The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Hit Parade is rarely dull, and Casey keeps things moving at a decent clip. With a bit more attention paid to characters and less on getting more cool points for easy pop culture references, it could have been considerably better. As it is, it’s a decently entertaining indie that hopefully hints at better things to come from its alumni both in front of and behind the camera.

  Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls (1979)

  Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 21 November 2014

  Bob Chinn and Carlos Tobalina are the two directors whose work has the most releases in the Vinegar Syndrome roster so far. Unless the latest pair of Tobalina double features are really spectacular, Chinn is pretty solidly coming out on top as far as quality and consistency of films. The latest Chinn feature to get a standalone DVD release is 1979’s Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls, a comedy starring John Holmes, Desiree Cousteau and Candida Royalle. And while it’s more or less on par with Chinn’s other films released by Vinegar Syndrome, it seems like an odd choice for a standalone disc.

  John (John Holmes) runs the Country Girl Pizza Parlor, which does actually make and deliver pizzas, although the majority of their business is sending out their delivery girls for sex. As the film opens, John hires a new girl, Ann Chovy (Desiree Cousteau). He introduces her to the other girls and they sort of give her a quick overview of what different orders mean (“Bell pepper, bell pepper,” for example, is a housewife looking for a girl for sex) before she’s on her way to her first order. Somewhere across town, Henry (Paul Thomas) and his business partners hire the Country Girls to examine the merchandise, all while planning to launch a fried chicken business to compete against Country Girls.

  Or something. Mostly, Henry and his partners just sit around talking. But soon, one of the Country Girls is attacked (“More like raped,” she bizarrely clarifies when explaining what happened to her) by The San Francisco Night Chicken, a human-sized chicken that has been stalking the streets. John, Bob (Bob Chinn himself!), and the girls decide to take it upon themselves to apprehend the Night Chicken using the girls as bait. For the audience, Henry or his partners are the top suspects, although Inspector Blackie (John Seeman), a trench coat-wearing detective determined to shut down Country Girls, could just as plausibly be the culprit. Will the girls stop the Night Chicken before he strikes again? Will Blackie shut down the Country Girls operation? Will Henry and his partners ever actually do anything other than hire girls for sex and hang out in their apartment?

  Bad news if you like your stories tied up neatly: most of those questions don’t really matter and are barely addressed in the film, which abruptly ends at about the 70-minute mark. Naturally, most of this slim running time is made up of sex scenes, leaving the slight plot barely enough time to complete one of its main threads before the end credits start rolling. Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls is not a film that one looks to for technical excellence, but while it’s perfectly competent, it has virtually none of the cinematic flair of Chinn’s better work. No doubt anyone who saw this during its theatrical release or on home video probably remember it fondly, but despite a few decent jokes, not much that happens outside the sex scenes is all that memorable.

  As always, Vinegar Syndrome nails the presentation: restored from the 35mm negative, the film looks and sounds better than it ever has on home video. The disc includes a trailer for the film and an interview with producer Damon Christian that runs a little over 11 minutes. It seems most likely that the film was given its own standalone disc release due to its reputation among fans more than its relative quality to Chinn’s other work. It’s not bad, and established fans will be ecstatic to have such a nice-looking edition of the film, but as an overall package Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls doesn’t quite deliver as much as we’ve come to expect from Vinegar Syndrome.

  The House of the Devil (2009)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 13 November 2009

  I’ve said it before, and it bears repeating: it’s hard to be a horror film fan. Especially in today’s film market, with the proliferation of dire remakes and obligatory sequels, where we routinely see genuinely great films shunted directly to DVD where they may or may not ever find the audience they deserve. These are dark times, and many fans pine for the good old days– which, depending on each particular fan, might be the Universal horrors of the early 30′s, the sci-fi/horror boom of the 50′s, or the exploitation films of the 70′s and early 80′s. Writer/director Ti West is clearly a scholar when it comes to the latter, presumably spending his teenage years trolling the horror shelves of his local video store.

