By Mark Trammell

In my fourth and likely final year here at UAB (let’s hope…), I’ve done a Halloween list every year, and at this point, the trick is finding a fairly obscure horror movie I haven’t mentioned in a previous article! So, I did some heavy duty web-searching, and here’s what I came up with. Enjoy!

1. “Let the Right One In”- Sick of all those wussy teen vampires clogging up the movie and TV screens? Check out this nifty Swedish shocker about a pre-teen female vamp that’s way more disturbing than anything you’ll see in the likes of the “Twilight” movies. And don’t worry if you fear subtitles more than vamps- there’s a dubbed option on the DVD.
2. “Dead Snow”- Another Swedish import, this one revolves around the ever-popular zombies, also still making waves with the recent “Zombieland.” However, this one features Nazi zombies! How can you go wrong? Not here, with the flick that stole the show at the recent Sidewalk Festival. It’s equal parts “Evil Dead” and “Scream,” with an amusingly tongue-in-cheek, self-referential tone that translates into any language.
3. “Martyrs”- Just when you thought it was safe to avoid torture porn comes this belated entry in the much-maligned (often deservedly so) genre. This French import is far superior to most films of its ilk, adding a dense psychological subtext that makes it cut deeper than most horror movies. That said, it is definitely not for the faint of heart, least of all in its super-gory unrated version. The French have been on a roll as of late- see also the excellent “High Tension” (by the director of the “Hills Have Eyes” remake), “Inside,” and “Frontier(s).”
4. “Blood and Chocolate”- Gore-fests not your cup of tea? Try this underrated flick, based on a young adult novel of the same name, which tried to do for werewolves what “Twilight” did for vampires before that film was released. It’s flawed, but beautifully shot, and well-acted. More for those who prefer lighter horror or so-called “paranormal romance” than die-hard horror fans- in other words, it’s much more girl-friendly than the other films on this list if you’re looking for date night material. If you like this, see also the excellent French period-piece werewolf flick “Brotherhood of the Wolf” or the Canadian teen-wolf series “Ginger Snaps.”
5. “The Woods”- Like “B&C,” this also features rising starlet Agnes Bruckner, plus horror stalwart Bruce Campbell, of “Evil Dead” fame and celebrated indie actress Patricia Clarkson (“Six Feet Under”) . Revolving around mysterious happenings at a girl’s school in the mid-60s, it’s a subtle, mood-driven chiller that makes up in atmosphere what it may lack in gore. See also director Lucky McKee’s fantastic “May,” featuring a rare straight performance from funny girl Anna Farris (“Scary Movie”), and for more girl-school thrills, check out the tres-campy “Satan’s School for Girls,” with- who else?- notorious bad girl Shannen Doherty.
6. “Tale of Two Sisters”- Sure, Asian horror is old hat by now, to the point that the recent remake of this film, “The Uninvited,” wasn’t even promoted as such. But this one is well worth a look, even for those burnt out on Asian horror. For one thing, it’s not your typical Asian horror movie. It’s actually grounded in reality, and though there are ghosts of a sort, it’s not anything like “The Ring” or “The Grudge” or what have you (not that there’s anything wrong with those films). This one is more of a psychological thriller than a ghost story, and it makes all the difference. See also the excellent Mexican chiller “the Orphanage,” presented by Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth”) for a similar flick that moves as much as it chills.
7. “The Funhouse”- Director Tobe Hooper has taken his lumps over the years, somewhat deservedly, despite having created two of the all-time best horror movies, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Poltergeist.” However, there are a few hidden gems in his repertoire that few talk about, including this shocker, set largely in a carnival ride- hence the title. The main monster’s gruesome makeup is by Academy-Award winning FX man Rick Baker (“Hellboy,” “An American Werewolf in London”). Other Hooper movies worth checking out: “Eaten Alive,” featuring a pre-Freddy Robert Englund and a hungry crocodile; and “Lifeforce” about space vampires (!). For an ideal double feature, check out the also-carnival-set flick “Dark Ride,” with “Sopranos” siren Jamie-Lynn Sigler.
8. “Videodrome”- Before there was torture porn, there was “Videodrome.” This ahead-of-its-time flick features James Woods and a post-Blondie Deborah Harry (as a redhead!) as a couple who run afoul of a pirated cable network that shows nothing but torture films with no plot or recurring actors. Might they be real snuff films? You’ll just have to see for yourself, but with David Cronenberg (“The Fly”) in the director’s chair, suffice it to say things only get weirder. This film single-handedly warped my childhood irrevocably, and I mean that as a compliment. See also Cronenberg’s “Existenz,” which could be a bigger-budgeted sequel to the film and makes a perfect double feature.
9. “Angel Heart”- Believe it or not, there was a time when Mickey Rourke (“Sin City,” “The Wrestler”) looked like a normal guy. Granted, he never was anything remotely resembling normal as a person, which is why he’s such a perfect fit for this proto-M. Night Shyamalan chiller. A modern-day film noir, the film is directed by Alan Parker, of “Fame” fame, as well as “Pink Floyd: The Wall,” and features a post “Cosby” Lisa Bonet, never hotter. It revolves around a P.I. investigating a disappearance in New Orleans at the behest of the mysterious Robert DeNiro, at his creepiest this side of “Cape Fear.” Great ending, beautifully shot, and excellent acting all around. A must see, but try and get a hold of the unrated version. See also the equally underrated “Jacob’s Ladder” for a similar nightmarish vision with a twist.

