"My Bloody Valentine"

Today I'll be retelling the tale of 1981's My Bloody Valentine. Recently this film was remade in 3D with the tagline "Nothing says date movie like a 3D ride to hell." I was previously unaware of this fact, so I'm rather glad that someone finally brought it to my attention.
This wonderful film opens in the dark spoooooky depths of a coal mine. Two ominous miners are walking through a tunnel wearing full gear complete with gas maxes so we can't see their faces which, of course, makes them scarier. The two miners stop and take a looksie at one another. One begins to remove their gear, revealing to the other (and the audience) that she's actually a beautiful lady- the kind with boobs. She takes off her max to let down her silky blond hair, and unzips her jump suit to show off her voluptuous tatas. The other miner steps closer and ogles her. Just as she's about to remove his max and commence their gratuitous copulation he grabs her by the shoulders, slams her into a pitchfork and makes her dead.
Next we head to the mouth of the mine where a happy go lucky group of young miners is finishing up for the day. They jump in the showers like a bunch of college athletes in the locker room. These guys are one happy healthy bunch in this group shower, which kind of makes me want to move to Kentucky.
Once scrubbed up they pile into their cars and speed off like they just won the big game. They race to town accompanied by some fiddle heavy getaway music and meet their best gals. The ladies are at the town hall decorating for the first Valentines Day dance in 20 years. The jolly group is soon joined by the mayor and sheriff. One of the lads finds a frilly heart shaped chocolate box for the mayor, who is giddy with wonder at who his secret admirer could be. He hops in the truck with the sheriff and opens the box to find not sweet sweet chocolate confections but a bloody human heart instead!!!
Later that night all the miners pile into the local waterhole where the bartender insists on telling them the tale of why there hasn't been a dance for the past 20 years. He warns that anyone who celebrates at the dance this year is a fool and should fear for their lives. He tells of a night in the mines twenty one years earlier when six miners were left underground while the other men ran off to the Valentines dance instead of waiting to be sure the others made it out safe. There was an explosion caused by a methane leak and the miners were buried alive. Six weeks later a crew was able to reach them through the rubble only to find that one man, Harry Warden, had killed and eaten the other 5. He was placed in a mental hospital for exactly one year, but returned to the the town the following year to seek revenge. He killed the supervisors who had left him below the year before, stuffed their hearts into candy boxes and left them at the dance that night with a warning to never hold a Valentines dance again. The bartender pleads with his patrons that the story is true and that by attending the dance they're putting their lives in danger. The slightly intoxicated crowd insist that the bartender is just a crazy old drunk telling tall tales.
The sheriff and mayor head to the town coroner to see whether the heart they'd received is real or if it's just the rowdy young miners playing a sick joke. The coroner confirms that the heart is the real deal, and that it belonged to a young lady- perhaps the beautiful one with boobs from the beginning. The three of them all fear that Harry Warden must have escaped from the institution and come back and enforce his warning.
The carnage ensues. The owner of the local launderette, Madame Mabel, is the first to meet her death. She finds a heart shaped box and a card that reads "Roses are red, Violets are blue, one is dead, and so are you." Which turns out to not only rhyme, but also to be true, because then she gets dead.
The next day the mayor finds poor Mabel slowly cooking in a dryer at her laundromat. Her heart has been cut out and replaced with a paper Valentine complete with rhyming poem. "It happened once, it happened twice, cancel the dance, or it'll happen thrice." Pure genius! THRICE! Instead of scaring me this ominous message makes me giddy.
For some strange reason the sheriff decides that they don't want anyone in the town to panic, so they tell everyone Mabel had a heart attack and keep the danger at hand a secret. They do have brains enough to cancel the dance (in light of Mabel's "natural" death) and forbid the town young folks not to have any parties. Not to be told what to do, the rebellious group of twenty somethings decide that they're going to have a party anyway. Where better to hold a party when the sheriff's got the town on lock down? The mines, of course!
The next night the sheriff still hasn't been able to find Harry the mad miner but decides its still best not to tell the community. The kids pile up to the mine's rec room for their party and hide their cars where the sheriff can't see them. I didn't realize until now that mines had rec rooms, but hey, what do I know.
The first to go gets drown and boiled at the same time when Harry finds him boiling hot dogs in the kitchen and stuffs his head into the pot. Gross! I hate boiled hot dogs.
Then Harry finds some sexy kids making out in the locker room and waits for the perfect time to strike. The guy gets up to go get more beer and leaves his gal alone. Harry terrorizes her and eventually slams her body into a pipe in the showers. The guy returns to find his gal with water spouting from her chest.
Meanwhile six of these geniuses decide to take a ride down into the mines. Their girlfriends want to check out the cart that takes them down. "It's like a roller coaster right?" This seems like a bad idea but maybe I'm just being paranoid. The idea is to ride down, turn around, and come right back up. Once down there though the girls want to have a look around. Of course the guys agree and they all split up to feel each other up in privacy.
Back up in the rec room the body of the hot dog guy is discovered just in time for the guy who found his girlfriend fountain to run in screaming. With two known deaths the party goers start to panic. Everyone runs to leave and one guy tries to call the police, but finds the phones are down. Most of the youngins escape in their cars, but two guys stay behind to help save the group that went down into the mines. One stays above and one goes down to save the others. He quickly locates four of the six people down there but while looking for the others people start to drop like flies. Flies with pick axe wounds in their foreheads.
With one dead and two missing the others decide to try to escape before it's too late, but they find that Harry has smashed the controls for the pulley carts that would otherwise carry them out to safety. So, they decide to climb a wet ladder instead, the girls in heels. Half way up they find that Harry has already strung up one of their friends and hung him from the ladder. They decide to go back and make their way to another exit. Along the way two more of them die. The remaining couple reaches the pulley carts and one manages to fix the controls. They get in the carts just as Harry finds them. They try to jump ahead from one cart to another with Harry in hot pursuit but he catches up quickly and they jump off the cart and flee down an air shaft. Harry runs in after them but his pick axe gets stuck in the wall so he pulls a knife. Before he can act, the girl pulls his max off and stuns him. It turns out not to be Harry at all but Axel, one of the guys who went down in the mine with them and was thought to have died. OOOooooOOoooooh! Surprise ending!! Big finish!!
At that moment the air shaft starts to cave in and the two escape leaving Harry, er, uh, Axel behind. The shaft falls in on him and the others find the sheriff and a rescue team waiting in the tunnel outside. The sheriff tells them that he heard from the mental institution that Harry had died 5 years before. Then they remember that twenty years earlier Axel's father had been one of the mine supervisors Harry murdered, and that Axel had witnessed the whole thing. They go in to retrieve Axel's body and find him still alive. He pulls himself free on the other side of the rubble and runs off down the mine shaft promising to keep Harry's promise and kill anyone who celebrates Valentines day in the future.
Scary stuff.
The end.

"The Thing"

Today I'm summing up a wonderful little John Carpenter gem from 1982 called "The Thing"
It's got Kurt Russell AND Wilford Brimley in it sooo...
During the opening credits of this film we get a glimpse into the amazing wonder of special effects before CGI. A beautiful model spaceship goes spinning past, heading toward the earth. It rushes away from view and, reaching the earth's atmosphere, bursts into a brilliant red ball of hand painted flame.
With the credits over, our film opens on a snow covered landscape in Antarctica. A helicopter is chasing a dog and firing at it from above, conjuring images of a wide eyed grinning Sarah Palin wielding a sawed off shot gun and a clay jug of moonshine. The dog runs toward an American Science camp stationed on the frigid island and the helicopter lands, throwing grenades and firing wildly at the doggy. The pilot of the craft accidentally drops a grenade in the snow under the helicopter and hurriedly tries to recover it. Too late, he goes kablooey along with his copter, but the other passenger manages to escape. He chases after the cute little pup firing his gun like a maniac. The dog runs toward the American camp and the gun wielding lunatic accidentally shoots an American scientist in the leg and misses the dog. The other men scatter and one man manages to shoot the unidentified mad man before he can harm anyone else.
The scientists realize that the helicopter came from the Norwegian science camp stationed nearby. Two of the men, one being Kurt Russell- called Mac in the film, hop in their helicopter to go find out what is going on. The other men take the poor innocent dog inside with them and prepare for a quiet evening. At the Norwegian camp Kurt Russell and his companion discover the building is completely destroyed. There are holes in the facade of the building, the power has gone out, and the inside of the camp is covered in snow and ice. They find several frozen mangled corpses along with the smoldering charred remains of a horrific plastic sculpture that looks almost like an anguished set of siamese twins.
Later that night with everyone home they decide to stick the traumatized dog into the cage with all of their dogs. The moment they step away from the cage the dog stands up and his head splits open like a gross bloody flower. The dog sprouts insect legs and shoots out stringy tendrils that look like blood soaked crazy straws. He tries to kill the other dogs, who all start barking like mad. The whole team runs in and discovers the hideous monster and start shooting at it. One of the men runs in with a flame thrower and finishes the creature off. The leader of the camp orders Wilford Brimley to perform an autopsy on the anguished monster and he decides that its some sort of shape shifter that can take over other creatures bodies.
Kurt Russell and a buddy go to investigate an area they know the Norwegians have been frequenting lately to find out if it may have anything to do with these strange goings on. They find a huge spaceship buried in the ice and see that the Norwegians used explosives to blow off the layer of snow covering the ship. They go back to camp and tell their cohorts what they've found.
Good ol' Wilford runs some numbers through his computer and determines that the likelihood of the creature infecting one of his cohorts is 75%. He asks one of the men how long he was alone with the dog before they put it in the cage. He says he was only alone with the dog for an hour or two but nothing happened. Some other men in the group go out to a supply shed, where the creepy remains of the siamese twin kabob they found at the Norwegian camp is stashed. One of them pops into another part of the shed to look for something, while the other looks around in the same room as the dead body. The first man returns to the room to find his friend has been sucked in toward the half burnt remains and they're surrounding him with bloody tendrils. He runs back to the camp to get Kurt Russell and when they return their friend has escaped through a window. They manage to hunt him down rather quickly because he hasn't fully transformed and has difficulty running. He falls to the ground to reveal gory unhuman arms. Kurt Russell knocks over a barrel of kerosene at the monster and fires a flare into it, setting him ablaze. They all decide to drag the other half charred alien corpses out to the blaze and finish them off as well.
At this point Wilford Brimley goes loony and starts bustin' up the joint. He gets it in his head that they can't kill the aliens so he needs to make sure no one can escape to infect the rest of the earth. He rips out all the controls in their helicopter and their snow tractors. Then he goes inside and takes an axe to the radios. To prevent him from doing any more damage they tie him up in a storage shed outside.
As if by magic a ferocious snow storm settles in over the camp. Great. At this point no one in the camp trusts anyone else, everyone suspects that everyone else is an alien. One of the men find Mr. Russell's uniform torn to shreds and covered in blood out in the snow. He himself is not aware of being infected, but all the other men are sure that he is. Who's to say? All the men rush to kill him but when they try he insists he's not infected, that he's been framed, and threatens to blow up the whole compound if they go near him. He throws one of the men into a storage shelf so violently that he dies. The camp doctor tries to revive him using the electric defibrillator paddles, but once he does, the man's chest splits open to reveal a lovely plastic mouth equipped with "terrifying" plastic fangs. The doctor falls forward as the chest cavity he was leaning on opens up, and the chest fangs bite his arms off. It's at this point in the movie that I realize this is probably the best thing I've ever seen in my life. Ever.
The alien creature pops up out of the chest cavity in a stringy blood covered tower at the top of which is a duplicate head of the man it popped out of. The head is covered in blood, appears tortured and anguished, is screaming and menacing, and looks completely and utterly ridiculous. It blows my mind that someone spent days designing this "monster." Kurtypoo blasts the alien with his flame thrower and the creature starts screaming in anguish. The man's head (The "real" one at the top of his shoulders) begins to stretch off away from the burning torso and falls off the table while no one is watching. It uses it's tongue to pull itself away and under a desk where no one can see it sprout legs like a spider and eyes like a crab. The smaller new creature, balding bloody man head as body, spindly bloody hairy spider legs, and bulbous purple crab eyes turns and tries to run from the room. Someone spots the absurd creature and signals Kurt to turn his flame thrower on it. Thankfully he burns that stupid piece of shit up too.
Mr. Russell then rounds everyone up in another room and starts tying most of them up. After watching the detached head separate from the body and try to escape, he's got an idea. He decides that every part of these alien's bodies are separate entities and that if you harm any part, even the blood, it will react. He starts cutting the thumbs of all his buddies and collecting their blood in petri dishes. He uses his own blood first, and with a metal wire heated by flame, he tests the blood to see if it reacts. He proves that he is not affected and then starts going through the list of others in the room. About the fifth man he gets to, the blood screeches and tries to scurry away. Then the man it was taken from begins to violently shake and pulsate. He's tied to a bench with two other men, who are screaming and wailing for their lives as they watch the man sitting next to them burst and bubble from the inside. Unfortunately Kurty's flame thrower stalls and he's unable to torch the monster as it tries to make it's escape. It jumps to the ceiling and drops in front one of the other men equipped with a flame thrower. Before he's able to use it, the monster's head splits open revealing huge ridiculous fangs which chomp down on the other mans head. Kurt finally get's his flame thrower to work, but too late. The first monster, engulfed in flames, bursts through the walls of the room into the snow storm. Mr. Russell tosses a stick of dynamite his way and the monster goes boom boom. Kurt returns to the room, torches the other guy who got his head chomped, and finishes testing everyone's blood. Wilford Brimley is still tied up outside though, and one of the scientists, who went missing earlier, isn't accounted for yet.
With only three men left, they go out to test ol' Mr. Brimley's blood and find that he's gone missing. They notice one of the floorboards in the shed is loose and they take a peek underneath. There's a tunnel below the shed, and when they investigate they discover that Brimley used the helicopter and tractor parts to build a small spaceship under the ice. Then the power goes out. The men decide that the aliens think theres no way out now and they want to freeze and go into hibernation until a rescue team arrives. The don't want to let that happen so they decide to blow the whole complex up and burn it to the ground. While in the basement of the complex the alien manages to nab two of the men, leaving Kurt Russell the last man standing. The alien comes at him from under the ground, and Kurt tosses a stick of dynamite at it. The whole complex goes up in a giant explosion but Kurt manages to get outside unharmed. The last missing scientist returns and the two sit down and have a little chat before they sit down in the snow and wait to freeze to death.
The end.
I apologize that I don't possess the language skills to properly paint a mental picture of the monsters I saw on the screen in front of me today. I normally would never ever recommend watching one of these films, but this is one you may need to see. If only to witness these monsters, I think you'll thank me in the end.