Belated Found-Again Friday: Putting The Chris Sarandon In Christmas With The Resurrected (1991)

Why Found-Again? It’s only been a year or so since I watched this one, so it really never left. One thing about the fictional character Charles Dexter Ward: he gets portrayed by some very good-looking guys.

The Premise:  Wealthy, slightly dorky chemist Charles Dexter Ward (Sarandon) gets progressively weirder about his secret experiments, eventually leaving his wife Claire (Jane Sibbett) in the middle of a party. With the help of a mysterious associate, Charles takes his studies to a rural cottage, but things take a dark turn after a neighbor complains and human remains are discovered. More confused than ever, Claire hires private investigator John March, who soon realizes Charles has been replaced by his wizard ancestor and that people and things are being—surprise!—resurrected.

They’re pretty bloody and sticky about it, too.

The cast is very good: I’m both old enough and weird enough to geek out seeing Jane Sibbett in this movie because I loved her in an old Fox Network show called Herman’s Headof which I may have been the only loyal viewer.

She more than holds her own in a role original to the movie, as does John Terry as the PI who would really like not to believe in necromancy. But of course, it’s Sarandon who steals the show in his dual role as Ward and his revivified ancestor Joseph Curwen. (Curwen subsists on red meat and scenery, and I’m not complaining at all.)

A decidedly non-chronological before…
…and ancestor after.

The Verdict: The Resurrected is a modernized, noir-ified version of the classic Lovecraft story, but the bones of the plot are largely the same: man dabbles in genealogy, discovers lookalike ancestor, dabbles in the occult, recovers lookalike ancestor, and lives to regret it but not much longer. The movie suffers from some of the common complaints of horror films—the effects can be a little goofy, the detective plot sometimes sits awkwardly over the source material, and I personally despise the set design for the PI’s office to an incredible degree—but it does a very good job as an adaptation, especially in the last half.

The mystery is compelling (assuming you haven’t read the story…or indeed this review), the villain is scary, and the creatures are downright chilling. This is probably the goriest thing in my DVD collection, and I regret nothing except the few seconds of eyeball violence.

Might go well with: The Haunted Palace, any of the other movies I’ve covered this month, and any vegetarian recipes you might have lying around.

 

Next time: We go from doubles to dubloons.

 

Found-Again Friday: Putting The Chris Sarandon In Christmas With Child’s Play (1988)

Why Found-Again? The *mumblety* years since my last viewing of Child’s Play are a rare example of self-control. I find creepy dolls disturbing (especially Annabelle from The Conjuring and the horrible revenge doll from that Night Gallery episode), and for once this didn’t lead me to watch every Chucky movie in existence in an attempt to compensate for my wimpiness.

The Premise: Fatally wounded by the police who are hunting him, killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif, who deserves a theme month of his own sometime) sends his spirit into a Good Guy doll, which is a fictionalized one of these:

The possessed doll is purchased by a hapless mother and son, and the evil “Chucky” snarls, bashes and slashes his way to horror-icon status.

This is about as happy as it’s going to get, and we’ve already had one murder.

As for the subject of our December celebration, Sarandon plays Det. Mike Norris, who bookends the movie by shooting Charles Lee Ray in his various forms.

Sort of looks like he taught Dennis Miller that look from Bordello of Blood, doesn’t it?

A few assorted thoughts:

  • Instead of a gritty New York movie, we have a gritty Chicago movie this time! In fact, a case could be made that Child’s Play functions as a dark counterpart to that least gritty of Chicago movies, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: a child running loose and being tempted into bad ideas while harried parents are off working. Norris’s partner even looks a tiny bit like Principal Rooney!
  • The murals in Charles Lee Ray’s apartment make me wonder if Child’s Play wasn’t also inspiration for some of the visuals in Candyman, my favorite movie I can barely stand to watch, also set in the Windy City.
  • Catherine Hicks, who went on to play the mother on Seventh Heaven, is one of the most put-upon screen moms of all time.
  • Perhaps I’ve just watched too much Criminal Minds—check that, I have definitely watched too much Criminal Minds—but I’m really at a loss why a strangling serial killer with voodoo murals and sorcerous abilities has a getaway driver in the first place. Why was the Eddie character even there?

The Verdict: Mixed, but in a good way. It turned out I remembered very little from my first viewing, and since “person is framed by own evil doppelganger” is a plot peeve of mine, the first half verged on excruciating. What saved it for me was my love of movie voodoo and the Law & Order: Demon Doll vibe of the second half, as well as the fact that Chucky really is simultaneously terrifying and entertaining. This one is definitely worth rewatching, especially for the scene in which Andy’s mom realizes the doll is alive.

Might go well with: Some of the later Nightmare on Elm Street movies; Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

 

Next time: “What Jonny and Hadji do to these turtles will shock you!” How’s that for clickbait?