10.”Pieces”- What would a Halloween horror list be without a guilty-pleasure slasher flick? One of “Hostel” director and “Inglourious Basterds” star Eli Roth’s faves, this so-trashy-it’s-great gore-a-palooza has to be seen to be believed. Featuring stalwart horror husband and wife team Christopher and Lynda Day George (“Day of the Animals”), plus Paul “Bluto” Smith, this would-be murder mystery is sleazy but fun, with loads of gratuitous nudity and gore, plus an ending to end all horror movie endings, “Sleepaway Camp” notwithstanding. For more Georges fun, check out the underrated “Mortuary,” featuring a young Bill Paxton, and for more guilty pleasure 80s slashers, check out the recently re-released “The Prowler” with FX by the guru of gore, Tom Savini (“Dawn of the Dead,” “Friday the 13^th”) and the underrated original “My Bloody Valentine,” which features restored unrated gore.

Well, there you have it! Have a great Halloween, and remember to lock your doors and bolt your windows, because you never know who- or what- might be lurking out there in the dark!

An inside look at the legendary Sloss ghoul-fest auditions

It is that time of the year once again. Every year, the Halloween season rolls around and brings out all of the ghouls, goblins and ghosts.
The biggest Halloween attraction in Birmingham has returned to put fear back in its guests.
Sloss Furnace has been a national historical landmark since 1981. The furnace has had a history of supernatural experiences that have led some to claim it to be one of the most haunted sites in America. It has been featured in several TV shows about the paranormal.
The story goes that at the turn of the 20th Century, James “Slag” Wormwood, a ruthless night foreman, encouraged dangerous work conditions that cost nearly 50 workers their lives. The foreman himself died when he fell into a vat of molten ore.
Some say “Slag” was murdered by his own men. To this day, workers still claim to be haunted by the spirit of the cruel foreman.
Since 1998, Sloss Fright Furnace has opened up its gates every fall to the general public, and this year looks to be its most frightening. Sloss Fright Furnace 2009 has pulled out all the stops and has created a terrifying experience that takes you into the deepest, darkest parts of the furnace.
Highlights of the trail include bloodthirsty zombies, a 3-D maze and rooms dedicated to the fear of bugs and tight spaces. While you are waiting to enter the trail, make sure to visit the Roadkill Cafe. There you can grab some grub while watching your favorite gore-filled horror movies.
The trail is a half mile of terror and opens Saturday, Sept. 26.
I got the opportunity to witness the orientation process and talk with the horrifying cast firsthand.
I asked Sloss Fright Furnace’s seven-year veteran actress Sara Knight what keeps her coming back year after year.
“Everybody who works in the world spends their time catering to people,” Knight said. “We get to spend one month scaring the hell out of them and that makes it worth it.”
I managed to also get an interview with four-time “Sloss Fright Furnace Actor of the Year,” Leah Pharo.
“It is a way to get connected with Birmingham,” Pharo said. “I can see people around Birmingham and say, ‘I probably scared the heck out of that person right there.’”
Both actresses agreed that this was the best time of the year.
“When you feel a chill in the air, you know it is Sloss time,” Pharo said.
Sloss Fright Furnace production manager, Grant Thomas, said this year’s Sloss is going to be the scariest ever.
“We’ve extended our trail, which has made the experience longer,” he said. “We have brought back some old favorites from years ago and also have several new additions.”
I asked the vital question on how guests should plan on surviving this horrific trail to which Thomas replied, “Run.”
Open - Sept. 26 through Nov. 1
Cost - $15 (cash or checks only)
Hours of operation -  Opens at sundown and closes when the last group leaves. Sloss stops selling tickets at 11 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on weekends. Check calendar for days.
Need more details? visit http://www.frightfurnace.com

