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[JOE SOAP]

The Exorcist III

Havent seen this in a few years, and we had a craving tonight. Gorgeous film, that even with the infamous studio-fiddling (reshoots shoving Nicol Williamson in it, as studio heads were alarmed a movie with 'exorcist' in the title didnt actually have an exorcism in it) manages to appear perfectly-pitched.

They're still looking for the original cut of this -before Morgan Creek studio interference- but so far it's fruitless. The version we have now has many moments of brilliance in the way Blatty's previous film the Ninth Configuration has but the Nicol Williamson and crucifixion additions don't really work.

[SmallBlueThing]

They're still looking for the original cut of this -before Morgan Creek studio interference- but so far it's fruitless. The version we have now has many moments of brilliance in the way Blatty's previous film the Ninth Configuration has but the Nicol Williamson and crucifixion additions don't really work.

Morgan Creek claims to have "lost the footage"- or so they said back in 2007. There are, apparently, rumours the French cinema cut used some bits not in the US/UK print (notably the beheading of the priest, who ends up holding his head on a bench), but the bits Blatty wants no longer seem to exist. These are the alternative beginning, where Kinderman visits Karras's body on the slab, and however it was supposed to end, before Nicol Williamson was crowbarred in. You could also claim that there's a lot of Brad Dourif that remains to be seen- as he shot all the Gemini Killer scenes, and it was only later that Morgan Creek demanded the inclusion of Jason Miller as well.

Despite all that, it hangs together really well, I think. Would it have been a better film if it more closely followed Blatty's novel? I dunno- I read that back in about 1988, so it's too long ago for me to judge. Would like to have the opportunity to find out though.

SBT

[brendan1]

The Exorcist III

Havent seen this in a few years, and we had a craving tonight. Gorgeous film, that even with the infamous studio-fiddling (reshoots shoving Nicol Williamson in it, as studio heads were alarmed a movie with 'exorcist' in the title didnt actually have an exorcism in it) manages to appear perfectly-pitched.

It's very clever, magnificently intense, has a powerhouse central turn from George C Scott (who shines whenever he opens his mouth, but especially in scenes with Ed Flanders and Jason Miller) and a couple of sequences that stay with you long after the end credits.

21 years ago, at the UK premier (Splatterfest 90, at the much-missed Scala) i sat with 300 or so other hardcore horror fans and watched a mexican wave of sheer horror go through the audience at the infamous corridor sequence. It's lost none of its power two decades on, and later when nursey pulls the enormous shiny head-cutter-offers out of her bag, i once again very nearly shit myself.

Ive never liked the original particularly- Mark Kermode (he'd, thankfully, be on The Gemini Killer's list, due to his second initial. That's karma, that is) may call it 'the best horror film ever made', but to me it's always been a mildly fascinating sub-hammer infrequently unsettling experience. But then, i grew up with no religious beliefs- so satan, or pazuzu, or whatever you like to call him here, is just another horror monster like Dracula or Jason Voorhees. Exorcist III somehow manages to overcome this and be extremely frightening for its entire length.

Based on the novel 'Legion' by Blatty (who wrote and directed this), the trailer reveals it came very close to having that subtitle in the final cut- and reminds me that, when announced, one uk paper reported it would feature 'a legion of exorcists fighting the devil'. Presumably as some kind of brilliant tag team.

Anyway, Exorcist III: bloody genius.

SBT

I did like The Exorcist, but I prefer Exorcist III. I saw it on VHS when it was released in that format and watched it late-ish on a Friday night with my three brothers. And all four of us were scared fucking shitless.

The slow-burn detective murder investigation at the start is perfect, and Scott is brilliantly cast, but the ever-increasing tension that builds up is almost unbearable.

There are so many scenes that do freeze your blood in the veins; the details of the beheaded child and hideous vandalism of church statues; the confession box scene; Bard Dourif's spiitle-flecked rage and then immediate return to normality ( "the torment of your friend Father Karras as he watches while I rip and cut and mutilate the innocent, his friends, and again, and again, on and on!........It's the smiles that keep us going. The bits of giggles and good cheer. "); that fucking corridor scene with the nurse and the shears (a friend sent me a clip of it recently and I was petrified all over again, sitting in an office in the afternoon).

It's one of my favourite films.

[mygrimmbrother]

Melancholia. Sublime, but will probably never watch it again (so file next to the rest of Von Trier's output).

[Greg M.]

After SBT's ringing endorsement earlier in the thread, I ordered and watched 'The Dead', with a certain amount of trepidation. Why trepidation? Well, for one it's a zombie film post-1994. And whilst I've sometimes found the wee blue fella's tastes to be comparable to mine (mutual love of The Thing, Day of the Dead, Michele Soavi movies, mutual distaste for Shaun of the Dead), at other times, they seem quite different (the recently mentioned Diary / Survival of the Dead, for instance – Diary is due a rewatch, but I can't see it ever being a film that'd receive my unconditional love.)

