We Are What We Are (2013) Now I'm Hungry

Yeah, I'm hungry, but I may never look at stew the same way again.

Let me just say that I'm increasingly impressed by director Jim Mickle. I first saw his work on the daring zombie-rat thriller Mulberry Street, then in what I believe is one of the very best vampire movies I've ever seen, Stake Land.  Mickle and co-writer/frequent star Nick Damici add another quality entry onto their resume with We Are What We Are, a remake of the 2010 Mexican film, Somos lo que hay.  Mickle and Damici go in a somewhat different direction and the result is a quietly creepy film that is photographed beautifully and well-crafted with suspense and some genuine chills.

The matriarch of a small, unassuming family (Kassie DePaiva of TV's One Life To Live...don't ask me how I knew that) suddenly dies one rainy day, and the family is consumed with grief.  They're a bit of an odd family, the girls (Julia Garner and Ambyr Childers) pale and soft-spoken, but very close with each other and their younger brother (Jack Gore).  Despite the death of their mother and through the kindness of the town (especially the motherly neighbor played by Kelly McGillis), the father (Bill Sage) insists that they will go ahead with some kind of ritual that their family has observed for decades.  While the father is very spiritual, the ritual is less religion than it is tradition.  In the meantime, a local doctor (Michael Parks) stumbles across a finger bone after the rains and is determined to find out its origins.  He's got the extra added motivation of having had his teenage daughter go missing - maybe this is her?  It's not a total spoiler to say that the Parker clan's ritual involves dining.  Missing people + a dining ritual?  I think you can put two and two together here.

The girls, Iris (Childers) and Rose (Garner) struggle with the idea of the ritual, wondering if they should rebel against their quietly firm (but simmering with rage) father.  Iris wants to act on her attraction to the deputy (Wyatt Russell), a former high school crush.  Rose wants to get their brother out of the house and away from the ritual.  Meanwhile, Doc Barrow (Parks) is closing in on the truth about the Parker clan and what may have happened to his daughter.

I won't spoil the ending, but it takes an intriguing strange turn that doesn't really seem out of place at all, despite what happens.  We Are What We Are is a beautiful-looking movie, with a structure and frame that really speaks to the telling of a story.  Director Mickle can put another knot in his success belt, in my opinion, as he tells an atmospheric, steadily-building story that has its abundant quiet moments coupled with scenes of meaty gore and bloodletting.  The acting was really good all around, with Sage showing understated menace, Garner and Childers showing a struggle with innocence, and Parks as a sad, hopeful, and vengeful father.

Now, while you wait for dinner, enjoy the trailer...

Phantasm (1979) I Love Your Free-Wheelin' 70's Ways

Right around the summer of 1980, I remember my cousin Scott excitedly telling me about this weird movie he somehow saw late at night. We were 13, and it's not like we were allowed to watch anything we wanted yet, so this rebellious tale intrigued me. He told me of a movie unlike anything he'd ever seen: Phantasm. It had, according to my cousin, "this tall, weird guy who's strong...and his finger gets cut off, but it's still alive...oh, and there's this ball with knives in it and it kills a guy...and people crushed down to midget size...and then the weird guy comes through the mirror!"

I thought he was making it up.

As I would discover in my journeys growing up, it turns out he didn't make it up. It is a real film, indeed. Made in 1977 and released in 1979, it is writer/director Don Coscarelli's first great tribute to cult films. He would make splashes throughout his career with cult classics like Beastmaster and Bubba Ho-Tep, as well as contributing a strong entry to the Masters of Horror series with Incident On and Off A Mountain Road. There's a free-wheeling creative energy to Coscarelli's films, and Phantasm is where I believe the ball started rolling.





To properly summarize Phantasm isn't a straightforward task. Its plot doesn't meander so much as it runs laughing, sometimes hitting walls, then proceeding to scamper in another direction, giggling with glee. This is a complaint by many, an endearing trait to others. As for my opinion, I found it fun because sometimes in life, it's OK to run flailing and laughing into walls.

Basically, it goes a little like this: Jody and Michael's brother Tommy is murdered by a mysterious person in the graveyard of the local mortuary. Jody wants to leave, but finds himself forced to care for his teenage brother. Michael, still hurting from the loss of their parents, is terrified of Jody leaving. When he spies the incredibly imposing Tall Man (the legendary Angus Scrimm) removing Tommy's coffin from the fresh grave, he pleads with Jody to investigate. Turns out people have been disappearing from the town for years, and the Tall Man and his house are at the center of it. Things get stranger and stranger, with hooded dwarves making periodic attacks on the two. Aided by their friend, groovy ice cream vendor Reggie (who becomes a bit of a randy, accidentally-indestructible action hero in his own right through the series), Jody and Michael enter the house to stop The Tall Man once and for all in a brouhaha that includes killer dwarf slaves, the Tall Man's gender-switching shapeshifter abilities, and gateways to other worlds.

If you cherish cult films as much as I do, you really should see Phantasm. It's not made on a huge budget and the acting is often unintentionally hilarious, but one can't fault a film that not only tries, but is perfectly comfortable in its own celluloid skin. Long-time readers know I like a film that has energy and a bit of a swagger (see my review of Equinox). Phantasm has that, and still resonates to this day. This film put Angus Scrimm on the map, and he is now undeniably a horror film icon - rightfully so, as his scenes are genuinely creepy and performed with confident presence. The musical score stands out, very John Carpenter-esque in its minimalistic approach, which lends to branding certain scenes with a certain mood.

