Werewolf Game, Co-Starring the Late, Great Tony Todd

Obviously, people deeply distrust social media tech companies, if horror movie makers believe the public will accept a company that somewhat resembles Meta kidnapping innocent people to produce a life-and-death dark web survival game. If you are wondering, the evil corporate entity sounds more Meta than X, because of all the references to their AI division. Regardless, their behavior is unambiguously criminal, but apparently, they have been getting away with it for quite a while in Cara Claymore & Jacki Payne’s Werewolf Game, which releases today on VOD.

The “Judge” will explain the rules to the distressed abductees, but viewers who have played the parlor game “Mafia,” also known as “Werewolf,” already know how it works. Two lucky “contestants” are designated werewolves. The rest are villagers. During the night, the two wolves hunt the villagers. By day, the sheep try to identify their hunters, before each fatal elimination vote, resulting in a bullet to the back of the head.

Frankly, nobody (including myself) would be particularly interested in Werewolf Game were it not one of the final films starring the late, great horror legend Tony Todd. It really is a nasty, brutish piece of work. Yet, the violence is eclipsed by the impossibly bad decision-making. Perversely, the villagers constantly vote to eliminate the least dangerous players, including the homeless basket case, who could hardly get out of bed. Very little makes sense, including placing Raymond, a former IT guy with the tech company, into the game.

Of course, Todd has the perfect, malevolent voice for the Judge, but it is rather a shame he must mask up for most of the film. Arguably, the best work comes from Robert Picardo (Star Trek’s holographic doctor), who plays Bill, a former police detective, who at least tries to apply a little deductive reasoning.

The Zhengs’ Insight

This is a Cain and Abel sibling story, told by a brother-and-sister filmmaking team. It also incorporates a whole lot of martial arts and some mild fantastical elements. Jian Huang is a highly skilled fighter who also has the gift of second sight. That certainly makes him sound formidable, but the same was true of his somewhat estranged brother, who just died under mysterious circumstances. Huang will uncover the bad guys behind his murder with the reluctant help of a LAPD detective in Ken & Livi Zheng’s Insight, which releases today on VOD.

Much to their bafflement. Detectives Abby Lerner and Carl Stevens have been pulled off a high-profile kidnapping case to greet Huang at the airport. Evidently, Huang has powerful friends in the Federal government, because of his work as a Jack Bauer-style counter-terrorism agent. His brother used to serve in the same agency, before he left for a job in Vortex, the tech company owned by the villainous Wallace Jackson. Initially, his brother’s death looked like suicide, but his visions clearly tell a different, homicidal story—one that deeply implicates Vortex.

Lerner was pretty put-out when she was ordered to escort Huang—and even more so when she finds herself bailing him out of jail. However, she soon gives credence to his suspicions. Of course, they are mostly on their own, but Huang is one hard cat to kill.

Okay, so Insight is basically a B-movie, but it is a thoroughly entertaining one. It represents a big step up from their last martial arts narrative feature, Brush with Danger. Ken Zheng is clearly a seriously skilled martial artist. This time around, he has the benefit of the support from some always reliable and entertaining character actors, starting with the great Tony Todd, playing slightly against type as the uncorrupted Det. Stevens. Plus, Keith David and John Savage both add grizzled grit as Stevens and Lerner’s Captain Duke and Huang’s superior officer, respectively.

Tales from the Hood 3, on Syfy

Can a horror anthology series maintain its identity without its iconic host? Is it still Tales from the Crypt without the Cryptkeeper? Is it still Creepshow without the Creep? Frankly, most fans probably do not have the same level of nostalgia for Mr. Simms, the creepy undertaker who spun the yarns in the prior two installments in the Tales from the Hood franchise. The 1995 original, starring Clarence Williams III has a strong cult following, but the 2018 sequel, with Keith David assuming the mantle of Mr. Simms, mostly underwhelmed fans and critics. Instead of Mr. Simms, this time we get the great Tony Todd providing the framing, but it is the little girl with him who will tell the tales of terror (we hope) in alternating writer-directors Rusty Cundieff & Darin Scott’s Tales from the Hood 3 (with Spike Lee still on-board as an executive producer), which premieres this Saturday on Syfy.

If you are not deeply invested in Mr. Simms, Cundieff’s “The Mouths of Babes and Demons,” the connective sequences featuring Todd, are indeed quite eerie. He plays a grandfatherly figure, who is desperately fleeing a pack of hooded ghouls with six-year-old-ish Brooklyn. However, as he listens to her sinister stories, we get a sense that there could be any even darker dynamic at play. Frankly, these are the only bits most viewers will want to re-watch, because they build up to a real “huh-what” climax and they are driven by vintage Tony Todd.

