Horror anthology Monsterland opens with a fine visual gag: a city street, filled with screaming, fleeing citizens, and one of those apocalyptic “the end is nigh” types with a sign that simply says “Told you so.” Let’s just say, you’ve been warned.
Superficially, this Dread Central-endorsed anthology takes the mechanic from Chillerama of each sequence being a film-within-a-film, as the last vestiges of humanity hang out in a cinema to avoid the end of the world. However, it’s actually more like 1986’s Zombiethon or the recent All Hallows’ Eve 2, in which a series of unrelated (and, in some cases, already completed) shorts are tied together with a weak linking mechanism. As is often the way with such horror mixtapes, there are high points and low. The biggest problem is that good ideas are left a little under-developed.
Case in point: “The Grey Matter” (directed by the McCoubrey brothers) strikes a similar theme to the underrated Motivational Growth, but rather than the office schlub getting lifestyle advice from a fungus infestation under his tub, this time it’s an evil caterpillar that takes residence in his head after what he thinks is just a nasty fall. It’s succinct, fun, but just peters out.
Oddly, Monsterland is at its most entertaining when it’s at its briefest or most ridiculous. The opener by Corey Norman (The Invoking 2), “Don’t Go Into The Water,” is a micro-length take on the underwater attack trope, while “Curiosity Kills” by Sander Maran is an impressively DayGlo Rube Goldberg creation about baked beans, mutated pet mice, and poorly timed visits from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Then there’s the entertainingly gonzo “Happy Memories”, a stick-puppet horror with shades of both stop-motion maestro PES and Claymation nightmare vendor Robert Morgan (ABCs of Death 2’s “D is for Deloused”).
Sometimes the comedy outweighs the terror, and that’s no bad thing (after all, a good horror short is close kind to a fine knock-knock joke, pithy and amoral). Lovecraftian lactation comedy “Stay At Home Dad” has some fun with gender reversal and takes an entertaining swipe at the phobias around breast feeding that could almost run as a PSA.
However, when it comes to a fully formed nightmare, “Hag” may be the most rounded and successful. Another preexisting short (having done the festival circuit in 2014) the unsettling tale by Erik Gardner (The Mangler Reborn) of a husband with night paralysis and a wife who sleep walks has an undoubted eeriness.
Yet Monsterland falls apart because it never really hangs together. The framing mechanism is often forgotten about (so much so that the entertaining radioactive jellyfish jam “Hellyfish” keeps its original credits) and the tonal fractures (for example, following “Hag” with the fun but silly animated “Monster Man”) mean just too much whiplash. Like All Hallows’ Eve 2, the shorts would probably have been best served by leaving them as shorts.
Monsterland (RLJ Entertainment and Dread Central) is available on DVD and Blu-ray now. Also available now:
The Funhouse Massacre (Scream! Factory) continues the belief in horror circles that simply casting Robert Englund as a sinister-seeming doctor automatically ensures access to a psycho-terror pedigree (*coughcoughFear Cliniccoughcough*). “There are people here that even God is afraid of,” he intones darkly to a visiting journalist as he shows her around his supermax asylum for super-serial killers. Sadly for fans of Freddie, Englund gets wiped out in the pre-credit sequence when the reporter (Candice De Visser) turns out to be mad murderer Dollface, who has come to break all those monsters out of the hoosegow and bring them to a state-of-the-art haunted attraction.
It’s a far-from-ingenious setup that has been used dozens of times before: the psycho-killer hiding in a haunted house because, well, everyone will be expecting it to be covered in gore and grue (cf Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse, the murder ride in House of 1000 Corpses, the underrated grindhouse classic Carnival of Blood, the terribly disappointing The Houses October Built and, just for coulrophobes, puppetry oddity Gingerclown).
However, just because it’s been done before doesn’t mean that this isn’t a ridiculous body dump of fun. Traditionally, the soon-to-be victims don’t realize that the bodies are real. The joke here is that the merry funseekers are watching the murders and just think that they are ringside for some true state-of-the-art effects.
Director Andy Palmer finds all the delicious Eighties throwback fun in Ben Begley and Renee Dorian’s script, with clear nods to campily blood-drenched masters like the Chiodo Brothers’ Killer Klowns From Outer Space, and Ted Nicolaou (Terrorvision). Having each of the killers be a different archetype allows for some glorious in-jokes (Dr. Giggles AND Cheerleader Camp? Sign me up), and the general madcap tone of goofiness and goriness pays off.
It’s no masterwork, but between some great set-dressing, and Begley giving cinema its best dopey deputy since Dewey in Scream, it’s hugely entertaining in a Friday night, pizza and beer way. Creepy clowns go out of fashion about as much as Englund, and with Zombie’s 31 due later this year, it seems that this is a fine year for mass murder and grease paint.
This article appears in June 17 • 2016.
