Hidden in Plain Sight

The Hidden (1987, directed by Jack Sholder) is one of those films from the 1980s that took full advantage of the video revolution. A marginal hit in theaters, it found its audience in mom and pop video stores across the country. This was back when movies still had some kind of commercial half-life after opening weekend. Good movies--and The Hidden is a pretty good movie--could have a long commercial life even if no one saw them at the multiplex. I suppose this is still possible, but it's much more difficult in the present movie economy. There are so many more shows competing for eyes these days that a movie has to be something really special to survive the winnowing process. None of which really has anything to do with The Hidden beyond the suggestion that it is an artifact of a bygone era, but it's one that's worth your attention for all that. It's a pretty good low-budget genre picture with enough quirks to make it stand out from films of similar provenance.

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Super Freaky

Of the five films Stuart Gordon made from stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Castle Freak (1995) is the one that completely misses the mark. Lovecraft, famously, is very hard to film in any kind of faithful adaptation. Gordon's best films take all kinds of liberties with the material--ranging very far afield from the source texts in most cases--but still manage to capture some ineffable essence of Lovecraft while also bearing the stamp of their director's own personality. Castle Freak, by contrast, spectacularly misunderstands "The Outsider," the story on which it is nominally based. Rather than turning the tables on monstrosity and finding its horror in a cosmic loneliness--as the story does--it's a stock "nuclear family in peril" film in which the horror elements act as marriage counseling for a couple who are on the rocks. It's disappointing.

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Like Father, Like Son

If David Cronenberg's The Fly is a drama with gooey special effects thrown in, then The Fly II (1989, directed by Chris Walas) is a melodrama with gooey special effects thrown in. Indeed, where the original film has no real villains, just several characters inflicting pain on one another in ways that real people inflict pain on one another, the sequel has very definite villains, almost of the mustache-twirling variety. Unlike Cronenberg's film, no one is going to call The Fly II a masterpiece. Certainly, some of the critical thrashing it received when it came out can be put down to outrage at the hubris of making a sequel to Croneberg's film in the first place. The remainder of the vitriol might come from the outrageous gore director Chris Walas throws at the audience. Cronenberg's film is gory, sure, but in this arena alone, the sequel outdoes it. As an example of the state of the art in 1980s practical monster movie special effects, this film rivals Carpenter's remake of The Thing.

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Baying at the Moon

Howl

(2015, directed by Paul Hyett) is another iteration of the Night of the Living Dead/Rio Bravo siege film, in which a train full of diverse characters is stranded in the darkest part of the forest and waylaid by werewolves. It should not be confused with the film of the same name that tells the story of Allen Ginsberg. Indeed, there's no poetry at all to be found in this film. It's cinematic pulp fiction through and through. Not that there's anything wrong with pulp fiction so long as you keep your expectations reasonable.

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Food for Worms

I was in high school the last time I saw Lucio Fulci's Zombie (1979) in one sitting. I've seen bits of it in the years since. Its most outré sequences show up in the culture outside the context of the film. I mean, an ad for a satellite service borrowed the film's notorious "zombie vs. shark" sequence a few years back and nobody blinked. It's a sad comedown for one of the original video nasties.

In truth, I've never revisited it because back when I was a young whippersnapper, I didn't really like it even if it did tickle something in the gorehound I used to be. I admit that the version I watched with my friends all those years ago was less than ideal: it was a dub off of some fly by night TV channel. I don't remember its exact provenance. It wasn't a commercial dub because it was grainy and cropped and not even panned and scanned. It must have come off of cable because it had its nudity intact, to say nothing of its zombie cannibal feasts. It certainly delivered on the gore. THAT, at least, I remember with vivid clarity. The story? Well, that's another matter. Like many Italian horror films of similar vintage, I thought the stuff between the set pieces was boring.

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