{"id":12822,"date":"2019-10-05T02:39:59","date_gmt":"2019-10-05T06:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=12822"},"modified":"2019-10-05T11:25:26","modified_gmt":"2019-10-05T15:25:26","slug":"rat-rage-four-quick-horror-film-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2019\/10\/rat-rage-four-quick-horror-film-reviews.html","title":{"rendered":"Rat Rage: Four quick horror-film reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u2018Tis the season.<\/p>\n

Cat\u2019s Eye<\/strong><\/em>: Three Stephen King stories linked by Drew Barrymore (eh ok) and A CAT (yes!). The first two are genuinely horrifying and tense. \u201cQuitters, Inc\u201d is kind of a cheesy story, about a man who enters a quit-smoking program with\u2026 extremely effective incentives. There\u2019s even a party hallucination scene with dancing cigarette packs. But director Lewis Teague keeps the story taut and unsettling. Cat content: medium, the cat is tortured to demonstrate the program\u2019s evil methods. \u201cThe Ledge\u201d is mostly just about how incredibly awful it would be to have to walk around a skyscraper on a tiny ledge. But that\u2019s very awful! Cat content: perfunctory, the villain bets on whether a cat can cross a busy street, thus demonstrating that he\u2019s a heartless fiend obsessed with gambling.<\/p>\n

Both of these stories felt like fairy tales, but fairy tales for adults\u2013and then the final story, about a little girl being protected from a hobgoblin by her pet cat, felt like extremely gentle children\u2019s \u201chorror.\u201d The pacing got much slacker, it seemed to me, the plot held no surprises, and I just could not care about this at all. I admit that if you aren\u2019t bored by the whole story, the final confrontation between cat and goblin has fun touches like the use of a record player as a weapon. And I can see why if you watched this film as a kid, it would be this final segment which made you \u201chug [your] Pound Puppy<\/a>\u201d in terror. Cat content: maximal!<\/p>\n

Pumpkinhead<\/strong><\/em>: Don\u2019t let the childlike title fool you. This is a hard ride on a dark night. Ed (Lance Henriksen) lives alone in the backwoods with his little boy. He loves that kid; the film lets you feel their bond and their trusting devotion to one another. Yet there\u2019s a shadow over this love. We see it when Ed bends over his boy to help the kid wash his hands: His hunching silhouette looks eerily similar to the monster Ed saw, when he was a child himself, killing a man who kept insisting that he was innocent.<\/p>\n

Soon enough a bunch of rich \u201980s jerkface teens from The City roar up with their motorbikes. In an unexpected twist, only one of them is actually a jerkface! But it is Jerkface, of course, who commits motorbike manslaughter. Man, I\u2019m working for ironic distance here, but it\u2019s hard to think about the scene where Jerk accidentally runs over Ed\u2019s son. Ed, in devastation, calls up the legendary local vengeance demon, Pumpkinhead. (Roll with it.) The local witch, Haggis (ok this I think you can laugh at), who is composed entirely of spiderwebs and old-age makeup, warns Ed that the price of Pumpkinhead\u2019s vengeance is too high. Ed, of course, learns only too late that she is right.<\/p>\n

Okay, so once Pumpkinhead starts making with the vengeance, the film gets slasher-like, never my favorite subgenre. Stalk stalk kill kill. But several elements let this movie punch way above its weight class. It\u2019s full of \u201980s visual pleasures, teetering on the edge between sublime and cheesy: the mist-hung pumpkin patch in the dead late fall, the witchiest witch cottage which ever did witch, the extremely tactile and visceral creature effects; the abandoned church, moonlight streaming through its broken cross-shaped window. The fact that most of the rich teens actually try to do the right thing also makes their terrified deaths more painful. And Ed\u2019s raw bereavement is simply harrowing. Lance Henriksen is phenomenal as he moves from love to rage to regret.<\/p>\n

This is one of those horror flicks where you think it\u2019ll be a fun time at the popcorn palace, and the next thing you know, you might never be happy again.<\/p>\n

