Cinema Basement

 A retrospective by Forrest Humphrey Society is not a movie for those with weak stomachs, or for those who harbor positive feelings for the social elite. Filmed in 1989 and released in 1992 by Brian Yuzna, with special effects by Screaming Mad George and starring Billy Warlock (son of veteran stuntman Dick Warlock), its a very strange movie, a satirical horror flick remembered mostly for its finale. Not undeserved mind you, but the whole movie is quite solid.  Our plot is quite simple. Billy Warlock plays Bill Whitney, the child of a rich family in Beverly Hills, and he doesn't really fit in. His parents are more interested in his sister's achievements and he regularly visits a psychiatrist regarding feelings of not being valued by his family and a general paranoia about something being “off” about the society his family lives in. And since this is a horror film, you know he turns out to be so very correct. What at first begins with simple gas-lighting and conspiracy theori...

A breakdown by the four writers It just wouldn't be fair for one of us to get to cover The Thing and exclude the others. So here's a quick breakdown by all four of us, each of us sharing our own take on The Thing.  Brooks This is the best movie ever made about paranoia and what paranoia can do to a group of people. We see the breakdown of this group of me, unable to trust one another and unable to go anywhere to escape. The Thing, like Alien before it, solves a major problem in most horror movies, where the characters should just get the fuck out of there. There's nowhere to go in The Thing. Outside of the compound is the frozen hellish landscape of Antarctica, much like outside of the ship in Alien there's only death in the cold vacuum of space. Escaping from the monster in The Thing will only guarantee a slow death out in the dark. Carpenter was a very pessimistic director at times but this is his bleakest film by far.  Forrest An interesting thing about John Carpente...

 A ranking by Brooks Rich When I was a kid, my go-to channel was Nickelodeon. I am a child of the '90s and I will fight anyone who says Spongebob is better than Rocco's Modern Life or Ren & Stimpy. Days home sick from school were spent watching Nick all day, starting with Nick Jr, it didn't matter if the shows were for little kids, you watched it, then finally switching to the live-action shows and Nicktoons later in the day. Occasionally one of the awesome game shows would come on and the TV goes off when Nick at Night starts. At least for me.  Back then the best night of the week was Saturday. Not because I went to the movies with friends or went to play Goldeneye 64 multiplayer. Ok, I did do that sometimes. (Goldeneye is better than Halo and you're an asshole if you used Odd Job.) No Saturday night meant Saturday night Nickelodeon, or SNICK.  There was nothing more awesome than SNICK. It was the best shows Nick had to offer in a two-hour block, four every night. ...

 A retrospective by Forrest Humphrey Its my favorite month of the year, and with it, our director is one of my favorites. John Carpenter is revered among horror fans as one of the genre's all time greats. Halloween, The Thing, They Live, Escape from New York. The man is a legend for a reason. But the film I want to talk about is not regarded as being among his classics. Not without some valid reasons mind you, but one I don't feel it quite deserves the flack it gets. I want to talk about 1998's “Vampires”. Carpenter both directed and scored the film, and it stars James Woods, Daniel Baldwin, Sheryl Lee, Tim Guinee, and Thomas Ian Griffith. Our plot is quite simple: James Woods and Daniel Baldwin play Jack Crow and Tony Montoya, leading a team of Vampire Hunters operating in the Midwest. After a successful hunt the hunters are partying it up when they are attacked by a new Vampire (Thomas Ian Griffith) and easily slaughtered. Crow and Montoya are the only surviving hunters...

  A retrospective by Brooks Rich  Carpenter is one of my favorite directors but is a good example of a director having an incredible run for a while and then completely tanking, producing critical failure after critical failure. Rob Reiner is another example of a director like this. But I'm not here to talk about one of Carpenter's failures. I'm here to talk about his fantastic science fiction drama from 1984, Starman.  Karen Allen is a woman mourning her recently deceased husband, played by an Oscar-nominated Jeff Bridges. One day an alien arrives in her house and takes the form of her husband. He has to make it to Arizona from where they are in Wisconsin in three days or he'll die. Of course, the government is hot on their trail. But instead of being a chase film, Starman is much more than that. It's really about the connection created between the two main characters and how we come to terms with our place in the universe.  Carpenter, for the most part, is a very ...

 A ranking by Brooks Rich The best anthology show of all time is the original run of The Twilight Zone. Period the end. You can debate who is the second-best but the best was OG Twilight Zone. But for October I want to rank my favorite episodes of the over the top but awesome HBO series, Tales from the Crypt, hosted by the pun spewing Cryptkeeper. Inspired by EC comics, the show told stories about villainous characters getting brutal cosmic justice. It was violent and gratuitous but always sort of winking at the audience. There was always a strange morality in Tales, almost biblical in nature. Break a Ten Commandant and you will be struck down in a horrific way. I won't spoil any of these but just no, most of the characters in these episodes did not have a happy ending.  10. Abra Cadaver  I see this one listed as the best episode on a lot of lists so already I'm being controversial by having it so low. It's a great episode, it is. But its main hook was done in an episode ...

