Sitcom legend John Ritter and erotic thriller queen Monique Parent are forever paired in trivia history for playing realtors who share horror stories of previous homeowners to their prospective buyers. Their respective anthologies are 2000’s Terror Tract and 2012’s The Perfect House, both owing a ton of debt (refi now to lock in 5.56% interest!) to 1961’s House of Mystery.
A young couple (Circus of Horrors’ Colette Wilde and Rough Cut’s Ronald Hines) tour a cottage so lovely, they’re perplexed why its market listing is so low. “I suppose it could be,” answers their host (Jane Hylton, The Manster), “because of the ghost.”
Ah, yes, the ghost. She tells them of the newlywed electrical engineer (Peter Dyneley, TV’s Thunderbirds) who lived there, briefly, before being fatally electrocuted under mysterious circumstances.
She also tells them of the next owners, the Trevors. Shortly after move-in, Joan Trevor (Nanette Newman, 1975’s The Stepford Wives) experiences strange things, like a lamp flickering and, well, a lamp going out. During these instances of alternating-current chicanery, she sees an apparition, so her husband, Henry (Maurice Kaufmann, Gorgo), hires a psychic investigator (Colin Gordon, 1967’s Casino Royale). When Joan dares to pose a question, Henry scolds, “Do shut up, darling.”
One séance later, thanks to an Edith Bunker-looking medium (Molly Urquhart, The Black Windmill), the Trevors have their answer. So do we, with the three time periods threaded together. Now, the twist ending, I anticipated from the first scene, but that’s not a disappointment because the reveal entails a nifty effect for its time.
From Strongroom helmer Vernon Sewell, House of Mystery is worth a 56-minute tour. It’s an unassuming and unfussy UK shocker, albeit set on the jolt level of a novelty joy buzzer. —Rod Lott
Every time I come across “yeti,” I immediately think of my introduction to the word: The creature sitting its hairy ass on sno cone after sno cone lining a sidewalk — a trap set by your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man on an episode of the PBS kid series The Electric Company. Although elementary in craft, that cheap, six-minute segment carries more of a kick than the 1940s-set feature film The Yeti.
An oil magnate (Corbin Bernsen, Major League) and a group of explorers-for-hire go missing in Alaskan Territory after issuing a distress signal. The energy company assembles a veritable super septet to attempt rescue, including a radio specialist (Jim Cummings, The Last Stop in Yuma County), a demolitions expert (Gene Gallerano, Occupy, Texas) and a navigator (Brittany Allen, Jigsaw) whose father (William Sadler, Hard to Kill) is among the disappeared.
Co-writers/co-directors Gallerano and William Pisciotta initially employ a spirited, semi-campy style that sets up The Yeti as a towering bundle of fun. Instead, it quickly stumbles into a lumbering slog of speeches. If your characters must hunker down in a cabin for a stretch, either stuff their mouths with cracklin’ dialogue (The Hateful Eight) or put a soul-swallowing demon in the fruit cellar (Evil Dead II).
Our titular cryptid attacks here and there and not often enough. When we finally get a good glimpse of it in its shaggy, matted-hair splendor, you may be reminded of Shriek of the Mutilated meets the beast within Creepshow’s “The Crate” segment. The monster’s murders make for the best parts — sometimes literally, like when Allen’s character attempts to save another from a yeti-yanking, only to be left with the poor sap’s large intestines sliding through her grip like a greased rope. Kudos to the filmmakers for going the practical route rather than taking CGI’s easy out.
The Yeti has the post-WWII pulp aesthetic down pat. (It’s so old-school, “Farmer in the Dell” adorns the soundtrack.) However, visual appeal only gets you so far. Watching is like going on a first (and last) date with someone who looks dynamite, but before the salads have arrived, you’ve discovered little going on between the ears. —Rod Lott
Filmmaker Barry Mahon primarily dealt in two genres: sexploitation and kiddie matinees. The Dead One is one of his few standing somewhere in the middle. Shot in New Orleans, it’s a Bourbon Street bouillabaisse of zombies and voodoo.
In the last of three movies he made with Mahon (or anyone), John McKay stars as Johnny, who takes his freshly minted bride, Linda (one-timer Linda Ormond), from the altar to a strip club, because women love that shit. As Johnny explains to a cocktail waitress, they’re combining their honeymoon with business, because women love that shit. He’s inherited a working slave plantation (!) from his grandfather, so they’re gonna go check it out.
En route, they pass a stranded motorist who happens to be Bella Bella (Darlene Myrick of Mahon’s Bunny Yeager’s Nude Las Vegas), whose strip act they just peeped. Because Johnny’s not mechanical, he invites Bella to join them on their honeymoon, because women that love shit.
At the manse, Johnny’s ice-veined cousin Monica (Monica Davis of Mahon’s Rocket Attack U.S.A.) isn’t keen on the unplanned visitor — or the whole thing, really, because Johnny’s marriage triggered a loophole in Gramps’ will that transferred the deed out of her clutches.
In fact, only in Linda’s death can Monica regain full ownership, so she rounds up all the Black people in her employ to play the drums while she conducts a voodoo ritual. This prompts her dead brother (one-and-doner Clyde Kelly) to rise from his coffin as a lumbering zombie. He sports a mullet, a prom tux and a skin tone somewhere between jaundice and guacamole.
Barely over an hour — and even then only because Mahon shows that ritual twice — The Dead One is no classic of the undead, but bears interest for leveraging the voodoo angle all but forgotten once George A. Romero came into the picture. Plus, how else will you hear Mahon’s gripping newlywed dialogue like:
Johnny: “She’s dead.” Linda: “Can we help her?”
Being made to look stupid onscreen? Women love that shit. —Rod Lott
While it might be one of the most recent examples, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance was hardly the first film to use bizarre and outlandish horror to earn critical acclaim. Possession isn’t necessarily the first, either, but you’d be hard-pressed to call 100-plus-year-old flicks like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu even remotely as jarring Andrzej Zulawski’s plunge into one of the worst breakups imaginable.
That’s not hyperbole, either: Like, have you lost a spouse to a free-loving German karate expert, only to find out later your ex also left him for — spoiler — a primordial, tentacled man-beast that feeds on human flesh? (If you have, please contact us.)
After wrapping his latest mission and coming home to West Berlin, Mark (Sam Neill, Event Horizon), likely the most mundane international man of mystery, is greeted by his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani, 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre), with the news she wants a divorce. Mark naturally goes on a skin-crawling bender, but snaps back to reality after realizing Anna has left Bob, their young son, by himself and on the verge of neglect.
They loosely attempt to mend things for Bob’s sake, but they mostly just harm themselves with an electric meat carver instead. Mark tries to move on with the help of Helen, Bob’s schoolteacher who suspiciously looks like Anna (and is also played by Adjani), except for her lighter hair and greener eyes. Meanwhile, Anna rents a dilapidated apartment that practically pushes against the Berlin Wall to look after her latest, more monstrous lover.
Dichotomies define Possession. Anna and Mark both vie for better versions of themselves. The former struggles with trying to reconcile her “Faith” and her “Chance” before “Faith” violently ejects itself from her uterus in an empty subway. The latter, however, forces himself to step up as a more present father, only to inevitably devolve into a self-destructive lunatic. All of which, appropriately, takes place in a physically and politically divided city. If Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire is an examination of how to potentially heal Berlin’s scar tissue, Possession is a nosedive into its festering wound.
What grounds the film is a pair of performances that shift on a dime. Adjani absolutely outshines Neill, but both show a physical and emotional toll from filming that rivals — and even matches — the very real distress seen from Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson just a year earlier in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Most will point to Adjani’s subway sequence, where Zulawski simply told her to “fuck the air,” as one of the main justifications for her Best Actress win at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but the scene just before that, where she whimpers and whines at a statue of Christ, might be even more telling of her character’s condition. Anna essentially begs for some answer to chaos, for some cosmic force to “fix” the calamity that’s tearing her and every relationship she has apart. But all she’ll ever get is a stone-cold stare from yet another man (or even a symbol of a man) who has no chance of understanding her. And no chance of helping, either.
Scholars have managed to dissect almost everything about Possession, and yet it still persists as a bizarre, mysterious and even schlocky horror drama. Maybe that’s what makes it so challenging. Even as touching and shocking as movies can be, this feels like something different and perhaps more intrusive. It’s like putting the saddest song you can think of from The Cure or Nine Inch Nails on loop, with every iteration getting a few seconds slower until it’s incomprehensible two hours later.
Possession is a free fall into an emotional chasm. You’ll catch your head on a protruding rock every few hundred feet. Eventually, you’ll forget that you ever stood on solid ground. —Daniel Bokemper
Young, timid YouTuber Da-kyung, aka “Horror Queen” (SNL Korea cast member Joo Hyun-young) investigates strange goings-on at a particular subway station. She hopes her snooping will prove fruitful in terms of traffic, views, likes, clout, etc. — all of which I have difficulty feeling empathy for in modern movie characters.
For intel, Da-kyung bribes the station agent (Jeon Bae-soo, The Wailing) with hooch. He feeds her more stories for her channel, including a schoolgirl pursued by a bandaged-face woman clutching a mug of acid, and a beauty influencer who undergoes a trypophobic transformation after touching a handrail ring.
Until this point, I didn’t know Ghost Train was an anthology. More surprising is not a single story fails. Not even the one that sounds stupid on paper: a homeless man harassed by a bullying cop gets revenge with cans of killer soda. Executed with O. Henry twistiness, this morality tale is one of the more creative and original ideas K-horror has offered.
Like a dog with a full bladder, Ghost Train jumps right out there and does its business. That’s especially admirable for Asian horror, which has a tendency to balloon toward two hours or more, including Tak Se-woong’s previous film, Devil in the Lake. I also appreciate how the wraparound story isn’t an afterthought or a device for device’s sake; it’s actual plot and feels like it takes up a third or more of the running time. Se-woong treats Da-kyung’s efforts as every bit as important as any of the five standalone stories.
In efficiency and effectiveness, Ghost Train reminded me of 2021’s Ghost Mansion — only to find out the omnibuses share the screenwriting mind of Jo Ba-reun. Both deliver more chills to the spine than jumps to the heart, and that’s the way to go. But don’t confuse Ghost Train with 2022’s similar-sounding The Ghost Station, which isn’t an anthology, but is also about a female content creator so desperate for a spooky scoop, she turns to the turnstiles. Only one is worth getting your bags together for and bringing your good friends, too.* —Rod Lott