Found-Again Friday: Putting The Chris Sarandon In Christmas With Tales From The Crypt: Bordello Of Blood (1996)

Why Found-Again? As a kid, I’d occasionally get overwhelmed by horror. My first Stephen King novel ended up in a faroff closet, only to be pulled out every other weekend. I did the same thing with the first two books of Anne Rice’s vampire series. And when I saw my very first Tales from the Crypt episode, “Lover Come Hack To Me,” I was both thoroughly freaked out and ready to watch some more. In fact, a creature from a Tales episode ranks with Pinhead and Samara Morgan among the few horror-movie things that have given me nightmares.

That’s one reason I ended up in the theater when Bordello of Blood came out. Others include an ill-advised crush on Dennis Miller and a thoroughly understandable crush on the subject of our theme month.

chrismas2016-week-2

The Premise:  Some leftover explorers from an unmade Indiana Jones movie find the mummified vampire Lilith (Angie Everhart) and restore her to bloodthirsty life, significantly shortening theirs.

Back in the US, the chaste Katherine (Erika Eleniak) has a fight with her loser brother (Corey Feldman), and he storms out of the house. When he doesn’t return, Katherine hires detective Rafe Guttman (Dennis Miller) to find him. The trail leads to a secret vampire brothel hidden beneath a mortuary. Lilith is an entrepreneur now! And brother Caleb has been good and chomped.

Like Dennis Miller, I made this face a lot during this movie.
Like Dennis Miller, I made this face a lot during this movie.

Rafe, Katherine, and Katherine’s boss JC (Sarandon as a televangelist with a guitar!) must band together to rout the fanged legions… with Super-Soakers full of holy water, among other things.

This picture may the the best thing about... well, this picture.
This picture may the the best thing about… well, this picture.

I’ve been watching a lot of Jason Statham movies this year–I didn’t write them up for the Omelet; you’re welcome–and the comparison that kept coming to mind was Crank and its sequel, the weird action movies that got so much easier to enjoy when I realized they were a kind of live-action Roadrunner cartoon. The kills and the big fight in Bordello of Blood have the same manic, unreal, goofy quality. And yet…

The Verdict: I tend to be optimistic about my Friday rewatches. Usually I rediscover what I liked about a film; at the least, I’ll make peace with not liking it or find something interesting there. Rarely does a movie I watch of my own free will seem worse with every viewing, but Bordello of Blood is that rare case. It has its moments, but the tone of the whole thing seems more like a Cryptkeeper monologue than a fully fleshed-out (sorry) episode of Tales from the Crypt.

To put it bluntly, I could not get over the stupid.

Unless you are a hitherto untapped Dennis Miller enthusiast, you’d be better off with the first Tales movie, Demon Knight.

Might go well with: Cherry Jell-O salad.

 

Next time: Jonny Quest isn’t Aquaman. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Found-Again Friday: Putting The Chris Sarandon In Christmas With The Sentinel (1977)

chrismas-2016-week-1

Why Found-Again? A few days ago I mentioned a theme month, and here we are! What I didn’t mention is that I’m going to be reviewing these in rising order of expectations. If it ticks you off that a horror classic like The Sentinel is at the bottom of my list, well, I totally sympathize. Maybe this viewing will be better.

The Premise: Alison (Cristina Raines) is a model, a bundle of nerves, and the girlfriend of a lawyer (Chris Sarandon in a terrible little mustache).

It takes a +20 Face of Handsomeness to defeat that facial hair.
It takes a +20 Face of Handsomeness to defeat that facial hair.

Once she gets an apartment of her own, she’s also the winner of the 1977 My Neighbors Are Super Weird Award—including a blind priest who inhabits the building’s top floor. When her orgy-loving, Jesus-hating father dies, Alison’s traumatic past returns to haunt her in lurid visions, and her health begins to suffer. Is she all there?

Indeed, is anybody?

Well, demons, it turns out. Guess who’s living on a hellmouth?

In a discussion about the best casts in movies, The Sentinel would be at the top of my list, and not just because it forms an important nexus in my Four Degrees of Jeff Goldblum game.

sentineljg
“I’m going to have a British phase?”

Visually (and ideologically, in its ironclad faith in Catholicism), the movie is a close cousin of those other classic dark-panelled 1970s horror films, Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen. The Sentinel is also an interesting confluence of subgenres: in addition to the church-versus-Satan plot, there are traces of zombies, haunted houses and a psychological thriller lurking here—even a touch of police procedural as Sarandon’s character is investigated for murder. It’s a very powerful film. However…

The Verdict: It’s a failing of mine that I can appreciate bleak movies in a lit-crit kind of way but rarely like them, and make no mistake, The Sentinel is bleak. It’s probably perfect for what it is, though: if someone tried to turn a Hieronymus Bosch painting into a 20th-century story, this is exactly what you’d get. All the glamor, the hopes, and the humanity of the characters gets burned away in a story of ecclesiastical good against evil. I have the same beef with mortal sin as a plot device here that I do when it turns up in Hamlet, and I can’t really get over it.

You can get me to admire The Sentinel—I was much more taken with it this time around— but you can’t quite get me to enjoy it.

Might go well with: Prince of Darkness, The Omen.