HORRIBLE NIGHTS - found.

“Do you want to be the kid that gets picked on

or the kid that gets in trouble?”

[Image source]

I've been curmudgeonly about new films for about a decade now for the same reason that I was driven back in time by music. The stuff that gets promoted is crap, it's that simple. But three years ago I stumbled into a tomb of wonders called bandcamp. It's a place for new independant bands to share and sell their music. It's a place where artists are free to exploit their own creative vision free from corporate restraints. Recently, I've challenged myself to tap a similar vein for underground filmmakers. I have this crazy notion that there's a world of worthwhile auteurs out there that you won't find in theaters. In my imagination, these freewheeling visionaries do what they want, take no prisoners and do it on a shoestring budget. The problem is, there's no bandcamp for filmmakers, not one that I know of anyway. Youtube could have been it, Vimeo tries to be it, but as of this writing I've yet to find the "filmcamp" website. Not too big a problem though, you've just got to dig. Finding great bands on bandcamp is a gold rush, finding great underground horror films is a scavenger hunt.

Probably the biggest prized piece of that hunt has been the movie Found (stylized as found.). Based on the novel by Todd Rigney, Found is the coming of age story about an adolescent boy whose older brother is a serial killer. Marty (played by Gavin Brown) suffers constant abuse from everyone around him. His only solace is making comic books and watching horror movies (as if that doesn’t sound familiar!). He goes into  his brother Steve (Ethan Philbeck)’s room when he’s not around and goes through his stuff. He already knows about the severed heads in bowling bags in the closet and likes to pull those out to have a look at, but the real hidden treasure is in Steve’s VHS collection. Replace “severed heads” with “skin rags” and “VHS” with “comic books” and Rigney and director Scott Schirmer (co-screenwriters) have just basically described my childhood.

In one cool scene Marty plays his brother’s tape deck and a scorching rendition of Eyehategod’s “Sister Fucker” blasts out courtesy of a band called Racebannon. You can find the complete soundtrack, including Racebannon’s contributions at this location.

But thee forbidden prize of them all comes in the form of the ‘Headless’ VHS tape. It shows a depraved film with no story, told from a maniacal, costumed killer’s point of view. The Headless movie ends up being the only thing that truly motivates each brother to take charge of their own lives and put their respective feet down to end the abuse, even if it means getting into trouble in the process. For Marty it’s a mostly negative process, for Steve, it’s an entirely negative one.

There’s really no avoiding it, if you want to live your own life on your own terms, you WILL get in trouble. In some ways there’s just no winning in life and this film doesn’t flinch from that reality. In some ways it can be seen as having a nihilistic or pessimistic point of view. Well, it IS a horror picture. But I don’t see it that way. It’s a sophisticated look at a brutal, capital T Truth.

The end of the film is as brutal and uncompromising as it gets. There’s no going back, there’s no classic happy ending and yet there is survival. Is that not a happy ending? One supposes it would have to be in a movie this stark. Found isn’t a nihilistic movie, it’s an existential one. It’s a cost / benefit analysis for sticking up for yourself, and the response is equivalent to the depth of one’s suffering.

More importantly, it’s a good movie. The violence and gore is mostly off-screen, though you’d never know it thinking back because of the unflinching use of sound. Most, if not all of the bloody violence takes place in the film-within-a-film, Headless. Director Scott Schirmer set up an ultimately successful crowd-funding campaign to bring Headless to life in its own right. Headless is already being called “a feature length gore fest” and if the scenes in Found are any indication, that ain’t just hype. There’s a teaser trailer up for it and it looks like pure sleaze. It should be good. You can watch the teaser at this location.

Found is available on DVD, iTunes, Xbox, Google Play and Amazon instant video.

