PART II

As is the case with many movies, sometimes a sucky sequel was made.  Many times these sequels were sold as part of a two disc set to tag along with the original.  Now, when it comes to my tastes, many of the originals were never a stroll down the red carpet to begin with, so the fact that they even made a sequel is a true testament to the cult lover.  Vampire’s Kiss had everything I love about the 80’s except the vampire.  The music is always a given with 80’s films and I have a huge fetish for movies shot in New York, especially 80’s movies.  I don’t know what it is, it’s like watching a movie that was shot on deteriorating 70’s film stock, it has a specific feel to it.  What you don’t get monster wise in Kiss is made up for ten-fold in Waxwork.  If you haven’t seen it I highly recommend checking it out as a late night winding down movie (LATE night) or if you’re just getting home/off from the bar.  Pure 80’s special effects and wonderful practical makeup.  A solid entry into the werewolf transformation debate I sometimes have with Mr. Gary Schaefer.  I am of the opinion that Monster Squad still has the best transformation scene ever filmed.

He’s gonna kill your son!

It’s intense and the werewolf is the one truly terrifying aspect of that movie.  All the other monsters in Monster Squad were stereotypes of how they were first created in the Universal monster movies but the werewolf was bat-shit.  Anyway, the SECOND disc on Waxwork is Waxwork II: Lost in Time and it’s shit.  BUT.  It’s shit for cool reasons.  Every once in a while there is a monster team up movie that appeals to the monster geek in all of us.  The most recent one I think, and sound off if I’m wrong is Cabin in the Woods.  A clever way to hodgepodge in as many monsters as possible.  Monster Squad was amazing, and the concept behind Waxwork is that in the complexities of  the space time continuum  (and so gonna dive into that with X Men which is the next blog)  a museum might exist where, theoretically, each display is a portal into that reality.  And so enticing and lifelike are these renderings that one simply cannot resist the urge to go in for a closer look.  Bad idea of course.   As our group of eighties teenage misfits struggle to stay alive it is revealed that the Godfather of our hero Mark (Zach Galligan of Gremlins fame)  plays the pointer character Sir Wilfred.  He’s the learned figure that has ties to Zach Galligan’s mystifying past. “There’s a voodoo belief that by making a wax effigy of an evil being, containing a belonging of his that he possessed in earthly form, and feeding him the soul of a believing victim, you can bring them back to life.”   Fucking Duh. The powers of  evil need 18 victims to bring the Waxwork to life and wreak chaos on the living world.  However they are thwarted by the last two survivors, Zach Galligan and Sarah, who manage to burn down the waxwork, restoring  balance between good and evil ………………for now!

“To the looking glass world it was Alice that said, ‘I’ve a scepter in hand.  I’ve a crown on my head; let the looking glass creatures, whatever they be, come and dine with the Red Queen, the White Queen, and me!'”

In the sequel, Waxwork II: Lost in Time we open with this quote intended to thrust us into a suspension of disbelief fantasy adventure tale.  The music backs that with an awesome eerie chime based melody that reminded me of a mixture of The ‘Burbs and Phantasm.  The perfect score to thrust us back into the unknown realms of good and evil, set against a backdrop that is the complexities of time. Well right away the film pissed me off because they replaced Sarah with a different actress.  I hate it when they do that.  Not that I’m gonna piss ‘n moan over continuity issues in the Waxwork series, like Deborah Foreman had so much going on between six lines in Real Genius and a MacGyver episode she could turn down the role.

 

The quote is wrong btw.  Anyway.  The NEW Sarah returns home after burning down the Waxwork with Zach Galligan to her drunken, abusive stepfather who’s been wondering where she’s been all night.  Where to begin Dad!?  Unbeknownst to Sarah but knownst to us is that she is followed home by a relic that survived the inferno.  A hand from one of the wax sculptors crawls out of the burning wreckage and hitches itself to the cab our heroes so casually hail after burning down a mansion.   It is right here that I interject that in 7th grade science we were assigned to write a sequel to the original:

 

I have no fucking idea why, but we watched it in class and had to write a short story continuation.  In that sequel I had the brilliant idea that a piece of “The Thing” survived the fire at the end of the movie.  Hmmmmm.  So “Thing” is loose to run amok. It tries to strangle Sarah’s stepdad before finding a hammer to  beat him to death with.  The cool soundtrack I wrote about earlier goes from eerie to comical as a Looney Tunes music compliments a severed hand running around an apartment trying to kill people.  When Sarah tries to intervene, the hand of course attacks her by grabbing whatever it can to defend itself.  Dad’s leftovers are the closest, so the thing begins to squirt mustard at Sarah, then throw diced onions and hot dog buns as the Looney Tunes score seamlessly transitions to the theme of “Take me Out to the Ballgame”.  It is here and now that you know what kind of movie you’re in for.  Finally gaining the upper hand 🙂 in the struggle, Sarah is able to shove the creature into the garbage disposal and turn it on, expectorating a monsoon of blood that leaves Sarah looking like Carrie.  “Mark, you said it was over!” Cue Waxwork II logo.  Unfortunately we don’t get any opening credits set to early 90’s rock, we just get straight to it.  Sarah is put on trial for the murder of her stepdad and the only way to clear her name is to prove the Waxwork is in fact a den of Satan.  Onto Sir Wilfred’s where they find his cache of horror artifacts collected from his struggles with the supernatural.  Here they find Jason’s mask, Van Helsing’s tool belt, the Arc of the Covenant, Norman Bates’ disguise, and a compass that opens the portal  of time, albeit the portal of fictional horror time.  The concept is WAY cooler than the execution and it’s here where the film gets downright silly.  The best part of it though is that the people involved in making this movie never took it too seriously.  They know how goofy it is and they roll with it.  So Sarah and Mark’s adventures through fictional time take them to Frankenstein’s house, the Haunted Mansion where they meet the one and only Bruce Campbell, into a mystical forest to be mentored by David Carradine, and into the future to pay a truly horrible homage to Alien.  Again, concept is better than the execution, but all of the scenes are entertaining and the Bruce Campbell stuff is dare I say almost good.

And Hans Gruber’s henchman from The Money Pit is the main bad guy.

The last of the disc twos is the second mummy sequel of the first mummy trilogy in the Warner Bros monster franchise The Mummy’s Tomb.

Not that one.  Continuing my monster fetish from the previous two posts this one stars Lon Chaney Jr. as the titular character.  At this point in the blog I want to incorporate a little outside reading I’ve been doing.  As I go through the 102 I’m also reading an old film book that I got in college entitled Understanding Movies by Louis Gianetti.  With certain posts I’m going to try and incorporate some of the aspects of said book.  My goal is to have read it and integrated it into this blog by the time it is finished.  I still haven’t picked an end date but I have one in mind.  More on that later.  The chapter I’ve most recently read is entitled Mise en Scene and that is the “arrangement of visual weights and movements within a given space.”  Within each frame, the movie should display a visual layering that is key to the overall theme or action.  Since their is nothing particularly special going on in The Mummy’s Tomb other than the fact it’s been dubbed as the first slasher film because the unleashed mummy stalks a small town and kills people, and because it’s a black and white monster movie, I thought we could try to inspect a specific frame of the film.

“The area near the top of the frame can suggest ideas dealing with power, authority, and aspiration……the areas near the bottom of the frame tend to suggest meanings opposite from the top: subservience, vulnerability, and powerlessness.”  Quarreling, burning lovers? The space between them almost forms the V shape! Looking for some fun feedback, please feel free to let your imagination run wild and leave some!

Up next: Project X!