Spontaneous Combustion (1990)

… aka: Fire Syndrome
… aka: I figli del fuoco (The Fire Children)
… aka: Nevada eksperimentet (Nevada Experiment)
… aka: Polttava kuolema (Burning Death)

Directed by:
Tobe Hooper

I scoured the internet looking for interviews with Hooper where he addresses this particular film and came up empty handed in my search. Seems like nearly everyone just wants to talk in great length about his masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). I wonder if he's sick of talking about that movie and answering the same questions over and over again forty years later. Other journalists will touch on some of his other, better-known films. You know, like his Spielberg-produced Hollywood breakthrough Poltergeist (1982), which remains his highest-grossing film to date, and his less successful work with Cannon Picture on the Texas Chainsaw sequel and the big-budget bombs Lifeforce (1985) and Invaders from Mars (1986), but tend to stop around that point in time as if he didn't make anything afterward. If I was ever given a chance to interview him I'd personally be picking his brain about movies like this (which bears the telltale signs of being a very troubled production) and some of the odd ones he made overseas soon after like Night Terrors (1993) and The Mangler (1995). Spontaneous Combustion was his first theatrical feature after his disastrous three-picture stint with Cannon / Golan-Globus four years earlier. Like the Cannon films, this one also had a fairly healthy budget and was a major flop. On a budget of 5.5 million dollars, it grossed just 50 thousand in its limited run. Box Office Mojo lists 226 theatrical releases for 1990 and this one ranks #221 for the year.

Things begin in 1955 at the “Hydrogen Bomb Testing Site” in the Nevada Desert. Brian Bell (Brian Bremer) convinces his wife Peggy (Stacy Edwards) to take part in a military experiment called “Project Samson;” which promises to “take the anxiety out of the Atomic Age!” While hiding down in a bunker 20 feet underground and allowing the military to drop an A-bomb directly on top of them may not sound like a wise choice, it certainly pays well and all they really have to do is strap themselves down to a seat and take an experimental new drug to make them immune from the radioactive fallout. Things seem to go off without a hitch... at least at first. Brian and Peggy pass all of their tests, are labeled “America's First Nuclear Family,” become national heroes for their courage and are given a wad of cash and put up in a nice new home in Phoenix. 

Nine months later, Peggy gives birth to a baby boy they name David. Though he has a slightly above-average body temperature and a strange circular birthmark on his hand, otherwise he gets a clean bill of health from the doctors. Brian and Peggy are elated... that is until both of them suddenly go up in flames. The baby is then handed off to project leader Lew Orlander (William Prince) to raise as his own so he can keep a close eye on him and perhaps cultivate his potential. Lew changes the boy's name to Sam Kramer, tells him his real parents drowned and naturally doesn't tell him anything in regards to his real parents or past.

Thirty-five years later in Trinidad Beach, California we meet the now-grown Sam / David (Brad Dourif), who's a college professor and has managed to ingratiate himself into society with no apparent issues thus far. However, that's all about to change and he'll have worse things to worry about than bombing his audition for the upcoming Shakespeare festival. Sam's recently started suffering from intense migraines to go along with a fever-like body temperature he's had his whole life. The birthmark on his hand keeps growing and he's soon having visions of his dead parents and recollecting things about his past he'd have no way of knowing. Coinciding with all of that, people in the area, namely those who have somehow crossed or angered Sam, have mysteriously burned to death. Though the press have written several of the incidents off as the deceased accidentally catching themselves on fire from smoking in bed, the latest victim somehow managed to catch fire while taking a shower; which forced them to look into the concept of spontaneous combustion.

It's soon made clear to both Sam and his supportive new girlfriend Lisa (Cynthia Bain) that he's the one actually causing the deaths after a woman he gets into a fight with, an inept doctor and a rude, Twinkie-eating radio technician (played by John Landis in a silly cameo) all go up in flames after angering Sam. A hole forms on his arm that starts spewing blood and fire and it can't even be put out with water, which just acts as a fuel of sorts to keep the flames going. And if you think dealing with common everyday assholes may make one angry, just wait until Sam finds out that his adoptive father (who's now the chief adviser to the board of director's at a power plant that's reopening in town), his ex-wife (Dey Young), the woman he now loves, his new doctor (Jon Cypher), who strangely whips out a Geiger Counter during an examination, and others are not only keeping things from him but may also be conspiring against him.