Rating: ««««½ / 5

Reminds me of: Childhood

Found official website

Found on IMDb
Found wiki
Found on Rotten Tomatoes

HORRIBLE NIGHTS - Demons (1985)

"They will make cemeteries their cathedrals 

and the cities will be your tombs"

While many other sites will be talking about the Friday the 13th film franchise today, I'm going to give you an alternative. I'm going to show you a movie that is one part mondo schlock and one part metafiction in overdrive. This is a horror film about people watching a horror film. As the film-within-a-film unfolds, the audience's reality intertwines with the story's plot. Like many Italian horror films, there's an ambiguity of intention due to narrative dissonance. While American filmmakers torture themselves over details of a tightly constructed plot, Italians have often gravitated toward pure expression. For audiences trained in Hollywood storytelling, these films appear to be a confused jumble of ideas. Things just sort of happen on screen and it's on the viewer to shuffle them into order. The film might be saying that horror films make demons of their audience, or it might be saying nothing at all.

The nihilistic tendencies of the story negate any sense of meaning at all. What begins as a story about people infecting and destroying each other in a self-contained environment, ie: the Metropol movie theater, ends in an apocalyptic outbreak. There is no hope here, no moral victory and that just may be the muted point, that the violence and destruction horror fans witness desensitizes them and destroys the moral fabric of society. The horror film itself is the demon infecting those in theaters who are then unleashed upon the world. Or it might be saying nothing at all.

Demons (Dèmoni) was directed by Lamberto Bava, the son of legendary Italian director Mario Bava and produced by Dario Argento. Argento's association with the film has taken precedence and many believe that the movie was directed by him. With such a pedigree the film may be a slight disappointment aesthetically. This is sleazy camp, the story is a mess and the English overdubs are atrocious. But no matter, those are reasons to love this film.

When a second set of characters are introduced we stay with them for a while and get to know them. They do interesting if hideous things like drive while sniffing coke out of a straw sticking out from a coca-cola can, then spill the can on their ladyfriend's chest before using a razor blade to scrape up the mess. They bicker, we understand their group dynamics and the air in their car is electric with sexually charged danger and tension. Ultimately, they're there to free the demons from the barricaded theater, a simple job that might have been handled by less developed characters. Their punk rock sleaze may be symbolic of a destructive force in society. In this film, it's those racy, drug-addled punks who literally set the demons free. Then again, the film might be saying nothing at all.

Those trapped in the theater and suffering at the hands of the demons are no better. The daughter of a blind man (what's he doing at the movie theater?) who relies on her to give him 'descriptive audio' sneaks off to bump uglies with a man, as far as we know a complete stranger, without exchanging a single word with him. These are people who talk during the movie or, in other words, assholes. Then there's the even bigger asshole who incessantly shushes them. There's the pimp and his two whores. The horndogs and their all too willing prey. And when the shit hits the fan, they're just people. Leaders emerge and are dragged or thrown of balconies, replaced by new leaders. Demons could be saying that this is what people are, scratch the surface (literally, with a metal mask) and underneath you'll find the most horrific, lustfully murderous perversions.

Under the surface of this film is a kind of frame story. The same actor who appears in the film being screened at the Metropol, whose character is the first to don the fateful chrome mask, hands our heroine the complimentary pass for the theater. He doesn't say a word, he just hands her the ticket.

The storytelling in Demons seems ham-fisted, the acting is distracting and much of the plot makes little sense at first brush. But the sleaze is on point, many of the kills are highly memorable and there are some good moments on the soundtrack. Behind it all is a subtle social message, a warning gilded with fun. As if to prove the underlying point of Demons, I'd love to have seen the highly atmospheric film-within-a-film that the spectators are watching. There have been endless sequels that are only tangentially related to this film, one that ends with very little possibility for a sequel.

WATCH DEMONS HERE:

HORRIBLE NIGHTS - Wake Wood

*NO spoilers*

I first heard about Wake Wood on the A Year in the Country blog. All I knew going in was that the trailer had the feel of The Wicker Man and it stars Aidan Gillen from The Wire. That's more than enough for me to check it out.

