Movie Review—Lord of Tears

So, I've helped fund 3 movies so far on Kickstarter. I'll get to reviews of the first two once they're out, but it IS kind of amusing that the one I helped fund most recently is the first one that I've seen. Now, Lord of Tears had a leg up on the others since it was already done and the Kickstarter campaign was mostly to secure distribution and marketing for the movie, but still.

So! As you can see from the pictures, Lord of Tears is about the owlman. But there's quite a bit more going on here than that, and despite how creepy the owlman looks... by the time the movie's over, you realize that it wasn't really about the owlman at all. The movie itself has a pretty simple plot, and it's not going to impress with a huge cast, and the monster doesn't do a lot more than stand around and watch... but as it turns out, when you've got such an incredibly haunting and scenic location to shoot in like the highlands of Scotland, things like plot and cast and super-dynamic monsters aren't all that necessary. Especially when you couple that with an incredibly dream-like style of shooting and then edit the movie so that the whole thing increasingly feels like a strange nightmare.

There's some cool twists to the story as well, one of which I saw coming early (and enjoyed nonetheless) and one of which kinda surprised me in a good way. I'll be somewhat vague about those. The movie's plot, as I mentioned, is pretty simple. A man inherits a house after his mother's suicide—but in her will, she says words to the effect of, "Something at that house drove you crazy and made you almost drown yourself—don't go back there today!"

And so, of course, he goes back there to find out, if he can, what caused him to repress a year or so of memories as a child. Because after that setup, what self-respecting horror movie character WOULDN'T go? (To be fair, the character comments on this in the movie, noting, more or less, "Why would Mom tell me to stay away like that, when she should know a warning like that would only intrigue me all the more?") Of course, once he arrives, he starts having strange dreams and seeing visions of a frightening creature watching him from the the surrounding hills and woods—was an encounter with the owlman what terrified him so as a child?

Or was it something far worse?

A very good reason to turn around and find your way down a different, less horror-filled hallway...

Lord of Tears ...

• ... is relatively slow paced and deliberate in getting where it wants to go, but it's never once boring to look at. The movie made me want to go visit Scotland!
• ... gets a lot of mileage out of the owlman suit. It doesn't need to do much but stand there to send chills up the spine, and the scenes where you don't realize immediately that the owlman is in there, watching you, blending in to the background, are pretty effective. Makes you start imagining owlmen in scenes where there aren't any.
• ... feels like being trapped in a nightmare. Not every part of it makes logical sense, and a fair amount of the imagery  is there only for symbolism and because it just looks creepy.
• ... uses a large number of public-domain or free sound effects, many of which I've heard a LOT in video games. That's always distracting to me, since those sound effects tend to be overheard a LOT in video games over and over... kinda took me out of the nightmare-induced fugue the movie was putting me in now and then.
• ... arrived in the best packaging ever—wrapped in black crepe paper, with an owl feather affixed to the front and no other indication as to what was inside. Owlman doesn't need to sign his name to leave his mark!
• ... incorporates themes of Slenderman and the tones of Lovecraft. No wonder it felt like a nightmare!
• ... is a refreshing throwback to older British horror movies where mood and tone rule all. Fittingly, the director dedicated the movie to Christopher Lee.

Grade: A–

Monster #17—Owlman

The concept of humans with animal heads is one of the classic monster tropes. Want a quick and easy way to make a person scary and strange? Give them a wolf head or a tiger head or a snake head. Or, as it turns out, an owl head.

The Owlman isn't a monster I'd heard much about until earlier this year, when a Kickstarter project caught my attention—a movie called Lord of Tears was seeking some money to secure some additional funding for last minute additions and reshoots, but primarily so they could pay for distribution of the already pretty-much-complete movie. After seeing Absentia come to life thanks to Kickstarter, I'd been keeping an eye out for other interesting and promising horror movies to help fund, so I probably would have kicked in some cash for Lord of Tears even if the movie hadn't yet started filming.

Now, while the Owlman of the movie was a very specific monster with a very specific tie to history, the "real" Owlman is a figure that haunts the area around Mawnan, Cornwall. He hasn't been sighted all that often, which may be why I've not heard about him in my relatively extensive monster researching lore. Variously explained as a manifestation of energy from prehistoric ley lines to sightings of rare eagles or other birds, I think my favorite explanation remains that he's a sinister demigod from antiquity. Which is, as you'll see in my next post, what the movie went with!


