Spreading the Syndrome

The Criterion Collection was my first introduction to the world of boutique blu ray. The July and November sales at Barnes and Noble would be mini Christmas celebrations for me. I'd stock up on as much I my wallet allowed. There were films from my favorite directors like Kubrick, Scorsese and De Palma. The selection was one where I was aware of what I was getting myself into. It was arthouse, sure. But even the genre titles like The Blob and Carnival of Souls were classic staples on television. 

When I opened the Vinegar Syndrome site, I knew a few of the titles at best. Ice Cream Man, Demon Wind and Jack Frost were video store rentals. 

They were offering Action and Exploitation bundles at the time. Through those, I made a mental note of the titles. Every month, they would release around 3 new titles and every month there were 3 movies I never knew existed. This was a company that was going deep. So I decided to finally order from them. Body Melt and The Incubus were the first two. Beyond just their descriptions, the slipcovers looked stunning. 

I will be highlighting around 20 titles that I consider the best VS has to offer. The films listed will all be 50% off MSRP during the Black Friday sale. If you are new to this label and have yet to dip your toe in, allow these recommendations to guide you. 

The Telephone Book

The poster says it all: the story of a girl who falls in love with the world's greatest obscene phone call. Photographed in black and white and including a surreal animated color sequence, this movie is one of the best kept secrets of the cult film world. 

Christmas Evil

You will be fooled into thinking this is a Santa slice and dice just by the cover. But the real present under the tree here is that it is a taut character study. 

Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls

The prosecution: "Porn is one note and boring." 

The defense would like to showcase Exhibit A: Bob Chinn's 1978 effort Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls. A comedic romp with an involving plot that revolves around a pizza parlor. 

The defense would like to showcase Exhibits B & C: Desiree Cousteau and John Holmes. 

No further questions. 

Dolemite

The Rudy Ray Moore films belong in everyone's collection. The sheer amount of energy and fun these movies contain are hard to top. Dolemite, The Human Tornado, Petey Wheatstraw and Disco Godfather have been put out by the company and you can't go wrong with any of them. 

**There's a nifty box set that houses all of them on the opening VS page. 

A Woman's Torment

Roberta Findlay's take on Repulsion. Blending melodrama and hardcore erotica with a liberal sprinkling of slasher, Findlay manages to inject warm blood into what otherwise could have been cateogrized as a boring Repulsion knock off.

Seeds/Vapors

I have to warn you upfront: Andy Milligan movies are absolutely an acquired taste. That being said, Seeds is one of those movies you need to see to believe. This is go-for-broke melodrama. A deranged plot twist awaits you at the end of every single scene. If you think your family is dysfunctional, put Seeds on. It's perfect viewing to prep for family get togethers this Thanksgiving season. 

Welcome Home Brother Charles/Emma Mae

A double feature worth writing home about, these two films by Jamaa Fanaka highlight his contribution to 70s indie cinema. Don't let the marketers fool you, these are not blaxpoitation films in the traditional sense. This is especially true of Emma Mae. A film that should have caused the same kind of stir that Mean Streets did. Jerri Hayes turns in a performance for the ages. 

Buddies

Just as important from a historical perspective as a cinematic one, Buddies is the first narrative feature films made about AIDs. An intense study of love, death and the need for activism during the earliest days of the public health crisis. Director Arthur Bressan Jr. would fall victim to AIDs two years after the movie's completion. If you like Philadelphia and/or And the Band Played On, this belongs in your collection. 

The Incubus

John Cassavetes had less than a decade to live. He would star in only six more movies. Yet this genre effort shows that he is absolutely committed to the characters he portrays, in this case Medical examiner Sam Brody. It's a supernatural semen splattered tale with genuinely effective filmmaking from director John Hough. 

Sudden Fury

A tense Canadian tax shelter-era thriller made by one time director Brian Damude. Sudden Fury is a five character piece that depicts escalating tension and violence among a married couple and a passersby. Shades of Hitchcock. 

The Corruption of Chris Miller

Releases like this one are why I love Vinegar Syndrome. Javier Bardem's uncle, Juan Antonio Bardem, crafted a Spanish giallo that ranks right up there with some of the best Italy has to offer. Convoluted revenge plots, murders driven by greed, lavish mansions, and over-the-top kills drive this twisted tale. It features one of the coolest looking killers in gialli to boot. 

Putney Swope

Vinegar Syndrome doesn't just cater to horror hounds and perverts. There's arthouse fare too. Every once in a while they will toss in a movie like this to the pile of sleaze to class things up and I am all the more grateful to them for doing it. Putney Swope is essential viewing if you are into good satire. Having come out in the peak of 60's counterculture, it satires race, politics and pop culture. Vital cinema from Robert Downey Sr. 

