Satan's Little Helper (2004)

Let me tell you about a terrible way to choose a movie on Netflix: Step 1) Open the ‘horror’ section. Step 2) Continually scroll until you have loaded every possible option. Step 3) Wildly scroll up and down the list and land on one at random. In using this selection method, you run the risk of having to watch Satan’s Little Helper.

I wanted to do a Netflix good-or-garbage review, but there are just so many possible choices on Netflix that I completely psyched myself out and decided to pick at random. I deserved what I got for such indecision, but I do regret that I kind of forced Rob to watch it with me.

The entire plot of Satan’s Little Helper is predicated on the notion that on Halloween, everyone becomes incapable of believing that anything is actually wrong, instead assuming that all bad acts are just part of some larger performance art of the holiday. A man dressed as Satan is arranging a corpse on a porch swing in broad daylight? Now he’s hanging a FULLY ALIVE elderly woman with a noose in front of her house? Oh, your friend who is a middle-aged adult woman comes to a Halloween party visibly upset and taped from mouth to hips with packing tape, mummy-style? Well, it IS Halloween so…I’m sure that’s fine. Nothing to see here. 

I’d like to try to sum up the plot in fewer than 250 words because that’s really all I can muster for this particular piece of art: there’s this shitty little kid named Dougie who is obsessed with a video game called “Satan’s Little Helper” (which features graphics whose quality rival those of this blog) wherein you kill people and dogs, I guess, to score points. He plays this on a generic handheld gaming system.

Dougie has a crush on his hot sister but is pissed to find out that she has a boyfriend—who, by the way, has serious daddy issues—and rebels by befriending a silent man in a Goatman-type of costume who is arranging a corpse on a front porch in broad daylight as described above, believing him to be the Satan of the game. Apparently this means that GameSatan has the ability to kill people without consequence. After all, it’s just a game. This last bit requires an extreme stretch of the imagination because we are never told that Dougie has any sort of mental problems that would actually allow him to believe this. The kid’s dumb, but come on. For nearly half the movie, the sister Jenna believes Satan to be her boyfriend Alex in costume, which makes total sense because Satan has about 6 inches and 80 pounds on Alex. Seems legit. There are five total cops in this film and Satan kills them all, then chaos reigns supreme. I think it may be an indictment of a video game violence-obsessed culture but truly I can't be sure. It was extremely stupid. 

242 words…not bad!

I did some research on this movie after watching it, and was surprised to see a number of positive reviews. People thought it was really funny and original. I am here to tell you that those people are wrong. I can get down with horror comedy, but I think my issue with Satan’s Little Helper was that at no point did I laugh (except perhaps the awkwardly delivered line, “and Jesus is Satan!”) because I was just kind of dumbfounded. I basically spent all 90 minutes like this:

Am I missing something? Am I not fun? I guess I just don’t feel that stupid always reads as funny and maybe that’s my loss. Anyway, this movie weirdly stars people you might know from other things: Amanda Plummer, who has been in a number of things including Pulp Fiction, The Fisher King and So I Married an Axe Murderer (one of Rob’s personal favorites) and Katheryn Winnick, whom I think is actually pretty great on the History Channel series “Vikings”. None of them are particularly good in this. Is that part of the joke? People on the internet seem to think so. 

I’m not saying that Satan’s Little Helper was without its moments: the house number of this family of big dumb stupids is 66, and upon entering the house with Dougie, Satan casually spray paints a third 6 on the doorjamb.

Satan does not speak a single line throughout the entire movie and communicates solely in gestures and boob-grabs (lots of boob-grabs). He gives a number of other characters in the downtown area the finger, which I guess is sort of funny in its stupidity…right? I guess? It’s okay. It's decent.

All in all, I just could not get behind this one. At one point Rob asked me for clarification on a plot point that he missed, and I realized that I’d missed it too because I’d just been staring at some pretzels. If I can’t even focus for 90 minutes on a movie in which a serial killer dresses as Satan on Halloween and murders a bunch of people—a pretty great concept!—then how can I ever recommend it to you? 

In the question of Netflix good or garbage, this one is basically recycling. You want better things for it, but you know you still have to put it out at the curb.

Stephen King's IT (1990)

Get a cup of coffee and get comfortable, because this is going to be a long one—truly an unnecessarily long post for an unnecessarily long film.

I recently told my friend Allen that I had just watched Stephen King’s IT (1990) and his immediate response was, “And it wasn’t as good as you wanted it to be, right?” Indignant, I replied, “NO, IT IS GREAT AND YOU SIR ARE INCORRECT FOR SAYING OTHERWISE.” Truthfully, he was right—it is not as good as I wanted it to be, but I always come back to it because it holds a special place in my little black heart.

