credited filmmaker, David Kramarsky, to get the flick in the can. This gives “The Beast” the somewhat dubious distinction of being Corman's technical first horror movie.

Somewhere in the Coachella Valley, Allan Kelley and his family – nervous wife Carol, tomboy daughter Sandy – reside on his struggling date farm. The only other people for company is a strange, mute workhand who only goes by “Him” and the family dog, Duke. The tensions in the household peek when a strange aircraft passes overhead, shattering all the glass in the house. Afterwards, Carol notices that Duke is acting violently. All the animals in the area are behaving strangely. Both Sandy and Him start to wander off into the desert in trances. Allan becomes increasingly convinced something has landed near-by. He's right: An alien entity without form and driven only by a cruel intelligence has arrived, observing the humans through the eyes of all the animals it can possess. 

Within the realm of vintage drive-in monster flicks, "Beast with a Million Eyes" is notorious for featuring a grotesque creature on the poster that never actually appears in the film. Knowing this still did not prepare me for how low-key exactly this particular motion picture is though. For most of its short 77 minute runtime, "Beast with a Million Eyes" is less of a monster movie and more of a suffocating melodrama about an isolated family on the verge of collapse. Father Allan begins the movie with an internal monologue about the crushing failure of farming dates. Shortly after being introduced, mother Carol admits she resents her own daughter for having youth and beauty. Later, when she's forced to kill Sandy's beloved dog, it's easy to believe that the woman would do it only to punish the daughter she despises so much. "Him," by far the strangest character in the movie, is introduced glaring at the women through the window of his shed. He decorates his walls with cut-outs of pin-up girls and clutches a girly magazine. Later, when teenage Sandy takes a dive in the local swimming hole, he climbs into a date tree and spies on her. Despite how obviously uncomfortable this creepy guy makes the women, Allan laughs it off and ignores the concerns of his wife and daughter. Lorna Thayer plays Carol as barely holding it together, a hysterical and overdone performance, while Paul Birch is nothing but a bland, stately voice of authority as Allan. The wife is losing her mind, the husband is clueless, the daughter needs someone to genuinely care about her, and the hired help seems minute away from committing a sex crime. You find yourself really wishing a monster would show up already, simply so you can get away from this dysfunctional, miserable family for a few minutes.

Not that the scenes of sci-fi/horror are much better than the plodding, miserablist melodrama. Every attempt the film makes to be scary or suspenseful proves to be underwhelming. The Beast seizing control of animals could've been an interesting premise. The scenes of simple black birds pelting a car or the family dog turned into a killer subvert commonplace creatures into objects of fear. However, the actors rarely interacting with the animals. When Duke the dog is terrorizing Carol, the actress never seems to be in the same room with the canine. A scene where a docile milk cow becomes vicious is similarly awkward in its construction, mostly composed of closeup on the heifer's face cut with people cowering on the ground. When the cast actually does touch the animals, the results are no more impressive. A scene where Carol is attacked by leaping chickens produces laughter rather than shivers. A brief opening narration explains how the titular beast has a million eyes, a desperate attempt to justify a lurid title in a film that couldn't afford a real monster. Instead, the "beast" is mostly represented by a twirling device in a cave that makes an annoying noise. When Sam Arkoff saw the finished movie, he reportedly insisted an actual monster be hastily inserted. Paul Blaisdell, in the first of his many jobs for AIP, was given all of two hundred bucks to whip something up. The result is a snarly faced miniature that appears in one blurry sequence near the end, never stepping outside of the (unconvincingly tiny) spaceship as it glares at the humans. Blaisdell said the entire scene was shot in ten minutes, so I suppose the results are actually decent considering those circumstances. 

Tom Filer's script obviously can't shine much when surrounded by such meager production values. The story is largely composed of the family bickering in their home or people wandering around the desert. Allan comes to some surprising leaps of logic concerning the threat at hand, which seems far beyond his mundane skills of observation. One attack sequence takes place entirely off-screen, Carol unenthusiastically explaining the events that brought them back to that damn farm house. Incidental dialogue from Sandy's boyfriend or the cattle rancher is mind-numbingly inane. Repeated references to a "plane" or all the glass in the house shattering are attempts to pad the script out. "Him's" backstory, the reason the dad tolerates the obvious creep's behavior, is dropped on us in one maudlin monologue. The biggest indicator of the film's cheapness is the climax, which takes the form of Allan and the family arguing with the psychic voice of the invader. How the dialogue keeps circling back to themes of love and togetherness, concepts the alien intelligence can't comprehend, quickly becomes hilariously overwrought. Those unearned pretensions continue into a philosophical postscript, which seems to add some vague religious context to all that has occurred. It is, to say the least, underwhelming. (And no "what is this thing you call love?" rambling could cover up that Flier's premise isn't much more than a rip-off of "It Came from Outer Space.")

