The Monkees in Monstrous Peril #3: "I Was a Teenage Monster!"

Last year, we visited the Monkees as they ran amok in a haunted house (Monkee See, Monkee Die) and had to fight off an entire castle of Universal Monster knockoffs (The Monstrous Monkee Mash). But the Monkees had several other flirtations with the supernatural and the macabre in the short run of their popular series, and so let's pick up the ball yet again for this year's Countdown to Halloween for more silly hijinks with one of my favorite groups.

One thing that I really admire about the plots of Monkee episodes (if plots they be indeed) is that they waste little time in jumping straight into the goofiness. After all, the boys have to cram a zillion one-liners, a song or two, flirting with whatever girls are at hand, and lots of scenes of them running about like crazy into a mere 25 minutes. It helps a great deal if they walk into a scenario and all of the major players are ready to get going straight away.

So it goes with I Was a Teenage Monster, the 18th episode of the first season of The Monkees TV show, which aired originally on January 16, 1967. True to form for a horror-centric Monkees story, the episode starts with the requisite castle shot and the brief eerie wail of a theremin, before we cut to the wise-cracking Monkees approaching the front door. Micky Dolenz comments that the place "looks like it was condemned before it was built" and Mike Nesmith backs that up by saying it looks "like a high-rise garbage dump." Mike knocks on the door and the group is met by a man wearing a white lab coat who is quite clearly expecting the band to arrive. He even says so. The actor playing the doctor is John Hoyt, a character actor long familiar to fans of TV from the 1950s through the 1980s, but who started out on Broadway in the early 1930s and began a film career in the late '40s.

The Monkees try to introduce themselves, but the doctor, last name Mendoza, doesn't even shake their hands. The band is confused, because they thought there was a party going on at the castle for which they were to provide the entertainment, but the doctor has seemingly tricked them into coming. He has other plans, you see... he wants the Monkees to... TEACH!

Mendoza convinces them to help by saying they are to teach a youngster, for whom "we have such HIGH hopes!" Before the first minute has even passed, the mood is interrupted by the doctor's assistant, who leads the doctor downstairs into the castle's laboratory. Referring to the doctor as "master," the toady named Groot (that's right... Groot) informs the doctor that "everything is in readiness," to which Mendoza replies, "Good! Good! We shall create the greatest rock 'n' roll singer in za world!" (Mendoza has a slight accent.) The doctor pulls aside a sheet that is draped over a huge slab, and on that slab is revealed a huge monstrous creation, much akin to Frankenstein's monster.

The monster is played by the late Richard Kiel, the acromegaly-plagued 7'2" actor who was exceedingly memorable in a wide variety of roles throughout his career. For me, this has been somewhat of The Year of Kiel at the movie theatres, as I not only got to see him in his arguably finest moment as Jaws, the steel-toothed villain who battles James Bond in 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me, on the big screen again this past summer, but I also saw him play the titular caveman Eegah when that film was shown during the recent live tour for the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 series. And here I get to see Kiel once again (albeit only on my computer), essaying a comedic take on his usual role as a heavy, with a much more mod-looking, shaggy haircut than a monster usually gets in these sorts of affairs. (Most definitely a sign of the times in which the episode was filmed.)

Oh, but first, we have to play the Monkees' opening theme song...

After the theme song and a quick plug for Kellogg's cereals, we dive right back into the story. Mike questions the doctor about teaching rock 'n' roll, and Mendoza reacts, "That's right! Rock 'n' roll really appeals to the little monsters!" Asked if the youngster is the doctor's son, he says "Yes, you could say he is my own... flesh and blood" and then laughs uproariously at his own comment. The doctor decides that the boys need to meet "his son" and toddles off to prepare the meeting. Mike, ever cautious, stops Davy and says, "You know there are overtones to this that I don't like!" but Davy says, "Don't ya get it? Flesh and blood... it's a joke!" Both laugh in the manner that the doctor did before, but then both turn to the camera and grimace, knowing full well that the band is once again in deep trouble.

In the basement lab, the band asks to see the little monster, and the doctor obliges, once more pulling the sheet off the slab. The boys are horrified – Micky cries out, "The little monster... is... a little monster!" – and try to come up with reasons why they should leave right away. Peter, meanwhile, goes up to the creature to study him more closely. Mike tells the doc, "You can't really expect us to teach a monster to sing?" but Mendoza reasons that "He's not a monster... he's a machine." Mike's quick retort is "Well, we can't tutor a computer!" But Peter cuts in, "I find it hard to believe that he's dangerous" and the monster opens his eyes and groans deeply. Peter tickles the creature and says "He wouldn't hurt a fly!" and the monster puts on a smile and groans again.