Anyway, 'The Dead' then. Yeah, SBT got this one right. It's very good (much better than the aforementioned late-era Romero films.) It reminded me a lot of when Jean Rollin described how he reverse-engineered 'The Poisedon Adventure' to get the structure for 'The Grapes of Death' – x number of minutes travel, set piece, travel, set piece, and so on. But the set pieces are frequently gorgeous and thrilling – shooting in Africa has absolutely set this film apart, and nowhere more so than the 'Devil's Claw' sequence, though for tension, the situation in which the two protagonists meet is pitched perfectly. But it's the 'travel' sections that really hammer home what a relentless threat the dead are. No matter what, the dead are there, emerging from the foliage with a stately menace when our heroes pause in their journey. Much of the time, they're simply a background detail, wandering by the roadside and individually easily dealt with, but their sheer omnipresence and the inexorable peril they represent is conveyed expertly. The film never lets you feel safe. And that's exactly what I want from a movie like this.

So, a thumbs up from me, and thanks to SBT for bringing this 'un to my attention.

[SmallBlueThing]

For wantonly mentioning the late, great, Jean Rollin in a public place, i sentence you to endless dull and largely one-sided conversation from me regailing you with my thoughts of why Les Deux Orphalines Vampires is one of The Best Films Ever Made, and how i had dinner with the great man AND accompanied him to a cemetary.

Or maybe i'll just say: yeah, The Dead. Is groovy. And youre the second person to mention it to me today. Hopefully word is spreading!

SBT

[SmallBlueThing]

Oh, and if you watched on dvd and not some newfangled online delivery method, did you find The Dead sort of froze in several places? At first i thought it was a stylistic thing, but its obviously not. My dvd player is literally a week old and this is only the third or fourth time ive used it.

SBT

[Keef Monkey]

Exorcist III is fantastic! I actually saw it before the first one, and I'd imagine I must have been very young because at the time horror to me was Freddy and Aliens, so I wasn't quite prepared for the kind of creeping evil that the movie deals in. Freaked me right out, and I was so scared at that particular previously mentioned scene that I missed the big scare thanks to burying my face in a cushion. Everyone else in the room yelped, and I only saw it years later (where it still shat me up big time).

We watched The Witches of Eastwick as it was on the telly and Bea hadn't seen it. It's another one I saw very young (although I doubt I understood it much as it's far saucier than I remember) and it's still a lot of fun. Nicholson is fantastic in it, in a role pretty much perfect for him. Cher was pretty hubba hubba back then too.

[Goaty]

Die Hard... that is one of best action films!

[Greg M.]

Oh, and if you watched on dvd and not some newfangled online delivery method, did you find The Dead sort of froze in several places? At first i thought it was a stylistic thing, but its obviously not. My dvd player is literally a week old and this is only the third or fourth time ive used it.

Watched it on dvd, and no, didn't notice anything you could describe as freezing - ran fine.

[SmallBlueThing]

Right then... John Carpenter's 'The Ward'. <rolls up sleeves>

It is impossible to explain how much I love John Carpenter. For my entire film-watching life, he has been a constant presence- from those early teenage days continually renting The Thing, The Fog and Halloween, through his less-popular middle period and They Live, Prince of Darkness and In The Mouth of Madness, to his later projects Ghosts of Mars, Vampires and Cigarette Burns. And everything in between: Christine- his glorious collaboration with Stephen King, his unloved comedy Memoirs of An Invisible Man, his Kurt Russell star vehicles and even his student films. The man is a fag-smoking, tight jeans-wearing, laid back genius of the first order. Everything he touches thrills me, and I'm prepared to accept it may be some kind of ungodly man-crush.

There's so much to love: the classic Carpenter hero, Tom Atkins or Kurt Russell (or later, James Woods), his perfect eye for composition, his steady hand on a story, his mastery of the sudden scare- and of course, his music. There's nothing like a Carpenter soundtrack and no film composer can possibly touch him. Ennio Morricone? Pah! Danny fucking Elfman? Carpenter wees on you, while stinking of Brut. And drinking beer.

In recent years, Carp has come under a barrage of criticism for "not being as good as he once was". Obviously, this is the kind of complete bollocks bandied about by shandy-drinking filmschool Knobheads with absolutely no sense whatsoever, that all right-thinking people should laugh heartily at, while smoking fags and stinking of Hai Karate. Not Calvin Klein, like those effeminate strokey beardy gimps.  Yes, his early films had a massive, hammering social impact: Halloween changed the landscape of horror forever, The Thing- after a dismal run at the box office- went on to be in absolutely every intelligent person's Top Five Films Ever, and Escape From New York defined every action film for the next twenty years. But Carp never "lost it". It's just that audiences became inured to his techniques, they were copied elsewhere by lesser filmmakers, the Law of Diminishing Returns hit hard- and his later movies never found the wide audience appreciation that his early ones enjoyed. But Christ, we're talking about some of the best genre films of their decades here- each and every one. Oh sure, he slips up from time to time. I can't, in all honesty, find much to love in his remake of Village of the Damned for example, but even his derided later films like Ghosts of Mars are chocka with typical Carp. Ghosts is a rufty tufty sci-fi action pic that seems to have slipped through time from the early eighties- it should be looked at in the same light as Escape From New York as it features similar themes and resembles it in too many ways to list.