  From the article at the front of its title all the way to the end credits, The House of the Devil is a beautiful gift to modern horror cinema and long-suffering fans: a reminder that a horror movie can be fun, creepy, and tense instead of just ugly, dour and gruesome. As a replica of look and feel, it’s on par with Anna Biller’s stunning Viva– you could put this on a double-feature bill with any low-budget drive-in fare from 1978-1982 and an unwitting audience wouldn’t bat an eye. That is, unless they’re big fans of Dee Wallace Stone, Tom Noonan, and Mary Woronov, genre vets who put in memorable appearances.

  Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is a college student who wants to move out of her dorm room. She finds a great little place but desperately needs some money to move in. She decides to take a babysitting job from a cryptic ad, and her friend Megan (Greta Gerwig, unrecognizable in 80′s drag!) drives her to the house. It’s a long way from campus, and once they reach their destination the girls are immediately creeped out by Mr. Ulman (Noonan). He tells Samantha that he does not actually need her to babysit, but to watch the house while he and his wife are out and make sure his mother is taken care of.

  Samantha balks, but Ulman offers her considerably more money than she would have made in a standard babysitting job, so she reluctantly agrees. She briefly meets Mrs. Ulman (Woronov) before the couple hurries out, and Megan agrees to return for Samantha at midnight. Now Samantha is left to her own devices in a very large, very dark, very creepy house, alone except for old Ms. Ulman upstairs… but, as in so many blind babysitting jobs, nothing is quite what it seems.

  The House of the Devil isn’t so much an homage to low-budget period horrors, it is one. West’s attention to period detail is impressive, from Megan’s feathered hair to Samantha’s giant Walkman. There is literally nothing in the film that might tip off a viewer that it was actually made in 2008, including its structure. The bulk of the film takes place in the house, where Samantha wanders around and a terrifying demise seems waiting to spring at any second. Given this, viewers might think it’s weird when she goes off on a dance through the house with her Walkman on, or when she orders a pizza. But really, what else would a character in a horror movie do? Some of her actions might not be exactly true to her character, but they’re true to the type of movie she’s in.

  The simple fact is this: The House of the Devil is one of the best horror films of the year, a treat for fans longing for a return to subtle scares and low-key creepiness. Horror fans as well as fans of early-80′s period pieces owe it to themselves to give this one a look. Ti West is obviously a talent to watch, and Magnet Releasing (the film’s distributor) proves that they’re the best place to look for intelligent and original new genre cinema.

  House at the End of the Street (2012)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 11 January 2013

  It’s entirely possible to make a great horror movie without shedding a single drop of blood, but is it possible to make a passable slasher movie without doing so? Whether this is a question that needed to be answered is up for debate, but the PG-13 House at the End of the Street takes a stab at it. The film was in the works for quite some time, and probably would have faded into obscurity if not for the fact that it stars Jennifer Lawrence, who has become a pretty big star over the last year with starring roles in The Hunger Games and The Silver Linings Playbook. Here, she’s still just a girl in a teen horror movie. With no blood.

  Elissa (Lawrence) and her mo
ther Sarah (Elisabeth Shue) are moving from Chicago into a new home in what seems to be a rural town. They learn soon after moving in that the house next door was the site of a double murder: “brain-damaged” daughter Carrie Anne (Eva Link) murdered her parents late one night and then disappeared into the surrounding woods, where she presumably drowned in a nearby lake. Town rumors say that Carrie Anne still lives in the woods, and her brother Ryan (Max Thieriot) is fixing up his parents’ house in hopes of selling it and getting on with his life. The kids at Elissa’s new school treat Ryan like a monster, but Elissa sees another side of him.