The other three try to leave but the doctor stands in their way, claiming that "Science must be served!" Mike says that he "can't risk the lives of me and my men... for such a foolhardy experiment... and for such a pittance of a sum of a hundred dollars!" The doctor doubles their money and the next shot shows the four Monkees wearing lab coats – Davy and Micky even have crazy wigs on their heads – and each one holds a beaker containing some chemical or another. They say in tandem, "SCIENCE MUST BE SERVED!"

The doctor claims that his "android" already knows how to sing, and when he claps his hands, the monster goes, "Goo-ra! Goo-ra! Goo-ra!" The doctor explains it as "an old Transylvania folk song." Asked to translate, Mike offers up, "Jimmy crack corn and I don't care!" The doctor unbuckles the monster, which makes the Monkees nervous, and Micky expresses worries that "his pants will fall down," not wishing to make the doctor think he is actually scared. The doctor leaves his creation with the boys alone, and the monster reaches out his enormous hand in friendship. Micky, Mike and Davy all shake the hand in unison nervously, but when Davy sneezes, the monster says perfectly politely, "Gesundheit!" The boys are shocked to hear this and it calms them down temporarily, but then the monster follows it up with a huge roar which makes them freak out anew.

Peter, however, really likes the monster, and as many things with Peter go, his reaction reverts to that of a child. "You said that if I made dinner every night and made my bed, that I could have a pet!" and the boys agree that such was the deal. Mike says, "Alright, but the first night you don't feed it, back he goes!" Micky has other things on his mind, wondering aloud about how amazing it is to think that this monster was created in the very lab in which they stand, but absentmindedly almost knocks an entire beaker full of some concoction onto the floor. Luckily, Mike catches it in time, and says, "You almost dropped his mother!" to which the monster looks sadly.

Later, in the music room, the boys try to work with the monster to turn him into a rock 'n' roll star. They decide to name him, to which Mike offers up "Frankie Frankenstein." "I can see it now in lights... all... around... the mausoleum." Davy rejects the name for a singer, because he "doesn't even sound Italian." Micky taps the monster with his drumsticks, and the monster spits out a very clear, non-monster-like "Don't do that!" He decides to change the monster's look, starting with "a Beatle haircut," and the monster's hair switches to a mop-top, "then dark glasses," and he is suddenly wearing dark, rectangular-lensed wireframes, "some groovy clothes," his outfit changes, "and a guitar." The monster strums the instrument awkwardly, and Micky asks Mike how he looks. "He looks like a long-haired, near-sighted monster with a guitar."

The Monkees decide to teach the monster how to move onstage, but when he swings to the left, he sends Peter and his bass flying away, and when he switches to the right, Davy goes sprawling with his tambourine. Micky has the monster try the drums, telling the creature that the trick is to "very gentle... veeeeerrrrry gentle." On the count of three, the monster jabs the drumsticks straight through the skins on the tom-toms while kicking a hole through the bass drum. "Some style!" says Micky, "Where d'ya keep your brains?" The monster smiles widely and holds up his hands, snapping the sticks into pieces as he does.

A little bit later, the monster is shown strumming the guitar and yelling out, "Goo-ra! Goo-ra!" again. The boys, still trying to escape the castle, decide that he doesn't sound half bad and tell the doctor they will be back in the morning to work on his voice. The doctor says the mountain road is too treacherous at night, and calls Groot to prepare their rooms for the night. As the boys split the room, the doctor has the monster play "Goo-ra!" again and seems pretty pleased with the result. Once the boys are gone, the doctor talks to Groot about the rest of his plan... to switch the voices of the Monkees into the monster. Groot asks how this is to be done, and Mendoza says, "It's very simple. We merely unite the frontal lobe with coaxial conduits and force the cerebellum to proliferate to the reflexes. Do you understand?" to which Groot replies, "All except the last part, master!" 'What last part?" "The part after 'It's very simple...'"

In their room, the Monkees continue to try and look for a way out of their predicament. Micky opens up the closet door and finds a gorgeous, blonde woman standing there. They ask who she is and she tells them she is "the doctor's beautiful daughter." When she is asked what she has to do with "all of this," she replies, "Nothing. I'm the sequel." They close the closet door and Mike expresses worry that "200 dollars isn't going to do us any good if we're dead." Micky says, "Yeah, we should have asked for 250."

They decided to try to calm themselves down with a little television viewing. The program on the tube is a mad scientist movie where the doctor is discussing an operation with his doctor. Davy tries to stretch out on a couch, but he falls through the back cushion and disappears through a trap door. Mike calls out to him and realizes that his friend has gone missing. He sits down on a chair against the wall, but the wall spins around and Mike disappears, replaced by a second empty chair. Micky then seeks out Mike but is pulled feet first through the curtains. Finally, Peter has a bag thrown over his head by Groot the henchman.

