Blood, gore and a new experience

Halloween is not really a time for trick or treating. Or parties. What it is, when you look deep in your soul and examine yourself, is a time for beer, couches and horror movies. We’re all familiar with Jason, the Freddy, The Evil Dead trilogy and all highfalootin’ Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento stuff that dudes in scarves are into. What you should do this Halloweeen though, it being the season after all, is give some of the smaller movies a go. The horror genre is oozing(get it) hidden gems and I’ve listed some of my favourites below. Oh, I should probably warn you that how you feel about exploding heads probably dictates how you will feel about most of this list.

Re Animator Trilogy

A lot of people argue about Lord of The Rings or Star Wars being the True Trilogy. These people are morons. Star Wars movies are toy adverts for stupid children and the only thing more long winded, ridiculous and overrated than the Lord Of The Rings movies are the bloody books. Real men know that it is a fight between the Evil Dead movies (not mentioned here because they (a) are not obscure and (b) I would need a whole book to talk about their genius) and The Re Animator. And, although the advantage is clearly in Ash’s corner, it is a closer fight than you think. A lot of this is down to Jeffery Combs’ portrayal of Doctor Herbert West. West is a man so dedicated to science and protecting himself he will kill or bargain with anything. He looks at people like they are smears on glass slides. Add this powerhouse performance to some awesome science nonsense, the goo will reanimate anything including severed limbs, and a Looney Tunes sense of humour, and everyone’s a winner. Also featuring the queasiest visual pun on the word “head” in cinema history.

Return of the Living Dead

Even casual horror fans will balk at this being labelled as “obscure” but it deserves to be right up there in the Halloween (whatever) and Exorcist (snoozefest) pantheon of classic horror so it would be a shame not to give it its dues. This movie is not only weirdly hilarious (ladies and gentlemen: the naked lady zombie), but also managed to flout every single one of Romero’s zombie rules (they run! they talk!) way before 28 Days Later. Essential.

Street Trash

Bottles of a mysterious liquor are being consumed by homeless people. It melts them. This isn’t strictly a horror movie, more like the masterclass in gross-out magic. For what on the surface is a textbook splatfest, Street Trash is remarkably well made. Very few movies managed to interweave storylines, animalistic Vietnam vets and criminal gangas, while managing to maintain such a consistent level of repellent themes and dialog. Basically if Robert Altman made a movie where a man flushes himself down the toilet, this would be it. Yep.

Inside

The newest movie on the list and the only one from France (unless I completely misunderstood Tokyo Gore Police). This movie has a simple premise (there is a pregnant woman in a house on her own, a mysterious female stranger will stop at nothing to get inside) but the grisly lengths to which this premise is streched will hit you like an anvil in the solar plexus. Far more worthy of your attention than the other recent feted French horror movies Switch Blade Romance (the twist in which will make you want to seek out the director and slap them in the face) or Martyrs (No France, torture porn is never going to be art).

Wishmaster 2

On to the Wishmaster series. The first movie is a bit cheesy, the third and fourth are genuinely unwatchable (this is coming from a guy who has watched Die Darkman Die more than once. Form an orderly queue ladies). However the second, starring Andrew Divoff as the human face of the Wishmaster, is an exercise in both endearingly rubbish special effects (children will stand up and shout “but that’s a dummy!”), berseker plotting (Italian gangsters? In my Hellraiser clone? Apparently), dramatic irony (“You’re a wishmaster? Well I wish something ambiguous enough that you will twist it to kill me” BOING!) all held together with Divoff’s character defining scenery-chewing mugathon. Divoff is to seediness as Leatherface is to chainsaws.

Silent Night Deadly Night 2

That two is very important. This sequel is so low budget it is 75% flashback to the first movie. This sounds dreadful but it actually ends up being a double blessing. It makes the first movie, an awesome mental ho-ho-ho-ified slasher movie, better by making it even tighter. It also gives us the new story of our psychotic narrator filmed on a shoestring. The original footage in SNDN2 makes no attempt to be anything other than a grim cartoon. The lead man (Eric Freeman in his only ever movie role) makes performance choices that Yosemite Sam would find too zany and says things conventional logic would usually deem unsayable: “It’s hard not to get paranoid when everyone around you is getting dead.”

Wild Zero

So there’s this Japanese rock band who play too loud for human ears. They are, obviously, called Guitar Wolf. In the tradition of Kiss, the Beatles and Eninem they have made a movie where they play slightly exaggerated forms of themselves. As you would expect in this movie a man in hot pants called The Captain keeps trying to murder them. Uncool. Oh and there are zombies. Alien zombies as far as I remember. The way this movie casually ramps up its insanity quotient has to be seen to be believed. It’s got all you need in the way of exploding heads, guitar tuning mid-gunfight and some of the best hair committed to celluloid. It makes Crank look like Tuesdays with Morrie.

August Underground Movies

It is hard to overstate exactly how real everything in this movie looks. The fact it was made by special effects students should make immediately obvious why it both goes so far and has so little story. The makers of this movie were actually arrested crossing the Canadian border because they suspected the content of the movie was real. There is something revoltingly believably in the way all of the action awkwardly and inevitably plays out. I cannot describe even one scene in this movie in print. This is the spiritual successor to the Flowers of Flesh and Blood movies. If you think laughing at Saw makes you a hard man, try entering August Undergrounds’s dojo. Prepare to be humbled.

Tokyo Gore Police

As usual, future Japan is fairly chaotic . Key Man has created a virus that makes humans sprout weapons from any injury. These people are, with characteristic Japanese movie logic, are called Engineers. Since the Tokyo Police Force has been privatized a special squad of Engineer Hunters are established to deal with them. However, unlike the average police force, the Engineer Hunters are big men for violence, sadism, and arbitrary executions. There’s more story but if you’d like to know that I’d suggest looking at the title again. A 110 minute middle finger to taste, decency and the laws of physics.

Blood Diner

I have left Troma movies off this list intentionally. Troma movies are not really horror, they are a genre unto themself, one probably best described as splatcore. If you’ve ever seen a movie that was deliberately and stickily bad to the point of psychosis, that could have been a Troma movie. Another tip-off is that no one acts - they either scream and bellow with bugged-out eyes or read their lines so flatly it makes you sad. Most people hate Troma movies. Of course, as a sociopath, I am very fond of them. The reason I bring them up with Blood Diner is that this movie manages to embrace the same absurdity, weirdness and disregard for any real attempt at “craft” without being quite so repellent and obnoxious. It also manages to get in some of its own unique squishy lunacy. Another technicolour 80s exploitation classic.

Murder Party

A lonely traffic cop finds an invitation to a “murder party” and decides he’ll give having fun a go. Sadly little does he know that the invitation is the only one of its kind, planted by art students with the intention of doing the most brutal performance piece of their lives. To anyone who knows art students it will come as no surprise that this killing is an attempt to impress a mysterious figure who recently arrived promising grant money. Not only does this have moments of real tension it’s also a pretty spot on send up of art pretensions. It even has an awesome Warriors reference. All you need really.

There you are then, a list of the lesser known but just as pretty children of the horror genre. This Halloween let the dust lay on the zombies and not on the DVD cases.