Holidays themselves are horror enough for many, and holiday horror movies such a thing by now that quite a number of folk have a personal favorite to watch each year. (In fact, so popular are the original Yuletide slashers Black Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night, both have been subjected to multiple remakes and/or sequels.)
But for the truly dedicated, all of December should be dedicated to cinema of the macabre. They get their wish with the latest edition of Another Hole In the Head, the festival whose focus on sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and more, i.e. the miscellaneously “wild, weird and wonderfully unexpected,” returns for its 22nd edition this week. The online edition on Eventive does indeed run all month long, December 1-31, with quite a number of titles available via streaming only.
The in-person program, held at SF’s Balboa Theatre, occupies a shorter if busy span December 5-18. It opens this Fri/5 with two indie US features (both accompanied by shorts): Daniel W. Bowhers’ Beyond the Drumlins finds a crew of university researchers waylaid by mysterious powers during a field trip in the woods; Kyle Misak’s more darkly comedic Bad Haircut has another collegian suffering some things far worse than the title predicament when he goes to get his faulty follicles fixed by one very peculiar barber.
Eating and drinking also prove potentially very hazardous to your health in Dead Bloom (toxic farm soil), The Undistilled (moonshine), self-explanatory Kombucha, and Spanish Free Buffet, about a Chinese restaurant where the menu gets a bit Eating Raoul, if you know what I mean. Likewise there are cautionary tales involving freelance housecleaners (Interaction), accepting stray dinner invitations (The Hanged Man), participating in community stage endeavors (Theater Is Dead), visiting that inevitable cabin in the woods (Weekend at the End of the World), and stumbling onto satanic cults (world premiere A Reservation).
Also represented among Hole Head’s features are true-crime (Dorothea, a rather camp dramatization of a 1980s Sacramento boarding-house proprietress’ serial-killing spree), documentary (Shopping for Superman, a history of comic book stores), and horror anthologies (Hans Christian Andersen-derived Danish Adorable Humans, midwest quartet The Driftless). Animation goes way out on various limbs in the Pasolini-inspired Italian phantasmagoria BlackFlag, as well as surreal Shrine of Abominations, which may appeal to Mad Godfans. Also on the dystopian sci-fi tip are the Mexican Beings aka Seres and Volume 7, a visually striking B&W futuristic drama from Greece. Other nations encompassed onscreen include the U.K. (Foul Evil Deeds), Spain (Lily’s Ritual), Japan (The Invisible Half) and Finland (Shadowland).
If you prefer your genre content vintage, there are plenty of opportunities to scratch that itch, including 16mm showings of James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein—the one that made a star of Boris Karloff—and 1979’s The Amityville Horror on Thurs/11. John Milius’ 1982 version of Conan the Barbarian will be revived Sat/13 with a live “re-score” by SLEEPBOMB, while Mon/15 brings Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece Metropolis, newly colorized, and rescored by The New Pollutants. John Carpenter’s 1981 Escape From New York gets the 16mm treatment on Wed/17, and the next night Hole Head’s on-site component ends with that original 1984 Silent Night, Deadly Night—its killer-Santa antics showcased (if that’s the word) in projected VHS. Before the festival’s official start on Friday, there’s also a special Tues/2 screening at Alamo Drafthouse New Mission of Mary Harron’s 2000 American Psycho—a prime example of a very good movie adapted from a completely awful book.
Among all these well-known revivals, a true obscurity is 1984’s Charon aka The Jar, an incomprehensible widescreen oddity in which a 30-ish bachelor picks up a distraught, wounded older man after a car accident. He brings him to his apartment to “clean up,” but when the stranger vanishes, finds himself left with a jar in which a grotesque troll doll/fetus-like creature is pickled…or something. Our hero almost immediately begins experiencing hallucinations, nightmares, et al., and cannot seem to get rid of the nasty thing no matter how he tries. Director Bruce Toscano, writer George Bradley and star Gary Wallace all seem to have never made another film, before or since. Is this near-plotless curio good? Well, not really. But it is strange enough to make you very curious just what the makers intended—and you can ask Wallace, who will be present for a Q&A after the recently restored film’s screening.