The Passing

The description they give is a lot better than I could do: "A seven year passion project for director/writer/producer John Huckert, The Passing is a dazzling micro-budget examination of love, loneliness, and the fear of death, set against an increasingly surreal science-fiction and horror background." This is one of those titles that not nearly enough people talk about. 

Amitville 1992: It's About Time

The second best entry in the Amityville series. The first being Amityville Horror II: The Possession. The four installments in the 'Cursed' series revolve around objects: The Evil Escape is about a lamp, A New Generation is about a cursed mirror, Dollhouse is about...well, a dollhouse. For my money, the best of the lot is this one. Hellbound: Hellraiser director Tony Randel takes on the series with finesse. 

Angel

The Angel trilogy box set has been sold out for a while, but that doesn't meen you can't buy them at all. VS sells the individual titles seperately. If I had to recommend one, it would be the first. As soon as it is about to veer into exploitation territory it takes a turn into something deeper. With great performances by Rory Calhoun and the always spectacular Susan Tyrell, this one is a real treat. Come for the synth score, stay for the egg sucking scene. 

The Candy Snatchers

This is a movie I heard about and was trying to find a decently priced copy for years. It lived up to the hype. If you're in the mood for unrelentingly bleak 70s exploitation, this is the one for you. 

Grave Robbers/Cemetery of Terror/Don't Panic

Ruben Galindo Jr. is a director I never even heard of until VS put these three movies out. Grave Robbers is a supernatural slasher concerning an axe-wielding Satanist brought back by grave robbers. Cemetery of Terror is perfect Halloween viewing fodder that tells the tale of teenagers stealing a body from the morgue as a prank only to resurrect the corpse along with all the other bodies in a nearby cemetery. Don't Panic is a Nightmare On Elm Street riff but with an evil ouija board that possesses a group of friends. Complete with dinosaur pajamas. 

Taken together, these films showcase heaps of gore, zombies, possessions, Satanic rituals and enough moody atmosphere for days. 

Dial Code: Santa Claus aka Deadly Games

Ever wonder what a mashup between Home Alone and Rambo would be like? Well, here's your answer. Kindertrauma in holiday form. 

Fade to Black

Eric Binford is the living embodiment of that 'movie trivia guy' at parties. Dennis Christopher plays his to psychotic perfection. 

SexWorld

Do you like WestWorld? Do you like hardcore films? Boy is this one for you. This is 70s adult cinema at its best. Plenty of sex of course, but also an honest look at the emotional fallout of the character's sexcapades. 

The boys at VS released this in 4K Ultra High Definition so you can see every little bead of sweat. 

'21 Catch-Up: LAMB, Dune, Last Night In Soho, Halloween Kills, TITANE

DUNE

  Thank every God for Denis Villeneuve's direction, Greig Fraser's eye, Tom Brown's art direction, and some of the best CGI ever committed to filmmaking: Dune has some of the most eye-popping visuals I've E V E R seen and evocative, brain-tickling sound design, BUT... some of the most serviceable, whelming writing latched onto it. The narrative isn't boring but it's not all _that_ engaging, either; if it weren't for the imagery and some strong performances (Chalamet, Bardem, Ferguson, Rampling, and Skarsgård [and Momoa who's such an effortlessly charismatic dude]) I would completely forget this movie. Fans of the book seem content with it because they're able to fill in the gaps but for those of us who haven't read it, it's full of esoteric holes and my trypophobic ass can't stomach it. B

LAMB

  Despite its painterly photography, stirring performances, and a typically-great trailer, Lamb is an entire waste of time. It's a great short film stretched to a full-length slog. The tale it's telling is so simple and to-the-point that there's agonizing bits of LITERAL nothing to pad it out; I could have gone to the bathroom (without hurrying back) and I wouldn't have missed anything. There are long, LONG shots of people drinking coffee, reading, or having mundane dinner conversations (don't forget the riveting scene where the dude washes potatoes!). Our two leads have no personality, chemistry, or even conflict whatsoever. The baby lamb girl stuff is funny but it also doesn't add up to much beyond some amusing imagery. The A24 Horror Movie Well has run fucking dry. C-

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

  Basically the exact inverse of Dune. This helps me forgive Edgar Wright for Baby Driver but it's further proof that he's not gonna reach greatness again without collaborators, I.e. Spaced, the Cornetto Trilogy and Scott Pilgrim. There are numerous set-pieces that, in better hands, would be great to lay eyes on. The problem is Edgar Wright seems content--or worse: confident--to wield hideous CGI to tell that story; it's a fucking *great* story but, visually, it's often indigestible. And, again, is such a shame because the script is really strong and the cast is aces, particularly Anya Taylor-Joy and Terence Stamp. C+