The premise is simple, a married couple move to a small village in the country after the death of their daughter. There, they discover the townsfolk engage in disturbing rituals. When the couple decide to leave, they are convinced to stay by one of the civic leaders. He tells them that he can bring their daughter back to life for three days, but of course, it comes with a heavy price.

It's one of those story ideas you would swear you've heard a million times, I call it the Monkey's Paw device.

I can’t say I loved Wake Wood, but I certainly didn’t hate it. An easy criticism to level at it is that the emotional element of the story is taken for granted from the get-go, rather than developed. The storytellers introduce the Daley family to the audience then kill their young daughter. This happens immediately, before the title card is even up on screen. From that point forward, the emotional impact of the daughter’s death on the parents is taken for granted and left unsaid. I understand what an impact that loss would have on a person, but how does it affect these people? What’s needed are a few quiet scenes of grief, that’s all, taking whatever form you’d like.

These can be boring scenes to write and I understand the urge to just push through the story, but when mother Louise (Eva Birthistle) experiences the occasional minor breakdown, it’s difficult to empathize with her and that impacts an otherwise wonderful performance. When we see her sprawled on the floor amid the daughter (Alice)’s things, it feels forced. Storytellers always fear losing an audience if things don’t play out at breakneck speed, and real empathy takes time to develop.

Amateur lessons in melodrama aside, I was pleasantly surprised by this film. My mind had already entangled Wake Wood with The Wicker Man and that’s heavyweight company. Paradoxically, I’m pleasantly surprised because I was expecting a lot from Wake Wood and it didn’t disappoint.

Pagan horror is an underused subgenre. When Alice (Ella Connolly) is resurrected we see the whole ritual of return, which involves finding a corpse, breaking the pelvis, severing the spine, covering it in mud or manure and burning it. It’s one of several satisfying and memorable scenes, satisfaction being key.

Too often in films and stories magical or pagan rites are glossed over because again, these scenes are difficult to write, especially if you’re just making it up. I can’t vouch for the kind of research that went into this one scene in particular, but it has the smell of esoteric authenticity. Or maybe that’s just the manure. Either way, because I was expecting that smell, when it actually does reach my nostrils, it’s satisfying.

The film also becomes self-aware in a good way. Because we know that our sympathetic characters are outsiders and that the townsfolk of Wake Wood engage in secretive rituals, when the townsfolk start doing things like entering the Daley’s home uninvited and sitting there in the dark, it’s unsettling. This is an old and necessary trope of horror: the violation of the homestead. There can be nothing sacred, there can be no safety in a horror film and this conjuring trick is performed well by the storytellers. We never really know who is on the Daley’s side up until the very end of the movie. We genuinely don’t know what the Wake Wood residents plan is for the newly resurrected Alice when they subtly separate her from her parents.

The ending is a bit off in terms of tone, ensuring a darkly happy ending for father Patrick (Gillen). The problem is the rest of the film is not a dark comedy, it’s tense and serious, the ending is inappropriately weird, and I'm saying this as an admitted weirdo. Still, it's well worth watching.

Wake Wood falls under the resurrected Hammer Films banner. Wake Wood is an Irish film, it was filmed in Ireland and directed by David Keating.

Rating: «««½ / 5

Reminds me of: The Wicker Man, Pet Sematary

Wake Wood on IMDb
Wake Wood wiki
Rotten Tomatoes

EVERYDAY STRANGE - Unsolved Mysteries

"What you are about to see is not  

a news broadcast."

On Tuesday, January 20, 1987, the magazine-style show Unsolved Mysteries first aired on NBC, as a special, hosted by Raymond Burr. The special and its subsequent sequels proved so popular that it was developed into a weekly series, hosted by Robert Stack. For anybody who was a single digit age when it first aired, chances are that the theme song (composed by Gary Malkin, see video above) still sends a chill down your spine. I know the X-Files theme is usually listed as the "it" spooky television theme, but Unsolved Mysteries has me running to my blanket, cardboard and pillow fort to this day.

