Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer: 20 of 31 Horror Movies I've Never Seen

Yes, there are classic films I've never seen.  In fact, there are classic films that plenty of people haven't seen.  I'm willing to bet that the majority of people reading this right now have never seen Made in USA, but that doesn't make me think that they're uncultured, just that they missed something I particularly enjoyed.  So yeah, I've never seen Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer until today.

How do I make a synopsis of a film that is a cult classic?  The title pretty much says it all.  The film examines a sociopath character in an attempt to portray the inner workings of the Serial Killer.  This is where the film is actually pretty accurate.  Henry is played as a REAL sociopath.  Even when we, the audience, begin to believe that maybe there's something sympathetic about Henry, the film is quick to remind us that there is no empathy in any serial killer.

Shot with an obviously small budget, Henry uses it's surroundings as a metaphor for the bleak viewpoints of the lead characters.  There is nothing but a visceral hatred present in Henry and his room mate Ottis, and when Ottis' sister Becky joins the fray the film makers are careful to disguise this hatred, as a sociopath would disguise it to any authoritarian figure, but once the net drops, it drops hard.

The film makes due with it's low budget by being inventive.  This may be one of the earliest examples of using VHS as a medium to aid the story telling process.  The filmmakers utilized this medium within context of the story, being watching by the characters on a color set they obtained via nefarious (murder) means, as a plot device, but by using it to actually tell the story as well, a method that is more prevalent now with the craze of Found Footage style horror films in the wake of The Blair Witch Project and in more recent films like the anthology V/H/S series and The Sacrament.

Another thing that I found particularly delightful about my experience watching the film was the discovery that the titular character of Henry was played by Michael Rooker, who I previously discovered as "The psycho dad from Mallrats."  I'm rather fond of Rooker's work following his relationship with director James Gunn and even his work in The Walking Dead (which I'm otherwise not particularly fond of) so you can probably imagine my gleeful realization that it was him when I finally got a good close up.

Most of my friends, who watch horror movies, have probably seen this film before me.  I like to think that I'm fairly transparent about the fact that there are many "cult classics" that I haven't seen due to my own tastes at the time, but sometimes I guess I'm not.  Anyway, if you're like me and haven't taken the time to check this one out, there's a streaming HD transfer on Netflix, or you can just rent the Bluray/DVD.  Be warned though: As enjoyable as the music is, it's mixed much louder than the rest of the sound in the film.

4 out of 5 skulls.

The Quiet Ones: 10 of 31 Horror Movies I've Never Seen

In the late 50s through the early 70s a British film studio called Hammer was born.  Making a mixture of schlocky b-horror and science fiction films, they rose to fame by injecting a dose of violence and sex into the, at this point, dead Monster Movie genre.  Their versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy, live on to this day as some of the most unique spins on the Universal Monsters.  They also made a series of occult based films, some of my favorites, and psycho thrillers until the audience tastes shifted away and the studio ultimately disappeared.  Then a film called Let The Right One In, came out, and an English language remake under the revived Hammer Film Productions banner, Let Me In followed.  After a few other remakes, they finally produced their first truly "Hammer" piece since 1979's failed The Lady Vanishes remake with: The Quiet Ones.

The film is very loosely based on The Philip Experiment, in which a group of parapsychologists attempted to prove that mental energy could create a ghost.  Though most synopses of the film describe it as a story about a college professor who is attempting to create a poltergeist, I would say it's about an Oxford College Professor Joseph Coupland, played here by Jared Harris, seeking to prove that a human being can manifest kinetic energy.  Unfortunately, "The Experiment" goes awry when the test subject, Jane Harper (played by Olivia Cooke), begins to lose control of said energy and the story begins to drift into the realm of the occult.

The story is told from a mixed viewpoint of the third person omnicient and the first person perspective of Brian McNeil, played by Sam Claflin, hired by Professor Coupland to document his experiment, which is only referred to as "The Experiment" throughout the film.  It's like a mashup of found footage and standard story telling which works quite nicely, in my opinion, to tell the story and supply an ample amount of creeping tension.  More than once I found myself legitimately on edge in anticipation of the scares, getting caught off guard as many times.

What I liked most about the film is that it feels like a vintage Hammer film with a modern gloss.  Sure, the characters don't exactly look like they're from the 70s, the period in which the film is set, but the locations and the design did, which made up for it.  Not to mention it lovingly utilizes an old Gothic looking building as the central setting for story, similar to the old Hammer monster films.  Throw in some sex and an ample amount of violence and presto, you have a genuine Hammer Horror Film.  There were a few moments where the dialogue pulled me out, but overall they were barely noticeable as the actors were overall believable, Olivia Cooke's performance standing out along with Jared Harris.

Sadly, this film didn't do very well in the box office, for who knows how many factors.  It's not a perfect film, but it doesn't need to be either.  Perhaps I just have a proclivity for these kinds of stories.  I certainly find them much more interesting than the "in your face slasher film" or the "pure found footage curse-a-thon."

4 out of 5 skulls.

The Amityville Horror (1979): 08 of 31 Horror Movies I've Never Seen

There are plenty of films about Haunted Houses and each one always seems to draw a little bit from a film before it.  Call it part of our obsession with the inexplicable, or our desire to find proof of some sort of afterlife, even if it may be a hellish purgatory for the spirits.  It's a subject that I haven't seen too many films about and if I'm being honest, it's because I don't believe in ghosts.  It's really that simple.  Still, these movies are fun, in that they give the filmmaker free reign with ways to make a house attack it's inhabitants.  The Amityville Horror takes it's time, but certainly delivers plenty of creepy motives and motifs that helped cement the subject matter within the horror genre.

Based on a "true" story, the film and house itself have drawn the curiosity of casual interest to devotee's of paranormal research and phenomena.  Most people who have even the slightest interest in the story know that it's about George and Kathy Lutz who bought a house at 112 Ocean, 14 months after Ronald DeFeo, Jr killed 6 members of his family within it's confines.  The story goes that within a few days of moving in the family began to experience strange phenomena and claimed that a spirit within the house was terrorizing them.  By the 23rd day they fled the house.

The Lutz family was the subject of many television interviews, books, and critique.  They stand by their belief that it was supernatural, but as the scientific method says, if you can't disprove it, that does not mean it's impossible, merely improbable.  Personally, my money is on stress, hysteria, and good old fashioned denial, but we're not here to discuss fact and fiction, we're here to talk about a film.

Before I get TOO negative (yeah, it's coming) I'd like to say that Margot Kidder and James Brolin (Josh Brolin's father) both deliver convincing performances as Kathy and George Lutz.  You really get the sense that they're being shaken to pieces by the film, although there is one Brolin moment that's almost reminiscent to the infamous "You're tearing me apart Lisa!" line from the awful pile of cinematic shit that is known as The Room, which nearly made me burst out loud with laughter.  Rod Steiger delivers a wonderfully emotional performance as Father Delaney.  It's reported that he was so unnerved and disgusted by a scene in which he had to be surrounded and slightly covered by flies that he found himself unable to eat for some time after and lost 30 pounds.

This film makes use of a gamete of gags to instill fear and suspense in the viewer, via the score, sound design, and visual gags.  A room full of flies, blood leaking out of a wall, explosive lightning, etc.  You name it, they do it, only skipping out on walking corpses.  While some of these gags are great, for the most part it played a little tame for me.  The movie clocks in at about 118 minutes including ending credits and unfortunately that hurts it.  It was cut together more like a diary of the bizarre events that took place rather than building suspense.  Each day where something of import takes place is preceded by a super title: Day <insert number here>.  This merely breaks the story apart when it starts to get juicy.  The climax delivers as one would expect, but is unnecessarily drawn out for no real reason that I could see except to say, "Hey look, blood! Woah why does she look so old! Hey wait, we can't leave the dog behind!"  Pardon the deliberate ambiguity, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone who may decide to watch it anyway following this review.

It's not that the film is bad, it's just not really good either.  It falls in that "meh" category that requires someone to be legitimately interested in, or full blown obsessed with the paranormal.  Me, I prefer the idea's of humans wielding supernatural power upon each other rather than the idea that their spirits would have any cause to linger in the physical plane.  Perhaps I need to see a few more to really make up my mind, but so far The Legend of Hell House is the only film of this sub-genre that I could really enjoy watching again.

2 out of 5 skulls.