The Curator of Schlock #323 by Jeff Shuster

Antrum

The Deadliest Film Ever Made?

My car broke down on my way back to Orlando from the Florida Everglades. I guess leaving it parked in the middle of the woods and not driving it for a couple of months wasn’t the best idea. Famished, hungry, and lost, I came upon on old Antebellum mansion. I was greeted by a gaunt butler named Jervis who offered me a fine meal and a room for the night. He says the former master of the estate had a rule about always showing kindness to strangers. I did a toast to my charitable host and Jervis informed me that I could stay as long as I wish. The Wi-Fi is great here, but these old portraits of southern ladies and gentlemen creep me out. I feel like their eyes are following me.

Tonight’s movie is 2018’s Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made from directors David Amito and Michael Laicini. Why is it called the deadliest movie ever made? Because everyone who saw Antrum died a horrible death soon after watching it. The documentary passes out some fascinating tidbits about this Bulgarian production from 1979, how when it was screened at a theater in Budapest, the whole place caught fire and the audience was burned alive. Other stories involved a man getting stung by a poisonous fish one day after viewing Antrum and dying on the spot.

Another one involves a rare screening of Antrum in San Francisco that caused the audience to storm the exits only to find them locked. The crowd then begins viciously attacking each other due to the LSD laced popcorn they were given before the start of the movie. That concessions clerk is now serving time on multiple counts of manslaughter. What a sick degenerate! The documentary reveals that Antrum also featured weird audio cues and still shots of vile scenes cut into the movie so your subconscious would register the image. Around this point, I’m kind of glad that movie was lost to the ages, but then the documentary reveals that a print of Antrum in its entirety has been discovered and purchased at an estate auction in Connecticut. The movie will begin in ten-seconds. Yikes! I now get to watch this cursed movie!

Antrum centers on a boy named Nathan (Rowan Smith) and his older sister, Oralee (Nicole Tompkins). We begin with Nathan’s mother, Amber, putting his dog, Maxine, to sleep. That’s an odd name for a dog, but Oralee is an odd name for a human, so whatever. During a car ride, Nathan asks his mother if Maxine is in heaven like other dogs and she tells him, “No, Maxine isn’t in heaven because she was bad.” I would have taken a different approach to this question. I would have told Nathan, “It’s a stupid dog! Woof! Woof! A dog!”

I’m good with kids.

We cut to Nathan and Oralee in a tent at night. They’ve gone camping. Oralee has an elaborate scheme that she got out of some kind of forbidden tome to redeem Maxine’s soul. They travel to the forest where the devil landed after God cast him out of heaven. It is there that they will find the antrum, the gateway to hell. Oralee and Nathan uncover some brambles that cover the place they’re supposed to start digging. Oralee draws a pentagram on the ground and puts the star and crescent, the menorah, a statue of Jesus Christ, a statue of Vishnu, and a blood red statue of Buddha smiling menacingly. I guess that’s covering all the bases. The two begin to chant, “One by one we pray to thee, protect us from all we see. From all we’ll hear and touch and smell. From all the unknown dark in hell.”

Weird stuff starts happening after they dig through the first layer. A apoplectic squirrel appears that Oralee insists is a demon. She tells Nathan to use a magic stick to drive it away. They come across a Japanese man undressing down to his boxers about to commit seppuku, but Nathan screams. The guy mutters in Japanese and walks away, presumedly to another part of the forest where he can get some privacy. Oralee and Nathan continue to dig. Nathan discovers a loaded handgun buried in the pit. Nathan keeps seeing black figures staring at them through the woods.

Before bed, Nathan comments on how Oralee’s feet stink and she orders him to brush his teeth because his breath is rank. Oralee tells him that the Cerberus will get him if he stinks too much. Nathan takes her warning to heart and brushes his teeth by the lake under the full moon. He sees what looks like a ferryman rowing a boat with a naked, deformed person in it. This movie is just plain freaky and I’m not liking it. Plus, I keep getting flash frames of devils, occult symbols, and photos from somebody’s sick torture porn fantasy. I haven’t even gotten to the part with the two Bulgarian rednecks and the fact that one of them is committing what I’ll describe as “animal husbandry” to a dead animal! This is a sick, sick movie, but movies don’t kill people.

I got to go.

Jervis is knocking on my door asking if I’d like a hot water bottle.

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock by Jeff Shuster

Rec

That’s short for record. 

Howdy y’all. Yeehaaaaaaa! I feel like a cowboy here, eating my Campbell’s Pork n’ Beans over an open campfire just like they did in the old west. This global pandemic will surely leave behind some good memories.

I’ve had a lot of opportunity for introspection, looking back on life choices good and bad. For example, why at the start of this pandemic did I go all in on the pork n’ beans? Why no chicken noodle soup or canned chili? I could murder a man right now for a can of chili.

Tonight’s movie is 2007’s Rec from directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza. I’m assuming that it’s two directors and that one of them doesn’t have a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing going on. The movie takes place in Barcelona, Spain and is Spanish language for those who you that need to be warned about such things. For those of you who can understand Spanish or don’t have problems reading English subtitles, be prepared for what may be the greatest found footage horror movie ever made.

Rec begins with a TV news reporter named Ángela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman, Pablo, shooting the latest in her documentary series While You Were Sleeping.  Each episode features people who work at night while the rest of the city is sleeping. The episode they’re shooting will focus on the city’s firefighters. The two firefighters they’ll be following this night are named Álex (David Vert) and Manu (Ferrán Terraza). The firehouse gets a call in the middle of the night about an old lady named Mrs. Izquierdo, a local cat lady, being trapped in her apartment. The neighbors heard her screaming and are gathered in the lobby of the building.

The four of them get over to the apartment complex as fast they can and are greeted by a couple of police officers that don’t care for a television crew poking around the premises. They all head upstairs and find Mrs. Izquierdo shambling about in a pink taffeta nightgown. Oh, her nightgown isn’t pink. That’s just blood smeared all over it. One of the officers approaches her and Mrs. Izquierdo promptly sinks her teeth into his neck, promptly tearing a chunk out while the other officer and firefighters pull her off.

This is one of those “things go from bad to worse” kind of movies. As the firefighters and remaining police officer try to evacuate, the lights in the building go off and we hear a man from the Spanish government informing them over a loudspeaker that the building is now sealed off. Everyone is under quarantine until further notice and to please be patient. This is not good. Let’s hope the disease that turned Mrs. Izquierdo into a rabid monster isn’t contagious.

At some point, the government sends in a doctor in a HAZMAT suit and we learn that the source of the disease came from one of the tenant’s dogs. I think this doctor has an injection that treats or kills the patient with the disease. That isn’t clear because no gets a chance to use it because everyone in the building keeps getting bit and turning into a raving maniac. Ángela and Pablo make it up to the penthouse apartment in effort to find a way out that isn’t known to the government officials outside. In this apartment, they discover all sorts of religious iconography, articles about a young girl possessed by the devil, and recordings about Vatican knowledge of this disease. We don’t learn much more because the end is nigh for Angela and Pablo. Maybe I’ll find out the rest in Rec 2.

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #318 by Jeff Shuster

The Black Cat

Not the Karloff movie. 

So Cat Month went awry. I wanted to review Uninvited. It’s the one with George Kennedy on the expensive yacht with the house cat with a mutant cat living inside it. Well, it got yanked from Amazon Prime status, and I ain’t paying for that noise. I went on a rage in my little cabin in the middle of the Florida Everglades, smashing all my bottles of Perrier, and now I’m quite thirsty. I wonder how sanitary the water is in these parts. I should have brought my Britta filter.

This week’s movie is 1981’s The Black Cat from director Lucio Fulci. The movie features a black cat that goes around murdering people in a small English village. We begin with some guy getting into an automobile and while he’s driving, a black cat appears behind him and uses mind control to get the guy crash into a street lamp, killing him instantly. Does the cat have psychic powers like the weirdoes in those Scanners movies or is black magic involved?

The next victims are a teenage couple who decide to lock themselves in a boatshed so they can shed their clothes away from prying eyes. I think the boyfriend of the young woman locks the shed from the inside, but the black cat steals the key while, at the same time, naturally, causing a gas leak. The young couple sucks on some bad air, causing them to foam at the mouth and die. The mother of the young girl who dies in that horrible way is Maureen Grayson (Daniela Doria). After the police discover the rotting cadavers of the two lovers, Maureen shrieks in horror at the sight.

Still, she doesn’t grieve for long since Maureen is the cat’s next victim. The cat manages to set her house on fire and Maureen gets caught under some burning curtains. The whole scene is rather disgusting. Maureen’s face begins melting off as if she were made out of wax. She flails about for several minutes before finally deciding to end her life by jumping out the nearest window. Not a good way to go. That’s going to be a closed casket funeral.

We have a couple of sleuths trying to get to the bottom of these mysterious deaths. One is Inspector Gorley (David Warbeck) and the other is American photojournalist Jill Trevers (Mimsy Farmer). We remember Mimsy Farmer from The Perfume of the Lady in Black. I believe her guts were eaten by a cannibalistic cult at the end of that movie, but I’m not one hundred percent sure of that. The two of them are fairly inept detectives, but really, how does one pin murders on a cat?

It turns out there’s this crusty curmudgeon named Professor Robert Miles (Patrick Magee, whose tremendous eyebrows you might remember from A Clockwork Orange). The good professor lives in this old, dark house on the edge of town. He psychically feeds his hatred of the townsfolk into his pet black cat and the cat then murders them in horrible ways. Lucio Fulci apparently based this on the classic Edgar Allen Poe story, so naturally it has zilch to do with the original story, but it’s not bad. What more do you want from me? Sometimes “it’s not bad” is good enough.

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.