  Unfortunately for the budding couple, Sarah is also creeped out by the idea of college-age Ryan who lives in the house where his parents were murdered dating her high-school age daughter. Despite the empathy of local police officer Weaver (Gil Bellows), Sarah is uneasy about Ryan. She has a right to be, although explaining why would spoil some of the film’s (exceptionally predictable) surprises. Suffice to say that when Elissa starts sneaking around and seeing Ryan without her mother’s knowledge, things are bound to end badly.

  House at the End of the Street is presented on Blu-ray in both PG-13 theatrical and “Unrated” versions, although after watching the “Unrated” version it’s pretty tough to say what must have been cut to get that PG-13. Characters are stabbed, shot, and bludgeoned all without a single drop of blood appearing on-screen. Elisabeth Shue is good as the concerned mom, but she’s mostly playing the same part she played in Piranha 3D– not that this is necessarily a complaint. Lawrence is fine, but she’s saddled with inane “teenager” dialogue. Still, she comes across better than Max Thieriot, who appears to sleepwalk through the entire film. There’s nothing much to recommend House at the End of the Street to anyone but hardcore fans of the cast, as even the most indiscriminate horror fan will likely be bored to tears long before the film’s final twists.

  The House at the End of Time (2013)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 13 November 2014

  For the horror fan, it is always exciting to discover genre films coming from countries that are not usually associated with horror films. For example, Venezuela is not one of the first countries that come to the mind of most American cinephiles when it comes to horror films. There appear to be only a handful of Venezuelan-shot horror films that have been exported from that country, the majority of them fairly recent. Perhaps the highest-profile of these films is Alejandro Hidalgo’s debut feature The House at the End of Time, which played Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival earlier this year and was picked up by Dark Sky Films for release in the States. As far as a first exposure to a country’s genre style goes, this film perhaps predictably falls into a category of slow-burning “haunted house” films with some obvious major influences.

  The film opens with Dulce (Ruddy Rodriguez) waking up on the floor of her house amid shards of a broken mirror, and with a vicious slash across her face. She stumbles through the house and discovers her husband Juan José (Gonzalo Cubero) stabbed to death, and as she continues to wander through the seemingly endless space beneath the house, she sees her son Leopoldo (Rosmel Bustamante) snatched away into the darkness. With no other explanation, the police arrest Dulce for the murder of her husband and son. Thirty years later, she is returned to her home to serve out the rest of her sentence under police watch. Soon after she returns to the house, strange things start happening that hearken back to the weird occurrences that led to the night of Leopoldo’s disappearance. A local priest (Guillermo García) helps Dulce try to figure out what is happening while a parallel story follows Leopoldo and his family dealing with their own apparent haunting–and the disintegration of his parents’ relationship–in the past.

  The influence of modern Spanish-language horror such as the films of Guillermo del Toro, J.A. Bayona’s The Orphanage, and Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others is unmistakable here. Hidalgo shoots each era of the story in its own distinct palette, which gives the film an interesting and dynamic look. He has clearly learned how to make an effective set piece, but unfortunately the film often mistakes a lack of forward movement for seriousness. The tone is utterly straight-faced, with the only variance happening early in the film as it follows Leopoldo and his younger brother Rodrigo (Héctor Mercado) playing baseball with their friends and pranking local adults. Other than these light-hearted scenes, the film is almost oppressively dour. And unlike The Others, the film occasionally follows characters out of the main story, which short-fuses the constant building of dread that would give the film a more powerful finale. This happens most notably with the Priest’s side plot, which involves him learning about the dark history of the house where Dulce lives. In these scenes, Hidalgo trades claustrophobic focus for some simple exposition that is not particularly relevant to the story.

  These complaints aside, The House at the End of Time has some moments of genuine tension, even if it never quite reaches the heights of the films that influenced it. The cast is fine, particularly the kids, who have some heavy emotional territory to visit in their scenes. The film is very light on blood, with most of the effects budget apparently going to Dulce’s old age makeup and a creepy medium. Fans of the modern Spanish style of horror will not want to miss this film, which is a fine debut for Venezuela and its writer/director on the international genre scene.

