150 Days of Halloween: C.H.U.D., Creep, End of the Line, Midnight Meat Train

Spent all weekend doing makeup and effects for a short horror movie, so sorry for the late post. As the guy doing the FX, I didn't exactly have free hands to take any pictures, but once they come online, you can expect to see them! It was a whole lot of tumors, puss, blood, and elephant man style makeup. Good messy times.

Most of us have at least been to a city before, many live in them. What has always fascinated me in whats under the city, the miles of tunnels, pipes, and caverns of decrepit infrastructure. Understandably this makes for a common horror theme, so today we run through four movies that revolve around the hidden lives and deaths that pound in the hidden hearts of cities everywhere. I won't be covering Kontroll because its not very Halloween-ish, but if you ever want to see an incredible subway movie, check it out.

I want to believe this happens.

Anyway, can't rightly mention the terrors under a city without talking about the classic and constantly referenced C.H.U.D. You may have never seen this movie, but you have almost certainly heard it referenced before in a show you like. The Simpsons, Futurama, Castle, and Robot Chicken all come to mind, but many more have made off hand comments to the cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers that appeared in the 80's.

This has everything you want and need in an 80's horror movie, you get your gore inflicted by men in crazy mutant suites, corrupt government officials you hate, cheesy lines and moments. Hell, this movie even goes and gives you no less then THREE classic hero archetypes to work with. You get the unwilling hero who just wants to do his own thing, the crazy and paranoid guy who was right all along, and the grizzled old cop who can no longer play by the rules. Its like four different awesome 80's movies fell into a blender and out popped this amazing gem of cheesy horror.

"WHAT AM I!?"

Its stuffed to the gills with random things happening, plenty of monsters, and satisfying moments of people getting what they deserve. This is just a must see for B-movie fans. At no point was I not having fun during this movie, which is high praise for a movie.

Then you have Creep. Oh Creep, you could have been a good movie. A woman at a party rebuffs some sleazeballs advances, and the informs her friends that she has word that George Clooney will be at a party later. She intends to seduce and bang Mr. Clooney come hell or high water, and leaves the party in a drunkenly determined manner. She falls asleep on the platform, and when she awakes everything is closed down and locked up. She is trapped, or appears to be, until a train arrives. We see the conductor dead, and know she has some trouble coming her way. Out comes the sleazy guy who attempts to rape her, like a sleazy bastard.

"Sorry about that rape attempt before."

Then a malformed sewer mutant dude pops out and kills him, and spends the rest of the movie trying to kill her, but mostly succeeds in killing anyone she meets in the tunnels. What the movie does well is the killer, we have only the briefest glimpses into what could have been its origins, nothing is ever fully explained. I love that, I like a movie to have a world bigger then I am privy to. What I don't like is for everyone in the movie to be completely devoid of reason and intelligence.

The victims will knock our killer out for a moment, and then drop all weapons and run back into the maze of tunnels they know nothing about. They never take that second swing to finish the deed, and within ten minutes a character will die because of it. This happens SEVERAL TIMES. Hell, even the killer does this sometimes, like it has sadistic killer ADD. Lets the heroes run off so it can brutally kill someone he already has strapped to a chair.

Don't worry, she drops the weapon and extends the movie many times.

When the movie can clearly end, but doesn't because a character is functionally brainless, it ruins the rest of the movie by making it all seem sadly arbitrary. Creep is well done when it comes to atmosphere, makeup, and some of the acting, but the ride itself is underwhelming.

Love this movie.

Then you have a total surprise, like End of the Line. A clever Canadian movie I had never even heard of before that presents the viewers with everything they need to understand the movie fully without question, but doesn't explicitly state any of it. If your an observant viewer, you know exactly whats happening. You know whats real, what imagined, and why. If you don't notice details and pay full attentions, its still functional as a movie, but you just don't know for sure whats real, which is awesome. I love that in a movie, subtle layers.

As per our theme, this takes place in the confines of the man-made underground. Unlike the last two mentioned, this one doesn't involve any monsters or malformed creatures. This is all humanity at play, and that is a very important fact. A cult, upon receiving a mass text from their leader, suddenly draw daggers and swords and begin to cut down everyone around them, trying to save all of their souls. You see, they believe the apocalypse is coming, and can see the signs of demons coming. They are told the only way to save everyone is to kill them, and so the knives come out.

"Nevermind! I'll take a pamphlet!"

Of course for those not in the cult, this isn't totally appealing, and so our survivors work through the subway system trying to get to the surface for help, despite knowing its just as bad above. What makes this more then just a mediocre movie of people running and other people stabbing are those signs. Some of our heroes can see those signs, demons creeping about and hearing voices, casting doubts on whats real and whats not. Again, for the observant viewer, they know exactly whats happening, but for those that miss a few details they enjoy some ambiguity. Either way is an enjoyable and valid experience.

I also have to admit to loving a movie with such a blatant message about the dangers of fundamentalism in society. Hell, one of the heroes is reading Caral Sagan's The Demon Haunted World. It's brilliant.

I love you Vinnie Jones.

Lastly we have one of my guilty pleasures, Midnight Meat Train. Actually, you know what, its not even guilty. I like this movie, I really do. I would argue its one of the best Clive Barker adaptions, possibly even better then Hellraiser. For a movie with a name like Midnight Meat Train, I know that's not exactly expected, but it really is surprisingly competent.

On the surface you have a serial killer who is killing people on the late night trains, and a photographer who manages to find himself obsessed with the idea of it all after a woman he saves from some attackers goes missing. In these early sections the movie effectively pulls off gory kills, some decent scares, and suspense from the imposing Vinnie Jones. As our hero progresses mystery enters the fold, and he begins to question just what it is he is trying to uncover. Soon things turn supernatural and you really know your in a Clive Barker film.

If you love him too, he won't butcher you.

This movie does what it wants to do, and is unapologetic about it, it slides between the various sub-genres of horror when it needs to, and it does it well. Its not a perfect movie, of course not, but when I caught it on late night TV a few years back, I was pleasantly surprised by what I expected would be a terrible movie. Instead I got a movie with a few decent surprises in it, good gore, and a cast and crew that were clearly all in it for the joy of making a horror movie.

Also its on the subway a whole bunch, in case you missed the theme here today.

"After the next picture, I'll help."

A weekend of filming, and now a week of letting some people take my blood and run tests on me. Fun! I will be tired all the time! Here is that link! The 150 Days of Halloween.

Things are still busy!

So things have yet to slow down, the screen printer I work with is in overdrive and suddenly I'm in his studio every damn day - which is making it difficult to finish the ear prosthetics. One way or another I'll finish those bastards.

It also makes it somewhat difficult to update this here blog the way I wanted today. I was going to talk about the prosthetics I'm working on, but I haven't gotten time to take pictures of the things. I do, however, have some pictures of that chocolate stuff I talked about in my first post!

So today's post is about that!

Aw, isn't he an adorable icon of madness and despair?

This guy is the first casting, so forgive his rough appearance and gimpy eye. I'll be cleaning the mold errors out and learning more about tempering chocolate, so one day he will dazzle! The general form was modeled after a squatting chocolate bunny, but with more tentacles, squid heads, and wings.

Also the Triforce!

The Triforce of Chocolate, just slightly less sought after then the Triforce of power.

One thing I learned while doing this is that when you temper chocolate, if ANY water comes into contact with the melted chocolate, the entire batch will just shit the bed. It turns into a solid mass of uselessness, and it is very sad. All of my methods for flavoring the chocolate with raspberry resulted in this massive waste of precious chocolate, which was kind of maddening. I now know that one needs raspberry oils to flavor chocolate, and wish I knew that when I was melting several pounds of the dark stuff.

These two will pop onto my store in the near future, along with a new desk idol, and a price drop on the massive idols.

Firefox may have crashed twice while I tried to update, but that didn't stop me from living up to my promise to update for you today! Next time: Those things I told you I would write about!

Oh, and any suggestions for Horror movies to watch for the 150 day Halloween countdown?

Update Pending

New words coming soon, but after I finish the latest clay and polyurethane nightmare and AFTER I get some sleep.

Awake for 36 hours and covered in goo

I have a dogged determination to "make it on my own." Which is to say, I damn well refuse to give in to the general concepts surrounding adulthood. You know: get a 9am to 5pm job that you hate and saps you of all life and happiness, live alone until you get married, have kids that you resent, fall into alcoholism and violence, getting mauled by a mall Santa, that kind of thing. Instead I live with five other people, friends of mine, and I do my best to be self-employed.

Now to be fair, there are more factors to this then just a desire to never be a proper broken-spirited adult. I have an anxiety disorder, a sleep disorder, and depression, so maintaining someone else's hours is really difficult, not to mention the damage retail and I would do to one another. This lifestyle is a compromise of sorts, my brain chemistry is doing its best to make life hard, so I do my best to make life enjoyable. Sure, this means that my more business-minded friends look down on me, but they will die of alcoholism anyway.

This preamble is actually just a bit of background to this story. That's what this blog is about, by the way, stories. Terrible decisions I have made while under the influence of sleep deprivation and poor impulse control. Many of them will detail criminal and illegal activities, however, I assure you that those parts of the story are all fictional embellishments that the law need not concern itself with.

Anyway, I have been awake for 36 hours today, which is not too uncommon for me what with the circadian disorder sometimes slipping into insomnia. However, this was one of those situations where I COULD have slept, but managed to arrange poor life decisions in such a way as to ensure I wouldn't. I'm an artist, a sculptor specifically, and try to make a living this way and via some graphic design. Well, I recently decided that hollow Cthulhu chocolate idols were my next project, and then proceeded to ignore that decision. Easter came and went (the idol is a riff on hollow bunny chocolates) and I totally missed my self-imposed deadline, so I decided to aim for the following Sunday as it's celebrated as Cthulhu Night here in Western MA.

I then had the brilliant idea to make SURE I finished it in time. I promised as many people as I could that I would have them for sale that night, practically letting people pre-order the thing. Made me feel pretty good, still no idea how I will make rent for the month, but suddenly I had an anticipated income source. Of course once Friday rolled around and I realized I didn't make the mold yet, well, it was time to panic. I spent 24 hours sculpting with a brief break to help one of the house-mates bottle his home-brewed beers, and at one point in the delirious clay spree I realized the wings were upside down and knew I was approaching the point where thinking would be near impossible.

Regardless of the discomfort, I soldiered on, semi-watching countless movies and cartoons in the background as I worked. Soon it was complete! I even had a Triforce sculpted with the extra clay for additional chocolate treats. I dragged myself into my studio, put together a mold container for the idol, built up walls for the Triforce pour, and mixed my silicone. Finally, feeling the relief of soon being free, I poured the goo into the container.

The panic I felt when it didn't reach the upper two inches of of the figure was sudden and terrible, and I hadn't even poured the Triforce yet. What followed was a horrifically sticky nightmare of trying to build up displacement lumps which broke free and sank, of swapping containers, of spilling it everywhere, getting it on my clothes and hair, and considering the virtues of just cutting and running into the woods naked and screaming. Eventually I pulled the figure out of the mess and plopped it on the table, messily dug through my shelves until I found a thixotropic, and began the longest hour and a half of my life.

(a thixotropic is an additive that causes the silicone to thicken considerably so you can brush it on as opposed to pour. Add too much and you end up with a solid lump and a wasted $50 in materials.)

I poured the Triforce and enjoyed fifteen seconds of nothing going wrong and began guessing at the volume I had left for the thixo-drops. Once I realized that math was basically impossible in my current state I just added drops according to whatever number seemed nice at the time and hoped I wouldn't have to burn the house down in shame. Then the brushing. Remember Sisyphus? He was doomed to push a boulder up a mountain for all eternity. Well, thats what this is like, you brush the goo up, and it runs back down - you need to do this until the goo sets - and the goo is reluctant to set. You will think its all set, stretch and yawn, and when you look back the puddle has managed to grow. It is mind numbing, and after not sleeping I was convinced I was going to spontaneously vomit all over the thing at any moment.

Anyway, eventually it set and I was free! At least until the setup period is over, then I get to learn how to temper and flavor chocolate. Once I learn that I get to melt and pour chocolate until the madness takes me, and if the universe wants to keep up the joke, then no-one will want to buy any.

This is all immensely preferable to any sort of "real" job though, I work harder then I would if I had some shitty corporate gig and its on projects I choose. Things may go horribly wrong and I may end up poisoning myself with half the shit I work with, but its MINE.

I'll post the chocolate once I add it to my dumb Etsy, in the event anyone on the internet is interested.