Insane asylums are fertile ground for horror flicks. Why shouldn’t they be? Insanity is scary stuff. Gathering different flavors of it together in an isolated location? How can filmmakers resist the temptation?
From way back in 1973 comes Don’t Look in the Basement, the first in a run of four horror flicks from auteur S.F. Brownrigg, from a screenplay written by Tim and Thomas Pope (despite results on the internet, this is not the same Tim Pope who is known for directing music videos).
A regional feature filmed in rural Texas, Basement tells the story of the staff and patients of the Stephens Sanitarium, a private institution run by its namesake, Dr. Barry Stephens (Michael Harvey). The location is a drab, three-story wooden building that was once part of Trinity University’s original campus in the very small town of Tehuacana, Texas. After Trinity relocated in 1902, the campus was occupied by Westminster College until it closed in 1972, leaving the property available for Brownrigg and company to film. The building is still standing as of this writing. Continue reading “Don’t Look in the Basement, aka The Forgotten”
In the decades since the 1989 release of Fatal Images, filmmaker Dennis Devine has staked out quite a place in low budget, trash horror cinema. Of the thirty-four directorial credits on his IMDb page that have viewer ratings, the average score is 3.8 out of 10. That’s pretty bad. Any single movie that garners a score that low is probably not worth the effort to watch, and that number covers Devine’s entire career. Some would say he should have thrown in the towel a long time ago, but shit on that. Devine is a filmmaker. It doesn’t matter that he makes crap. He makes movies, and no matter how bad they are, there is an audience of mutants out there who reject force fed studio movies — who experience culture outside the big corporate stranglehold on media. Sure, his movies stink. But every blown line, every plot hole, every frame of bland, desaturated magnetic video is a ‘fuck you’ to the moneyed gatekeepers of cinema.
A Chinese Ghost Story, from Hong Kong actor, stuntman, and filmmaker Siu-Ting Ching (screenplay by Songling Pu and Kai-Chi Yuen), is, according to the internet, a xianxia film. Xianxia are ‘closely related to the wuxia and shenmo genres.’ There is some cultural illiteracy here, on my part, but those strange new terms basically mean ‘based within Chinese mythology.’ Now we’re getting somewhere. If one has seen a Hong Kong martial arts flick that takes place before the emergence of modern China, one will be familiar with the look and feel of A Chinese Ghost Story. It’s a piece of fantasy, encompassing demons and the supernatural, with Hong Kong martial arts movie trickery thrown in, and comedy to keep things light.