  House of Fallen (2008)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 22 August 2011

  The horror anthology seems to be making something of a comeback in low-budget horror films, and one curious example of this style is writer/director Robert Stephens’s House of Fallen. House of Fallen follows three storylines that share characters and a common mythology, each story with a somewhat different tone. This is fairly common in anthology films, but House of Fallen does not play each story out at once, instead interweaving pieces of each story in with each other in turn, with occasional title cards punctuating the action. Unfortunately, this approach only serves to further confuse an already deeply confusing film.

  After a brief pre-credits sequence, the film opens with a group of thieves holing up in an abandoned house after a robbery. They have a bag of money but one of them has been shot, and the rest decide to lay low until they can make a break for it. Once that story is set up, the audience is introduced to Thomas (C. Thomas Howell), a former priest whose psychologist friend Mara (Felicia Dames) believes one of her patients is possessed and who wants Thomas to help. Finally, the film follows the story of Roland (Corbin Bernsen), a mysterious figure who appears to Brooks (William Gregory Lee) and claims to have visited his dreams.

  The three stories are bound by a character named McCarren (Richard Fullerton) and a complicated biblical mythology involving a group of fallen angels called the Grigori, who were sent to Earth to watch over mankind but instead tempted and tainted humanity. McCarren is the leader of a group called The Twelve, whose calling is to destroy the Grigori. As the film progresses, the mythology becomes increasingly murky and its tie to at least one of the stories (the thieves in the haunted house) seems tenuous at best. The same goes in general for the story of Thomas, which is only linked to the other two stories by McCarren and one of the Grigori, but the action of which does not seem to have any impact on the other two tales.

  Due to its complicated, sometimes confusing mythology and the structure of the film, House of Fallen ends up being a serious chore to sit through. The constant cross-cutting between the three different stories makes them all feel like they’re just barely crawling forward, and the film regularly stops dead in its tracks for characters to explain what is going on or go over things the audience has already seen (or has already figured out). House of Fallen is about par for the course from a technical standpoint for a low-budget direct-to-disc horror film– it looks like semi-pro digital video, the acting is all over the place, the effects are few and far between– but the completely humorless presentation is too dour to be entertaining. House of Fallen could possibly have made an interesting short– or two, or eve
n three– but as a feature it’s an exhausting mess.

  House of Ghosts (2012)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 14 June 2012

  Minnesota-based filmmaker Christopher Mihm is back with his latest homage to classic horror/sci-fi cinema, his seventh feature and first straight-up horror film. House of Ghosts is a tribute to the master of the “gimmick” horror film, William Castle. Mihm has patterned House of Ghosts on such Castle classics as 13 Ghosts and House on Haunted Hill, even opening with a personal introduction and warning about the horrific nature of the film viewers are about to see. The icing on the proverbial cake here is the inclusion of two “Fear Shields” with every copy of the DVD, useful for placing in front of the eyes in the case of extreme fright when things on-screen get too intense. Not that things ever get all that intense: like all of Mihm’s previous films, House of Ghosts is era-appropriate in both form and content, and aside from a few creepy moments, this is about as family-friendly as independent horror films can get.

  Eccentric couple Isaac (Mark Scanlan) and Leigh (Sid Korpi) invite some friends over on a chilly winter night for dinner and entertainment. Over the meal, they inform the guests that the “entertainment” is a medium who will allow them all to commune with the Other Side. The guests all take the news differently: gruff Harlan (Michael Cook) is annoyed, his somewhat dim young friend Ray (Justin Overlander) is just confused, mousey Ursula (Stephanie Mihm) hopes to contact her missing son, and former show-biz couple Arthur (James Norgard) and Mary (Catherine Hansen) can barely stop bickering long enough to pay attention to anything else going on. Just as dinner is wrapping up, local police officer Deputy Hayes (Michael G. Kaiser) drops by to inform everyone that the snowstorm is quickly getting worse, and all the guests are advised to stay in the house overnight until the storm blows over.