The DAN ZONE

How to even begin with this 1990 (aka:late 80s) horror film that I just pulled off my DVD shelf for a viewing? I guess you could call it Snow White meets Carrie. Sounds horrible, I know. But somehow, it works for a 1990 (aka: late 80s) horror film.

For starters, the movie begins with girl on girl action—and by that I mean, girl on girl slashing! In front of a mirror. And it’s brutal. Now that’s my kind of movie. But naturally, this is just the prologue. It’s when we get to the actual story that the fun really begins. First, there’s the presence of scream queen Karen Black and laugh queen Lily Munster (who racked up a couple of good horror movie credits in her later years). Recently widowed Karen and her daughter are moving into the house where the mysterious mirror resides. Lily Munster works at some sort of antique shop and wants to take all the old items left in the house by the previous tenants for her shop. She leaves the mirror, probably because she’s too distracted by the books she finds on black magic and the occult.

This mirror is the perfect centerpiece for the bedroom of our female lead, Megan. Megan looks pretty much EXACTLY like Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice, which is why all the popular kids at school end up treating her like she’s Carrie. Luckily, Megan makes at least one friend, and no, it’s not her gym teacher. Typical high school bully stuff goes on, making it clear that Megan is going to need to tap into the evil within the mirror to get some nice brutal revenge on her antagonists. In fact, it’s really the mirror that ‘taps’ Megan when she essentially gets her sexy on with her own reflection as the mirror drips blood. When the mirror is done with her, it has magically transformer her into what looks like that sexy 1990 one hit wonder Alannah Myles (if Megan had grabbed a hairbrush microphone and started singing “Black Velvet” into the mirror while shaking her new perm, my life would have been complete). Once she’s gotten the Olivia Newton-John Grease finale treatment, Megan has the power to make the popular jock boy fall for her, which leads to a very The Craft moment—but, you know, with a mirror.

Megan’s metamorphosis into an evil and sexy murderess is just icing on the cake when you have Karen Black around. As usual, this be-otch is crazy! Karen has some awesome lines in this film and deserved more. Let’s see, first, right after they move, she’s on the phone with the family therapist, and when he asks how her daughter is coping with the death of her father and the move to a new house and school, Karen’s eyes get all Cookie Monster googily like they do and she barks, “I’m talking about me doctor, not my daughter!” And when Karen finds her dog dead (after it was sniffing around the mirror), she cries “First your father now this.” When a shocked Megan stammers, “It’s not the same thing,” Karen responds, “You never liked him, but he liked you!” She’s definitely a dog lover after my own heart. Later on, when a quickly evil-turning Megan gets all demonic on her mother’s ass, Karen goes “I’m going to the store Megan. Do you want me to pick you up some Midol?” PRECIOUS. Karen even ends up hooking up with the guy she calls from the Pet Sematary (I mean…cemetery) to bury her dog, which results in a very bizarre bug-hater’s nightmare of a family dinner.

But all that gay campy shit aside, there are two genuinely creepy moments in this film: a visit from Megan’s ‘father’ in the middle of the night as well as what eventually comes out of the mirror alone could support a much freakier horror film if the moviemakers had opted to exploit those elements (which is what would probably happen if this film were remade today). Other than those two scenes, while the film has a great creepy atmosphere and pretty excellent gore scenes, it’s not essentially a scary movie. And the ending scene—oh man, I was having flashbacks to the end of The Exorcist II: The Heretic, when Regan returns to her home where she was possessed and there’s bright blue light shining through all the windows, crap flying everywhere, doors banging, and the entire house rocking on its foundation. All that’s missing in Mirror, Mirror are those darned locusts. Which, you know, is the one thing that saves Mirror, Mirror from having a totally busted ending. That and the freaky thing that comes out of the mirror. You simply have to see this film if just for that ending.

Ever heard of Rolfe Kanefsky? I hadn’t either, until I discovered that I have not one but FOUR of his horror movies in my collection. So I guess that means I’m a fan.

Funny thing about Rolfe, he had a huge window for a lawsuit when Scream premiered in 1996. Four years before Randy gave us lessons on the rules of slasher films, there was David, the lead character in There’s Nothing Out There, who spouted the rules of surviving a horror movie every chance he got. That’s right kiddies. Randy the video store clerk is a total poser.

Speaking of video stores (still hot in the 90s), let’s start with the opening of There’s Nothing Out There. A blonde chick in a hot pink miniskirt and tank top is working in a video store and is suddenly attacked by a crazed killer. As she writhes and crawls with pouted lips and heaving chest across the floor of the video store (make love to the camera, baby!), we are bombarded by the cover art of VHS tapes on the shelves—classic horror titles that feature artistic drawings of curvy, busty, scantily clad women looking somehow horrified and horny at the same time (hornified?). Keep that in mind—because Rolfe likes to make films that are, in part, a discourse about the intercourse between sex and horror.

Turns out video store blondie is only dreaming. She’s actually asleep in her car—and is immediately attacked by some sort of alien with octopus arms! She drives until she crashes…

Dissolve to David…and his teenage friends. They are headed off for a weekend at a summer home. When they see police investigating a crashed car on the side of the road, David immediately pipes up worriedly, claiming this is a clear warning sign telling teenagers on their way to party and have sex that they should really go back. When they arrive at the summer home, Randy…um…I mean…David, warns them not to skinny dip, not to go off into the woods alone, not to go in the basement, to beware the cheap cat scare tactic…you get the picture. David is Randy, four years before. David’s character tries continuously to warn the others that they are in the midst of a horror movie, but they don’t listen until most of them have been slaughtered at the hands of an alien that looks kind of like the lovechild of Basket Case and that big pile of talking poo from Weird Science. David has all the answers. He’s the one who knows how to survive a horror movie. Hell, not even Randy made it past the first sequel.

Even though it was released in 92, I have a feeling There’s Nothing Out There was completed at the tail end of the 80s, because it’s more 80s than 90s. Most of the songs used in the soundtrack are very new wave sounding (nothing famous), there’s a group of punks who come to skinny dip in the water behind the summer home, and all the girls look like members of Poison, only, you know, not as pretty…

There’s Nothing Out There is low budget, extremely funny in all its familiarity, and clearly made by a lover of the genre. Rolfe also serves up the sex—and based on his imdb page, it appears he’s no stranger to ‘non-mainstream’ movies, if you will. In fact, several of the actors in this, his first film, appear in some of them. Here we get a gratuitous shower scene with a blonde chick and sex scenes galore. And Rolfe gives us a nice bit of balance when the cutest guy in the film tears of all his clothes to go skinny dipping at night. And boy is there a full moon out!