TITANE

  This movie is almost nonstop fucking gorgeous; the second time I watched it I kept pausing it to gawk at the photography; there are so, so many frames from it that could be striking, evocative, fascinating stills unto themselves. It also has a confounding sense of humor, bold structure, and some of the most upsetting onscreen violence I've seen in the past few years. I have so much more to say but there's just too much to get through right now; this is a complex, wholesome, weird, disgusting, audacious, special movie. To paraphrase Ebert: movies like Titane are the reason I love movies. A+

HALLOWEEN KILLS

  I don't HATE this movie, like some fans do, but I definitely don't like it either - not on the whole, anyway. It's a mess but it's not 100% be-all end-all awful. If you're a Halloween fan and you're surprised by a bad sequel, you must be new here; temper your outrage, most of them are garbage with a few things here-and-there to appreciate: the opening credits of 4, the Cookie Woman scene in 5, Busta Rhymes doing the Spider-Man imposter meme in Resurrection, etc. There are pockets in Kills where great side characters are given some memorable, funny, idiosyncratic banter - which was to be expected since that's the best shit from Halloween 2018 (a significantly less-mixed bag). I'd watch a whole Altman-esque hangout comedy, based on Halloween night, featuring all the victims in Michael's path (it makes me want to do a whole post ranking the side characters between the two movies). McBride should stick to what he does best: Comedy. He's made some funny fucking TV doing that but, here, when he tries to be capital-S SERIOUS, it's glaring what his weaknesses are. When he wanted me to laugh, I laughed, but when he wanted me to be scared...I also laughed. Thus my experience with it is crystallized as a good time and I'll never watch it again. C-

Top 100 Horror Films

In August of this year, the UN Climate Report stated 'Code Red for Humanity'. The world is likely to hit 1.5 degrees celsius in the next 20 years. California was literally on fire. Louisiana went through mass flooding. Each summer follows up the next as 'hottest summer on record.' In his book, The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells argues we could lose half of our agriculture yields because of temperature increases alone. Oceans will acidify. The disappearance of fresh water leads one to a conclusion that water will become the new oil. Because of the water scarcity, conflict between nations will increase considerably. 

So, what is the point of horror when confronted with the oncoming ecological collapse of society? To have something so existentially large cast a shadow over any boogeyman these directors and writers throw at us? 

To put it in a scientific way, seeking out what scares us provides a counterbalance to life's stresses. Some say it's a type of exposure therapy. The more we experience anxiety triggers in a controlled way, the thinking goes, the more we're able to deal with our anxiety responses in the world. Another theory was developed by Margee Kerr, a "sociologist who studies fear". Her explanation was that watching scary movies temporarily floods the nervous system with a cocktail of neurotransmitters and hormones, from dopamine to adrenaline, yielding mood boosting euphoria. The effect is not unlike riding a rollercoaster. 

Horror through the years has been born out of our anxieties with society at that point in time. 

Postwar horror dealt with fallout of atomic radiation. Giant ants and godzilla. The monsters were out there. Paranoia- fueled McCarthyism only dumped gasoline on this fire. Then came the 60s with Psycho, Peeping Tom and Black Sunday. Horror started to take itself seriously again. This seriousness only metastisized into what became the late 60s and 70s. Where the images of Vietnam were on news channels across the nation. John Carpenter mentioned there are two kinds of horror. Imagine a tribe sitting around a campfire and the chief of the tribe stands up and says the beast is out there. This is right wing horror. Now imagine sitting around that same campfire and the chief gets up and says the beast is in us. That is left wing horror. It is the latter that dominated the 70s. 

Then came Reagan. 

It's no mystery the 80s saw the rise of Jason and Freddy, the return (and revenge) of Michael, and introduced us to Chucky. External horror. Or as Carpenter points out- 'right-wing horror'. 

The two months exclusively watching horror movies had me come to terms with what I like. Gothic castles joined my other hot button words like witches, and cults. Delivered in a variety of flavors of course: Hammer horror always felt like stuffy British movies to showcase costumes and sets. AMC's FearFest always played Horror of Dracula in their marathons and it was always a chance to flip channels or go to the kitchen and whip up something to eat. Me being an immature shit, I pined for more Jason, less Dracula. "It's not nearly gory enough and the body count isn't high." It wasn't until later I got bored of visiting the same campsite, the same house on Haddonfield or checking in on 1428 Elm Street. None of these franchises were actually scary. But their ill received follow ups offered unique antidotes to the poisons they carried: A New Beginning, Freddy's Revenge, Season of the Witch.

And yet, I digress. The classics like Frankenstein, Wolf Man, Dracula and Creature For the Black Lagoon should be no more vulnerable from criticism than Halloween. In fact, nothing should be off the table. That's not the problem. The problem I see with horror geekdom is that it's a "one or the other". There is either a rejection of anything past 1970 or a rejection of anything after 1970. This can be whittled down to a generational thing. 