The first Tale from the Hood is also sturdily serviceable, following squarely in the EC Comics tradition. Scott’s “Ruby Gates” takes its name from the apartment building David Burr hopes to renovate and gentrify. He stands to make a small fortune is he can convince the last tenants holding out to vacate. Logically, he hires his go-to arsonist to start a small grease fire in their kitchen, because what could go wrong? It all proceeds in an orderly, by-the-numbers horror movie fashion but Scott’s execution is tight and effective.

Without question, Cundieff’s “The Bunker” is the low point of the film and maybe the last ten years of anthology films. It isn’t really even horror, but rather an attempt at an ironic Outer Limits-style tale with a twist, focusing on a ranting and raving racist survivalist. Unfortunately, it is really more of an exercise in projection that sacrifices narrative and character development to ideological point-scoring. It is also marred by some really gross sexual references.

The sequel rebounds somewhat with Scott’s “Operatic,” starring Lynn Whitfield (the second most recognizable name attached to Tales 3) as Marie Benoit, a Norma Desmond-ish opera diva, who hires Chela Simpson, an aspiring R&B vocalist to be her companion. Inevitably, Simpson and her lover start conspiring to murder the rich and demanding Benoit. Right, good luck with that. Again, we’ve seen these elements many times before (for instance, there are a number of similarities with Twilight Zone’s “Queen of the Nile” episode), but Scott cranks up the sexuality and the creepy imagery, so it is still fun to watch.

Immortal: Tales Where They Don’t Die at the End

For Larry Talbott (a.k.a. The Wolfman), immortality was a source of unending horror rather than a gift. Some of these characters might very well agree. It turns out there are people out there who just will not die. In most cases, they have the Wolverinish healing powers to go with an unending life-span. They also tend to learn of their rare status at the darnedest times in the shared world/concept anthology Immortal, written by Jon Dabach, which releases today on VOD.

People are hunting people yet again—the cinematic epidemic continues (following The Hunt, Bacurau, The Prey, etc., etc.)—in the first storyline, “Chelsea,” directed by Rob Margolies. However, the stakes are higher this time around, because the prey is a high school track star and the hunter is consciously immortal. In truth, it is rather clever, but viewers would probably appreciate it more if it came at the end of the film rather than the start.

“Garry & Vanessa” directed by Danny Isaacs also builds towards a “hey there, immortality” twist ending, but this time we’re already expecting it from the start. The titular Garry plans to do something extreme to provide for his pregnant titular wife. Presumably, it will not work out exactly as planned. As a modest bonus, we get to see an incredibly tired looking Mario Van Peebles playing a cable guy.

Things unexpectedly get a little preachy in “Ted & Mary,” directed by Tom Colley, wherein our focal couple give a final interview before he administers her assisted suicide. The good part is Tony Todd pays Ted (quite poignantly). The bad part is the third revelation of immortality is extraordinarily depressing.

Death House: The Cast is Killer, but the Movie is Dead

Abandon all hope, because you are in for some half-baked Nietzschean platitudes. It is not the Nazi and Satanist mass murderers who are the real bad guys in this subterranean super-max prison. It is the lab coats who want to move humanity beyond good and evil. Alas, this film makes you wish you could materialize Nietzsche out of thin air to tell the filmmakers what a hash they have made of his philosophy, like Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall. For some reason, a who’s who of horror also parades through B. Harrison Smith’s enormously problematic Death House (trailer here), which releases today on VOD.

Toria Boon and Jae Novak are FBI special agents who have just apprehended two of the most notorious terrorists at-large (foreign in his case, but she collared Sieg, a home-grown Neo-National Socialist), or so they have been told. However, they quickly start to suspect they have experienced Death House’s brain-scrambling technology first-hand before. They both committed horrible crimes to accomplish their objectives, but Doctors Eileen Fletcher and Karen Redmane assure them they shouldn’t concern themselves over the eggs they had to break to cook up a tasty law & order omelet.

It turns out Boon and Novak chose the wrong day to get brainwashed at Death House, because a full-scale escape attempt will trigger a complete lock-down. Unfortunately, it is not nearly as locked down as it should be. This puts the bargain-basement Mulder and Sculley in an awkward position, but instead of making a break for the surface, they head towards the “Five Evils” housed in the bottom-most level.

So, basically, Harrison builds towards a climax wherein the Rudolf Hess-like Giger, the Elizabeth Bathory clone, Balthoria, and Crau, a freak who looks like Michael Berryman from The Hills Have Eyes, because he is played by Michael Berryman, help regulate the world, because you can’t good without their borderline supernatural manifestations of evil. Blah, blah, blah, whatever.

Indeed, Death House is so well-stocked with horror-specializing character actors, it is trying to get other people to call it the Expendables of horror. However, the film scandalously squanders much of their talents. Dee Wallace and Barbara Crampton have some moments as Fletcher and Redmane. Sid Haig chews plenty of scenery as the Icicle Killer, but his character conveniently disappears after his big scene. There is also Tony Todd playing a serial killing farmer in utterly baffling, completely unrelated wrap-around segments.

Frankly, Tiffany Shepis and Debbie Rochon have such inconsequential cameos, the film’s marketing does not even bother to mention them. On the other hand, prominent use is made of Adrienne Barbeau’s name, yet her only participation is narrating a training video Boon and Novak watch. At least the great Kane Hodder tries to give fans their money’s worth as Sieg.

For what its worth, Cortney Palm and Cody Longo are reliably bland as Boon and Novak. This film just craters so thoroughly, not even Hodder can save it. It is all just rather messy and eh. Not recommended, Death House releases today (11/6) on VOD.

The Man from Earth, Back on DVD

The protagonist of sf writer Jerome Bixby’s final screenplay is a lot like Donnie Darko. They both inspired relatively well-reviewed stage adaptations and they can arguably be considered you-know-who figures. In fact, Bixby’s John Oldman might just be you-know-who himself. If you don’t know who we mean, you can find out for yourself when the Bixby-scripted, Richard Schenkman directed The Man from Earth (trailer here) returns to home video in a special DVD/BluRay edition from MVD.

John Oldman is packing up and about to move out of town, when his friends and former fellow faculty members at a small California liberal arts college suddenly show up for an impromptu going away party. (He snuck out of the formal one). They are concerned by his hasty departure—and somewhat hurt. After a little Johnny Walker special reserve, Oldman decides to tell him his incredible story. He starts out speaking somewhat hypothetically, but quickly switches to the first person. He is in fact a late Cro-Magnon man, whose body’s regenerative capabilities have never slowed down, leaving him an immortal thirty-five-year-old (he looks forty-ish, but still pretty darn good 14,000-years-old).

Oldman has the right audience for his story, including a biologist, an anthropologist, an archaeologist, an Evangelical art history scholar, another historian, and eventually a psychologist. Most of those fields Oldman took advanced degrees in, but his biologist doctorate from the Victorian era is somewhat out of date. As a teacher, Oldman was known for making the past come alive, but Oldman insists it is mainly from scholarship. He has limited dealings with great historical figures, because he always lived as an average citizen. There were some notable exceptions. That Van Gogh looking painting is of course a Van Gogh. He also studied under the Buddha and tried to spread his teaching throughout the Levant region. Right, Oldman did not want to go there, but once its out there, you can’t get that kind of toothpaste back into the tube.

Man from Earth sounds nauseatingly New Agey, but it is surprisingly compelling. Bixby literally finished the screenplay on his death bed, so it understandably has an elegiac, end-of-an-era vibe to it (and yet, a really good sequel hit the festival circuit this year). Bixby more fully explores the themes of immortality and its psychological implications that he first addressed in the Star Trek episode “Requiem for Methuselah.” Thanks to his smart writing and Schenkman’s assured hand on the helm, we never doubt Oldman’s wild yarn. The question for viewers is whether or not he can be convinced to break his pattern of hitting the reset button every ten years.

Frankly, after watching Man from Earth and the sequel, Man from Earth: Holocene within six months of each other, it leaves one rather baffled as to why David Lee Smith hasn’t become a household name. He is terrific as Oldman in both films, conveying all the nuances of a man with 14,000 years of learning, who has convinced himself to stay emotionally aloof, for the sake of anyone who might get close to him.

For genre fans, the biggest (pleasant) surprise might be how good Tony Todd is in a non-horror role: Dan, the iconoclastic anthropologist. Immediately recognizable character actor Richard Riehle also provides an indispensable assist as the head-shrinking Dr. Will Gruber. Annika Peterson develops some believable confused but still potent chemistry with Smith, as Oldman’s history department love interest. The first time around, William Katt sounds a bit strident (in the wrong way) as archaeologist Art Perkins, but Alexis Thorpe exceeds expectations as Perkins’ student hook-up along for the ride, who has a convenient habit of asking on-point questions at precisely the right time.

Granted, Man from Earth might annoy some Evangelical Christians, but for what its worth, Buddhists should be able to accept it in its entirety without troubling their faith. Ultimately, the film does not feel like it is trying to be offensive, thanks in large measure to Smith’s forgiving and philosophical tone. It is one of the rarest science fiction films that have zero special effects and are driven entirely by dialogue, which is a cool thing. It sill holds up, if you take into account the rise of the internet will eventually catch up with Oldman in the sequel. Very highly recommended, The Man from Earth is now available in a DVD/BluRay package, from MVD.

Zombies: The Title Says It All

Arguably, a prison cell is a worse place to find oneself than a hospital bed during the initial days of a zombie apocalypse. Fortunately, one of the surviving detectives realizes killings that landed Luke behind bars were not really killings. Yes, it all looks and sounds familiar, but at least the energy level is cranked up throughout Hamid Torabpour’s Zombies (trailer here), which opens today in select theaters.

Eventually, Luke and Det. Sommers fight their way out of the station, holing up in a shelter with a rag-tag band of survivors. Luke becomes their best scout and forager, regularly venturing out in search of more survivors. He is particularly keen to find his girlfriend Bena, since she is played by former America’s Next Top Model contestant Raina Hein. However, it will be Bena and her surly pal Tala who find Luke when he most needs help. This is quite a small town. He had just encountered Haley, another former girlfriend (or something), who has suffered a nasty psychotic break. Rather bizarrely, she seems to have some sort of symbiotic bond with the shuffling hordes, which allows her to lure unsuspecting survivors to their deaths.

Right, the rather generically titled Zombies could be described as three parts Walking Dead and one part Wyrmwood. Perhaps Torabpour recognized the Haley sub-plot does not make much sense, because he chokes it off relatively early in the second act. Regardless, he delivers some bounteous helpings of hack-and-blast zombie killing action. To give a feel for where the film is coming from, everyone basically admits the big climatic zombie battle involves a crazy plan and it’s probably avoidable in the first place, but they are going to do it anyway, because why not?

Why not indeed? Zombies are nowhere near as gripping or inventive as Train to Busan, the breakout zombie hit of the year. However, it delivers the raw meat. It is also cool to see horror legend Tony Todd playing a good guy, the world weary Det. Sommers. Steven Luke is respectably hardnosed as his namesake, while Hein shows some solid action chops as Bena.

This is basically a meat-and-potatoes zombie film that could become a sentimental fan favorite over time. There is nothing spectacularly original about it, but it aims to please. Recommended for zombie buffs, Zombies opens today in select markets.

Scary Movies 9: Frankenstein

In a world of human embryo cloning and Dolly the Sheep, Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus is no longer as outlandish as we would want it to be. Arguably, the time is ripe for contemporary take on the legend and Bernard Rose, the prolific modernizer of Tolstoy and director of Candyman, is a logical choice to do it. Transporting the monster from Geneva to Los Angeles, Rose takes intriguing liberties while remaining oddly faithful to the iconic tale in Frankenstein (trailer here), which screens as part of the closing night tribute to the British filmmaker at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Scary Movies 9.

This might shock you, but the wealthy Dr. Viktor Frankenstein and his wife Elizabeth have been trying to create a living human being (with the help of their senior staff scientist, Dr. Pretorius). Initially, they believe their latest attempt is the breakthrough they have hoped for, until cancerous lesions start appearing all over his formerly pristine body. Despite his bonding with Elizabeth Frankenstein like an infant with his mother, both Frankensteins agree to euthanize their creation for ostensive reasons of mercy. However, the increasingly disfigured creature just will not die.

Escaping from the compound, the wretched soul accepts the wider world’s name for him: “Monster.” He soon has a nasty run-in with LA’s Finest, but falls in with a homeless blind bluesman. The protective Eddie is the first person to truly treat him like a human being. Unfortunately, Eddie’s misunderstanding of the extent and nature of Monster’s blighted appearance will lead to compounded tragedy.

Rose riffs on Shelley and the original Universal films in clever ways, honoring the spirit of both. He follows the same general trajectory of his Frankenstein predecessors, but he does so within a distinctly gritty, naturalistic urban environment. The grey concrete labs and scuzzy welfare hotels are fitting backdrops for the ultimate genre morality tale, while also presumably accommodating his budget constraints.

Danny Huston (a regular Rose repertory player) is absolutely perfect as the arrogant Dr. Frankenstein and Carrie-Anne Moss plays off him well as the deceptively warm and supposedly empathetic Elizabeth Frankenstein. Despite his small stature, Xavier Samuel is still impressively expressive as the largely inarticulate Monster, especially considering the escalating layers of makeup that masks him for most of the film. However, it is Tony Todd, the Candyman himself, who really anchors the film with tragic gravitas as blind Eddie.

Rose somewhat misfires with a rogue cop subplot that seems calculated give the film further zeitgeisty urgency, but it comes across as a heavy-handed distraction. In fact, a film depicting the creation of life through, amongst other things, the use of 3D printing, without regard for the ethical implications, is already pretty timely. Regardless, Rose’s mise-en-scéne is austerely stylish and often quite visually striking. Altogether, the film is quite in keeping with cautionary essence of the original novel, while Randy Westgate’s ghoulish make-up design gives this Monster his own distinctive look. Recommended for Frankenstein fans, Rose’s Frankenstein screens this Thursday (11/5) at the Walter Reade, as part of Scary Movies 9.