NEW FEATURE! Throw Back Thursday: Critters.

Taken from:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2d/Crittersposter.jpg

Ah, the month of October. The leaves are flinging themselves off the trees, the roads are clogged with rain, and I’m needing a hot cups of tea more often. It’s a great month!

Halloween is just around the corner, and you know what that means… Yep, Horror films galore! So to celebrate this beautiful time of year, I have decided to start a new (hopefully progressional) blog series where just like those totally hip and trendy people on that photo showing website (Instagram for those of you who don’t get my arty-farty language) where they throw back to past Thursdays. What film better to throw back to than my favourite film of all time, the first horror film I can vividly being terrified of, but needing to re-watch it like 832883 times… Critters!

Critters is a sci-fi horror that takes place in a secluded rural town in Kansas (we unfortunately don’t see any links to Dorothy here, though), where the residence look like butter wouldn’t melt and it’s strange to see that most of the town’s inhabitants pro-created.  We are introduced to the Brown family, consisting of a loving Mother, bowling mad handy man Father, and two teenage kids. The Brown residence is the normal TV stereotype family, where Brad teases April about a fancy guy she’s dating, and Harv, being the protective Father he is, scrunches his dusty face about it… My point being they are normal, have a huge farm and life is hunky-dory, until later in the evening the Brown family encounters creatures of a third kind (or something…) The Critters.

As most space monsters do, they eat the Brown’s cattle, make loud noises that startle the Mother, Helen, where we get our first glimpse at their blood red eyes. Terrifying. The Crites go on to half eat Aprils Jonny Depp looking man, and trap her in the barn. Meanwhile, Charlie, the resident town joker and alien believer repeatedly reports that space critters (get it) will be making their way down to our beloved planet anytime soon. Charlie, played by Don Opper, is the first to experience the Crites outside of the Brown residence and calls it into his local jail house.

From there we see that the Crites are pretty smart, can work as a team and will use their porcupine like hairs to send the wary recipient into a debilitating state. They become more scary than the feasible fluff balls they appear, and thus become really rather scary (well, they were to the 5 year old me.)

The end comes nye for the Crites as our great saviours, the bounty hunters, come to planet Earth’s rescue. They transform into pop stars and dead people (seriously, watch below for how cool they look transforming) and blow shit UPPP! After a huge explosion, and many tears the Brown family is save…. Or are they?

Re-watching the film that made me become a horror horder, I am still quite enamoured with Critters, without it being loved due to my childish lust for scary stuff and the turmoil it left me in for years to come, it does have a certain b-horror charm about it. The wonderful animatronics of the Crites powered by the ever amazing Chiodo Brothers is simply breath taking, and the writing of the film in general is pretty great too.

I love this film, and it’s sequels so much so, that when I took a trip to Seattle’s EMP Museum I took about 1,000 selfies with the Critter on display, and nearly cried (sort of…) when I had to leave it.

Love it or hate it, Critters is a great little film to show your young ones if you want them to catch the horror bug young, like my Father, or to just see if you want something cool looking without psychological plot twists blocking your brain’s eye. Long live the Crites!

Until next time,

Jessie.

Shatter Dead

I first saw Shatter Dead on an internet streaming website hosted by one of my friends from the US, and ever since seeing it I've been obsessed with it in an unnatural way. Shatter dead is very much a b-movie that has a Dogme 95 feel to it (mainly due to a low budget) with scenes that are both amazing yet sickening. 

We are introduced to an Earth where the dead are alive and walking around with the living. Susan, the main character of the film, is walking down town to her car with some groceries she has picked up, and passes by a number of undead who ask her for money. One asks her for money to get surgery on his [badly prosthetic wearing] face which has been terribly marked, she gives in and he blesses her for her kind behavior (which seems to be a rare occurrence between the living and the undead in this World). She goes to a payphone just by her car to make a call (which we later realise is to her boyfriend). As she does this, the first undead to ask her for cash tried to empty her fuel tank but before he gets away with the hole tank Susan catches him and shoots at him, causing the fuel tank to explode, and set him on fire (which is one of the best technical effects of the film).

Susan retreats after being threatened by a bible basher to a nearby house which a fellow living soul informs her about. In this house we see mostly undead staying there with the occational living, like Susan, there too. Susan retreats to her room, which she shares with an undead who asks to borrow her soap to cover the smell of her flesh decaying. We then learn why so many people have chose to be undead since the world became a place in which you lived even after you have died; to have youth, strength and to remain attractive with no real human waste or consumption*

After this a wild group of reckless people turn up at the house and shoot it up, disfiguring the undead (since they can't heal) and 'killing' the living, apart from Susan. At this point we see a bad yet still gruesome part where a pregnant mother gets shot in the belly and her unborn spawn (which is totally convincing... if you're a 2 year old) half comes out of the open wound. This scene is full of blood and bath scenes, which you all know I am a huge fan of, which carrys on to the next, and more or less ending of the film. 

Susan finally gets to her boyfriend's apartment, where she finds a bathtub full of blood (ugh, it was the most aesthetically pleasing shots of the film for me) and her lover sitting in a dressing gown in the kitchen. She asks why he did it and how it felt to die, which he expresses, and after a not too long reintroduction and a understanding of the situation, they express the desire to have sex (oh hi darling, you're dead? Oh... Let's fuck!)

He basically tells her without any blood, he can't get an erection, and so her first thought is to get her trusty gun out and strap it to him (who wouldn't want to stick something inside them that can go off at any minute and kill them?) Anyway, we see the love making happen, in some versions we actually see the gun thrust in an out of Susan, and after the sweet lovemaking session the boyfriend puts poison in her milk and tells her she's going to die. Susan is very displeased with his actions, understandably and pushes him out of the window (a beautiful act of revenge!). Here we see the bible basher help him up via wood planks, that amazingly replicates Jesus on the cross, and takes him back up to his house. Here we see Susan die and come back to life and look at her newly undead skin disappointingly in a mirror.

Shatter Dead is a mix of things for me. I love the way it is shot, the characters (even through the less than A class acting), the, in my opinion, necessary gore and to some extent the plot, even though it isn't exactly new age or unique. The length (1h 24 mins) is perfect for you to understand the plot and understand it all fully whilst getting the links to actual world paranoia and not being too grossed out by the explicit scenes of nakedness, lesbianism (with a hint of antichrist theory?) and despair over the amount of hopeless and potentially tragic outcomes of the World. 

Shatter Dead is a film I love, and will continue to love for a long time. 

Until next time, 

Jessiefer.  

*I have noticed that many horror films have links to real world worries in them throughout the era's recently, such as the boom of monsters in the 30-40's which symbolise the nazi's and other enemies the World had, through to zombies, which coincides with mass hysteria over the unknown information about everyday chemical's (such as fluorine in our drinking water) that our governments' hide from us. and ghosts which express that an unknown force, who we are powerless against will eventually get us.