Robert Stack [Image Source]

The show lasted an incredible 14 seasons on the air after a scrappy existence. In spite of still solid ratings, NBC cancelled the show in 1997 citing the desire for a "younger audience". It was revived by CBS for four or five more seasons before being cancelled in 1999. It was revived again in 2001 by Lifetime, but only lasted a little over a year before going off the air in September of 2002. The show was exhumed a final time in 2008 by Spike TV, this time hosted by Dennis Farina until the run ended in 2010. No new episodes have been developed since that time.

But the real grist of the show was aired during those initial few years. Ghosts, UFOs, people disappearing without a trace, all narrated by the stoic Robert Stack, the show was a pivotal feature of my childhood. I remember when a woman disappeared from my hometown of Richmond, BC and her story aired on Unsolved Mysteries. It was a Big Deal in town, let me tell you. After the show was aired her body was found in a strawberry patch across the street from the 7-11 on 3 and Blundell. That may not be exactly how the story played out, but that's the way I remember it.

That field is apartments now, I doubt any of the residents know about what happened there. Aside from being a sad story, it had a deeper effect on me as a child. Because the tragedy was so literally "close to home", and undoubtedly because of the way it was presented, eerie music and all, the story showed me that Unsolved Mysteries can happen in my own backyard. That the familiar didn't need to be mundane. That under every bush may lie a monster, even though I may walk by that bush every day on my way home from school.

[Source]

I remember one day when I was 7 years old I rode my bike outside the neighborhood block. I wasn't supposed to and I knew it. The place I rode to was the 7-11 on 3 & Blundell. This was as far away from home as I had ever been on my own. I remember because when I went inside the store I got myself a slurpee and a copy of Marvel Universe Update '89 #5 because it had Mr. Sinister and Sabretooth on the cover (see picture).

I suppose there's no shame in admitting now that the reason I went to that 7-11 as opposed to say, the one on 3 & Williams which was closer to my house was because I wanted to see a dead body. It's stupid logic, but well, if something happened once, it could happen again, and I wanted to be there to see it. But standing across the street with my slurpee in hand and comic book folded in my back pocket, it all became a little too real. All of a sudden, dead bodies could mind their own business thank you very much, and I'd mind my own. I'd already seen enough Unsolved Mysteries by that point to imagine what could happen next if my curiosity got the better of me.

By the time I was in Grade 8 that overgrown lot had developed a reputation among local teens. There was a path in the grass you could take to get through to the other side of the block. The grass was between six and eight feet high by then and it was the home of at least one homeless guy who it was said would attack anyone cutting through his territory. Some of my friends had actually been spit on walking through there, who knows, maybe if he'd have caught them he'd have done a lot worse. It might even have demanded a new Unsolved Mysteries episode.

There are so many segments from the series that traumatized me for life. The most memorable of them all was about a family who lived in a haunted farm house. One of the daughters told the story that one night, she was sleeping on her side, facing away from the wall into the room, when she woke up, opened her eyes and saw a shadowy figure standing next to her bed looking down on her. Any attempt for me to explain the level of terror this story put me through pales to what it actually did, but I'll just say that to this day I sleep facing the wall and until recently, on the wall side of the bed.

[Source]

In another segment, I learned what fear is: the Men in Black. I don't remember the details of it, but the gist of the segment was that if you report seeing a UFO, be prepared to get a visit from vaguely human looking men in dark sunglasses and black suits. My imagination took the scenario a couple steps further however, inferring from the segment that it didn't matter whether you reported the sighting or not and that you might just get disappeared after a visit from the Men in Black. This was long before the Will Smith movie came out, by the way.

So, when I saw my first UFO in the night skies above Glenbrook Drive when I was 11, I could have dropped dead from fright about what was going to happen next. But growing up didn't help much. When I was 21 years old I saw the same type of UFO in the night skies while in the next block over from the house I grew up in. I was scared shitless that night and the following night and the night after that ...

[Source]

And just so you don't think your old pal LK Ultra has lost his remaining marbles, I don't believe the UFO's I saw were piloted by "alien visitors" or even piloted at all for that matter. They were remarkably similar in behavior, I just couldn't identify what they were, they might have been balloons, Asian lanterns or ball lightning for all I know, but it didn't matter, because Unsolved Mysteries taught from a very young age to BE AFRAID, and to BE VERY AFRAID.

As someone who at least tries to write horror stories I've often thought about how the hell do you actually scare people? Invariably I think back to Unsolved Mysteries as my touchstone. It's the scariest program I've seen, or ever will see, almost certainly because of the impressionable age I was when it first came on air. At this point, a good DVD collection would be vastly superior to the "best of" selections that are available today, it might be a bit unwieldy but one is long overdue.

SOURCES:
IMDB
Wiki

MUST-KNOW TRIVIA:
Here's a mystery for you: where did Matthew McConaughey get his big acting break? "That's easy," I can hear you say, "it was Dazed and Confused." But you're wrong, it was Unsolved Mysteries. Read about this and 26 other useless bits of fascinating trivia at this location.

HORRIBLE MONDAYS - Lucifer Rising

The occult has long been an object of fascination for many horror fans, particularly those with a supernatural bent.

The allure of it has to do with the idea of accessing secret or hidden ('occult') knowledge and the power it contains. Also, there's a morbid curiosity that maybe ("I seriously doubt it, but just maybe") there really is a hidden hand that grants such power. A dark hand with claws. But in reality, 99% of the time, the occult is practiced by earnest (though perhaps a bit off-kilter) folk like you and me who manifest no supernatural phenomena (save for personal interpretation) nor have any intention of doing so.

Many of the popular horror films of the 1960's and 1970's skirted around the subject of the occult, using guess-work and imagination regarding what rituals actually look or feel like and the overall effect is campy more-often-than-not. If you're looking for authentic occult, look no further than Lucifer Rising and the works of avant garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger.

Lucifer Rising is an occult film. It seems to describe an occult ritual, couched in esoteric visual terminology. If nothing else, it is a marvel of surrealist filmmaking. And behind it all, it is the movie equivalent of a haunted house. At different points the film stars a murderer, a satanist and the brother of Mick Jagger. To get those esoteric elements just right, the "Thelemic Consultant" on the film was Gerald Yorke, an associate of Aleister Crowley, an early cut featured an appearance by Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey and the soundtrack was composed by Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil while in prison for murder (he's still serving that sentence (more on him later)). You couldn't possibly have had a more notorious pedigree at that time, one simply didn't exist.

The 28-minute film was completed in the early 70's but not distributed until 1980. Lucifer Rising is, at its core, about the dawning of a new age, the Aquarian age. However, to summarize the storyline would be to catalog the moments of a madman's dreams. Rebirth, lightning, resurrection, volcanos, revelation, clouds, decay, pyramids, souls depicted as UFOs in ancient Egypt, this is one weird film. But in the context of Anger's filmography, it's eminently watchable, because the kaleidoscopic storytelling moves along at a good pace and there's always something captivating on screen. It may or may not feature a classic linear storyline, but it's more accessible than Anger's other films, like Puce Moment, Invocation of my Demon Brother (essentially an early cut of Lucifer Rising) or it's homoerotic antithesis Scorpio Rising.

