The Lords of Salem (2012)

"Heidi, a radio DJ, is sent a box containing a record - a 'gift from the Lords'. The sounds within the grooves trigger flashbacks of her town's violent past. Is Heidi going mad, or are the Lords back to take revenge on Salem, Massachusetts?"

There's no point beating around the bush like a lot of reviewers do, "The Lords of Salem" is just a load of disappointing, boring, faux arty-farty bullshit.

As much as I like Rob Zombie's "Halloween II" and fancy his wife in everything she does, "The Lords of Salem" put the kibosh on any of those warm fuzzies. If a film like this, which borrows from everywhere yet still fails to deliver its story in a comprehensible manner, is the way that Rob Zombie has chosen to go, horror isn't just dead, it's rotting too.

There's a lot of pretentious arty-farty crap in the world, and then there's crap which pretends to be pretentious and arty-farty like this. Rob Zombie has described his film as "If Ken Russell directed The Shining", but that's nothing to be proud of. The obvious homages with pacing as lethargic as "2001: A Space Odyssey" are, however, the least of this movie's problems.

As I mentioned, I think a lot of Sheri Moon Zombie. She seems like a nice enough woman in real life and she's undeniably hot. The problem is that she doesn't have enough charisma on screen to pull off a lead role. This, of course, is disastrous in "The Lords of Salem" where the focus is on her.

Men seldom make passes at girls who need a good wash.

Sheri has great legs and a pretty face. You can say what you like about her bottom and washboard chest, and beauty is subjective, but you still can't deny her legs. You get to see a lot of them here too. Unfortunately, with ugly librarian glasses, dirty-looking dreadlocks and a bunch of fake tattoos, she's been made to look like a female version of her husband which doesn't exactly make her Heidi character sympathetic.

To say that the ex-junkie Heidi looks like she smells of wet dog and needs several showers (not to mention lots of laser tattoo removal to get rid of all that vile self-harming) is an understatement. Gratuitously showing her ass cheeks a couple of times doesn't help in any way, shape or form either. She's just too alienating. When Heidi says that she's "super tired" around 20 minutes in, that's the end as far as dialogue goes too. The correct word is "very" or "really" not "super"! I hope this is just a one-off and that irritating West Coast half-grammar hasn't spread from YouTube to real movies.

It's not really worth mentioning any of the other actors or actresses in "The Lords of Salem" especially as the big name convention whores who everyone expected to see cameos from are only in "blink and you'll miss it" moments, and the others are just in the background, but I'm obliged to say something merely to be sociable. I think Jeff Daniel Phillips is supposed to be channelling Rob Zombie, and Bruce Davison (aka Willard) has an even more pointless role than Scatman Crothers in "The Shining".

When old Willard uses Google (relabelled "Lookup") on his Apple product placement laptop to search Heidi's real name, the Bumhole (I mean Blumhouse) Productions influence is painfully obvious. Seriously, he'd just been reading the diary by the leader of the Lords of Salem and got his wife to play a bar of music out of it, so how is finding out that Heidi's real surname is Hawthorne (or "Hawthroen" according to the misspelled website) some great surprise? The Family Tree search is a most unnecessary discovery contrivance since there can't be that many people named Hawthorne who are born in Salem. It's not like her surname is Smith!!!

Sorry, you're not coming in if you don't have any little cakes!

I'm sure that there will be Rob Zombie fanboys raving about the three old satchel-asses, i.e. Macbeth witches, so I might as well say something about them too. Yes, Patricia Quinn, Dee Wallace and Judy Geeson are the best part of the movie, but they deserved to have a movie devoted entirely to themselves without all the other rubbish going on. "The Witches of Eastwick" has already been made, but if anyone wanted to remake it as a real horror movie, I now know three actresses who would be good in it. As someone who usually can't stand Dee Wallace's acting, I'm still willing to give a compliment when I feel that she has actually earned it.

