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This Weekend’s Film Festival Celebrates Blood & Belly Laughs

Recently I caught the new audacious horror comedy TEETH on DVD, so this week's lineup is dedicated to the age-old combination of giggles and gore. This Weekend's Film Festival features one of the original horror comedies from the 1930s. There's a retro-silent horror ballet flick. An originator of the slasher genre, which could be taken as a soap opera satire. A tongue in cheek H.P. Lovecraft adaptation. And let's not forget a girl power remix of the vagina dentata myth. This isn't a lineup for the cinematic timid. This is a lineup for those how like blood and could find ironic gory deaths laugh out loud hilarious. It's a lineup for the twisted or those who want to see another side of cinema that lurks in the shadows and is having a great time there.

James Whale never really took his horror films all that seriously. His classics like FRANKENSTEIN, THE INVISIBLE MAN and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN all had campy humor woven in. But his THE OLD DARK HOUSE is what could be considered his full-fledged horror comedy. Funnier still is that there are moments more frightening in this film than any of his more well known work. A collection of bickering rich folk get stranded in the stormy countryside and find shelter at an old dark house. The inhabitants of the house are a horde of odd balls. The crone Rebecca (Eva Moore) makes the Wicked Witch of the West seem attractive. Her brother Horace (Ernest Thesiger) revels in the strange. The drunken butler Morgan (Boris Karloff) is like a hairy Lurch. And those are only the ones who come out of the woodwork at first… wait till you meet 100+ year old Sir Roderick or brother Saul — he's the real crazy one. While the Femms are played broad, the unfortunate guests are played straight. There's lazy playboy Roger (Melvyn Douglas), feuding couple Philip and Margaret Waverton (Raymond Massey & Gloria Stuart), flashy chorus girl Gladys (Lilian Bond) and boisterous Sir William Porterhouse, played wonderfully by Charles Laughton. Roger becomes an unlikely hero and his romance with Gladys is ridiculous. Whale plays all this with biting wit. As I said in my original review, "For the Wavertons, they’re a typical hero and heroine stuck in a horror movie, but they aren’t in on the joke." With great subtlety, Whale is poking run at horror films, movie conventions (which are still used and abused today), and British aloofness, creating a wonderful example of a film that is of its genre and a satire of the genre at the same time. Modern horror comedies such as SCREAM owe a great deal to this film.

DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY kicks off our Saturday lineup. Mixing horror, satire and dance, the Canadian auteur Guy Madden creates a film that feels like a lost silent film from the 1920s. Using the conventions of the silent era, Maddin combines the dialogue free pantomime of silent film and the expressive movement of ballet brilliantly. In a short running time, he also faithfully adapts Bram Stoker's vampire saga. But as I said in my original review, "Maddin is too sly to make it that simple. He turns the novel’s themes of sexual promiscuity and foreign invaders into a contemporary satire on those issues." Asian dancer Wei-Qiang Zhang plays the creature of the night preying the beautiful blonde Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle). When one sees the ballet and silent style together, one wonders why it was never done before. Contrasting modern sensibilities with vintage filmic techniques, his style is provocative and often hilarious. The viewer is not only compelled to rethink the issues ingrained on the Dracula myth, but film techniques in general.

The Saturday closer is an optional pick, but only because it may be hard to find. So if you can't find it, just replace it with your favorite horror comedy. I suggest DEAD ALIVE, which didn't make this lineup only because it made a previous one. BAY OF BLOOD is currently out of print on DVD in the U.S. However, a good indie rental store might have it. It was also released in the U.S. under the awful titles of TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE and THE LAST HOUSE OF THE LEFT, PART II. Director Mario Bava is the granddaddy of Italian horror — a genre director known for his striking visual style and strange humor. Coming in 1971, BAY OF BLOOD precedes the '80s slasher genre by a decade, but franchises like FRIDAY THE 13TH with their elaborate teen death scenes owe a great deal of credit to the Italian master. As I said in my original review, "The mystery plot works almost as a very dark satire of soap operas and Agatha Christie tales where vile rich people cheat and double-cross each other to get more wealth." There are no redeeming characters in the story, but that just frees us to enjoy the twists and turns of the backstabbing. So many sleazy horror films pander to the grisly desire of a good death scene using characters that we are supposed to care about or ones so vile no one could like. Bava often uses his deaths for ironic satire and commentary. Right from the first shot, which features a fly committing suicide by drowning itself in the lake that all the characters will be fighting for control of, you know this isn't your typical gore fest.

Sunday is for the extreme. One of the best horror comedies starts us off — RE-ANIMATOR. Director Stuart Gordon brings the macabre humor found in the 1950s E.C. Comics to the screen, pushing it just enough not to break. This modern mad scientist movie, based on a work by H.P. Lovecraft, finds a creepy medical student discovering a serum to re-animate dead tissue. Hero Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) is stuck in the middle of a horrific series of events when his girlfriend is sucked into the war between the mad genius Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) and the arrogant, decapitated professor Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale). Abbott's straight performance balances out the wonderfully campy portraits from Combs and Gale — a hero/villain dynamic that worked so well in THE OLD DARK HOUSE. Injected with iconic boundary pushing moments and great quotable lines, this tongue-in-cheek genre film is as surefooted as any film could be, balancing all its elements precisely. As I said in my original review, "With wit and a well-plotted story, Gordon allows the audience to revel in the trash, because the film isn’t pandering to our basest desires, it’s having fun with them."

Closing this week's lineup is its inspiration — TEETH. When it comes to tone and style, first-time writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein takes a page from RE-ANIMATOR. The Latin myth of vagina dentata, which tells the tale of teethed vaginas that need to be conquers by a hero, is taken into the modern age. As I said in my original review, "In TEETH, vagina dentata is viewed as female sexual power and a defense mechanism against the very misogynistic views that made up the original myth." Dawn, played amazingly by Jess Weixler, is part of an abstinence group where she meets Tobey (Hale Appleman). He awakens sexual feelings in her that scare her. When she tries to break it off with the aggressive Tobey, she breaks it off… and you know what I mean. Dawn's discovery of her condition quickly transforms her from the sexually intimidated to the sexually liberated, using her newfound ability to rid the world of pigs disguised as men. The sexual content of RE-ANIMATOR pales in comparison to the brave new world TEETH bites into. Campy humor mixed with gruesome gore and a dose of social commentary, Lichtenstein could be heir to George A. Romero. His bold calling card is certainly not for everybody, but it certainly shows his guts to take a dangerous premise and pull it off with smarts and flare.

So that's that. Tell me what you think, but be warned this a collection not for the squeamish or easily offended. So basically don't write in telling me that I'm a degenerate. If you have a lineup theme suggestion, please send it in or post it here. And like every week it's time to head to the video store, update the rental queue, check out Zap2It.com for TV listings or buy the DVDs below to support the site.

Buy It Now!

Buy The Old Dark House Here!

Buy It Now!

Buy Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary Here!

Buy It Now!

Buy Bay of Blood Here!

Buy It Now!

Buy Re-Animator Here!

Buy It Now!

Buy Teeth Here!

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Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks