So, you like horror movies, but can you sit in a theater for a ten-hour marathon of them? And can you do it even when each one is kept a secret so you don’t know what the hell you’re gonna see?
Sure, you can! It’s like trick or treat. All you know about this show is that your butt’s going to be numb when it’s all over and you’re going to see a lot of people die. Also, the coolest thing about it is they don’t show anything that this theater has shown before, which means that they have to dig deep and go for the weird stuff.
It gets you in the Halloween spirit.
Me, I’m a broken-down old creep. I don’t really do Halloween anymore. Maybe I’ll put on a Cramps record or watch some old horror movie faves (Arrow’s new An American Werewolf in London Blu-ray restoration should be in my hot little hands this week, says Amazon) in October, but I don’t carve pumpkins or wear costumes. I mostly enjoy the fall weather and rationalize eating some candy. That’s my idea of a party.
So the annual Dismember the Alamo horror-o-rama pretty much IS Halloween to me. Everyone’s in a good mood. Anticipation fills the room. Some people show up in costumes. Next thing you know, even a little introverted mosquito like me chit-chats with the guy in the next seat about the movie we just saw and what the hell might hit us next. (This year’s theme was creepy-crawlies. Snakes and bugs and worms, oh my!)
In other words, it’s a great show. It’s the kind of show that blasts your brain with movies like THESE:
Spasms from 1983. That was the first film. 35mm print. Right away we get thrown into a dreamy past (I LOVE when these shows start with 35mm). This is the one in which Peter Fonda is a scientist who gets roped into a whole strange story in which sweaty millionaire Oliver Reed has a psychic connection to a giant killer snake from some South Pacific island. Meanwhile, a goofball pagan cult also has designs on the snake. Reed pays to have the snake captured and hauled to the States, where he can confront it or kill it or contain it or do something to get it out of his head. Do I even have to tell that the plan goes awry and the snake gets out and turns a lot of people into tomato paste?
Flick #2 is the grossest, most disturbing and all-around flummoxing of the batch. It was my favorite, of course. I’m talkin’ about The Centipede Horror, a Chinese movie from 1982 and for which the producers rounded up every centipede in the Eastern hemisphere that they could find in order to freak you out. The story gets rolling when a girl gets nibbled half to death by a centipede army, which is not the sort of thing that happens everyday. Further investigation reveals that a magician who has power over the world’s centipedes is directing them all toward the grandchildren of a guy who once did a very bad thing that I won’t spoil. Only two things can stop this weirdo: a mystical protective amulet and another magician who has power over the world’s chicken skeletons. The result is primo Asian horror fucked-up-ness. Every main actor here deserves an instant Academy Award for having to work with centipedes crawling all over them. The girl who had to have live ones in her mouth deserves two trophies and a medal and whatever else we can scrape up.
AGFA restored this film in crisp digital just in time for October so a lot of Alamos around the country showed it for their own Dismember, but only Richardson, I believe, built the entire theme of the marathon around it.
For flick #3, we got Squirm, the finest worm horror film of 1976. All it took was a downed power line in a tiny Georgia town to turn all of the local worms into vicious killers. Maybe one worm can’t do much to you, but hundreds of thousands of them sure can, so that’s what happens here. More worms than you’ve ever seen in a movie invade houses and chew up old ladies. All of the worms are real, too. It’s the first film written and directed by Jeff Lieberman, who later made one of this site’s favorite horror movies, Blue Sunshine.
After we were done with the worms, it was time for snakes to come back with Curse II: The Bite from 1989. A young couple road trip through New Mexico and Texas and pass through a remote town where the snakes are all super-snakes for some vague reason related to radioactivity. When they bite you, you gradually turn into a snake. It’s the classic werewolf scenario, in other words, but with snakes. It’s also a pretty good offbeat flick that I’d never heard of before. No, it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s oddly well-made in widescreen by first-time and only-time director Frederico Prosperi under the name Fred Goodwin.
As for the final movie, at this show it’s always a classic or a crowd-pleaser and this year that slot went to James Gunn’s Slither from 2006 on 35mm.
Now, the room loved it. You could feel the warmth. It was a good choice for the finale.
THAT SAID, I have to be a big ol’ stick in the mud and say that I’m not a big fan. I’d seen it before.
Slither isn’t a terrible movie; I just think it doesn’t do anything with its well-worn premise (an alien threat in the middle of the night in a podunk town) other than hang a bunch of sitcom jokes onto it. If I’m gonna watch this story for the 300th time, I need more than that. I need the kind of shocks that didn’t fit into Gunn’s Hollywood ambitions.
The cast is charming is all hell though (and Gunn deserves credit here for giving the great Michael Rooker a showcase role), and I don’t doubt for a moment that the people who made it really cared, which is what kept my ass in the seat in this final stretch. I even fucked up my stupid low-carb diet and ordered some peanut M&Ms and the mega-hopped, but delicious, Velvet Hammer beer for this movie.
I gave it another chance and I still didn’t like it. but whatever. I’ll live. One of the earmarks of horror is that it’s forever controversial. It’s the most controversial genre ever. Nobody can agree on anything.
The closest we can get might be the feeling in the air as we all left this show. Stiff in the limbs. Bleary-eyed. Hanging halfway onto consciousness. Minds full of screams and dark dreams and little bugs crawling everywhere. Maybe we all had different opinions about the movies that we saw, but we nevertheless all left sharing the same experience of surprise and discovery and exploration in the dark.
And that’s what it’s really all about.