There are plenty of nods to other horror films. The slapstick humor, which is laugh out loud at times, is straight up Evil Dead, as is a face melting scene. Random blue and red lighting is thrown in that has Dario Argento written all over it. There are abundant references to stomach bursting scenes from alien horror films. And they even try to burn the alien in the oven in a very Trilogy of Terror moment. Not to mention, there’s a watery basement scene that I would swear is an ode to the film Return of the Alien’s Deadly Spawn that I just reviewed recently.

To add to the fun, there’s one guy who has total gay face. I’m sure this dude has to be gay in real life, because every line he delivers sounds somewhat queeny, not to mention that his only other credit in film on imdb is as a dancer in the original 1988 Hairspray. And not once, but TWICE in this film he lashes out against pussy—first he throws a poor little pussycat to the alien to save himself, and second, he knees one of his ‘girlfriend’ in the va-jay-jay when she is possessed by the alien after it shoots green lasers at her eyes. Yeah, There’s Nothing Out There is definitely my kind of horror film.

12 years after his first horror film (and clearly a fun time making adult entertainment), Rolfe returned to the genre where he got his start with another goody. This time around, the major inspiration seems to be the Night of the Demons series.

A bunch of college kids, including b-movie scream queen Tiffany Shepis, are involved in a hazing (imagine that) on Halloween night that involves them stealing a demonic book for a scavenger hunt from their crazy teacher (scream king Brad Dourif—you know, the guy whose soul jumps into Chucky), then spending a night in a creepy mansion. Well, the demonic book ends up in the basement, Dourif ends up in a coma, and the kids end up getting possessed by his spirit one by one when the hole to hell opens. Hole-y Night of the Demons! The long shots of dark hallways, the glowing fire in the main room where the kids are hanging out and the zooming camera signifying the rampant demonic spirit looking for a new body to inhabit are straight out of my favorite horror film of 1988.

Again, Rolfe loves camp and comedy in his horror, and there are plenty of good one-liners in this film, the kids battling each other as they turn into demons—only one at a time in this film compared to the demon party in Night of the Demons. Tiffany Shepis gets some awesome support from the blonde ‘bimbo’ in the bunny costume, who has a few surprises up her sleeve. And then there’s the absolutely adorable Parry Shen in the male lead. Parry is like the go-to guy if you want an adorable, boyish Asian guy in your film. He has also appeared in the campy horror Hatchet as well as Shrieker. I just hope he keeps making these kinds of horror movies because he totally rules.

On top of all that, there are also creepy mannequins, men in women’s clothing, Tiffany Shepis’s boobs and butt, a chainsaw, a long tongue, a creepy floating red balloon, darts, and a picture perfect Bruce Campbell cameo. And then there’s the basement ending hell hole ending, which is like something out of Amityville-3D.

Too bad Tiffany Shepis was too young to be in movies in 1992, otherwise she would have been in EVERY Rolfe Kanefsky film. Corpses, while campy and low budget, runs a little long in my opinion, but it still has its moments—and plenty of Argento lighting, plenty of gore, and plenty of undead. In fact, it starts immediately with disembowelment—on a baseball field—which leaves you with a lot of high hopes.

An evil undertaker is bringing the dead back to life in the basement of his funeral home using a special embalming fluid. His assistant happens to be Tiffany Shepis’s cute boyfriend (whose nipples she likes to squeeze—hard—after sex in a coffin). Tiffany happens to be the daughter of the Sheriff. The sheriff happens to now be marrying the ex-wife of the evil undertaker, and the ex-wife is trying to get his funeral home shut down so the city can build a mall there (and yes, there’s a reference made to Dawn of the Dead). So the undertaker is going to use the undead to fight the powers that be and get his ex-wife back. But that’s when things get gory and the undead wreak havoc.

This film seems to draw its inspiration from Re-Animator as well as Dead Alive and, of course, Evil Dead. Fun moments include a horny zombie with a constant erection because he died of a Viagra overdose and a bunch of zombies ripping of Tiffany Shepis’s clothes, to which she comment “Is that really necessary?” Jeff Fahey takes a Bruce Campbell stance to battle the undead, but the real comedy show is the MILF playing the stepmother. She totally steals the show.

Just note that this is one of those films that ‘continues’ after the credits. But the content is more like the ‘special features’ because it’s approximately 15 minutes of alternate scenes and endings! WTF?

Moving on up to the big time, Rolfe’s 2006 film Nightmare Man landed in the Afterdark Horrorfest. And people HATE this movie, which shocks me, because I think it has everything going for it. It’s scary, creepy, suspenseful, laugh-out-loud funny, gory, and has Tiffany Shepis in her best scream queen role ever. This time around, Rolfe deeply explores the fine line between hard-ons and horror.

The first half hour of this film is like a mini horror film in itself, with fantastic directing that keeps you on the edge of your seat. A woman having problems getting pregnant with her suave Italian boyfriend orders a fertility mask, but instead gets a seriously hideous looking black mask with gnarly teeth, evil eyes and devil horns. She plans to return it. When she hears someone in the house, the lights go out and she goes to look for her Italian Stallion, who calls to her from the attic. She goes up there…and…EEK!!! Fricking scary scene.

Next thing you know, Italian Stallion is driving her to some sort of nut house. Their car runs out of fuel so he offers to leave her all alone in the middle of nowhere while he walks back to a gas station. It just so happens that, to help with her therapy, one of her doctors has told the Italian Stallion to bring along the mask she thinks is coming to life as the ‘nightmare man’ when she doesn’t take her medication. So now the mask is in the trunk of the car, it turns to night, and we are treated to another fricking SCARY scene. This is what a horror movie is supposed to be. Our infertile femme fatale runs off into the woods, being chased by Nightmare Man.

At the same time, Tiffany Shepis and her friends are partying it up at a summer home in the woods (sound familiar?). It’s only Tiffany, her boyfriend, her female friend (with whom she’s had a secret lesbian relationship), and her now hetero girlfriend’s new boyfriend. Believe me, this hottie could turn anyone from dyke lover to dick lover. Anyway, this group is playing truth or dare, and when the ex-dyke is dared to do demonstrate having an orgasm, Rolfe juxtaposes her gasping and moaning performance over the infertile femme fatale’s screams and gasps for air in the woods, once again exploring the sex and horror theme he first considered way back at the beginning of There’s Nothing Out There.

Naturally, our infertile femme fatale makes it to the house, beginning the reign of terror on this gang of friends. But is Nightmare Man real, or just a figment of this crazy be-otch’s imagination? Is he a symbol of man’s power over women’s bodies? Is he just her husband in a mask? Is he her physical manifestation of everything she fears about men? Well, whatever he is, people start dying, until only Tiffany Shepis and the infertile femme fatale remain. This is where Tiffany shines. Her dialogue exchanges with the crazy bitch are perfect, bringing in the camp and comedy aspects of this film. And just when you think the twist (a lame one) has been revealed, the film delivers a perfectly demonic second twist that’s like something out of…you guessed it. Evil Dead or Night of the Demons.

These aren’t the only films Rolfe celebrates again. He also throws in Argento lighting and…in fact…totally celebrates his own movie There’s Nothing Out There. For starters, one of the characters is wearing a t-shirt that says… “There’s Nothing Out There.” Awesome. There’s another gratuitous shower scene, and also a blatant close-up of a big glass jar of M&Ms being smashed during a fight, something that also happens blatantly in There’s Nothing Out There! On top of that, there’s a bit of dialogue in which Tiffany Shepis references a mysterious sound being the cat, but when another character asks her if she has a cat, she says no. I’m telling you, Nightmare Man is for There’s Nothing Out There fans what the self-referential Was Craven’s New Nightmare was for A Nightmare on Elm Street fans. But even if you haven’t seen Rolfe’s first movie, Nightmare Man is a rollercoaster ride of horror fun that has sadly fallen victim to the negative free-publicity that the online world offers awesome horror films way too often. For me personally, Nightmare Man has me hoping for another Rolfe Kanefsky film to come along.

Having almost 40 years of experience watching horror films (I’m 41 and have been watching some form of horror films since I was like 5) I grew up on what are now considered ‘slow burners’: horror films that have about an hour or so of characterization, plot development, and a snail’s pace building of tension, headed for some sort of horrific climax, most often only hinted at in the promos. In essence, this was pretty much the norm for a majority of horror films for decades. This formula not only drew you in while causing your fear to mount, it also prevented an early climax—the premature delivery of the money shot, be it the reveal of the horrific monster previously hidden in shadow or the first drop of bloodshed. Many movies fit into this mold, including Psycho, 2000 Maniacs, The House on Haunted Hill (original), Homicidal, Black Christmas, Night of the Living Dead… I could go on and on.

Naturally, many of these movies gave you short spurts of thrills early on to grab your attention, but after that, it was just little dribbles of fear that carried you along. Not knowing when something was going to happen is what kept you watching. The anticipation of seeing what all the hype was about while actually being tentative about finding out was what created the intense horror movie experience. I mean, after being told that people were puking all over their popcorn while watching The Exorcist, when you sat down to see it for yourself, you definitely weren’t glancing at the clock every five minutes wondering when things were going to get exciting. There was actually a sense of relief that things were somewhat calm, because you were dreading the worst. But that calm was a false calm. You knew it was just the calm before the storm, so you welcomed the dialogue and level of sanity as you were supplied with exposition and character development. When you were finally slammed with the true level of repulsive moments the film had to offer, you were pretty much left damaged for life.

That all began to change, I guess in the 80s after the slasher phenomenon took hold and movie studios began calling for higher body counts and more blood, as if that were a substitute for chills, atmospher and suspense. Take, for instance, the Friday the 13^th series. The original film, released in 1980, had a body count of 9 (four more bodies than in the original slow burning slasher Halloween two years earlier). In 1989, when Jason took Manhattan, the body count was 19…almost double. And let’s face it. In 1980, Friday the 13^th was considered a ‘shocker’ and was actually a scary experience for filmgoers (despite it just being on old lady doing all the killings). By the time Jason took to the streets of New York, it was all a big joke, and he was even facing off against smart-mouthed street hoods with boom boxes. Ooh! Scary! This was pretty much the dark period of horror, which had become a farce, a joke; the audience was in on it, cheering for the evil rather than the well-being of the disposable characters. Then came Scream, which initially celebrated the dawning of the age of the slasher. While predictable and formulaic in terms of slashers (because it was mocking them), Scream was also suspenseful, heart-pounding, and loaded with likeable characters. A barrage of copycat films soon followed, and horror quickly promised to lose its foothold again.

Unfortunately, in most cases, the conclusion studios looking to make money off horror movies came to was that what ‘scared’ people was brutality, extreme violence, and body counts. It was a logical theory based on the success of the resurgence of slasher films. It’s what the latest generation was growing up on. And it’s the reason why we are about to witness the seventh sequel of the Saw series, why kids in the theaters were laughing at even the most grotesque moments of The Exorcist when it was re-released, and why The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is now called out as being ‘overrated,’ ‘laughable,’ and ‘boring’ on message boards.

The real saving grace for the horror genre in the past decade was the infusion of foreign horror films into the American mainstream, beginning with Asian horror. Other countries explored new horror devices rather than recycling the formula that had become so popular in the U.S. The impact of these films on the horror conscience was so strong that they started getting English version remakes, the most successful being The Ring, followed by The Grudge. The funny thing is, what you’ll notice if you watch The Ring is that, in essence, it is a major slow burner. After a fantastic shocker of an opening (in true Scream style), The Ring really turns into much more of a suspense/mystery film, and it is not until the end that we get the most pay off from a horror perspective—but that one taste of it at the beginning is what keeps us glued to the screen. Unfortunately, the whole girl in a white dress with her long black hair combed over her face thing was exploited like slashers had been, and before long, the string of films with this theme were throwing her in your face, all up in the camera so often that she was no longer frightening.

But we have definitely seen somewhat of a revisiting of the slow burner. Eli Roth did it with Cabin Fever, and wouldn’t you know, many people say the film is crap. Rather than being about people getting stripped, tortured and killed for exploitative purposes (as his follow-up, Hostel¸ was) it is an exploration of morality and humanity as friends turn against each other when faced with catching a spreading disease…slowly but surely. And of course, I’ve posted a whole blog about him, but director Ti West is mastering the old school art of slow burners, with mixed reviews from current horror lovers. The Roost and The House of the Devil are two of the creepiest films I’ve seen in years. The characters are slowly immersed in something horrific and unexplained, and we’re right there with them, our hearts in our throats as we wonder What the fuck is going on here?

And that question pretty much sums up the slow burner. It’s the “what the fuck is going on here” question begging to be answered that keeps you watching…if you have patience and relish the prolonging of the terror. If you prefer immediate gratification without any variation of ups, down, slow, fast, you’ll be satiated by modern films that start you right at the highest frenetic peak, providing you with a “this is exactly what the fuck is going on and is going to continue to go on non-stop for the next hour and a half.”

Riding the wave of the slasher resurgence due to the Scream series from1996 – 2000, the 2002 film Miner’s Massacre is a slightly better than average SyFy Original quality slasher (without the sex, blood and bad words cut, fuzzed and bleeped out). It’s cheesy, offers no genuine scares, and simply delivers a bunch of bratty horny young people being killed. You’ve heard the plot before…bunch of kids comes across a nice stash of gold and the original owner wants it back. However, this time it isn’t a little green man spouting one-liners in an Irish brogue. This time it’s essentially a miner zombie.

Aside from typical adolescent backwoods slasher hi-jinx, like a girl doing a striptease for her man or a dude who gets a bad case of the crappers while eating a can of beans by the campfire, this movie depends on some faces you’ve seen before for its horror validation. Apparently there’s a cameo by Jeff Conaway as a reverend. Unfortunately, despite having seen this movie several times on cable, I’ve never noticed him in it, which means I must get bored in parts and start playing fetch with my dogs. Karen Black has a pretty big role as the crazy local lady with all the facts about how the Miner came to be. I love how she doesn’t even like horror movies in real life but she’ll do pretty much any that are thrown her way, although she smartly passed on that piece of torture porn The Devil’s Rejects that marred the legacy of the brilliant House of 1000 Corpses. Meanwhile, in this film, Karen has one extremely burly stunt double (who’s almost as big as she is) doing a scene in which she’s lit on fire…and the filmmakers don’t even try to hide the fact that the stunt double has some sort of protective mask over his face.

The naturally creepy actor Richard Lynch is super recognizable with his white hair, beady eyes and weathered face…one of those actors they call on whenever they need a sleazy bad guy—or the devil. Martin Kove is another face you know when you see him. Butch, hairy, blond and handsome with a nice dimpled chin, he was pretty much passed around every television show in the 70s and 80s and still looks really good—even shirtless as he is in this movie. It’s always nice to see your childhood wet dreams haven’t been hitting the ice cream (as much as you have yourself). Oh yeah, since the franchise is relevant again, Kove was also the bullying competition in all three original Karate Kid movies. And he sure wore an Olivia Newton-John “Physical” bandana well.

Sadly, the makers of this film gave too much screen time to these well-known faces and overlooked their could-have-been diva, the Jersey Shore bitch with attitude at the beginning of the movie. I loved this fiery redhead—she demands her boyfriend stop for a pee break somewhere, then when he pulls up to a derelict house, she says, “Not here! This is the Psycho house!” She could have carried this whole film with witty quips like that. Yet, despite her character being the only one wary of backwoods psycho shit, she bites the dust (and tumbleweeds) first! NoooOOOoooooOOOO! She also happens to be involved in one almost flawless special effect that doesn’t rely on a fake head but instead involves the Miner holding her chopped off head while she’s still making facial expressions. Only one slip at the end of the effect spoils it a little.

Also of note is the sort of play on the Evil Dead series. The Miner, after losing his arm and not being savvy to chainsaw technology, jams the handle of his pick axe into his stump to use as a weapon. But perhaps the most glaring horror cliché ends this film. The survivors blow that Miner away in the mineshaft just as the local sheriff pulls up. He puts them in his car and says he wants to go look around… Can you guess what happens next?

This gory little b-movie is one I’d forgotten about until it was recently mentioned on the horror message boards. When I saw it back in the 80s on VHS, it was titled Return of the Alien’s Deadly Spawn, but the DVD release simply uses the original title The Deadly Spawn, which they apparently changed to cash in on rumors that there was going to be a sequel to Alien. Even though it’s not a sequel to anything, somehow Return of the Alien’s Deadly Spawn works so much better with the b-movie sci-fi/horror feel of this 80s treat. It was originally released in 1983, one of my ten favorite years of the 80s.

I can not believe how bloody red gory this film is, with plenty of awesome fake body parts (mostly heads) and the giant Deadly Spawn’s slithering, sperm-with-teeth offspring (which love to eat head, ironically).

The opening has two young guys camping out in the woods together (gay!) when they see a meteor fall to earth nearby. They go to investigate but one guy goes back to the tent for a flashlight. This is classic. He starts calling out to the other guy because he can’t find the flashlight…but the guy apparently has no name, because he’s calling out generic things like “Hey! Where’s the flashlight! Hello! Can you hear me? I can’t find the flashlight!” Not only are these guys gay, but apparently they’re turning tricks with strangers in the woods! And those who are gay shall pay, so both dudes fall victim to the giant alien sperm machine.

After some absolutely awesome synth-drenched creature feature music over the opening credit, we arrive at the house that is predominantly the setting for the remainder of the movie. It’s not explained, but somehow, the giant Deadly Spawn has worked its way into one of the dankest flooded basements I’ve ever seen. This thing looks like a sewer, and is apparently the perfect temperature to keep sperm-with-teeth thriving.

So in this house lives a couple, their older son who is some sort of science major, their younger son who has a room loaded with iconic horror merchandise (I can totally relate), and visiting relatives—an aunt and her psychotherapist husband.

Mom and dad both end up in the basement (they’re having electricity issues they need to check on), and the gore is superb, although the giant Deadly Spawn, revealed pretty much from the start, is almost comical in its look—sort of like a more gruesome and evil Audrey II with great big eyes. But the real comedy is that when everyone else wakes up in the house, they have no idea of the horror in the basement (even though the cat tries to tip them off) and just go about their daily business. The uncle intends to sit down with the little horror freak to psychoanalyze his obsession, while auntie is off to an old lady tea party—and she conveniently leaves a sign on the door that the electrician should go round back and into the basement. Dunh! Dunh! Dunh!

You can guess what happens next. However, our little horror freak decides to slip on one of his masks and go scare the electrician after he arrives. Instead, he witnesses some serious head chomping by the sperm-with-teeth. And for pretty much the remainder of film, we keep cutting back to the kid just standing in the basement taking in the Deadly Spawns feasting on the heads of his mom, dad and the electrician while being totally ignored by the main monster.

In the meantime, auntie’s tea party gets NASTY. The sperm-with-teeth have escaped the basement, and one ends up ground into the salad in a food processor. Yum. But what happens next is awesome. It’s an old lady army as the sperm-with-teeth attack and grannies strike back, beating them down with umbrellas and other elderly apparel!!! These senior actresses totally get into it, crawling on the floor with sperm attached to them, blood gushing from their arthritic joints. Totally awesome.

At the same time, the science major gets a visit from some of his friends (it wouldn’t be an 80s horror film if teen characters weren’t thrown in there just to raise the body count). These fellow science geeks have found one of the nasty critters on the street and are dying to examine it. Dying being the operative word. Let the killings begin as the Deadly Spawn manages to climb its way out of the basement to chase the kids around the house! It’s so awesome to watch this three-headed moving monster model being pushed around the house by hidden crew members—I’ll take that over CGI any day.

Naturally, it’s not the science majors who figure out how to take down the sperm machine, but the little kid who is totally into horror. In the aftermath of the carnage and the defeat of the Deadly Spawn, we get like 5 lame minutes of the authorities hunting down the remaining sperm-with-teeth through the woods, and it feels like they’ve just ruined an awesome flick with a horrible ending. But what follows after the 5 minutes of filler is one of the most fricking AWESOMELY unexpected endings you’ll ever see. If you thought twist endings began with The Sixth Sense, think again.

I don’t remember adding the1982 film Midnight to my collection…but there it was as I continue my A to Z rewatch of all my horror DVDs, so I popped it in not recalling anything about it until as soon as it started. I assume I purchased it after seeing it mentioned as a film from 1982 on a message board. Since it is horror and came from the 80s, I’m obligated to own it. Yes, obligated. It’s a rule of living in the Dan Zone. I’m just shocked that I absolutely never saw this movie before I bought it on DVD. It must have been like the one 80s horror movie that we didn’t carry in the video store I worked at in the 80s.

Getting the important horror trivia out of the way, this film is written and directed by John Russo, the man responsible for writing the original Night of the Living Dead. When the film begins, it seems like it’s going to be a real bad low-budget flick but once it gets off the ground (and that takes a while), there are actually some great horror elements.

The film has a ‘prologue’ involving a mother and her children catching a little girl in an animal trap in a field, beating her and then taking her home to sacrifice her. When the little girl is sitting with her leg in the animal trap, she sounds and looks like she was directed to merely scream—without any direction as to the kind of pain and terror she would be in if she was actually caught in an animal trap. Not a good sign.

It only gets worse when we flash forward and meet Nancy, a tomboyish looking chick who somehow ends up being the objective of every man’s ‘affection’ in this movie. First thing, her drunk old stepfather cop comes home and tries to molest her, so she hits him over the head with a tape recorder (totally 80s!) and runs away, leaving him passed out on her bed and…snoring. I kid not.

Once she takes to the streets, she’s immediately offered a ride…in exchange for sex…by some perv in a car. She gets rid of him and is then picked up by a couple of buddies in a truck, a black dude and a white dude (who is hot for her—but she’s not hot! I don’t get it!!!). As they drive off, things go really downhill and make me pretty sure this film was filmed in the 70s but not released until 82. We are treated to a melodramatic, soft rock track by a female singer, with the main lyrics being “you’re on your own.” Wow, this is bad.

Meanwhile, back home, stepdad cop is telling his wife that her daughter ran off and that Nancy has been trying to seduce him! What a disgusting pig!

But back to more of “You’re on your own” as the truck trio makes its way through a small. At a gas station, they meet a black reverend and his daughter who tell them there have been a lot of murders in the town over the past few years that the locals are calling ‘accidental deaths’ because they are a bunch of racists. Wow. Didn’t see the racism angle coming. Anyway, the reverend and daughter hitch a ride in their truck and are dropped off at a cemetery to pay respects to the reverend’s dead wife. The daughter decides to walk home (home seems to be pretty close to the cemetery), and once she’s gone, this bearded fat guy in overalls comes out of the woods with a knife and kills the reverend! Soon, the fat guy is at the reverend’s house, and things don’t turn out so well for the reverend’s daughter.

Meanwhile, our interracial, intergender trio is facing their own harassment by the locals (they’re run out of a bar for having a black dude with them), and the black dude even drops the ‘honky’ bomb after. Awesome! TOTALLY 80s! Right after, the guys inform Nancy that they’ve been stealing food from convenience stores as they travel because they have no money, so she joins in and they steal from another place…to the  mellow 70s sounds of “You’re on your own”! TOO funny.

But this is finally where the real horror begins and we are treated to a backwoods family film that’s half Texas Chainsaw Massacre, half Psycho. After an all-points bulletin is put out for our trio, they are chased by cops and of course make a ‘wrong turn’ into the woods to escape. They soon see the fat killer running around with what looks like a body in the woods. But it wouldn’t be an 80s horror movie if they didn’t decide to camp out in the woods anyway. And if Nancy didn’t decide to take a walk by herself the next morning before the guys awake.

Well, Nancy returns to camp to find that two ‘policemen’ have found her male companions. One creepy guy is a totally androgynous dude (at first I thought it was a woman) and the other is this bulky, bald, goateed leather daddy type! WTF? It’s like something out of a Mapplethorpe photo.

Unfortunately, things don’t go well for Nancy’s friends, and within minutes she’s on her own (the ‘racism’ theme discarded and rendered completely irrelevant for the remainder of the film), running through the woods being chased by the creepy pair and, naturally, right into their sadistic home. This is when it gets really good. Nancy is directed by a nice girl playing solitaire at a table to a phone in another room. Unfortunately, when she goes in that room, she finds the fat killer cutting off some dude’s head with a knife! Within minutes she’s at the mercy of the ‘family’—the two guys in the cop uniforms (which it turns out they got when they killed some real cops), the fat guy, and the solitaire playing be-otch. They make Nancy walk on all fours like a dog into a cage next to some other already caged girl! I was sure this was about to turn into a seriously disturbing exploitation flick, but that never happens.

Instead, it turns out the dirty stepdaddy decides to go find his wife’s daughter and make amends, so he follows clues all the way to the crazy family’s house!!!

While stepdaddy is playing hero and sneaking up for his rescue mission, we get to meet the family’s mommy—a corpse sitting in a rocking chair upstairs. Seems the family needs the blood of three people to perform an Easter ritual at midnight. They hook themselves up with another female victim, who is the first to be sacrificed at an old skool occult ritual including a classic black room with candles, the family in black robes with hoods, inverted pentagrams painted on their foreheads, and dear old dead mom watching the whole ceremony.