In the laboratory, the four Monkees find themselves strapped onto a large, rectangular slab with helmets on their heads attached via electrodes. The doctor tries to assure them that this sort of experiment need not be fatal, but then shocks himself when he is handed two wires. Soon, the experiment begins, but while the machinery starts pulsing, Davy expresses concern over getting a headache. "Oh, don't worry," says the doctor, "there won't be any headache. But you won't be able to make a fist for three weeks!" and then he laughs crazily again. Davy continues to panic, and the doctor tells him to relax. He turns to the camera in the manner of a medicinal advertisement and states, "My electricity gets into the bloodstream seconds faster than aspirin." The doctor shouts out ever more ridiculous orders to Groot: "Turn the coaxial knob to full!" "Set the input output to whatever!" "Move the quasar to mellow!"

With such orders, even the bound Monkees are starting to doubt the science behind the experiment, but then the doctor throws the last switch. There is a series of four explosions, one behind each Monkee on the large slab. He orders the boys to sing, and Micky starts out meekly and unsure of himself with "Here we come... walkin' down the street...," Mike joins in on "We get the funniest looks from... everyone we meet..." and then Peter comes in on "Hey, hey, we're the Monkees." Davy joins the rest on the rest of the chorus, and the monster listens with great interest, taking in every note. Finally, the monster's voice seems to start up like an old cranked Victrola, and the sound coming out of his mouth is that of the four blended voices (along with the music) of the Monkees themselves. In the middle of the room, Doctor Mendoza and Groot dance together in victory while the Monkees, still strapped to the slab, look on with shocked faces.

Mike warns the doctor that he will be sorry when the police hear about it, but the doctor has a plan for this as well. He hypnotizes the boys by holding a device to their heads, one at a time, and telling them "You will remember nothing" to which they each reply "I will remember nothing." However, he goes one body too far and does the same thing to Groot, whom he then slaps and says, "Not you!" He then discusses with Groot their final experiment for the next day: whether the monster can fool an entire audience.

The next day, as said, the Monkees are preparing their instruments onstage for the experiment. Mendoza asks the boys how they are feeling, and they all seem to be feeling fine but very confused when the doctor refers to an experiment. They attempt to start playing Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day, but the instruments are all out of tune and none of their voices can get anywhere near harmony. The doctor demands his money back, saying that the band told him that they were trained musicians. Mike coughs up the dough and hands it over and the band, still under hypnosis, try to depart. But the doctor stops them, wishing them to see his new discovery, The Swinging Android. The monster steps onto stage in his "cool" regalia and starts to strum his guitar. He plays the same song perfectly and exactly like the Monkees.

Afterward, the Monkees are confused as to why the monster played and sounded exactly like them. Suddenly, Micky remembers something about a laboratory, and then all of them start to be flooded with memories of what happened to them. They check the closet where the doctor's beautiful daughter was kept, and Micky tells her, "Your father stole our voices and gave them to that monster. Now what do you think about that?" The girl is shown reading a script with the Monkees logo emblazoned across the front of it, and says, "Just wait until the sequel. A vampire turns Davy into a werewolf." Micky closes the door on the creepy girl, whining "I don't wanna hear it!"

In the lab, the quartet find the monster strapped back into his normal place, and Micky attempts to reverse the experiment. With the boys moving at high-speed, they try every knob on the machinery, and then strap themselves back onto their slab and helmets. However, when it comes time for Micky to throw the final switch, he can't quite reach it from his position. The machine starts to wind down and they have to start all over again. Meanwhile, the doctor and his toady stroll the halls in triumph, and the doctor can't resist stopping at a magical mirror on the wall. Asking "who is the evilest one of all?," the doctor is disappointed to find out another doctor in Dusseldorf, Germany is the truly evilest one. The mirror, who is voiced by James Frawley, who directed the vast majority of other Monkees episodes (Sidney Miller did the honors here), says, "You are only second best. You vill have to try harder. And don't yell at me; I only vork here."

Back on the slab, Micky figures he has the wiring straightened out now, but Mike says he isn't worried because he "is very fatalistic. I figure either an electrode has my name on it or it hasn't." Micky has by now employed the crook end of a cane to help him reach all of the knobs and switches, but is very nervous about hitting them. He rattles the cane wildly as he hits everything in sight, and the machinery starts to smoke and overreact. The monster starts to speaker like a hippy, saying "Groovy, man. That's not my bag. Don't get uptight." Davy notices the change, and the monster says, "Let's split... go to my pad. That's where it's at. Groovy? You dig?" Mike rolls his eyes and says, "Oh, great. Now we've got a super hippy on our hands."

Micky figures that they have corrected themselves, but we see Mike have a strange reaction and he starts saying, in Kiel's deep voice, "Kill! Kill!" Micky adjusts the dials and pops the switch again. The monster comes loose and immediately says, in a lisping voice, "I would do this room in French provincial!" He follows that up with "The color scheme should be lavender and puce... or this." The monster picks up a vat containing something or other, but Micky takes it from him, saying he has one more adjustment to make. He sets the formula down, but it falls and crashes to the floor, alerting Doctor Mendoza upstairs. He runs down and has Micky taken captive by Groot. Micky yells "Curse you, Red Baron!" in a nod to the popular Snoopy oath of the day. The doctor orders the monster to kill the rest of the Monkees, but Peter stops him briefly by calling him "Andy" (short for "Android").

He tells the monster that the doctor is out to exploit him, "You're only a pawn in his hands, a tool for his avaricious ambitions!" When Mike asks where Peter got words like that, Davy says "It's in the script. On page 28." Peter continues, claiming the doctor wants 60% of his income. The monster says "60 per cent?" and turns on the doctor, who says he only wants 25% and orders him to "Kill that Peter!" But Peter turns the monster around again by simply saying, "He's a bad man!" The monster keeps turning back and forth from Mendoza to Peter over and over again, and the strains of the song Auntie Grizelda being to play. With the music on, the monster starts to dance instead.

As the creatures spins and twirls, the Monkees free themselves from the slab and start to run all over castle while the song continues to play. The monster chases them at one point, but so too do a pack of villagers with torches, who appear from out of nowhere. Micky stops to drink a potion and starts to act like he is being transformed. He turns his back on his friends and the audience, but then turns around and he is fine, if not a little disappointed. Mike flips a switch on the lab equipment, and we see a quick clip from the old crappy Danish monster flick, Reptilicus, where the giant reptile breathes a quick snort of fire. Davy leaps into the monster's waiting arms and at first it looks like a cute move. But then Davy punches him with a boxing glove that suddenly appears on his fist. (At least he barely taps the monster, who lets Davy go without a fight.)

Mike plays the surface of the lab equipment like the Phantom of the Opera would play a pipe organ, but is chased away by Mendoza. Micky plays a rack of equipment and beakers like a xylophone and convinces the monster to take over, which he does happily. The Monkees form a football huddle but stop the monster from joining in, so he and the doctor and toady wait patiently. Davy opens the closet door and finds the doctor's daughter. She grabs him and kiss him. Davy then reaches for a sign that says, "A sequel? You better believe it!" At another point, the monster is seated in a chair while the boys give him a manicure and brush his hair. Reptilicus is shown attacking the Netherlands again for no real good reason but for kicks. The monster sits around a campfire roasting marshmallows with the villagers. Finally, the Monkees capture the doctor and strap him to his own slab as Reptilicus seems to either lie down for a nap or die. The song ends.

In the epilogue, Mike is shown talking to the police on the phone. "That's right, Officer. It's the big scary-looking house at the very top of the hill." He has to stop to ask the doctor for directions, but the doctor has been completely tied up by the other Monkees. He tells them the name of the street is Rosebud Lane, and Mike says, "Rosebud? I thought that was the name of a sled." Micky insists he got the wiring correct and that they shouldn't have lost any musical abilities. "We didn't have any to spare," replies Peter. To put them to a test, Mike and Peter pick up guitars while Davy picks up maracas, but on the count of three, the maracas and guitars shatter into pieces while the amps behind them short out and catch on fire. Cue closing credit sequence.

This is a really fun episode of the Monkees, chiefly for the game performance of Richard Kiel. Yes, he finds himself typecast in the role of yet another monster, but he gets loads of little opportunities during the episode to step outside of the character and act against type. He also gets to dance with great abandon, try on cool clothes, and switch personas more than once. It is actually a pretty full role for the length of a sitcom, and I think that Kiel seems to be having great fun being so silly throughout the show. Hoyt, too, seems to be having a ball playing a part that is really far beneath his talent, but then again, so were many of the parts he ended up playing in his long television career.

As promised by the doctor's beautiful doctor, there was a sequel to this, only the details got shifted slightly. The episode was the already discussed The Monstrous Monkee Mash, which aired almost exactly a year after this episode. While there is a vampire villain who turns a Monkee into a werewolf, Micky is the victim, while poor Davy is selected to become a new vampire instead. It hardly matters; like most of the details within a Monkees episode, they are only there for fleeting reference, nothing sticks forever, and the only important thing was record sales. And being truly, truly silly, something which this episode does in spades. As one expects from the Monkees...

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it...

Other titles in this series:

#1 "Monkee See, Monkee Die"
#2 "The Monstrous Monkee Mash"

This Week in Rixflix #19 : August 18-24, 2017

OK, let's get this ship righted... I have missed a few weeks in-between my last supposedly weekly installment of this series and this post. I am not going to go into the hows and whys, apart from saying that I, for the last week of July and the beginning of this month, decided to concentrate full-time on the TCM online course on Alfred Hitchcock in order to complete everything before the course's expiration date (August 5th). That's my excuse for the first couple of weeks I missed for This Week in Rixflix; the rest is my own concern. 

But complete the TCM course I did, and not only that (as I posted on Facebook a while back), between July 6th and August 10th – a span of 36 days – I watched 42 of the 56 feature-length films that Hitchcock directed in his lifetime. Twelve of those movies (about half of them silent features) were first-time views for me, of which I will speak more on The Cinema 4 Pylon in coming weeks. (If you think this isn't going to turn into a couple editions of my All or Nothing series, you'd better rethink your position...) Most amazingly to me, in that group of 42 films, I never got around to watching some of my favorite selections of The Master, such as Psycho, North by Northwest, The Birds, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man, and my #1 Hitchcock film overall, Strangers on a Train. So now I have decided to casually play catch up with the rest of the films, so I can say that I have watched as much of his available oeuvre as I could within the same year. The Birds was the first film in that follow-up, and I plan on relaxing with NxNW this coming weekend, if not more. 

I just couldn't stop at 42, you know...

The Numbers: 

This week's feature film count: 21; 15 first-time viewings and 6 repeats.
Highest-rated feature-length film: The Birds (1963) – 9/9
Lowest-rated feature-length film: Toxic Shark (2017) – 4/9
Average films per day in August so far: 2.4167
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 2.97
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 254

And, to finish off the course, here is the list of the 42 Hitchcock films that I watched from July 6, 2017 to August 10, 2017. I have lined them up chronologically by release year (but not necessarily in order of release) so you can get a quick snapshot of the breadth of the man's career. The list covers 49 years of the man's work, extending from the silent era all the way up to Family Plot in 1976, the only Hitchcock film I saw in a theatre within the same year of its release:

1927
Downhill (1st time)
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
The Ring (1st time)

1928
Champagne (1st time)
The Farmer's Wife (1st time)

1929
Blackmail
The Manxman (1st time)

1930
Murder!

1931
Mary
Number Seventeen (1st time)
The Skin Game (1st time)

1932
Rich and Strange (1st time)

1934
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Waltzes from Vienna [Strauss' Great Waltz] (1st time)

1935
The 39 Steps

1936
Sabotage
Secret Agent

1937
Young and Innocent (1st time)

1938
The Lady Vanishes

1939
Jamaica Inn

1940
Foreign Correspondent
Rebecca

1941
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Suspicion

1942
Saboteur

1943
Shadow of a Doubt

1944
Lifeboat

1945
Spellbound

1946
Notorious

1947
The Paradine Case

1948
Rope

1950
Stage Fright

1953
I Confess (1st time)

1954
Dial M for Murder
Rear Window

1955
The Trouble with Harry

1956
The Man Who Knew Too Much

1958
Vertigo

1964
Marnie

1966
Torn Curtain

1972
Frenzy

1976
Family Plot


This Week's Reviews:

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016) Dir.: Edward Zwick – I would ask "Did we need another Jack Reacher film?" but then I would have to also ask "Did we need the first Jack Reacher film?" No, and no, would be my hard answers. This is not Tom Cruise hate, because as my wife will tell you, he is my boyfriend. Or at least she loves to say that because I seemingly have no qualms about going to the theatre to see the latest Mission: Impossible installment or the latest big-budget sci-fi or action flick featuring him in the lead. (There is a huge story behind all of this Cruise discussion between my wife and myself, only some of which I have made clear on Facebook; maybe in the near future.) Despite my dislike for his weird religious cult (sorry, but until their practices are more open to the public, that's what they are), I think Cruise is just fine as an action star, and even a pretty good actor in the right role. (And he is dead on hilarious in Tropic Thunder...)

So, I do see nearly everything that Cruise puts out eventually, though I don't necessarily see many of them in theatres apart from the hugest blockbusters. And then there are these Jack Reacher films, based on an extremely popular series of books that I cannot (and possibly never will) ever fathom. Of course, people I knew made a lot of jokes when the first movie came out about "Jack Reach-around," and other people told me how fantastic the books are but that Cruise was the completely wrong choice for the titular role. Part of this attitude is pretty easy to understand: Cruise is very nearly a foot shorter than the six-foot-five Reacher in the books, and at least 75-80 pounds lighter. And I totally understand that if you read the books and envision this Paul Bunyan of a man battling against the world, and then you go to the movies and see what amounts to a pipsqueak – a very muscular pipsqueak, but a pipsqueak nonetheless, I can understand your disappointment. I am not going to rip on the books only to say, "Not interested" because from the plots of the two films that I have seen, they would not be my thing at all. It doesn't matter who is in the role. Seems more like a thing for people who enjoy JAG or NCIS. I liked the first film a little bit more, which surprises me, because this sequel has Cobie Smulders in it, whom I like in everything. (Sometimes, she is the best part of that "everything," but you know what I am saying...) I just found myself mired in a pool of general annoyance at the absolutely incoherent and unbelievable plot line – especially the parts involving a girl who may or may not be Reacher's daughter – which itself has found praise in its book version.

So that's the split line between me and the book-reading world right now. (OK, there are actually a great many places where I am divided against the rest of the book-reading world, but this is the one under discussion right now.) I am not going to hold forth further until the day that I, out of sheer desperation in an airport somewhere, decide to actually read a Jack Reacher novel. Perhaps I will get swept up in Lee Child's prose and find a way to buy into this world of a brooding drifter who gets caught up in conspiracy after conspiracy against him; perhaps I won't. For now, I will just say that I am not fond of the movie series, but apparently, neither are many fans of the books. On this, we can at least currently agree. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Blair Witch (2016) Dir.: Adam Wingard – Why? I am a horror movie fan of longstanding, but even I did not want to see another iteration of The Blair Witch Project come around at all. Do I still like the original film? Well, I did when it came out even though many people of my acquaintance claimed they got sick from the whirling handheld camerawork or just thought the movie was a dumb idea and poorly acted. I thought the original film was pretty spooky, was a clever way to transfuse some new blood into what at that point was a fairly stale horror environment (in my opinion, though I am sure you can always find others who professed the same at the time), and yes, was amateurishly acted and produced but with a huge amount of chutzpah. That chutzpah got its creators, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, a ton of box office and critical buzz, and even put them on the cover of Time, and that was pretty remarkable at the, ahem, time. I saw it a couple of times in the theatre in 1999, bought the DVD, and watched it twice more trying to convince people they should also "at least see it" before badmouthing it. Then I saw Joe Berlinger's cranked out sequel in 2000 on DVD instead of the theatres because of poor word of mouth, though I did watch the phony documentary promoting the second film at the time it appeared on TV. At that point, I then promptly set the Blair Witch story aside, possibly even to shut it away forever. I just no longer cared. Stand me in the corner.

It's 18 years later, and there is a whole new generation of suckers, er, young millennial horror fans out there that may not even know that The Blair Witch Project was ever even a thing. The found footage device that served as the original film's gimmick is now done practically everyday on YouTube and other sites, and there have been innumerable feature films since released in the style (the bulk of them in the horror genre), many of them quite successful. While The Blair Witch Project was nowhere near the first such film to use found footage, it was certainly one of the biggest in terms of the cultural impact it had almost immediately. I am also pretty sure that someone more knowledgable on the entire subject than I probably has connected all the dots between TBWP and the Creepypasta phenomena that we must suffer through today.

If there were a chance for a remake/sequel (because, come on, the new film really serves as both) of TBWP to be pulled off even halfway decently, I would think that director Adam Wingard would be in the list of those who could do it. A hugely prolific talent, Wingard tends to work mainly in horror, but also has a foot in the supposed "mumblecore" genre (a term that I hate). While I did just finish watching his new Netflix version of Death Note and was mildly disappointed in the result (possibly more on that film next week), WIngard has, in recent years, directed two of my favorite recent horror films – You're Next and The Guest – and I am also excited about his involvement in the eventual production of Godzilla vs. Kong (to be released in 2020). As for the movie at hand, I will say that he is the perfect pick for someone to replicate the look and feel of the original film, which is what Blair Witch tries and mostly succeeds at artistically. The film builds up some decent atmosphere, and the house they find (c'mon, you know they have to find her house eventually) is a good deal more extensive and the action there more explicitly detailed than in the original. While I never agreed with those who ripped into the amateurish acting, I will say that the cast in the new film are all most likely professionals (hey, the girl with the purple hair plays Arthur's sister Dot in the new Tick series on Amazon), but the downside to that is the original amateur feel is what I liked in the first film. The people in this film, girls included, all seem to have boners over having as many cameras as possible on them.