While this starts out fairly well with the 1950s segment, it only gets progressively worse from there. The plot is unfocused and meandering, there's so much stuffed in here that pretty much every plot thread ends up under-baked or just gets tossed to the side altogether, the John Dykstra special effects are highly variable (ranging from excellent to awful) and everything leads up to a truly terrible finale that's unsatisfying, anticlimactic and utterly senseless. What gives with the birthmark? What gives with Sam briefly acquiring clairvoyant abilities and being able to see into not only his past but other (dead!) people's lives? What gives with the syringe of glowing green goop a mad doctor / assassin wants to inject Sam and Lisa with? What gives with Sam being able to cause people to spontaneously burst into flames at will and from afar yet not using these powers on the people he knows mean to do him harm? The piss poor writing / plot development does provide the occasional unintended laugh and "WTF just happened?!" moment, so this has that much going for it.

I've always loved Dourif. He's a great actor who usually gives it his all, as he does in this film, but even he can't do much when the dialogue is this bad. Some clunkers include Lisa reassuring Sam not to worry because spontaneous human combustion “...happens all the time!” and one of the military men noting the irony of the atomic baby's birthday: “Well it's August 6th... Today's the 10th anniversary of the day we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. That's pretty funny, isn't it?” The supporting cast also includes Melinda Dillon, Dale Dye and former Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus as members of the 1950s military / science team, Michael Keys Hall, Dick Warlock and one-eyed House of Wax director André De Toth in an uncredited cameo. George “Buck” Flower provides the voice of a radio preacher and Hooper himself can be seen smoking in the boy's room.

★1/2

Netflix Instant Marathon: 3 Days, 8 Movies

Usually when I'm browsing Netflix I feel the same way I do when I'm in a restaurant with a huge menu: I can never decide what I want because there are so many damn options. Sometimes I'll skim through the catalogue for half an hour unable to pick and finally just get annoyed and end up not watching anything at all. Where do all of these movies even come from? Why do they make so many of them? Do any of these things actually make money? I suppose they do or else they wouldn't be making so many, but considering these days thousands upon thousands of independent horror films are released, it couldn't be all that much. Wading through all of these mysterious titles to find the few gems out there can also be downright frustrating. There's a lot of sheer mediocrity out there, which is mostly what I experienced in my random marathon of films, but I stuck them all out until the bitter end... 

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Abandoned Mine (2013; Jeff Chamberlain)

On Halloween night, a high school jock named Brad (Reiley McClendon) decides to take his girlfriend Sharon (Alexa Vega) and three of their other friends into an abandoned, supposedly haunted mine where many died years earlier. Predictability ensues with banal dialogue, unconvincing emoting, inappropriate use of condiments during lame practical jokes and too-slow-to-get-started-and-then-not-much supernatural shenanigans. Upon this film's release, numerous supporters, who may very well be production company sock puppets from the sounds of their glowing posts, kept flooding message boards praising this as a great horror flick for teenagers. In actuality, it's more like a great horror flick for parents who don't want their kids watching real horror films. Though there's little objectionable material here, teenagers, if anyone, will likely be bored senseless as this has no gore, no profanity, no sex and nothing else they want to see. It also happens to have no real scares, no creepy moments, no suspense, a corny ending and is filled with cheap attempts to disorient the viewer by toying around with the timeline and repeating things over and over again to make up for the lack of plot. The portrayal of an Indian supporting character is slightly offensive and it's a muddled bore regardless of how old you are. [USA]  ★1/2

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Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader (2012; Kevin O'Neill)

Cassie Stratford (Jena Sims) is an unpopular, nerdy college girl with acne, greasy hair and big glasses. Her comically awful mother (Sean Young) is pushing her to become both a cheerleader and sorority girl or else she won't pay for her tuition. Cassie doesn't quite cut it at either, so she takes a pink experimental drug that ends up making her beautiful... but it has a few side effects Allison Hayes, Daryl Hannah and J.J. North already know all about. Cassie soon finds herself stealing a bikini off a giant blow-up display, bathing in swimming pools and crouching down inside a gymnasium hoping her lab partner (Ryan Merriman) can come up with an antidote. This is one of those purposely stupid, silly films that doesn't take itself seriously at all and it's just OK entertainment for B movie fans. The CGI effects (including a giant spider) and much of the acting is awful, but there are a few dumb laughs and Sims, Olivia Alexander (as a bitchy sorority queen bee who also gets injected with the drug) and Anne McDaniels show ample skin for your viewing pleasure. Treat Williams has a co-starring role as a doctor who gets to yodelayheehoo into the heroine's cavernous vagina. There are also brief cameos from the likes of Ted Raimi (another doctor), Mary Woronov (sorority house mother), John Landis (professor) and producer Roger Corman (college dean) for the faithful. Highlight: the nude 50 foot cat fight on a football field, no doubt. [USA]  ★★

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Cheerleader Massacre 2 (2011; Brad Rushing)

Two rival teams - the cleverly-titled red team and blue team - are slated for a competition at a secluded cheerleading camp where a 10 thousand dollar college scholarship is at stake. Meanwhile, some mechanical flying devices with differing abilities have somehow been unleashed into the woods and do the cast in one by one. And what a cast it is! Excluding a dozen skimpily-attired bimbos, we also get a creepy groundskeeper, a pervy camp owner, three cheerleading coaches, a pair of cops, a trio of dumb boys trying to sneak into the camp for some action, a female news reporter and her crew and numerous others. In fact, there are so many damn people in this movie the director can't even kill them all off in 75 minutes even though six die in in the pre-credits sequence alone. There's a ton of nudity, including three shower scenes, two sex scenes and topless sunbathing. Some scenes of nudity (like a large-breasted redhead who speaks in an extremely bizarre Euro monotone like some Hungarian valley girl) seem to have been grafted on at a later point and have nothing to do with the plot. The CGI is laughably awful, as is the acting, dialogue and the killer's motive, but the idea of robots flying around laying waste to a bunch of half-naked airheads puts a smile on my face and I wasn't at all bored while watching this. So while this isn't good at all, it's bad in a good way. Bring on Cheerleader Camp 3, I say! [USA]  ★1/2  SBIG

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Devil's Pass (2013; Renny Harlin)

In 1959, nine members of a skiing expedition were found dead in Russia's Ural Mountain weeks after the fact. A later investigation revealed that they had ripped their way out of their tent and fled into the snow barefoot for some undetermined reason which has caused a lot of speculation from conspiracy theorists over the years whose theories run the gamut from an avalanche to wild animals to aliens to Yeti and to the Russian government murdering them because they stumbled upon something they shouldn't have. This film uses that real life mystery as a basis for a found footage horror shot from the first person camera perspective of the characters. What an original concept! A female psychology student, a student director, a boom operator and two experienced hikers travel to Russia and hike to the spot of the Dyatlov Pass Incident where they encounter avalanches, a couple of armed government agents, a secret underground military lab, skinny mutant monsters with shaky faces and the ability to teleport and, finally, a time travel wormhole. The characters are unlikable and the acting and dialogue are surprisingly bad considering this film actually had enough of a budget for on-location filming, which makes the first talky hour or so extremely tough to get through. This does become slightly more interesting toward the end but by then they'd already pretty much lost me. I also found it rather distasteful to use still photos of the actual corpses of those killed in 1959 to open this film. [Russia, UK, USA]  ★★

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Exit to Hell (2013; Robert Conway)

Man, I am so sick of these current throwback "grindhouse" flicks. The fake film grain and scratches added in post production, the purposely choppy editing, the constant jumps and split second flash-forward snippets so our ADD-racked minds don't stray... Guess what filmmakers? This has already been done hundreds of times. It's not clever. It's not stylish. It's not novel. It's just tired and copycat, makes you look like a bargain Tarantino wannabe and really does nothing to actually improve your film. Enough already. It's a shame in this case because this film otherwise has a few things going for it. After shooting up a Russian gangster's strip club and fleeing with a bag of cash, four criminals headed toward Mexico take a wrong turn and end up in a small Arizona town where everyone seems a little bit off their rocker Two-Thousand Maniacs-style. The town is resided over by Sheriff Sickle (Kane Hodder), who slaughters bad folks and then cannibalizes them with his son and obese wife. There's not a moment in here or a stylistic choice that hasn't been cribbed directly from another film, the direction, editing and camerawork are often massively distracting and every single character is unlikable. On the plus side, there's gore and nudity, Hodder isn't bad in his role, Dustin Leighton and Tiffany Shepis do the best they can as two of the criminals and there's a standout role for Dan Higgins as a gas station attendant. The film falls short of its potential simply because the the director is so infatuated with "style" he neglects the story. The who, why and how are all extremely vague. Filmed in the Spring of 2009 under the title Sickle, this took until the end of 2013 to get a DVD release. [USA]  ★★

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Midnight Movie (2008; Jack Messitt)

Clearly influenced by Demons (1985), Anguish (1987) and Popcorn (1991), this supernatural slasher flick set in a movie theater is acceptable within its own limited parameters. Bridget (Rebekah Brandes) is the put upon manager of a cinema who's planning on screening a black-and-white horror flick from the 70s by a long-forgotten director named Ted Radford (Arthur Roberts) at midnight. Years earlier, Radford had gone crazy and was stuck in an insane asylum where everyone else was mysteriously slaughtered. Ted however was not among the bodies found and may still be on the loose. Well, never mind that. What unspools for us here isn't the tale of a mad director per se but of the mad director's creation. The killer on screen (a guy in a skull mask and some hand-held giant corkscrew) materializes in the theater and goes on a "real" murder spree. His murders even magically show up on the screen as part of the older movie. Granted much of the acting is amateurish and the plot hasn't been thought through all that well, this is fast-paced, performed with enthusiasm by the cast and is entertaining (and bloody) enough for slasher flick fans. [USA]  ★★1/2

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100 Bloody Acres (2012; Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes)

*PICK OF THE LITTER* The Morgan Brothers, Reg (Damon Herriman) and Lindsay (Angus Sampson), have a successful organic fertilizer business with a product capable of growing gigantic vegetables. Their secret ingredient? Roadkill. The siblings don't limit that to just dead animals either and have no issue snatching humans up from accident sites if they can get to them before the cops can. Hoping to improve their fertilizer even more, their next scheme is to drain fresh potassium from live humans. Reg stumbles upon a trio of young folks having car problems, takes them back to their secluded farm, ties them up and demonstrates their patented meat grinder. Troubles arise when Reg starts having second thoughts about what they're doing and finds himself having feelings for the lone female captive (Anna McGahan), who's not quite happy with her current love life, anyway. This medium budget backwoods Aussie effort - more a comedy with gore than a horror-comedy - is well made, well acted, nicely photographed and edited, breezy with the pacing, light on the tone and entertaining for the most part. There's enough enthusiasm on display to mostly overcome the threadbare plot, though some cliché drug humor seems out of place and the aggressive attempts to be quirky and charming seem forced and calculated at times. That said, this was easily the best film from my marathon. John Jarratt (Wolf Creek) has a fun cameo as a police officer. [Australia]  ★★★

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Zombie Night (2013; John Gulager)

After starting this and seeing the production company was "The Asylum," I automatically set my expectations low. Good thing, too, as this film is infested with annoying boneheads doing moronic things simply to advance the nearly nonexistent plot. Speaking of plot; I couldn't really find one here. Zombies rise from their graves, attack a town and people scurry around trying to avoid being killed. That's it. There's no explanation behind the zombie plague and there's also no explanation for why the zombies "die" when the sun comes up. The film moves along at a brisk pace, has plenty of action, highly variable makeups and gore (some of the CGI blood splatters are terrible) and the acting from the leads (Anthony Michael Hall, Daryl Hannah, Alan Ruck) is acceptable. What drags this down are the characters, including a whiny blind mother (Shirley Jones!) who won't shut the fuck up until a bullet is put into her head, a horrible little brat whose retarded actions get several people needlessly killed and a couple of teens glued to their cell phones and moping around over one another for an hour. At one point, a small group of survivors - knowing they only have to survive a few hour until morning - have full access to a safe room but then leave the house for no reason whatsoever. Director Gulager (the son of actor Clu) also made the Feast films. [USA]  ★★

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Thanks for reading.

Darkman (1990)

Directed by:

Sam Raimi

Sam Raimi borrows elements from THE INVISIBLE MAN, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and several other horror classics for this dark, comic book-style revenge tale, which can now be seen as the direct link between Raimi's grittier, low budget horror efforts of the 1980s and the more polished, expensive SPIDER MAN series of today. Liam Neeson does a fine job as the kind-hearted hero, a scientist working on a breakthrough of synthetic skin for cloning body parts, who's attacked and left for dead by sleazebag henchmen with political and mobster ties. Using his brilliant scientific know-how to mask his badly scarred face, "Darkman" lurks in the shadows waiting for a chance to get back at his attackers. Raimi's over-the-top approach can be a bit over whelming at times, but it's well countered by realistic and likable central characters (including Frances McDormand as Neeson's co-worker and love interest) who we want to root on, plus remarkable make-up effects and stunt work and suitably slimy performances from Colin Friels, Nicholas Worth and Larry Drake as the bad guys. The cast also includes Bruce Campbell, Dan Hicks and Ted Raimi (all of whom appeared in EVIL DEAD 2), Aaron Lustig, wrestler Toru Tanaka, Neal McDonough and cameos from directors John Landis as a physican and William Lustig and Scott Spiegel as dockworkers.

Danny Elfman composed the score, Jenny Agutter puts in an uncredited appearance as a doctor and several direct-to video sequels (starring Arnold Vosloo) followed in 1994 and 1995: DARKMAN II: THE RETURN OF DURANT (with Drake returning) and DARKMAN III: DIE, DARKMAN, DIE.

★★1/2

American Werewolf in London, An (1981)

...aka: American Werewolf, The

Directed by:
John Landis

Review coming soon.

★★★