For all intents and purposes Lucifer Rising is a silent film. The musical accompaniment was originally composed by Jimmy Page but wasn't used in the final cut after Anger, living in Page's basement at the time, got into an argument with Page's wife Charlotte and was subsequently thrown out of the house. Former Anger associate Bobby BeauSoleil then wrote to Anger from prison and petitioned to take over the project. The score he composed is alternately haunting, trippy and rocking. I bought the soundtrack album from iTunes many years ago and it's still something I whip out every now and then. It's not frightening, but it's specific. Much like the soundtrack to Under the Skin it sets a specific mood, in the case of BeauSoleil's Lucifer Rising, that mood is wall-eyed fascination. It's murderous psychopathy with the twist of child-like innocence. The soundtrack to a back-alley "ripping" in the way a child might try to flush a cat down the toilet or pull the wings off a moth. I'm speaking about the piece that you'll at about the five minute mark in the video below.

Watch Lucifer Rising, right here:
 

HORRIBLE MONDAYS - Velvet Robe - The Devil Bat Re-Score

[Image source]

[Image source]

I like classical music, but not a lot of it and not all the time. When it comes to 20th century composers, I like the minimalists, guys like Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass. One of the best things Philip Glass ever did was his re-score of the 1931 Universal monster classic 'Dracula' starring Bela Lugosi. The story goes that the original score for the film was lost, so Universal drafted Glass and the Kronos Quartet to re-score it, which they did in stark and startling style. It slices and dices nerves and leaves the viewer electrified. I've got it on CD and it's become one of those rare few classical scores that I've gone back to for well over a decade.

So I was delighted to hear that The Velvet Robe, those mysterious blackened doom experimentalists were working on the score to a Bela Lugosi movie. Well, the results turned up in early November on youtube and they are incredibly creepy (see video below). I mean theremin bat-scream creepy. The film in question turned out to be The Devil Bat (1940), a story about a cosmetics chemist who seeks revenge against his employers for short changing him on his inventions. I'm no vintage film buff so I'd never seen the picture before. I hate to say it, but those old timey soundtracks sometimes serve to hurt a film by telegraphing emotion and by being overbearing. The best thing Velvet Robe has done here is to liven up the story by toning down the soundtrack.

I like the restraint shown here by Velvet Robe. If it was me scoring this thing, I almost certainly would have shown no restraint whatsoever and taken a kitchen sink approach which would have simply thrown a wet blanket of noise over the film. Velvet Robe reserve their touch-ups to atmospheric brush strokes under key moments in the plot and the occasional but always effective 'sting'.

It makes me wonder just how large a role those original Universal monster scores contributed to their perceived campiness. Given a sonic updating, The Devil Bat becomes deadly serious. Listen to and watch the bat attack scene about 47 minutes in to the video. Something that could have been, and most likely was, so corny becomes positively unsettling.

This is brilliant.

Watch the entire video with Velvet Robe's re-score below.

HORRIBLE MONDAYS - The Blind Dead Series

[Image Source]

[Image source]

So, Zoltan's 'Tombs of the Blind Dead' EP got me thinking about the Spanish Blind Dead film series. I have all four of them on DVD and I've considered it one of my many 'guilty' pleasures. I think "guilty pleasures" is a good phrase, I know some people don't like it, but there's no better way to describe the cognitive dissonance of liking something that you know intellectually is genuinely bad. And I'm not going to sugarcoat it, the Blind Dead series, on the 'high art' wall chart, notches at about the ankle level. Some of the films are better than others. I like the first and third films in the series 'Tombs of the Blind Dead' (see video below) and 'The Ghost Galleon'. I'm sure if you asked any four Blind Dead fans what was their favorite and least favorite of the four, they'd each give you a different combo, but all would be equally enthusiastic about the underlying concept of the series: A cloaked legion of mummified zombies seeks revenge on the descendants of those who murdered them. Oh yeah, and the sadistic undead just happen to be Knights Templar.