Now about those cameras... For me, not being a video game player of any real account, when the film starts revving up and looking more like a first person shooter being attacked, I kind of tuned out of the whole thing. I also felt, despite being told how everybody had body cameras and whatnot filming the affair that some of the angles still did not make sense to me. I am certain someone out there will protest that the angles all made sense – "You're forgetting about the crotch cam she crammed in her shorts, dude!" – but to me, that is always an annoyance in found footage films. (The only thing more annoying is when someone doesn't just drop the goddamned camera and just fucking run for it...) Me? I don't care if I saw film footage of my long lost sister (Heather Donahue, the girl from the first film) in window of the house where the evil witch supposedly lives (the premise of this film), I'm not going out in those stupid woods. I don't even believe in the supernatural at all, but if I found evidence, however sparse, that my sister is where many people are rumored to have gone missing over the years, I will hire every private detective in the book to go do the dirty work. When they don't come back, well, gather everything you have and bring it to the cops. Fuck those woods. As for the film, I am not going to tell it screw off, but I have seen it, and now I have seen two Wingard films in two weeks that have left me mostly cold. Not what i was expecting from someone that I thought had caught fire. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Dude Bro Party Massacre III (2015) Dir.: Tomm Jacobsen, Michael Rousselet and Jon Salmon – I completely stumbled upon this film by absolute accident, and then I spent a couple of wild hours early that morning reveling in sick, gory effects and an almost completely unrestrained comic sensibility. I laughed so much that I couldn't believe it, and then I had to keep stopping the video so that my brain could catch up with the flurries of rapid fire gags and insults via a great many replays of scenes. The third in a series of films that don't really exist, Dude Bro Party Massacre III operates somewhere in the vicinity of South Park as far as humor goes, and if that is not your cup of tea, please move it along, because we won't be friends. As I said, this is supposed to be Part III of a series, and the first two non-existent films are recounted at the very beginning, much in the style of the Friday the 13th series. But the film is far more than a mere slasher parody; it acts like a lost VHS tape of a film that would have disappeared altogether if some über-geek hadn't plopped a tape into his deck and captured the thing for his own collection. (It seems an impossibility that anything could disappear like that, but there are still some obscure films from the '80s that I have on tape that I have yet to see on DVD.)

I don't know which channel that makes its hay by selling advertising would have shown this film uncut back then, but we get flashes of fake advertisements intermittently throughout Dude Bro III that, even at a mere second or two are pretty entertaining. (The feeling is that the taper paused the tape at each commercial break and then started it again at the end of the break.) In one ad is Matt Oswalt, brother of Patton Oswalt, and that is more than mere coincidence, because Patton shows up in a supporting role (as a favor) in the main plot of the film (as the sheriff). We also get a brief flash, most surprisingly, of Larry King – yes, that Larry King – in another intentional cameo. The people behind the film are a comedy troupe called 5-Second Films, who are pretty well known on the interwebs for their long-running site of the same name. I have been to the site off and on over the past decade, but it had been long enough (certainly more than five seconds) that I was completely unaware they had sprung this film upon the world. I think that I may have enjoyed it even more the way that I did discover it, rifling through archive.org that morning. (Yes, I found it because someone posted it illegally; no, I did not download it for myself.) This one will definitely get added to my collection once I start buying discs off Amazon again, but if they don't put this out as a collector's item on VHS, I would be really upset. A must watch for me again (and again) in the very, very near future. It may become a perennial. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Last Girl Standing (2015) Dir.: Benjamin R. Moody – Longtime followers of this site might recall that over the past couple of years, I reviewed two different titles based around the popular slasher movie concept of the last survivor who fights the villain/monster to the death known as the "final girl". I hated one of those films, that being Final Girl (with Abigail Breslin) but loved the other one, the far more intentionally comedic and dimension-warping The Final Girls (with Taissa Farmiga, Vera's little sis). Of course, just like slasher films themselves, those two films weren't going to be the only films that would dabble with the fringe concept outside of the normal run of slasher films. At the same time as those other films were released in 2015 came Last Girl Standing (though I have only discovered its existence recently), yet another variation on the final girl trope. While I still feel The Final Girls is the most fun and accomplished of the three films, but Last Girl Standing has plenty of spunk – and loads of great gruesome gore – of its own.

Just like Dude Bro Party Massacre III, this film is technically a sequel to a movie that does not exist. The difference in tone is one of awareness. Dude Bro is completely aware of its existence as a winking and more than nudging comedy in a completely ridiculous film universe; it never allows for reality to step into it in any way, not even in its fake commercial breaks. Not so with Last Girl Standing, where its heroine, Camryn (an excellent Akasha Villalobos), is the lone survivor of a horrific attack on herself and her fellow campers by a serial killer known as The Hunter. That set-up may be a basic one for a slasher scenario, but for Camryn, the horror is all too real. This film is no tongue-in-cheek affair; Camryn has PTSD from what occurred, and it is affecting her life from every possible angle. She shuts herself down from the world and hides behind the counter and clothes at the dry cleaning establishment that has hired, where the owners have special rules where she doesn't interact with customers. Camryn is haunted by constant flashbacks of The Hunter, to the point where she starts confusing reality and what both she and we first think are hallucinations. Or is she being stalked by someone posing as The Hunter, the killer she herself dispatched by hand? Or is The Hunter really back in her life? And then stuff starts to get really weird, and bodies start piling up...