 A ranking by Brooks Rich The X Files is not just one of my favorite shows of all time, it is one of the main pieces of media that made me want to be a writer. Chris Carter is one of my heroes and I think is one of TV's greatest showrunners. We have modern television because of the X Files. I don't want to get into its history today so instead here is my personal ranking of the ten scariest episodes of all time. I am coming at this as a fanatic of the show so I'm a little forgiving of some episodes considered lesser. Most of these probably wouldn't make an overall best episode list of the show but that doesn't mean they're bad. I'm mainly judging based on how scary the episode is, though story and quality will play into some. Anyway on with the list. 10. Roadrunners The show lost a lot when David Duchovny left at the end of the seventh season. The mythology got convoluted and downright silly at times.  Robert Patrick's Doggett played skeptic to now Scull...

 A retrospective by Brooks Rich Let's talk about a film that's a hundred years old now. Last year I covered Nosferatu, one of the masterpieces of the German Expressionism movement. I still think it's the best one but The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is right up there. The '20s were ruled by the German filmmakers and I truly believe that if the Nazis had not come to power, Germany could have become the film capital of the world and not Hollywood. These guys were pushing the medium farter than anyone in Hollywood was at the time. Even Hitchcock wouldn't make his standout silent film, The Lodger, until 1927, well after the classics of German Expressionism.  Caligari is not as accessible as Nosferatu, where it presents us with a world that could only come from our deepest nightmares. Caligari is very much designed in the Expressionistic sense, with harsh lighting, twisted environments, and shadows that seem unnatural. It follows a man named Cesare, who is being used by a mad...

A retrospective by Brooks Rich The character Snake Plisken is one badass dude from the '80s who I think gets overlooked. Surely some of you know who he is… but he's probably not as well known as The Terminator, Rambo, or John McClain. This is a shame because Kurt Russell owns this guy Snake Plisken in Carpenter's wonderful dystopian action film from 1981.  A one-eyed convict, Plisken is sent into New York City, which in 1997 has been walled off and turned into a prison. His mission? He’s got to save the President whose escape pod has crashed after Air Force One is attacked. In the city, Snake finds the President is being held by a warlord known as The Duke, played by the immortal Isaac Hayes. Assisted by a friendly cab driver named Cabbie and a mysterious woman named Maggie, Snake races against time to save the President and himself. He has a big problem… a small detonator in his arm will explode and blow him up if he doesn't return the President at a certain time! I ha...

 A retrospective by Brooks Rich The interesting thing about this month is most of Carpenter's filmography could qualify for Forgotten Film Friday, save for Halloween, The Thing, and possibly Escape from New York. Carpenter always kind of worked under the radar. He's respected now but he's more of a cult director than anything. The Thing was a financial and critical disaster when it first came out. Christine is one of his more successful films from the '80s but I feel like it's not as well known as it should be. The same could be said for the book itself. It's never really talked about as one of Stephen King's classics, even though its a tremendous book and a fantastic movie.  I really want to examine Carpenter as a director as this month goes on and explore what makes him one of the best from his time. His shots always feel right. There's a sense of planning behind them, that Carpenter doesn't want to waste a single frame of the film. Every choice is...

  A retrospective by Brooks Rich This is one of those that is only forgotten because it's not known as one of the greatest suspense films of all time. In 1955 Hitchcock was the reigning master of suspense but French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot gave him a run for his money with this brilliant film noir with a supernatural twist. In fact, Clouzot beat Hitchcock to optioning the film rights. If this film had been made by Hitchcock, it would be considered in his top five films. Not that the film Clouzot made is bad. This is a masterpiece. But Hitchcock's name no doubt carries more weight than Clouzot's.  The plot is very film noir. Two women, one the wife of the headmaster of a Paris boarding school and the other his mistress, conspire to murder the headmaster for revenge for his mistreatment of them and the children at the boarding school. However, when his body disappears, strange events start to occur. That's all I can say without possibly ruining any twist or turn t...

 For the month of October, we will of course be exploring horror films in-depth but will also be focusing on the work of one, John Carpenter. He didn't invent the slasher film with Halloween but he sure as hell made it mainstream, leading to an eighteen year slasher boom that saw the birth of horror icons like Freddy Kruger and Jason Voorhees. Carpenter is more than just a slasher director though and was one of the best genre directors of the '80s and somewhat into the '90s, directing classics like The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Christine, and The Fog. Then for some reason, at one point the quality fell off and Carpenter wasn't the same. But this is still one of the coolest directors of all time and he deserves a deep dive.