Nancy is the star, so she ends up being the lone survivor (stepdad gets killed trying to save her, but we don’t exactly feel sympathy for him, even though he was drunk when he tried to screw her). Nancy takes care of business, knocking off the family one member at a time, and as soon as she sets the last one on fire, the credits begin to roll to the sound of… “You’re on your own”! Didn’t anyone tell John Russo that classics like Night of the Living Dead were classics in part because of their appropriate musical scores???

As cheesy as Midnight is (and actually, the word is actually a lyric in “You’re on your own”), it has some really strong horror moments that make it totally worth a watch. Like I said, it feels more 70s than 80s, so I can’t say it gets points for coming from the 80s. And here’s the real kick. I just discovered that Russo did a sequel in 1993 in which one member of the family didn’t exactly die at the hands of Nancy… I MUST see this movie!!!!

We’re in our basement right now watching movies because it’s cooler down here, and I go behind the bar in one corner of the room to refill my glass of water at the small sink.  I didn’t bother to turn on the light back there because I didn’t expect to be battling a creature of the night in the shadows!

But there it was: a spider, crawling on the wall right above the sink. I hurriedly filled my glass of water, but I couldn’t have peace of mind if I just left the spider there, knowing it could work its way across the room at some point and into one of my orifices if I dared to fall asleep.

So I stood waiting for the spider to approach the sink–the direction in which it was heading. It got closer, closer, finally reached the lip of the sink, then worked its way into the sink.

I quickly dumped my glass of water over the side wall of the sink to send that sucker down the drain!

Instead, what do I frickin’ see in the shadows??? The water SWOOPS down one wall, across the base of the sink, and up the other wall! And there goes the spider, surf boarding off into the darkness as I jumped back in terror!

Now there’s no telling WHERE the creepy crawly is. And you KNOW that spider has every intention of enacting its revenge on me. The hairs on the back of my neck are sticking up right now–I can FEEL it watching me…

The cover art of the film The Final from After Dark Horrorfest 4 makes it look like a creepy horror movie, featuring a young girl with her black hair all down over her face like something out of a Japanese horror, bloody handprints on the papers littering the floor around her desk, and the words “I will not kill my classmates” written on the chalkboard behind her.

The cover art is totally misleading. What we have here is a vigilante justice film. Select kids in a high school who are bullied endlessly get together with a bunch of guns, dress up in creepy clown costumes, Nazi regalia and other dark themed disguises, drug all the mean kids at a party in the house in the woods, chain them all up together, and then proceed to torture them one by one. It’s kind of like the Columbine tragedy meets the Saw series. There’s nothing ‘horror movie’ scary here, just the disturbing nature of a situation that could really happen—how targeted kids can be turned into monsters.

That’s the strong point of this film. The dialogue in The Final examines the psychological damage high school bullying can do, and how many of these school massacres that happen in real life could be the result of a domino effect that pushes tormented souls to the breaking point. At the same time, it sort of comes across as defending the violent actions of the vigilantes, just as the Saw series tries to steer the audience to want the victims to be tortured. To me, that’s not a horror movie in the traditional sense. It’s not a scary thrill ride, not a film involving situations or characters to which I can relate, and not a movie I can see watching more than once. It kind of bangs you over the head repeatedly with its social commentary, and the bottom line is, you don’t sympathize with any of the characters.

In terms of its ‘torture porn’ clout, the ‘pain’ really all that impressive—and most of the actors fail to deliver any genuine realistic emotions or reactions to the situation in which they find themselves. There’s some goop rubbed on a chick’s face that’s supposed to eat her flesh off—something we never see happen on screen. One guy is stuck with a bunch of needles that look like they’d be used for acupuncture. Some fingers are cut off, a guy’s spine is severed…but none of it is gory, all just suggested. There are quite a few people shot with guns (yawn). The film wants to be vicious, but it fails to make you curl your toes or feel an aching in your groin like the Saw films do. Add to that a weak ‘racism’ subplot involving one black dude who escapes the party and is then harassed by some red neck ex-military guy while trying to find help, and the film falls flat on all counts other than its probing dialogue. It’s pretty safe to say this movie could be aired on SyFy or the Chiller network virtually unedited—but in both cases, it wouldn’t really fit into the format of the network. It’s not horror, and it sure isn’t science fiction.

WARNING: this post is totally spoiler-FILLED.

I saw Rob Zombie’s Halloween and my confused reaction was, “What was he trying to do to such an iconic film?” I saw the Friday the 13^th remake and thought, “Whatever. Another Jason film. Fun while you’re in it, but pretty forgettable (yet totally rewatchable every time it’s on cable).” Now I’ve seen A Nightmare On Elm Street and all I can think is, “How in the hell could they blow it so bad when drawing from such a frightening original source?”

The weakness of this film perfectly illustrates the brilliance of Wes Craven’s 1984 original. Even when 2010 tries to toss in favorite moments from the original (Tina’s wall crawl death, Glenn’s blood bath scene, Nancy’s near bathtub ‘fingering,’ Tina’s body drag through the school hall) they feel like afterthoughts or pale imitations that fail to impact viewers the way they did in the original.

That’s not to say 2010 doesn’t have its moments, even if some of them do rely on CGI. There’s a frightening scene in the “Tina” character’s attic (not named Tina this time around). When Nancy sees the Tina character’s body calling out to her from the body bag, the horrific imagery is intensified in the remake. Although loved because it’s a classic camp moment, the final kill (Nancy’s mom) in the original is so cheesy that even with the use of CGI in the remake, a similar bye bye to mom is a visually gore-iphic blast. And what is implied by Freddy’s speech to one of his victims about how the mind lives on for several minutes after death perfectly echoes much of what made the first film so great—the power of suggestion over the actual spelling out of every detail.

That’s what we have here. For starters, Freddy is only kept in shadow for a tiny bit at the beginning of the re-imaging before his face is constantly being slammed right up in the camera, accompanied by the blaring sound of slashing knives for cheap jump scares. 20 minutes into the film, we’ve seen him at least three times in brightly lit close-ups for long durations that reveal how much less frightening his look is than the ghoulish appearance of Robert Englund’s Freddy. Instead of looking gross and freshly burned, Jackie Earle Haley’s Freddy comes across as a dirty pervert who caught on fire and lived (in dreams) to tell about it. He’s just not scary. And he’s WAY too conversational with his victims from nearly the start, something the original Freddy didn’t do until later in the series when he became more of an iconic anti-hero than a horrifying monster. In the original, Freddy’s sadistic persona spewed short taunts like “Watch this!” (cuts off his fingers) and “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy!” (sticks his tongue through the phone to lick her mouth), and performed gruesome acts like letting Tina peel his face off during a struggle to reveal his heckling skull or calling out to Nancy in Tina’s voice while wearing a “Tina mask.”

Freddy’s torture of kids in the original is a mind fuck, but it still suggests that when he was a living, filthy child murderer (as Nancy’s drunken mother describes him), he did perverted things to them. However, the focus is on him in the present—a boogeyman that kills teenagers in their sleep. In the remake, Freddy’s whole identity is reliant on his past as a pedophile. It’s all spelled out for us, right down to the discovery of naked pictures of children in his secret room, Freddy telling Nancy how she smells different now and dabbling in some disgusting sexual foreplay with her on a bed. The subject of pedophilia is repulsive for sure, but there’s a good chance that viewers of this film won’t be able to relate to the threat. And those who can would most likely never make it through the film because it would bring back too many horrible memories. The bottom line is, a burned pedophile (the new Freddy) just isn’t terrifying to people who were never sexually abused, but a hideously disfigured monster that kills people in their sleep with finger knives (the original Freddy) most definitely is because he’s not as discriminating. Anything goes—or rather, anyone goes.

Then there are the ‘teenagers’ in the remake. They lack the youthful innocence demonstrated by Heather Langenkamp in her frilly pajamas and Johnny Depp with his raging teen hormones in the original. In 2010, from the very start Nancy is portrayed as a gloom-and-doom, depressed, moping, pretentious artsy outcast, as is a majority of the other teens. As the film progresses and the truth is revealed, I guess we can accept that they are all fucked up because of their repressed memories about being molested by the school maintenance man when they were just children, but why is it that all these kids have repressed their memories? A dozen people do not handle childhood trauma exactly the same, yet NONE of these kids can remember that they were molested!!! Really???

Yes, that’s the connection the new film goes for to ‘change it up.’ In the original film, Freddy’s ‘motive’ was to make the parents who burned him alive suffer by killing their children. In this film, Freddy is killing the very children he molested to get revenge on them for breaking their silence years before (and then forgetting they told on him?). In the original film, the suburban parents were the ones who were a mess (sluts, alcoholics, white trash) as a result of keeping the secret of what they’d done to Freddy. In 2010, the parents seem to be living life fine and oblivious to the toll the situation has taken on their children. Plus, Nancy’s father is not the police chief in this film. In fact, Nancy doesn’t even HAVE a dad. That’s right. There is never any mention of her having a father, living or dead, married to his mother or divorced from her. Talk about plot hole, especially when the very same character’s father had such a prominent role in the original film, and considering Nancy is the ONLY character to have the same name in this remake.

Instead, it is the father of the “Glenn” character who plays the authoritative role in 2010, which I guess explains why it is his son who has a dream in which he witnesses the lynching of Freddy, led by his father. Why does Freddy force just this one victim to dream the truth with the most vivid of details? Can Freddy really project a specific dream in your head like a movie rather than just enter your dreams now? And what purpose does it serve other than to allow the entire torching to play out on screen instead of simply being related by a character, as it was by Nancy’s mom in the original? Again, it’s being spelled out for us, and melodramatically at that, with the parents surrounding the building into which they chase Freddy (his old boiler room isn’t referenced in the re-imagining), Freddy inside yelling “Whatever you think I did, I didn’t do it!” and the parents outside barking “Come on outta there Freddy! We’ll get you for what you did to our kids!” Why bother with the chit-chat when they actually have canisters of gasoline in the trunks of their cars? And why did they take justice into their own hands without even reporting the horrible things the man had done to their children to the authorities? At least in the original they torched Freddy after he was able to walk free due to a legal technicality—and they sort of had the law (Nancy’s dad) on their side to cover up their illegal act.

An extremely glaring problem with this re-imagining is why Freddy has his iconic glove at all! Freddy, as far as we know based on the new script, never killed any of his victims, just molested them. So what purpose did the glove serve? It’s shown to have left scratches on one child’s back and ripped her dress, but if it had inflicted any major damage, she would have required some serious medical attention. Did he use the glove to bully the children into submission or scare them into silence about what he’d done to them? Did he really create that weapon as part of his molestation practices? Or did he know that he’d someday come back in dreams and would need some nifty nightmarish weapon to kill with?

There are a few more crucial aspects to Wes Craven’s film that demonstrate his genius, and it is all pretty much summed up in the title of the film. Craven has said that he titled the film as he did because most people know of an Elm Street in their town, which helps him in bringing the nightmare into modest suburbia so we all feel vulnerable. You truly feel like you’re in a small, close knit town: Nancy can walk to and from school just as easily as carpool with friends; she can communicate with Glenn simply by looking across the street from her bedroom window to his bedroom window; the police station where Nancy’s dad works is only walking distance from her home. Hell, the town is loaded with rich green lawns and trees, blue skies, and bright sunlight. The remake fails to capture the intimacy of the community or demonstrate the fracturing of a suburban utopia, instead relying heavily on the cloak of night and jumping from one disjointed location to another: a drug store, the diner, Nancy’s house, the school.

Craven further knocks down the walls of security through his nightmare sequences. The kids are not even safe in their bedrooms, classrooms, or backyards—take into account the subtleties of Tina being frightened by a rogue garbage can cover and then crashing onto an outdoor table in her yard and pulling the tablecloth over her head to escape Freddy only to have him crawl underneath there with her. Or Nancy waking to find she has dragged pieces of rose trellis from her own front yard out of her dream and into her bed. There are no such domestic details in the remake. Nancy even finds over-the-counter ‘stay-awake’ pills in her bathroom medicine cabinet in the original, while in 2010, she has to stop at a pharmacist so her friend can refill a sleep-deprivation prescription while she’s in the drugstore aisles discovering she can pull things out of her daydreams.

Even when Nancy goes after Freddy for the last time, in the original she’s tucked away in her own bed with her hair cascading over her own pillow, a pot of coffee on the nightstand beside her bed to keep her awake. In the remake, Nancy is lying on the disgusting, filthy bed in Freddy’s secret room where she was molested when it’s time to fall asleep and bring him into her ‘world.’ His dirty quarters are her world? And forget coffee. Nancy needs to get slammed in the chest by her boyfriend with a syringe full of adrenalin, Pulp Fiction style. On top of all that, gone are the nuances of real dreaming that are so perfectly captured in the original. The inexplicable appearance of a goat running by in Tina’s dream touches upon how illogical they can be, just as Nancy finding a door in her basement that leads conveniently right to Freddy’s boiler room demonstrates the random teleporting we do in dreams. And there’s that brilliant moment when Nancy tries to run up her stairs to escape Freddy, only to find she can’t move her legs quick enough because she’s stepping in some sort of gummy substance that impedes her progress (the visual translation of a sensation most of us have experienced in dreams). In the remake, she instead falls into a goopy mess that looks like a hallway full of blood. While Craven incorporates our actual lack of control over dreams into the fear in his movie, the re-imagining filmmakers exchange those highly relatable details for literal movie moments and generic horror situations.

Generic is the operative word here. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 will not leave a lasting impression on anyone and it will not scar this generation’s children for life as the original did to its generation (in fact, kids were laughing at the remake in the theater). Remember films from this past decade like The Boogeyman, Pulse, and One Missed Call? This film has more in common with those films than it does with the iconic, influential film from which it gets its name. It’s a film with a promising premise that fails to live up to its potential. Sure, there may be a couple of creepy moments, but it lacks cohesion, so all we’re left with is a couple of ‘good parts’ instead of an entire start-to-finish horror experience. And what’s worse, it may be just successful enough to spawn a couple of even more generic and forgettable sequels.

So a while back, I posted about this Wii exclusive “re-imagining” of the original Playstation One classic from over ten years ago, and how the game mechanics and crappy Upchuck controller pretty much made me give up on the game and sell it online.

Well, I was determined to get through the game since it’s so short and would have been the only game in the Silent Hill canon that I didn’t complete and keep in my collection, all on account of the “Nightmare” scenarios. During a Nightmare scenario, the game’s environment turns to ice (as opposed to the bloody and fiery changes in the other titles in the series) and you are forced to RUN from the creatures of Silent Hill through dark locations, using just neon blue borders that mark doors, wall and ditches as guidance to a possible way to escape the nightmare. If the creatures jump on you, you have to wildly gyrate with the Wiimote and Upchuck to get them off before continuing. There are no weapons to fight back in this game, but once in a while you run past a piece of furniture you can knock over to slow the pursuing creatures. Health and a health gauge are also a thing of the past. As you continue to get attacked by creatures, you start to run slower, then limp, and eventually die and there’s nothing you can do about it. There are only six of these Nightmare scenarios in total, but if you read back to my old post, you’ll see how incredibly infuriating they are. That is unless you figure out a way to beat the system.

Nightmare scenarios are not linear—you have to find the correct route to escape this hellish maze yourself. Pulling up your map doesn’t much help because it does not reveal any of the obstacles you’ll run into, nor does it pause the game, which means that while you are standing there trying to read the map, you can easily be attacked by creatures. In order to stay alive, you’re basically never going to reference the map at all. Which means just running around randomly through environments and blue-glowing doors that all look the same after a while when you are in such a panic, causing you to run in circles while being assaulted regularly by evil inhabitants of the Nightmare world. The environments are extremely dark unless you keep your flashlight turned on, but this is Silent Hill, so keeping your flashlight on in this hellish environment is the same as going to a football game wearing a cut-off shirt and Daisy Duke shorts. In both situations, you become a prime target for a beat down by a bunch of monsters.

Instead of this situation creating an adrenalin rush of fear like all the other games in this series and others like Resident Evil or Fatal Frame, games in which you want to be immersed in the experience, the Nightmare scenarios in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories are all about just wanting to get OUT of them as quickly as possible and back into the scare-free and danger-free experience that is the rest of the game. There is no even pacing of the horror rush in this game. You are either skipping carefree around the daytime town meeting other characters and collecting clues to the game’s story for stretches of time, or you are racing through the horror as fast as you can to return to the dull parts of the game!

The basic plot outline of the re-imagining is the same as the original. You are Harry Mason, you get into a car accident, your daughter is gone when you awake, and then you have to roam the town in search of her. Other than that, this re-imagining is completely rewritten. An interesting aspect of the game is the way your responses to questions and tests by your therapist to some extent affect what you see and do as well as the ending you get. That’s right, you have a therapist in this game: a very distinguished and attractive man who can be somewhat aggressive in his analysis of you. If you are honest in your answers to his questions, at the end of the game you get one final reading of how he profiled your personality. It was very much on the mark in most cases for me. However, even though I spent most of my time on his couch just staring at his crotch, the game didn’t conclude that I was gay (although it will label you as a pervert if you stare too much at the breasts of any of the female characters during the game). So the game is entertaining the first time through, but it doesn’t seem worth a second play because it simply doesn’t deliver that constant edge-of-your-seat experience the original game did. The dread you feel throughout the entire original game is gone, replaced with the dread you feel having to get through the clumsy mechanics of the Nightmare scenarios.

So how to smoothly get through these moments so you can at least complete the game once and learn the whole story? For starters, crank up the brightness on your television all the way. By doing this, when you enter a Nightmare, you can actually keep your flashlight off throughout the entire Nightmare without having any problems seeing where you are going! Keeping the flashlight off drastically reduces the amount of creatures that actually find you and chase you, which is a huge relief. Next, go to YouTube and search for a video walkthru of whichever Nightmare you are about to enter—the way to know one is coming soon is to follow an online written walkthru and read ahead to see exactly when you are close. Next, carefully watch the entire video walkthru of the Nightmare. If you are a longtime player of horror survival video games, you’re most likely good at memorizing environments and paths quickly, so the layout of the Nightmare will be fresh in your head when you move back to your Wii to start it. Add to that a navigator—a friend who starts the video walkthru just as you begin it and basically DIRECTS you as you run the path (“turn left into the next door,” “run straight to the set of double doors ahead,” “Climb the wall to your right”). You must communicate with each other, and you should basically repeat the navigator’s directions as you accomplish them so you know you’re both on the same page. This way, if the navigator’s video gets ahead of your progress or vice versa, the navigator can pause the YouTube clip or move it ahead a little to stay with you. Using this process, we managed to get through each Nightmare in about five minutes with barely ever a need to redo them because of a death.

Sounds like fun, right? And there you have it. That’s how you cheat your way through Silent Hill: Shattered Memories so you can at least say you played it once. Now let’s hope that Konami gives up on this horrible new format of a classic series and returns to form on the next installment. Because if we get another game like this one, there will be no more returns to Silent Hill for anyone.