The Inheritance<\/strong><\/em>: The only non-\u201980s entry in this post. Does far too little with its terrific premise. Five black families are holding a joint reunion in the snowy hills, and their ne\u2019er-do-well children, plus respectful daughter Karen (Golden Brooks), head to the family cabin hoping to hit up \u201cthe Elders\u201d for some cash. But after a night of hard cousin-on-cousin partying, and a spooky message appearing in bloody letters on the window, the Elders arrive and tell the young folks the true history of their families\u2019 wealth. An African with mysterious powers has protected them since slavery times, but in order to secure his goodwill, they must sacrifice their children.<\/p>\n

The costumes are fantastic, and really create an Afro-horror vibe which hints at the movie this might have been. There isn\u2019t enough exploration of what this all means\u2013I definitely don\u2019t need \u201cWe take our anger out on our children because of slavery!!\u201d or really any moral, but I do need some richer texture to the themes of intergenerational violence, or the way violence and protection can come from the same source, or something<\/em>. Show me how the families\u2019 daily interactions have been warped by this centuries-long decision to sacrifice their personal children<\/em> to secure the wealth of the family collective.<\/p>\n

The pacing is flat-out bad. A white couple is introduced and then killed off without even the sense that their abrupt dispatch is meant to be funny. Once the family story is told, it\u2019s just a cavalcade of chasing, shrieking, wandering, chasing and shrieking again, with no sense that any individual action scene has a point<\/em>. (They\u2019re safe! No, wait, they\u2019re just in a different room. Here we go again\u2026.)<\/p>\n

Less repetitive chasing and screaming, more closely-observed emotion. Just give me one moment as recognizable, tender, and sad as Ed washing his kid\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n

Of Unknown Origin<\/strong><\/em>: This may not be the best killer-rat movie there is. But it sure is the killer-rattiest.<\/p>\n

Honestly? I loved this. I have a huge inexplicable love of killer-rat flicks anyway\u2013I got a huge gleeful grin on my face whenever we got shock close-ups of this thing\u2019s hideous yellow teeth, viscous fur, or pink paws tipped with sharp glassy claws. The \u201980s were, I think, killer rat movie central, and this thing goes hard, telling the story of\u2026 mergers executive??? idk, Bart (Peter Weller), and his life-wrecking battle with a rat the size of a daggone koala. (Size comparison via Final Girl, who turned me on to this movie<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The cuts are weirdly abrupt and sometimes drain the tension rather than increasing it. The movie also suffers from the usual killer-rat-flick problem of confusing action sequences, using tight close-ups to hide the (I assume) rat puppet. The characters are all unlikeable rich people doing unlikeable rich things. AND YET Peter Weller is genuinely terrific, readin\u2019 his Moby-Dick<\/em> and growing increasingly wild-eyed and unshaven. And the rat is so awful! It\u2019s just a very effective rat and I hated it and wanted Bart to git it \u2019til it knew it was gotten. ETA: I should note that Bart lures a stray cat into the house to do his dirty work, and yes, we see that cat\u2019s unhappy end.<\/p>\n

We get rat\u2019s-eye view or, as we call it in the business, \u201cratcam.\u201d We get a business dinner which Bart ruins with a series of Rat Facts which make him sound very knowledgeable, but also very deranged. There might be some thematic stuff about how the battle for survival makes your previous rich-executive concerns seem trivial, or total loss as rebirth, or whatever, but do I care? No. This is a movie that knows what it is about and that is, in the words of the magazine Bart reads, \u201cRATS: The Devil\u2019s Lapdogs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pic of well-groomed suburban rat via Wikipedia.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Tis the season. Cat\u2019s Eye: Three Stephen King stories linked by Drew Barrymore (eh ok) and A CAT (yes!). The first two are genuinely horrifying and tense. \u201cQuitters, Inc\u201d is kind of a cheesy story, about a man who enters a quit-smoking program with\u2026 extremely effective incentives. There\u2019s even a party hallucination scene with dancing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":12834,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[119,120,322],"class_list":["post-12822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-horror","tag-killer-rats","tag-stephen-king"],"yoast_head":"\nRat Rage: Four quick horror-film reviews<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"'Tis the season. Cat's Eye: Three Stephen King stories linked by Drew Barrymore (eh ok) and A CAT (yes!). 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