Giving it more benefit than it actually deserves, "The Lords of Salem" is really only "Rosemary's Baby" mixed with "Black Sunday", "The Shining", Lars Von Trier's "The Kingdom", "The Devils", "Crowhaven Farm", "The Ninth Gate", "Trick or Treat", "The Ring", "Pontypool", "The House of the Devil", and "Suckspiria". I could quite easily tick off another 20 or so movies (and short stories such as M.R. James' "Number 13") which it borrows from, but if I can do it, so can you.

There are so many places where parts of the story are set up just to fizzle out and be forgotten about that it's all a confusing mess which seems designed to be weird for the sake of being weird. Even Dario Argento's "Mother of Tears" is better than this shit and doesn't have anyone giving birth to a lobster in it. Oh, did I just ruin the ending? Too bad. Most people will either walk out or fall asleep before they get that far anyway. "The Lords of Salem" doesn't even have any spring-loaded cat scares in it!

Ultimately, the sad thing is that no matter how many bad reviews "The Lords of Salem" gets, the braindead "yukyukyuk" crowd will still pay to see it just to find out how bad it really is for themselves. Ker-ching! Once you're famous, it's a licence to make money from morons even if your product sucks possessed priests.

This, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

"Humanity finds a mysterious, obviously artificial, object buried beneath the Lunar surface and, with the intelligent computer H.A.L. 9000, sets off on a quest."

It's "Sci-fi Saturday" again so I've given my old $1 VHS "Deluxe Letterbox Edition" of "2001: A Space Odyssey" another try to see if it's grown on me. It hasn't.

Without doubt, "2001: A Space Odyssey" is still the most boring film that I have ever seen in my life. I wish I could say that "Solaris" (1972) is even worse, but I've only watched the 2002 remake which at least had sexy Natascha McElhone in it.

I have no idea why people rate "2001" so highly. It might look nice (for the time), but there's hardly any story. What little story there is has nothing to do with any "Odyssey" that I know about. Where is Odysseus or Circe in all of this? Nobody gets turned into pigs, there are no flirty chats between Athena and the hero, and there's no archery contest at the end. What a jip!

I suppose the scenes between the HAL 9000 computer and Bowman (Keir Dullea) perk things up a bit, and it's nice to see the much missed Rigsby (Leonard Rossiter) from "Rising Damp" in something other than an old Cinzano commercial, but right from the start with a bunch of idiots badly dressed up as monkeys, it's pretty obvious that this movie is a complete turd.

There's a tiny bit of horror towards the end when Keir Dullea is trapped on the other side of the universe in some kind of rich Elizabethan girl's bedroom until he eventually gets old and dies, but that's it. That's all I get from this.

"2001: A Space Odyssey" is just a load of cheap gorilla-gram costumes, little toy spaceships cleverly filmed to look like real ones, colourful fake spacesuits, Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube" waltz, and a big, black, meaningless monolith which turns up simply to be arty. Nothing is answered, but no questions are posed either other than why anyone would make such a piece of crap or expect anyone else to watch it.

I'll be completely honest with you, I don't understand "2001: A Space Odyssey". Not only that, but I don't like it either. There's no action, no sexiness, no big, scary monsters. There's no message to it and no lessons to be learned other than to never watch it again.

Next!

Danny meets the twins!

It's "Terror Tuesday" again already so what better way to make you soil yourself today than with one of the most terrifying scenes from "The Shining"?

Kids are horrible enough anyway, but putting a couple of freaky-looking ones in even uglier dresses and sticking them at the end of a corridor was a master stroke by Stanley Kubrick.

As if there isn't enough creepiness seeing little Danny Torrence (Danny Lloyd) trundling round The Overlook hotel on his tricycle, suddenly the Grady daughters are just standing there inviting him to play with them "forever and ever"! As some of my horror blogging brethren would say, "Pants will be shat!"

Lisa and Louise Burns are even scary in a still image without the intercuts of their characters' dead bodies and all the blood.

In case you are wondering whatever happened to them since "The Shining" (1980) was their first and last movie, Lisa went on to get a degree in Literature while Louise became a microbiologist. They also grew into their looks and turned out to be rather pretty.