As I said, I like the Blind Dead series, but they're the kind of movies I'll put on mute and watch as I listen to a band like Moss. It's not the kind of thing that warrants repeat viewings, not with the sound on anyway. The problems with the series are numerous but I'll try my best to narrow them down to the major few. 1). Poor Acting. I hate to point the finger here, but the reactions and line delivery leave a lot of to be desired and undermines the carefully built-up horrific atmosphere. 2). Limited Visual Vocabulary from the Director. This situation improved as the series went on, but those first two films (again see below) are all medium or full shots, no matter what the situation. It keeps the audience at a distance, reducing the viewer to spectator, rather than participant. 3). Sloppy and / or Awkward Editing. The series is plagued by sloppy editing. Once again, the first film is atrocious with this but there's an obvious jump cut in the middle of an early scene in Ghost Galleon that just feels amateurish and sets an awkward tone (but increases its 'guilt' appeal!) 4). Special Effects that Aren't So Special. Guns that don't actually fire. Miniatures that fail to capture the minutiae of their larger studies. Fog that just sits there. The list of examples is long and tedious. One of the things that makes the Blind Dead creatures so cool and creepy is their stiff, shambling gait. Watching them engage in sword fights is far less inspiring than having them gouge eyeballs with their bony fingers and tear limbs slowly asunder with unnatural strength.

This franchise is due for a re-make.

[Image source]

It's been to my infinite shame and gut-twisting regret to watch classic horror film after classic horror film be re-made, "updated ... for today's audience!" and done in piss poor fashion. I tend to fall on the hate side of the re-make fence more often than not, I think it just may be how I'm built. I remember in Grade 8 we had to do a "what's your dream vacation" project where you get to create a totally fictional vacation / travel agency and itinerary, etc. Me and my buddy Andy came up with "The Booze Cruise" and it was funny for its time, but one kid in that class, who didn't have any ideas of his own, saw what we were doing and decided he was going to do "The Alcohol Cruise". The Hollywood Horror re-makes remind me of this forehead-slapping moment. I fell for it with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre re-make and the shame was on them. Then I fell for it again with the Dawn of the Dead re-make and the shame was on me. The 21st century horror re-makes that I've seen invariably miss the point and are completely devoid of soul. To me, this policy of re-making established classics is socially retarded. The worst example isn't even from horror, but it illustrates the point and that is the American version of The Office. Forget the fact that NBC thinks so little of its home audience that they feel the need to re-make an English language comedy for an American audience, the British Office's greatest asset was understatement, something that is completely lacking from the American version, given Steve Carell's over-the-top performance. This is what I mean by missing the point and devoid of soul. Why is there an audience for this stuff? Why re-make a film that already works on so many levels levels? So the visuals can be corrupted with unconvincing CGI? Why not re-make a film with a strong concept and cool characters with visual appeal that just didn't work for technical reasons?

If you're going to re-make an existing property, why not re-make the Blind Dead series?

I got that same thrill when I was doing an image search for this post as when I first discovered the series. Seeing the Blind Dead in all their dusty, bony glory I'm reminded that the ENTIRE appeal for this series rests in their appearance (that and the boobs) and the atmosphere surrounding them. The way they move on screen and interact is sometimes lame, the staging and composition are disappointing at times, but the threat that, at any moment some real scares might break out looms over every frame of this series because the Templars are cheesy and unembellished enough to actually be creepy. Any producer / director / writer teams out there willing to take on this project would have a wide field to play in because the details of the stories are not sacrosanct. If nothing else, you've got a built in quadrilogy, and studios love endless sequels.

If put into the hands of the right creative team, who takes the good elements of the series (the emergence from the tombs; the thick layers of atmosphere; the unforgettable image of the corpses riding on horseback; the inhuman look and stiffness of the Templars), it could be a kind of redemption for Hollywood's re-make mania. But it almost certainly wouldn't fall into the right hands. The project would go to another TV commercial / huge budget music video director whose entire oeuvre involves flash and no substance. Still, it would be something many frustrated moviegoers have been clamoring for: something different. And anyway, screw Hollywood, let's put on our imagination hats for a minute and place Stuart Gordon in the director's chair, backed by the same Spanish producers who helped him to make Dagon. Who's with me?

"I am!"

WATCH TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD: