BHFF ’19: A Night of Horror—Nightmare Radio

When it comes to horror movie radio personalities, Rod Wilson cannot compete with Adrienne Barbeau in The Fog, but who can? The important thing is he connects with his listeners and he can tell a spooky yarn with the best of them (maybe not John Houseman in The Fog, but he is still pretty good). In fact, his framing sequences are the best part of the Onetti Brothers’ anthology film, A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio, which had its North American premiere at this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.

Wilson produces his own overnight show, so it is just him and a cup of coffee in his converted ranch house studio. Ordinarily, that suits him fine, but tonight he gets a little spooked by a series of crank calls. Obviously, the best way to settle his nerves will be telling his audience the scariest tales he can spin. However, there is very little consistency to his stories, both in terms of theme and quality.

Instead of commissioning new segments, the Onettis just parked pre-existing short films within their anthology framework, so it is not impossible horror fans could have seen some of these before. It starts with one of the more aesthetically challenging, Jason Bognacki’s In the Dark, Dark Woods, which is even less conventional than his head-spinning doppelganger feature, The Mark of the Witch. Arguably, Joshua Long’s Post Mortem Mary is the most traditional, but he wrings plenty of creepiness out of the macabre premise involving a young girl working as a post-mortem photography assistant in frontier Australia.

Probably the best shorts, A.J. Briones’ The Smiling Man and Oliver Park’s Vicious would be tricky for Wilson to actually relate over the air, because they are largely dependent on freaky things seen out of the corner of our eyes or in reflections. Regardless, they are easily the tensest, most effective constituent films in the anthology.

BHFF ’19: P*rn*

Yes, these kids chose to watch a Satanic smut film that summoned a nasty succubus, but it is hard to blame them, considering their other choices were Encino Man and A League of Their Own. Yeah, yeah, “no crying in baseball,” but seriously, do really want to watch Rosie O’Donnell and Madonna kvetch again? Of course, we would rather see a rude and tasteless horror comedy. Fortunately, that is exactly what Keola Racela’s P*rn* happens to be. The title is slightly misleading (and prone to excite nanny-ware), because the naughty bits are not the least bit sexy, as viewers saw for themselves when it had its New York premiere at the 2019 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.

It is 1992, so nobody has cell phones. The staff of this neighborhood first-run theater are all professed Christians in accordance with the owner-manager’s hiring practices, but they are really just as horny as any other horror movie teens. Chaz (as in Chastity) is hung up on Ricky, but he is not so into her, for reasons we can immediately guess. Everyone knows Todd is a horndog because he was busted for window peeping, but it was really the idea of Abe, who turned out to be much fleeter of foot. Meanwhile, Heavy Metal Jeff, the projectionist, clings to his Christian hardcore death-metal dreams.

Their boss lets them have their own private Friday night screening after the last public showing (Mr. Pike is supposed to be complete pond scum, but that is actually a pretty cool perk), but it will be a little delayed when a crazy old dude bursts into the theater and through a drop-wall to reveal a secret screening room and archive in the sub-basement. It is there they find the can of film that will summon Lilith. Of course, when she shows up, all H-E-double-hockey-sticks breaks loose. There will be temptation and some super uncomfortable gore (that happens to be funny, in the darkest way possible).

Even though the film portrays Pike as a hypocritical jerkweed and it skewers the Evangelical mindset in general (especially straight-conversion camp), Prno ironically holds more affection for its Christian characters than most Hollywood movies, in which religion ostensibly should not even play a role. In this case, their belief in Satan, End Times, and fire-and-brimstone evil is certainly vindicated, in spades. Regardless, they are generally good kids, just a little confused.

BHFF ’19: The Yellow Night

Maybe it is a coincidence, but this film produced with funding from Petrobras, Brazil’s petroleum consortium, spends a long flashback in the parking lot of a gas station. At least the behavior of the teen characters makes sense there. In contrast, logic craters into dust when they decide to take a short holiday on a sparsely inhabited equatorial island. Supposedly what happens reflects their fear of the future, but they probably don’t have one to look forward to in Ramon Porto Mota’s The Yellow Night, which had its North American premiere at the 2019 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.

There are not a lot of people living on Arco Velho, but the beaches are nice and Mariana’s grandfather has a house there. Of course, wireless service is kaput and the statue by the harbor has been decapitated, but they remain undeterred, even when their no-show ride leaves them stranded at the nearly deserted dock. Eventually, they make their way to Grandfather’s house, but he is nowhere to be found. By now, we can tell this is a bad situation, but for some reason they can’t. They even stick around after watching a suspicious VHS tape, in which the missing grandpa discusses his quantum mechanical research and how it was driving him bonkers. Instead of fleeing, they revisit happier times in the gas station parking lot.

To give credit where it is due, Porto makes inventive use of split-screens and cinematographer Flora Dias lights it all in ways that maximize the eeriness and the nagging sense of uncertainty. However, the film is maddeningly coy in the way it presents its time loops—at least we’re assuming that is what is happening, since it would be consistent with all of Grandpa’s quantum double-talk.

Films like Benson & Moorhead’s The Endless and Jon Mikel Caballero’s The Incredible Shrinking WKND maintained plenty of mystery and suspense, but they always kept viewers keenly aware of where they were in each loop. In contrast, everything just sloshes around in Yellow Night, like the characters are waiting Pirandello-like, for a stronger editor to come along and re-establish some order.

BHFF ’19: The Haunted Swordsman (short)

Anyone who knows classic Japanese cinema knows there was more to fear during the Edo era than ronin and ninja. There were also Kwaidan-style ghosts and so-called Onibaba demon-hags. A ronin bent on avenging his shogun master will face the latter as the first challenge of his quest in puppetry-filmmaker Kevin McTurk’s wildly cool short film The Haunted Swordsman, which screens during the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.

Technically, the squared jawed samurai failed his lord. That is why he is now a ronin. However, it is hard to blame him, given the powers of the demonic monster that consumed the shogun. The ronin has pledged to avenge him, but he realizes he will need some powerful help, most likely of a supernatural nature, to get the job done. Fortunately, he has a decapitated death’s head that will serve as his reluctant “Navigator” of the spirit-haunted regions. We had better listen to him, because his voice is supplied (quite eerily) by the great James Hong (and Christopher Lloyd provides the sinister speech of one of the truly monstrous figures).

We can’t wait to see a full feature from McTurk, because Haunted Swordsman and his previous film, The Mill at Calder’s End are two of the most amazing genre shorts we have ever seen. Even beyond the puppetry, which puts most live action filmmaking to shame, the attention to detail lavished on the sets and costumes is quite extraordinary. You can see real world-building in Swordsman. Perhaps the greatest endorsement is the imprimatur of Lisa and Heather Henson (as in the Henson Company) serving as executive producers. They would know puppetry world-better than anyone.