Recommended Viewing:

• Lord of Tears, dir. Lawrie Brewster

Monster #15—Mothman

The majority of my early childhood exposure to monsters and horror came at my grandparents house. Both my grandfather and grandmother on my father's side were prodigious readers. My grandpa had several stacks of horror comics, like "House of Mystery" and "Tales of the Unexpected," while my grandmother kept me well supplied with reading material—she gave me Cujo to read at the ripe age of about 9 or 10, and a year or two later gave me some Clive Barker books. It was in my grandparent's reading room that I first discovered F. Paul Wilson, Dean Koontz, and many others.

Including mothman.

The book was The Mothman Prophecies, by John A. Keel. The copy I found in my grandma's collection had what looked like a photo of a scary flying red-eyed monster on the cover, and proclaimed in bold red letters: "COMPELLING AND GENUINELY FRIGHTENING!" How could I resist that?

Turns out, those letters are right.

The Mothman Prophecies doesn't read like a horror novel; it's presented as a collection of case studies and interviews and investigations performed by John A. Keel, exploring the mysterious sightings of a red-eyed monster that was haunting the region around Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The book went on to link Mothman to shadowy government conspiracies, the men in black, UFOs, and of course the collapse of the Silver Bridge.

When X-files finally came along, it already felt familiar to me as a result, because this book was very much a proto-X-files. And mothman's been creeping around in the back of my mind for the past 30 years or so as well.

I wish my hometown had a mothman statue.

Reccomended Reading

•  The Mothman Prophecies, by John A. Keel

 Recommended Viewing

•  Eyes of the Mothman, dir. Matthew J. Pellowski

Movie Review—The Snow Creature

So, IMDB claims that "The Snow Creature" is the first movie about the yeti. My favorite yeti movie is probably "The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas." Made a few years after "The Snow Creature," that movie featured Peter Cushing in a movie directed by Val Guest and written by Nigel Kneale—the duo responsible for the Quatermass Xperiment and Quartermass II, two of my favorite sci-fi movies from the 50s.

But it's "The Snow Creature" that I'm here to talk about, and if it is indeed the first yeti movie, then it's also rock solid proof that what comes first is not always the best. In fact, in this case, what comes first is one of the worst.

The plot, such as it is, involves a botanist and his boozy photographer henchman who head up to the Himalayas to seek out and photograph high-altitude plants. Like moss and some tiny flowers. When the yeti (more on THIS piece of work below) shows up to abduct the lead Sherpa's wife (despite the fact that the yeti has a doomed nuclear family at home), said distraught Sherpa rounds up the other guides and they head off to hunt down the yeti, save the wife, and kill the presumably rapist or woman-eating monster.

Unfortunately, the movie assumes we, the viewer, identify more with the (white American) botanist and his boozy photographer pal. Who are mortified that their plant-seeking expedition is being usurped by a mutinous crew of Sherpas and a yeti. Much of the first 3rd of the movie consists of the group trudging around in the snow during the day, then the two American "heroes" spending time trying to fix the radio to call the police at night. Eventually, the botanist realizes that catching a real-live yeti might make him more money than mountain moss, and soon thereafter they find a yeti in a cave with his yeti-wife and yeti-kid. There's a confrontation, and the yeti-dad (for some reason I'm still not clear on) races up to the cave wall and pounds his fists on it, causing a cave-in that not only knocks himself out but also kills his yeti-wife and yeti-child. The brave Americans boldly leave the two dead yetis behind, truss up yeti-dad with a rinky-dink home-made stretcher, and after 15 agonizing minutes of watching the logistics of walking their prize down the mountainside, storing him in a warehouse, arranging to have a refrigerated shipping unit (that looks like a metal outhouse with a frosted window in the side) built in the states and then shipped to Tibet, and then loading up their yeti onto an airplane and flying to Los Angeles from Tibet via New York.