The Shining (1980)

"A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where an evil and spiritual presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from the past and of the future."

Due to the unbearable heat this month, I thought watching a movie set in Winter would help me psychologically. With three fans blowing continuously, I'm already beyond help physically.

Unfortunately, most of "The Shining" took place indoors and I'm not even going to finish this sentence with any pun using the word "chilling". Trust me, watching "The Shining" in 100 degree weather does not help in the slightest.

I don't really want to review "The Shining" now either since anything I have to say has certainly been said before. I will do so anyway for the younger readers who are still playing catch-up. If you haven't ever seen "The Shining" and you are a follower of this blog then you really need to see this film or return your horror licences.

Even if you've only watched the trailer, you should already know that "The Shining" is Stanley Kubrick's flawed version of Stephen King's famous novel, it stars Jack Nicholson who spouts his famous "Here's Johnny!" line, and there's a creepy little kid in it who talks to his finger a lot.

What you might not know is that Stephen King was inspired by Dan Curtis' "Burnt Offerings" (1976), Scatman Crothers was the voice of Henry in the "Hong Kong Phooey" cartoons, and Shelley Duvall is really weird looking. Okay, you probably do know that last bit.

The trouble with "The Shining" for me is that I don't really know if it's supposed to be a ghost story, a possession story, or just the tale of some guy going crazy. Stanley Kubrick's screenplay is quite a bit different to the novel as I remember it and, apart from the sometimes stunning and frightening visuals, "The Shining" is a mess as far as the narrative goes.

Obviously, the main focus is Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the Jack Torrance character. Apparently, his alcoholism was based on Stephen King's own experiences and this changes the way you think about the character in the novel. You can wonder if what Torrance sees is real or brought on by withdrawal symptoms. In this movie version, however, it's more certain that these things are real so a big chunk of mystery and suspense is lost immediately. Like I said at the start, Kubrick's film is very flawed.

I really don't want to dwell on the differences between the novel, the movie or even the boring TV version with the thumbsucker-mouthed kid in it. They are three very distinct entities and those who enjoy one probably won't like the other two.

What I will say is that I used to really like "The Shining" until I rewatched it and started picking holes in it. There were always parts of it which made absolutely no sense, and Dick Hallorann's death was just plain mean (not to mention wasteful), but the scary bits still worked.

For at least the first two-thirds of the movie, the atmosphere was creepy as Hell and almost nauseating but, when Jack's madness kicked in, it started to get dull. All work and no play, eh? I can't even explain why the final third failed to interest me since it's the section with the most physical action. Maybe I've seen "The Shining" too many times.

I've never really cared about any of the main characters, least of all the pointlessly psychic Danny with his stupid croaky voice or his even more irritating mother. If ever there was a character who I wanted to drag out of a movie and beat senseless, it was Wendy Torrance so kudos to Shelley Duvall for making that role so memorable for me.

The ghostly barman also annoyed me as much as the entire series of "Twin Peaks" which had a similarly surreal vibe to it (and which I loathed after three episodes). As for Jack Torrance, in spite of Jack Nicholson trying to make the character more charismatic, he got just what he deserved. I didn't like him and I had no sympathy for him.

My main gripe about "The Shining" though is that I don't like it when films start getting too surreal for their own good. Stanley Kubrick was really out of control with this one. Of course, there are some nutters who claim that Kubrick was hiding messages about his involvement in the faked NASA moon landings in "The Shining" which, if true, might explain a lot of things. Even so, it's still only the score which makes "The Shining" a masterpiece rather than any of Kubrick's alleged skills. If you took the music out, everything (apart from the infamous bathtub scene and the creepy little girls) would actually be cinematically excellent but also rather tedious.

I'm going to end this with the numerical rating of 5 out of 10 for "The Shining". I haven't done a numerical rating for ages, but, based on how I felt after rewatching "The Shining", it's better than the expletive-laden alternative.