So we come to The Ward- just out on DVD- and positively reeking of Carpenter. Brilliantly, we have a near all-female cast. It's a shame that he didn't cast women in the few male roles, or we could have had a brilliant thematic reverse on The Thing- especially as all the horror here is of the (traditionally female) psychological bent, as opposed to the visceral masculinity of his earlier classic. But he doesn't, so we can only comment on how near it came. Which is a pretty good review of the whole thing, to be honest: It's very nearly great. The comparison to The Thing is doubly apt- but for reasons I can't possibly reveal to people who may not have seen it, but I can't help thinking it's an amusing coincidence that Carp unleashes this- which has so many similarities to his earlier film- at the same time we see that film remade and about to go on release.

We have a female psychiatric ward, in a mental hospital in 1966. Into this comes Kristen, arrested for burning down a farmhouse. She doesn't remember why she did it, but soon finds out the ward is seemingly haunted by a rotting zombie girl, picking off the patients one by one.

And that's basically it- tension is ramped up, we find out stuff, and it builds to a climax that will, as the sleeve says, "set you thinking". All the boxes are, if not confidently ticked, then at least slashed at by a master filmmaker wielding the tools of his trade in an effective manner. The sudden jumps are all present and correct, it's nicely filmed, some bits will make you squirm, the creature is pretty horrible and like I say (without ruining it) there are some strong thematic echoes and reversals of The Thing. The music- here not by the man himself- is very much in his style, and if we can't expect him to break out his Bontempi every time he goes to work, then at least we can be glad others appreciate his music enough to ape it when given the chance to work with him.

Is The Ward going to change the mind of anyone who whinges that "Carpenter hasn't made a decent film in mehmehmeh (makes yappy motions with his hand, while screwing face up to suggest a ponce)? No, obviously not. Is The Ward going to make the man's fans happy and give them the same kind of thrills and chuckles they've loved ever since they first saw his name appear on the screen? Yes, it is.

I may watch it again tonight, just because it's Carp.

7.5/10

SBT

[Tiplodocus]

DEATHPROOF.
Nope. Don't get it. What was the point of that again?  If that had been the first film Tarantino had made, I think it would also have been the last.

[JamesC]

Deathproof is ace! I don't know why, it just is!


I like the sound of The Ward - I read about it ages ago but was expecting a cinema release. I'll definitely be renting it out to see if it's as good as I'm hoping.

[Keef Monkey]

SBT, I skimmed your post due to spoiler fear, got The Ward on blu-ray last week and am planning to watch it at some point soon (still trying to get the tv at an opportune horror movie hour). Glad to see you seem to have liked it judging by the score, I personally don't think Carpenter has fallen as far as many make out (Ghosts of Mars is his only truly bad step in my mind) and as his Masters of Horror episodes were great (particularly Cigarette Burns) I'm confident he still has the suspense chops.

[SmallBlueThing]

Stakeland

The zombie apocalypse, only with 'vampires'. Zombieland, only played straight. A road movie set in a post-apocalyptic America, after a vampire happening. Our young boy hero teams up with a grizzled vampire killer in an attempt to drive across country to 'New Eden', where it's safe, in Canada. Along the way they pick up Kelly McGillis (from Top Gun) and Danielle Harris (from Halloween 5 and Hatchet 2) and run into a lunatic christian cult who dog their tracks throughout the movie.

It's very good- the vamps are mindless, snarling zombies (basically, they're zombies, it's a zombie movie) who have added interest in that they burn in daylight. There's plenty of gory action, and the most interesting name in the credits is that of producer Larry Fessenden, whom you may know as the talented director of the brilliant Wendigo and The Last Winter, which this echoes quite a lot.

Fessenden is a fairly new name in horror cinema and one that's truly worth keeping an eye on. His work is imbued with a melancholy lyricism, notably in his use of locations, their interaction with the cast, and his singular soundtracks. Check out the odd foley in both his directorial features, and how it mixes with the dialogue and the music; it's almost mesmeric- and i detect his hand in the look and soundscape of Stakeland. Which, if that were the only thing i could recommend, would make it worth watching in itself. Thankfully, the movie is a cluster of good bits- and the overall package is more than the sum of its parts.

Not perfect by any means- the plot mechanics that result in the climactic showdown are lame, but not lame enough to ruin it.

Double disc comes with a bunch of extras: two commentaries, a docu and a gaggle of prequel 'webisodes' being the main attraction.

SBT