Phantasm is pure, popcorn fun, taking me back to my youth, an early-80's kid just getting his feet wet in the horror genre, listening with a rapid heartbeat hammering in my ears to anyone who would tell me the synopsis of the latest "forbidden fruit," be it Phantasm or some years later, the classic Evil Dead. No Internet back then - word of mouth, trial and error at the local video store (miss you sometimes, VHS) and eventually Fangoria were the only ways I could get my horror movie interest stoked.

Enjoy, and remember to duck:

Roots of Personal Horror: The Sheik, Wrestling's Original Madman

The year: I'm going to go with 1976. That's the best I can remember. The place: outside Cadillac, Michigan. My brother and I sit glued to the black and white TV, one of three channels. That's right, young'uns. Three channels is ALL we had: the local ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates. FOX wasn't even a sparkle in an executive's eye back then. My brother and I, we're glued to our favorite weekend entertainment (after the dearly-missed less PC cartoons): Big Time Wrestling.

Big Time Wrestling was a staple not only in the Detroit wrestling scene, but the national one as well. Anyone who was anyone back then came through the Detroit territory, and this is before Vince McMahon turned his little corner of the wrestling territory into the juggernaut it is today. Dick the Bruiser, Abdullah the Butcher, Andre the Giant...they all passed through the Detroit area.

And they all, in their own way, met up with The Sheik.

The Sheik - or Ed Farhat - ran the territory for decades, their heyday coming in the 70's with a wide-ranging TV deal and regular stars that captured the hearts and imaginations of impressionable youth such as my brother and I. The Sheik was a madman who slinked into the ring, often prayed on his sacred rug to the chagrin of his opponent, the proceeded to maul, bite, and carve up his hapless opponent with a sharp foreign object before clamping him in the dreaded Camel Clutch, his signature submission hold (as seen above as he applies it to Terry Funk).

My brother and I were scared out of our wits by this guy. He made ugly faces as he jabbed whatever object he could into the face of his foe. He fish-hooked the guy's mouth. He stuck his fingers in his eye. Our hearts beat wildly with equal parts fear and awe. We'd go into a frustrated frenzy at his actions...how could he get away with it? Fortunately, there was a hero: Bobo Brazil. Bobo was one of the pioneers of diversity in the business, a black man wildly cheered by predominately white audiences. Bobo, the commentators always reminded us, was the only person who could scare off The Sheik. Sure enough, the roar of the studio crowd prefaced an eleventh-hour rescue by Bobo Brazil, who would almost get his hands on The Sheik. Arrgh! So frustrating! Again, the villain gets away. But matches were signed: Bobo would face The Sheik at the legendary Cobo Arena in Detroit, and there would finally be a reckoning. My brother could only imagine, as we lived nearly five hours north in Cadillac, Michigan.

Flash forward to January, 2003. I was still fresh to my new position as wrestling commentator in independent wrestling and was attending my broadcast colleague and dear friend Jim Hall's debut show for his Marquee Wrestling. At the after-party, I received the sad news: Ed Farhat, the fearsome Sheik, had passed away at the age of 76. There was silence followed by hushed tributes from the wrestlers and staff who had either known him personally or, like me, had been affected by the man's work in our younger lives.



In something of a "come around full circle" thing, we flash forward once again, this time to December of 2004. Jim and I were asked to be commentators for a benefit show for Sabu - The Sheik's nephew - organized jointly by Scott D'Amore's Border City Wrestling out of Windsor, Ontario, and BCW's Detroit affiliate Prime Time Wrestling. Now the young kid who sat in front of his old TV, mesmerized and completely afraid of The Sheik in the mid-70's, was a small part of a show that paid tribute and respect to not only Sabu, but The Sheik. This was in Detroit. This was the heart of Sheik country, and a real heart of professional wrestling as history. Getting to say his name as a lasting part of DVD commentary cemented my own personal "horror" history with The Sheik.

Through my travels in that time, I met other connections to The Sheik, such as his son, Ed Farhat Jr., who runs the direct descendant of Big Time Wrestling, the All-World Wrestling League (AWWL). I also met a man I'm still proud to consider a friend, Mark Boone, a longtime musician, current wrestling manager, and lifelong Detroit wrestling historian. If there is anything to be known about wrestling in Detroit, he's the go-to guy. He even contributed to the soundtrack of the film about The Sheik, I Like To Hurt People. There's never a doubt in his voice when he says that The Sheik was the "Daddy of what became known as 'hardcore wrestling.'" The following pictures were taken by Mark himself during the 70's, at the same Cobo Arena that my brother and I longed to go to, and are only a drop in the bucket of his personal collection:

Previous two photos courtesy of Mark Boone

Simply great stuff. Thanks, Mark!

The Sheik was the monster under my bed. His was the name my brother and I evoked to scare each other. Back in a time when I was too scared to watch anything close to horror, a bloodthirsty, foreign-object-wielding, biting, scratching madman was enough monster for both of us.

And we wouldn't have it any other way.

(Like scary wrestlers? Then check out this post by my friend B-Sol of The Vault of Horror - trust me, this man also knows his wrestling. After you check out that post, check out more of his posts - you won't be sorry.)