My mom was really into Hitchcock when I was growing up, so I was exposed to horror from a young age. I have a very distinct memory of watching the episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour that told the tale of "The Monkey’s Paw" while eating spaghetti and being so afraid that I started to imagine that the spaghetti was intestines and I THREW UP. I think I was probably about ten years old when I came across the novelization of IT in the local library. My parents were largely hands-off at this point and were definitely not aware that I was in my room, filling my tender child brain with scenes of graphic violence and also, some weird sexy scenes. A few years later, I found a VHS copy of the movie at one of those Blockbuster Video store sales and took it home with me.

It scared the living shit out of me.

IT was also the catalyst that really threw me wholeheartedly into horror. I went back to the Blockbuster sale a few days later and bought VHS copies of Halloween, Friday the 13^th and Night of the Living Dead. Impeccable taste, right? Also, if I was terrified at IT, imagine me in a basement watching Night of the Living Dead and being so afraid to go upstairs that I had to hold my cat Gizmo in front of me so that any zombies would get him instead of me (sorry buddy).

IT was the first horror movie I had ‘discovered’ on my own and it felt really important and special to me. As an adult, it took me two nights to watch it because WHY is it 192 minutes long? I need to sleep, you know? Approximately 30% of the movie is flashbacks, and you know it’s a flashback because it is just a replay of a scene you watched an hour ago. Did they think we wouldn’t remember? Also, whose idea was it to do THREE musical montages set to the Curtis Mayfield song “It’s Alright”? Three of these, in three hours? C’mon fuckin guys.

There are a lot of other things wrong with this film. Beverly as an adult is such an incredibly terrible character that I honestly wish she had been murdered by the clown (although I think I just remembered that in the book, as a child, she has sex with all the other members of the Losers’ Club while they are down in the sewers. Come on, Bevvie.) Henry Bowers is definitely not threatening enough. In fact, the entire second half of the movie (which was originally aired on network TV as a two-part miniseries) really kind of sucks.

But there are also a lot of things right with IT: Clowns are indisputably scary.Tim Curry is a god among men; I will hear no arguments to the contrary. The first half of the movie is still pretty damn frightening.  The balloon of blood coming out of Bev’s bathroom sink makes for a super good scene (although the line “we’re all the dead kids!” coming from inside the drain is probably the worst-written and most laughable in the entire movie.)

Overall, the acting outside of adult Bev and adult Eddie is actually pretty good. The child actors are particularly good: Seth Green is adorable, and let us please not forget our fallen brother, Jonathan Brandis.

True and mostly unrelated story: my first job out of college was a temp gig doing data entry. When I arrived on the first day, I found that I’d be working with another temp who was about my age, a really fashionable girl named Liz who convinced  me to switch from Camel Lights to Parliament Lights and also to brush my hair before I left the house. The temp that had worked on the project before us had apparently been really inept, and it had taken her weeks to do what we could do in a few hours. However, we worried incessantly about the job ending because neither of us had anything else lined up, so we used the low expectations of our employer to our advantage and spent literally days on the internet doing nothing. In our infinite clicking into the internet in a pre-social media world, we got really into reading Jonathan Brandis suicide memorial pages together and we are still great friends to this day. I credit JB with this victory. Thank you, sweet prince.

I guess now that I’ve made Jonathan Brandis into a cartoon angel, there’s really nothing more for me to say. THEY ALL FLOAT DOWN HERE. 

Insidious (2011)

It’s taken me awhile to write this review of Insidious (2011) because I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. Actually, I’m still not sure. It’s a generic concept—a happy family moves into new home and all hell breaks loose (optional: something baaad has happened in the past that they are trying to escape) with a particular focus around the mother who is far too svelte for having birthed three children in seemingly six years. Okay, I guess I can get behind that, plus I really like the word ‘insidious.’

The central plot of the film is that one of the three aforementioned children falls into an unexplained coma and does not wake up for months upon months. Doctors, naturally, are stumped. Then strange things begin to happen in the house because why wouldn’t they? Time to call in the psychics! This particular set of psychics and ghosthunters inform the family that their son has astral projected into a place called “the Further”—which, let’s be honest, is a terrible name for another realm of scary shit—and someone has to go get him back. What lives in the darkness that is “the Further”? If you guessed (spoiler alert) pinup girls with shotguns…well, 10 horror movie points for you.

You know, the great philosopher of our time Harvey Danger once said, “well, if you’re bored then you’re boring.” I decided that since I am bored just writing this up, this movie must have been boring. There were some good jump scares in it and the twist at the end is okay, though it’s a really obvious plot device to set up a sequel (see also: Friday the 13^th, Halloween, and every other horror movie that has ever existed in series form). I can’t even get excited about drawing it because I can hardly remember a memorable scene. 

Well uh, I guess that's that. I feel like I've barely had any horror-watching this month and the day after tomorrow is Halloween. I'm thinking I'll review a couple classics over the next week or two instead of venturing into Netflix territory, particularly because my friend Mike argued SO PASSIONATELY that I need to watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 that he stepped off a curb directly into traffic and nearly lost his life. So, you know, I guess I owe him that much!