That still doesn’t cover the whole program gamut, which also includes several “shorts blocks,” yet more features, in-person appearances, and more. Here are a few recommended highlights we were able to check out in advance:
Hoagie
Hole Head always offers plenty of comedy alongside the bloody thrills and spills, frequently in movies that intermingle all three. That is certainly the case with Matt Hewitt’s anarchic feature, in which a milquetoast suburban dad (co-writer Ryan Morley) acquires the titular pulsating organic whatsit from a rural store. Eventually what his kids term a “puke sandwich” gives birth to a pint-sized being with supernatural powers—one avidly being sought by its prior owner (Stephen Heath), a crazed alt-right militia leader who’ll stop at nothing to get “my homunculus” back. Occupying terrain at the intersection of Napoleon Dynamite, E.T. and The Toxic Avenger, complete with power-ballad montage, this is a relentlessly juvenile exercise in splatstick whose witty direction and some inspired performances make it pretty dang funny.
Influencers
This sequel to writer-director Kurtis David Harder’s streaming hit Influencer a couple years ago has its surviving would-be victim Madison (Emily Tennant) realizing that serial murderess Catherine (Cassandra Naud) is alive and unwell, still wreaking havoc on well-heeled tourists and online personalities around the world. She tracks the perp down in the luxury resorts of Southeast Asia, where the two young women slowly, lethally close in on one another. Though you have to suspend a certain amount of disbelief (how could Catherine, who has a very prominent facial birthmark, hide in plain sight from authorities for so long?), this Ripley-esque thriller for the internet age is full of entertaining twists, as well as handsome sites in multinational locations.
The Killing Cell
No horror-centric fest would be complete without at least one “found-footage” narrative, and this effort by James Bessey and Karsen Schovajsa (who are also in the cast) manages to be a cut above average in a frequently tired subgenre. Five friends venture to a long-shuttered private prison facility in rural Georgia that was notorious for its abuses, intending to videotape their nocturnal poking-around for a web show exploring “haunted” places. Needless to say, what they find is much, much worse than the mild shivers hoped for. Straightforward and nasty, this doesn’t boast any particularly original ideas, but goes from creepy to brutal with impressive dedication.
LandLord
Tasked with recovering a briefcase full of loot, a no-nonsense bounty hunter-hitwoman (Adama Abramson) infiltrates a nondescript Kentucky apartment complex. But in seeking her quarry, she realizes something awful is going on here—tenants seem to be disappearing i.e. getting murdered on a regular basis. You know that thing about vampires needing to be invited into homes by their victims? Well, that doesn’t apply if the bloodsucker owns the building. Remington Smith’s gritty thriller recalls other inventive modernizations of vampire lore, like Near Dark and Let the Right One In, while staking out its own distinctive, blood-soaked terrain.
Raising Phoenix
A different kind of “found footage feature” is the assemblage constructed entirely of parts from other, prior movies, some excellent recent examples being San Francisco cinema homage The Green Fog and Soda Jerk’s subversive political commentary Hello Dankness. Jorge Torres Torres contributes his own unique spin with this loose life-story narrative about a protagonist who suffers a traumatizing shock as a child—one portrayed from grade-school youth to middle age by Joaquin Phoenix, or rather by clips drawn from his entire career to date. Only the later parts are likely to be very familiar, as they utilize scenes from variably famous, more recent films like Joker and Gladiator. You may well have forgotten, or never knew, that before fame the actor appeared in all kinds of TV detritus, from an Afterschool Special to Murder, She Wrote. This clever construct also utilizes footage from other, non-Phoenix-related projects, some 300 altogether, creating an exquisite-corpse monster out of mismatched puzzle pieces.
The 22nd annual Another Hole in the Head runs Fri/5-Thu/18 at the Balboa Theater in SF. Its On Demand programs will be available December 1-31. Full schedule, film, ticket and other info can be found here.