Mood, atmosphere and gothic storytelling have overtaken the slasher film for me. Witches, cults, demons, exorcism and haunted houses are just more interesting. If we're talking aesthetics, Dracula's castle will always be sexier than Crystal Lake. Frankenstein's lab is more ominous than the streets of Haddonfield. 

The Frankenstein series from Hammer is the perfect entry point for people who struggle getting into Hammer. Don't let them fool you with their uptight British reputation. There's vile shit going on in them. They set a mood that is the heartbeat of October. 

The American International Pictures Corman/Price Poe cycle is another movie series I've tackled this season. Tomb of Ligeia and The Masque of the Red Death in particular. Two more examples of why Vincent Price might be the greatest human being to ever live. 

Hangin' with the boys during spooky season has become a tradition. 

I started on the wild and crazy road to Paul Naschy with Inquisition and Horror Rises From the Tomb. The Untold Story stopped me in my tracks with it's cobination of vicious brutality and keystone cops humor. Evil Dead Trap, a film I always heard about but never watched, was finally ticked off the list and was well worth the wait. Xtro blew my mind in it's feverish, batshit, throw-narrative-out-the-window creativity. A Woman's Torment, Robert Findlay's take on Repulsion, helped bridge a gap to genres I didn't think of having a bridge: hardcore sex films and psychological thrillers. Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass, well...It's safe to say it's in the top 3 pieces of media of the 20's. 

Between all these discoveries, September/October 2021 will go down as one of my favorite Halloween seasons precisely because of this. To answer the question posed at the beginning, "what is the point of horror given the climate change crisis?" If it means coming to terms with the dystopian hellscape we're living in, then so be it. Once upon a time, I watched horror to get scared. What I found out is that the more I watched, the less afraid I became. Call it desensitization. Call it a lack of trying on part of the director/write. Hell, it can be both. Maybe the science is right: the dopamine and adrenaline is flowing. Every once in a while I'll come across a movie that's special and actually does give me goosebumps. A couple years ago, the other two writers on this blog pressed me to watch Savageland. A movie I never heard of. So I watched it and was left rattled. Here was a movie not even on my radar.

We have our collective backs up against a wall of shit and there doesn't seem to be any opening in it. Watching a movie isn't burying your head in the sand or 'ignoring the problem'. The problem is bigger than any one person. So lock the doors, turn out the lights and watch a scary movie. It's good for ya! 

Enough of my yammering. Now onto the list. 

The one thing I would want anyone to take away from any list I make, is a movie they never saw before. To turn someone onto a film you love is a high I always chase. There's nothing wrong with wanting to watch The Exorcist for the 1,739th time. But to simply sit back and say "I've hit a ceiling with what I like and don't feel the need to explore the genre" is the type of thing that makes me run the other way. As horror fans, or fans of any genre, we should always be digging through the mines of the past to see what shiny new gems we can come up with. The kind that make us scream "Holy shit I'm gonna cum!". 

Or you can just complain how your favorite movie isn't included. Whatever. 

Below are a list of films that have either rotated in and out of the list through the years or just missed the cut. 

The Phantom Carriage (1921), Haxan: Witchcraft For the Ages (1924), The Seventh Victim (1943), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Blood and Black Lace (1964), All the Colors of the Dark (1972), Tales From the Crypt (1972),  Horror Rises From the Tomb (1973), Sisters (1973), A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973), Deathdream (1974), The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue (1974), Lips of Blood (1975), The House With Laughing Windows (1976), Alucarda (1977), Beyond the Darkness (1979), Don't Go In the House (1980), Dead and Buried (1981), Der Fan (1982), The Entity (1982), Halloween: Season of the Witch (1982), Next of Kin (1982), Xtro (1982), Sole Survivor (1984), Friday the 13th Pt. V: A New Beginning (1985), Phenomena (1985), The Fly (1986), From Beyond (1986), Anguish (1987), Blood Rage (1987), The Gate (1987), Near Dark (1987), A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), Prince of Darkness (1987), Slugs (1988), Misery (1990), Cemetery Man (1994), In the Mouth of Madness (1994), Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), Ringu (1998), The Mist (2007), REC (2007), Trick R Treat (2007), Lake Mungo (2008), The House of the Devil (2009), The Innkeepers (2011), Lords of Salem (2012), The Babadook (2014), It Follows (2014), The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015), The Wailing (2016), Gerald's Game (2017), Terrified (2017), Suspiria (2018), Doctor Sleep (2019), The Empty Man (2020), Barbarian (2022), Nope (2022), Pearl (2022)