I'm a fan of cheapie monster movies and my tolerance for B-movie tedium is higher than most. "The Beast with a Million Eyes" still had me fighting sleep, the finished film feeling much longer than it actually is. When you read about the behind-the-scenes struggles of the production – much more interesting than the actual movie, it must be said – I suppose it's impressive that a presentable motion picture was assembled at all. Clearly, Roger Corman's abilities to simply get the footage in the can, no matter how meager that budget was, were honed during shoots like this. That doesn't mean "The Beast with a Million Eyes" is good though. We were a while off from ol' Rog being able to toss together a cult classic like "A Bucket of Blood" or "Little Shop of Horrors" within a weekend. Instead, "The Beast with a Million Eyes" is largely dull, filled with off-putting characters and desperate attempts to add some depth to a story where little actually happens. An overwhelming shoddiness infects the entire picture, with little of the charm or cleverness that would characterize AIP's later monster quickie. That a nightmare production like this, resulting in such a lame movie, didn't put Corman off filmmaking forever – instead kicking off an astonishingly prolific, nearly seventy year long career with an immeasurable legacy – is a testament to his skill, talent, and sheer passion for the medium. "The Beast with a Million Eyes" mostly blows but Roger Corman will always be a hero of mine. [4/10]

The Ray Bradbury Theater: The Coffin 

Out of the roughly ten thousand stories Ray Bradbury wrote – about 9,000 of which are fucking phenomenal – 65 would be adapted for "The Ray Bradbury Theater" over the course of six seasons and two networks. "The Coffin" is one such episode. Charles Braling is a very rich, brilliant, and reclusive inventor and roboticist. His younger brother, Richard, is greedy and broke. The two had a falling out over a woman some time ago. Richard visits his brother's mansion, maintained by robotic butlers, and discovers him building an elaborate coffin. Charles, in poor health, passes away after the two have an argument. Richard is willed the house and everything within it. Shortly before his death, Charles hid his entire fortune somewhere inside the building. Having ignored his brother's wishes, Charles left the mechanical coffin in his lab. He soon deduces that the money must be hidden there, fulfilling a plot of revenge from beyond the grave. 

For its first half, "The Coffin" is essentially a two-man play between beloved character actors Dan O'Herlihy and Denholm Elliot. O'Herlihy's deep voice and commanding presence makes Richard Brasling immediately seem like the wiser, more upright of the brothers. Elliot, meanwhile, brings an appropriate weaselly quality to Charles, a cad if there ever was one. That the two stars can so quickly establish who these characters are is good, since we only have 22 minutes to tell this story. Bradbury's precise dialogue sounds extremely good coming out of O'Herlihy's mouth. After his character dies, that voice is still put to good use. Even if watching Denholm Elliot by himself, entertaining a performer as he may be, isn't as compelling as seeing these two eighties genre icons verbally spar. 

If you haven't read the original story – I haven't gotten to this one yet – it's still fairly easy to deduce where all this is headed. However, it's certainly still a ride worth taking. The robots represent the past's version of the future, meaning they are incredibly charming to see now. That's an example of "The Ray Bradbury Theater's" limited budget actually working in its favor. The climatic booby trap plays out as both black comedy and surprisingly chilling horror. As he's trapped inside the coffin, Charles is berated by a demeaning message from his late brother. The episode cuts between the panicking Charles inside the glass case and the view outside, in which his cries are totally unheard behind the sound-proof material. Unsettling! The very final image pairs the fear of being buried alive with a sense of bitter justice, a bastard done in through suitably ironic means by a lesser bastard. Exactly the kind of sci-fi tinged but deliciously macabre fables Bradbury specialized in, brought to life faithfully by some fine actors. [7/10]

The Addams Family: The Addams Family in Court

Gomez Addams' rarely utilized profession as a lawyer takes center stage in "The Addams Family in Court." While Morticia and her husband were out bat hunting, Granmama has taken up her old habit of fortune telling again. She's successful enough to attract the attention of the police, who take Granmama away to prison for a municipal code violations. It's a simple ten dollar fee but Gomez decides to take the case, his loophole heavy defense thoroughly baffling and irritating the straight-laced judge. 

Despite appearing in the opening credits of every episode, Blossom Rock hasn't gotten much to do as Granmama over the course of these first twenty episodes. "The Addams Family in Court" is a rare Granmama-centric episode. Previous installments mostly portrayed her as a wild old woman fond of battle axes and darts. That characterization continues here, in amusing scenes of Rock clanging a tin cup against her jail cell bars only because she saw it in a prison movie once. This episode also established Granmama's more common attribute as an old witch with a mischievous streak. Her powers of precognition seem quite genuine but her fortuneteller act still feels like a con job. I imagine she likes it that way. Rock does get several laughs here, whenever asked to display an innocent seeming face or where enthusiastically practicing what amounts to her carnival act. 

For the most part though, this is another episode devoted to the Addamses Freakin' Out the Squares. Gomez' tactics as a lawyer seems to mostly be confusing the judge with as much nonsense as possible, while throwing around wild accusations. This is presumably why he has a perfect record of no wins or losses. A lot of the expected gags – Thing popping out of an unusual place, Fester sticking a lightbulb on his mouth – show up, while the judge looks on in shock. Hal Smith makes for a fairly tedious straight man. He's then driven off to some obscure corner of the world by his experience with the Addams, as usual by now.  However, there are some good gags in this episode. How the court case concludes is amusing enough. The discussion of bat hunting at the beginning made me chuckle, as did the cop's reaction to Uncle Fester's bald head. The episode's final scene features a cute double headed teapot, one of the many amazing props for this show that disappeared after its cancelation. [6/10]