ANYway... they get back to LA and after spending a mind-boggling 5 minutes or so on a "must see to believe it" subplot wherein the customs department at the LA Airport are trying to decide if the yeti is a man or a beast so they can decide if he needs immigration papers... the yeti gets out, kidnaps and/or chases some women, steals some meat from a meat packing plant, then gets netted in the sewers by the cops and shot dead by a hand gun (seen in a closeup wherein the man firing the gun is using his middle finger... thanks movie!). The movie ends with us seeing the botanist eager to get home to his wife, his policeman friend excited to go see his new baby at the hospital...

...and with the Sherpa's wife still missing out there in the Himalayas after being kidnapped by a yeti. Well... I guess it was the 50s. American movies had different priorities back then I guess.

Behold the SNOW BEAST in all his glory! Check out those muppet mitts!

So! On to the yeti! This was one of the WORST monsters I've seen in a movie. Ever. I kid you not. The yeti was basically a tall lanky guy wearing what looked to be like long underwear to which someone had glued swaths of rabbit fur to the the shoulders, chest, groin, back, and legs, then slapped a couple of novelty muppet monster gloves on each had, then threw on a squarish fur hat and a fake beard.

That's it.

Oh... and he's all gray and black, just like you'd expect a creature that lives in the snow and, indeed, is called "THE SNOW CREATURE" to appear as.

But the absolute best part? The director doesn't skimp at all on showing us the monster, often in unforgiving hard focus. Unfortunately, probably 75% of the scenes where we see the monster doing stuff ARE THE SAME SCENE! There's a shot of the monster walking slowly forward toward the camera against a black background, and the director sees fit to simply splice in that scene over and over and over and over whenever he wants to remind us that the yeti is out there. Doesn't matter if the scene's supposed to take place on a snowy mountainside or a deep Himalayan cave or in the LA city sewer or in an airport warehouse or in an alley. That scene's apparently good enough for anywhere!

HA! Also? When he wants to convey the notion that the yeti is being sneaky and retreating into the darkness to hide? He simply runs that same footage BACKWARDS.

I picked this movie to watch tonight out of the 100+ movies in my online Netflix queue for 1 reason—it was tied with "Tetsuo: The Bullet Man" for the title of "shortest movie in my online Netflix queue" at a mere 70 minutes or so. I'll have to watch "Tetsuo" later this weekend to see which one seems longer. Because "The Snow Creature" seemed like it went on for 70 hours, not 70 minutes!

The Snow Creature...

• ... informs the viewer of many well known scientific facts, including, for example, that yetis instinctively know where to seek out the cooler areas in a region... such as the sewers of Los Angeles.
• ... may well have the honor of the least convincing yeti costume ever filmed.
• ... seems to think that in a movie featuring a woman-abducting yeti and life-or-death survival situations on the slopes of the highest mountain range on the planet, the best place to go to for tension and action are sequences of radio repair.
• ... assumes that if a dude brings a live yeti back to Los Angeles, one reporter is enough to represent the media attention such an event would bring—and that this one reporter wouldn't put up a fight when the cops tell him "you'll get a chance to ask questions about the yeti later; first we have to get him through immigration!"
• ... would have probably been about 15 minutes shorter if the producer had told the editor & director, "Okay, you can't re-use ANY FOOTAGE in your film."
• ... is one of those movies that's important to preserve and see, so that you can point it out to those people who say that Hollywood doesn't make great movies the way they used to.
• ... teaches us that the best time to cry out a warning to "LOOK OUT!" is after the cop you saw walk by the tunnel you just watched shabby-yeti shamble into has already been snatched and mauled.
• ... really could use a good rifftraxing.

Grade: F

Sorry... couldn't find a trailer for this one, so enjoy a clip from the movie where the heroes ambush the yeti and his family at home and marvel at the yeti's nonsensical reaction to this home invasion.

Movie Review—Creature from Black Lake

So, as if to celebrate that last Sunday's monster day entry was on the Fouke Monster, today I sat down to watch "Creature from Black Lake," which more or less exists due to the popularity of "Legend of Boggy Creek." Unfortunately, this movie is nowhere near as spooky and charming and interesting as the former.

"Creature from Black Lake" opens with an attack on a pair of trappers floating in a boat on the eponymous Black Lake (which looks more muddy than black, but whatever) by a big hairy hominid who comes at them from under the water. That's right! Bigfoot can swim, apparently!

Anyway, that scene dealt with, the movie shifts gears to a pair of "yankees" (as the movie is so fond of reminding us) from college in Chicago who've come down to the Black Lake region to try to find the creature. Maybe to catch it and bring it back alive. A large portion of the movie chronicles these two gadabouts as they run into trouble with the locals, be it a faux pas at a hillbilly dinner or flirting with the sheriff's pretty young daughter or trying their damndest to track down the surviving trapper from that first scene so they can interview him and find out where to get their own look at the Creature from Black Lake.

There might not be any hamburgers in your future, but I bet getting mauled by Bigfoot will make up for it!

I'm not sure WHY the monster's called the Creature from Black Lake... since the lake only appears in that one pre-credit sequence. The rest of the movie takes place in a small town and in the woods, more or less.

Anyway... no real suspense. Some goofy music. A pretty mediocre ape suit. And a big dose of pan-n-scan coupled with at times barely-understandable dialogue from a pretty sub-par transfer to DVD equates to what can be charitably called "Not one of my top ten Bigfoot-related movies."

Creature From Black Lake...

• ... features a Vietnam Vet who's defining characteristic is that he likes hamburgers. Why? Because he grew up in town with a chicken processing plant and his dad worked there so they had chicken every day. Chicken for breakfast. Chicken for lunch. Chicken for dinner. One day his dad tried to make chicken jello. What does this have to do with Vietnam or, more on-topic, the Creature From Black Lake? Not sure... but there's a lot of film time spent on the topic so it must have been important to someone.
• ... isn't interested in showing us the fate of the creature. Did it die when it got shot? Did the van explosion kill it? What happened? Doesn't mater, because with about 5 minutes to go, the movie loses interest in the Bigfoot and wallows in a long coda where we get to worry about Mr. Hamburgers after he gets mauled by the Bigfoot earlier on.
• ... reminded me why I don't like pan-n-scan.
• ... doesn't have a cat trick, but it does have an unexplained bearded man in the woods trick.
• ... spends roughly 2% of its running time at the actual Black Lake. I guess that's okay, since it's about the creature FROM Black Lake, not the creature AT Black Lake.
• ... has a much better poster than it deserves.

Grade: D

Monster #5—The Fouke Monster

Not all Bigfoots are built the same.

For example, the Fouke Monster, known perhaps more widely as the Boggy Creek Monster, has only three toes. That's pretty unusual, especially considering pretty much no other big hairy hominid prints have three toes. Could this mean the Fouke Monster is a mutant? Or is the one that terrorized the people of Fouke, Arkansaas back in the early 70s merely deformed? Or, perish the thought, are the Fouke Monster tracks the work of a hoaxer who didn't do his homework on basic Bigfoot (and basic primate) zoology?

In the end, it doesn't matter, because the Fouke Monster is the scariest of the Bigfoots. Partially because it lives in a swamp, arguably the scariest of all terrains. Partially because stories about encounters with the Fouke Monster tend to be a lot more agressive that most Bigfoot encounters are. But when you get right down to it, the reason it's scary is because of "The Legend of Boggy Creek."

This movie was more than just a drive-in feature that achieved unexpected popularity and success (7th most successful movie of 1972 in fact... also the year I was born!). It seems like it spawned an entire generation of cryptozoologists. It certainly did a number on myself and my sister, back in the late 70s when it showed up on TV now and then. I once convinced my younger sister to stay up until midnight to watch the movie, and she made it barely through the credits. The combination of the forlorn cries of a loon, the raspy croaking of bullfrogs, the swampy visuals, and then the eerie sound of a monster howling somewhere in that swamp as a young child appears to run for his life from an unseen terror were too much. She went to bed before the credits rolled.

If you name a place like this "Boggy Creek," why NOT have a monster in it?

I did not. I watched the whole movie. I've been having nightmares about Bigfoot peering through a bedroom window (one that's at least 7 feet of the ground, mind you) ever since.

Recommended Reading

• The Beast of Boggy Creek, by Lyle Blackburn

Recommended Viewing

• The Legend of Boggy Creek, dir. Charles B. Pierce