Tim Melton
Staff Writer
tim35071@hotmail.com

Mark Trammell
Features Contributor

“The Final Destination” is everything you could possibly ask for in a 3-D movie. Stuff flies at the viewer with alarming and unpredictable regularity, the plot is a fun conceit, and if the acting is strictly amateur hour for the most part… well, it tries.
For those new to the series, this is the fourth and supposedly “final” installment, hence the un-numerical title. In the previous installments, there was always one person, who, for whatever reason, was given a glimpse of a disastrous occurrence, and then given the chance to thwart it and save as many people as possible. Fat lot of good it does them, as “death” inevitably comes for them anyway, in a series of bizzaro set-pieces that are equal parts Rube Goldberg contraptions and anything-can-kill-you-at-any-time scenarios. Someone throws a rock that lands in the grass, which is then run over with a lawn mower which then flings it at lightening speed at a person, shooting through their eye-socket like butter at the viewer. You get the idea.
In the first three films, this idea was fun enough. Death could occur at any time, in any number of myriad ways. Would it be death by a fan blade gone awry? A nail shot out of an explosion and into someone’s head? A brutally quick slam by a speeding bus or train into an unlucky victim? You never knew, but part of the fun was guessing what would happen next, and how.
In this one, the initial set-piece is a car race gone horribly awry. True, not as spectacular as a plane crash (Part 1), a highway pile-up (Part 2), or a rollercoaster ride gone to hell (Part 3), but it gets the job done. Besides, the 3-D is super cool, as explosions blast out of the screen, tires shoot out this way and that, beams crash down, and even various body parts careen out at the viewer. So, it’s hard to complain that they’re running out of conceits to take out a mass amount of people in one fell sweep when the results are this much fun. (For the inevitable sequel, might I suggest a natural disaster, like an earthquake or rainstorm? Either of those would be super-awesome, especially in 3-D.)
This one even tosses in a bonus mass-murder scene, set in—what else?—a movie theatre in a mall, playing an ironically-titled (“Love Lays Dying”) 3-D flick. Needless to say, the potential victim is the main protagonist’s girlfriend. Not exactly subtle, true, but it does show a sense of humor on the filmmaker’s part, which is more than you can say for a lot of horror films lately, what with all the torture porn we horror fans have been subjected to over the last few years. I’ll take a wry, if dark, sense of humor over these humorless gore fests any day of the week. There’s a place for realism in horror, to be sure. But that’s no excuse for not showing the viewer a good time. And too often these days, filmmakers equate disgusting the viewer with scaring them.
“The Final Destination” may not be subtle, but it gets what viewers want. Especially insofar as a 3-D film is concerned—which is non-stop special effects and stuff flying at you every few minutes or so. Sure, it would be nice to see what a truly gifted director might do with the medium. We’ll get a chance at just that when James Cameron’s long-awaited “Avatar,” which previews before this film, comes out on December 18th. In the meantime, “The Final Destination” does exactly what it sets out to do—show the viewer that likes this sort of thing a great time. And what’s wrong with that?

Mark Trammell
Features Contributor

A remake of a classic is always a dubious prospect in the best of circumstances, but certain films have shown the old can be made new in clever ways, if done correctly. However, a remake of a sequel is even more groan-inducing, seeing as, more often than not, the original sequels themselves are almost always inferior retreads of the originals by definition, with only a few exceptions to the rule, depending on who you ask (i.e. “Aliens,” “Godfather 2,” and “The Empire Strikes Back”).
Give Rob Zombie credit then, at least, for getting rid of the source material from the original “Halloween 2” within the first thirty minutes or so. As it stands, the original was no great shakes, with the best bits being the fact that it was the rare sequel that picks up directly after the original ends, and completes the night begun in the first film. Well, that and the dubious revelation that Michael Myers was heroine Laurie Strode’s big brother. Zombie keeps the latter and scraps the former, opting for the old “one year later” approach after the whole hospital business is taken care of in the beginning.
Zombie’s world is, as ever, an ugly and unpleasant one. The buildings that the film takes place in, from the houses to the stores the characters work in, are all on the verge of ruin and seemingly one step away from outright condemnation. The exception is the places where Michael Myers’ doctor, Sam Loomis’ interviews and lectures take place, which are presented as sterile and blindingly generic, as if to represent the hollowness of the media, who aren’t exactly portrayed in the most flattering of lights. (Amusingly, however, the lone sympathetic voice in the entire film is Loomis’ agent!)
Likewise, the people are unrepentantly ugly and unlikable, even Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) and heroine Laurie Strode (Scott Taylor-Compton), who both curse like sailors on shore leave, as do the entire rest of the cast. At one point, Laurie even voices her beloved stuffed Paddington Bear as a foul-mouthed heathen! The original had memorable characters you cared about and genuinely hated to see killed. Here, you could care less who lives or who dies. In some cases, they couldn’t be killed fast enough for my tastes, which is not a good quality in a film to have.
The cinematography is likewise nasty and eye-searingly unattractive. When even a perfectly attractive girl like super-cute Danielle Harris (who played Michael Myers’ niece as a child in the original series, but plays Annie here) is made to look like death warmed over, you get the feeling Zombie even has contempt for beauty itself. The lone exception is—perhaps not unintentionally—Michael’s mother, played by Zombie’s own wife, Sherri Moon. She nonetheless looks like an angel of death in the film’s most laughable conceit, as she and the young Michael (and often a horse!) crop up from time to time to egg Michael on in his murderous intent, Mrs. Vorhees-style.
The film is not completely without humor. There’s an amusing sequence with, of all people, “Weird” Al Yankovic, who gets off a few funny zingers. There’s also some fun cameos for hardcore horror fans, including Margot Kidder (“The Amityville Horror”) and Caroline Williams (“Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2”), but by and large, Zombie’s film is unrepentantly repulsive all around.
Nor does a lot of it make sense. Why does Michael go around mask-less for no apparent reason from time to time? Why does the film seem to take place in a world in which the 70s never ended, yet the younger characters speak as if they walked in off the set of “Juno”? Just what version of “Nights in White Satin” runs, like, fifteen minutes or more, and for that matter what TV station would be playing it in the dead of the evening on Halloween night? Oh, and when did Michael become Korean? (Don’t ask.) The film is filled with these ridiculous touches, which only serve to make the film more and more ludicrous as it goes on.
To be fair, Zombie is not without talent as a director. “House of 100 Corpses” had flashes of demonic brilliance, and a truly eye-popping color palette. It was like a nightmarish Technicolor version of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” “The Devils’ Rejects” had to grow on me, but I now respect what Zombie was going for. He was just trying to make horror movies scary again. Even his remake of “Halloween” tried its best to ground Michael in reality instead of the supernatural, even if it did use every serial killer cliché in the book. He reportedly refused to even consider a sequel, before being wooed back with the right to do whatever he wanted, and, no doubt, a big, fat pile of money. Let’s hope he uses that money to make something a little more original next time around than “Halloween 2,” which doesn’t just fall prey to every cliché in the horror movie book—it wallows in them.