Last Girl Standing is a bare bones production, filmed in Austin, Texas with a mostly local cast and crew. (Villalobos' husband plays her love interest; that's how tight-knit the work is.) This is not to say that there isn't production value on display in the film, especially in relation to the rather extensive gore effects, all practical and mostly terrific. Don't be fooled either... the film looks and feels like an earnest drama (which it is) that takes a deeper look into a stock slasher character than we normally get to see, but it doesn't, to paraphrase Mr. Creosote, skimp on the pâté. And yet, for much of its running time, it is not a normal genre film either, though it does take a turn deep in the second half where it goes full bore towards its grim conclusion. I was more than pleasantly surprised by the film, though it certainly has some areas with which I found fault. Since I first watched the film, I wavered a bit in my feelings for it, and felt I was a bit stingy in my initial response when I added it to my film diary on Letterboxd. But after thinking about it for over a week and also watching a big chunk of the film a second time to get the mood back, I finally settled on 6/9.

The Big Sick (2017) Dir.: Michael Showalter – You know, sometimes you just need The Big Sick to clean out your system. I love the summer movie season. I love the middle months of the year where giant action blockbusters all try to outdo each other for the weekly box office take. And you will never hear me cry about there being too many superhero movies, because they are exactly the movies I wanted to see when I was a kid but were rarely made because the effects just weren't there. But even I long for the occasional break from BIF! POW! WHAM! KA-BOOM! and that is where The Big Sick came to our rescue today.

Jen and I had been planning to see if for a good while now – pretty much since its creators hit the talk show circuit – but just hadn't made it. The Big Sick is a marvelous comedy-drama about the beginnings of the real life relationship between comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, writer and producer Emily V. Gordon. They meet cute, they fall in love, they break up, and then he ends up having to sign as her husband (even though they weren't married then) to induce a coma to possibly save her life. It's quite funny and adorable, but becomes almost entirely a drama for a long chunk of the film as he not only juggles possibly losing the women he loves, but also dealing with her initially surly parents and with his own family, who want him in an arranged marriage with someone else from Pakistan. Kudos to Michael Showalter, Nanjiani, Gordon, and Judd Apatow for bringing this story to the big screen. It's a pretty satisfying, small film, and I hope it gets some recognition come awards season. – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) Dir.: Mike Flanagan – A while back, my pal Aaron mentioned to me via Facebook Messenger that the Ouija sequel was, in his words, "surprisingly enjoyable". We had been discussing numerous other items of worth (to us, at least) and so I rather passed by his statement without comment. I hadn't the inclination to watch the sequel, as I had leapt on the first film, mostly out of loyalty to Olivia (Bates Motel) Cooke, and found it severely lacking apart from her participation. And so I wandered for weeks after that, secure in the knowledge that I would probably avoid the sequel for a good while, but Aaron's words kind of nagged at me. Our viewing tastes are fairly similar, and even when we don't agree on a project, we still are able to see what it is the other one found intriguing in a film. Seeing the film pop up on Cinemax one evening, I recorded Ouija: Origin of Evil and when I started watching it the next day, I found the opening of the film a lot of fun and pretty captivating. As the film rolled on, I continued to enjoy what I was seeing, and it was only in perhaps the final half hour that I finally wearied of the story they were telling me, which was that of the fate of a family that occupied a house visited by the characters in the original film. There was also the use of an effect that I am not especially fond of in films today, something I will refer to as the "Black Hole Sun effect" (after the Soundgarden video) that really takes me out of nearly any film that employs it (which, today, is a lot of horror films).

Still, even after tiring of the story and that stupid effect, I felt the film was pretty taut and sharply directed, and a damn sight better than the original. About halfway through, I decided that I needed to look up the director and found out it was Mike Flanagan, who had already delivered the truly excellent Hush a couple years ago as well as the really spooky mind-bender, Oculus. (I also liked, but not to the same degree, Absentia, from 2011.) It seems, with the recent loss of Romero and even more recent loss (this past weekend) of Tobe Hooper, that perhaps there are some openings in the ol' Masters of Horror lineup. It might be a little premature, but might I offer up Flanagan's name to the list? II feel like Wingard will eventually hit that list as well with a couple more solid films.) Flanagan has an adaptation of Stephen King's Gerald Game, in the works as a major release, so maybe his time has come. We shall see. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

Until next time,