Movie of the Month: Double Feature Disaster: Spontaneous Combustion (1990) & Society (1992)

This was originally posted on Swampflix.com as part of that site’s “Movie of the Month” feature, in which one contributor makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and the staff discusses it afterwards. This article was published as a follow-up to the discussion of MotM Society on February 9, 2017. 

When I first set out to track down a copy of Society, I turned to my old pal, the Vulcan Video catalog search, which showed that there was a copy at the location nearest me. When I went to locate it, however, it was nowhere to be found on the shelf, and the kind woman working the counter that day noted that their copy had actually been sold several years back and that the catalog listing was an oversight (an unusual lapse for the fine folk of Vulcan). We did eventually track down a copy of the film in their stacks, one of those early double-sided DVDs with Society on one side and Spontaneous Combustion on the reverse. I was pretty pleased by this, because a double feature usually means an easy instant follow up article (just add water).

I was wrong. I was so, so wrong. There’s nothing easy about Spontaneous Combustion.

Movie of the Month: The Funhouse (1981)

The post from which this was excerpted was originally published on Swampflix.com as part of that site’s “Movie of the Month” feature, in which one contributor makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and the staff discusses it afterwards. For October 2016, Britnee made Brandon, Alli, and me watch The Funhouse (1981).

This begs the question of what exactly a B-Movie is, especially with regards to the Tobe Hooper oeuvre. Is Texas Chainsaw Massacre a B-Movie? Is Poltergeist? What’s the real difference between Funhouse and those two films that makes film scholarship so dismissive of it? Chainsaw is definitely a B-Movie by every objective measure: budget (a mere $300K), cast (all virtual unknowns, with the Edwin Neal having the largest pre-Chainsaw filmography, consisting entirely of dubbing voices for the American import of Gatchaman), and overall feeling of cheapness. Instead of B-Movie fodder that is remembered for its campiness, however, Chainsaw is generally regarded as a landmark horror movie for bringing terror out of the night and into the light of day, and its legacy holds up despite seven follow up films of various quality and dubious chronology (there are three sequels, then a reboot, a prequel to the reboot, then a sequel just to the original skipping all others, and an upcoming film about Leatherface’s teenage years). It’s easier to single out Poltergeist as a more traditional “prestige” horror film; having Steven Spielberg as producer lent the movie an air of credibility that neither Chainsaw nor Funhouse before it had had (and that Lifeforce,which followed in 1985, was certainly missing; even a script by Dan “I wrote Alien” O’Bannon wasn’t enough to cover the Cannon Films stench on that one, but I digress). I think the reason that Chainsaw is so widely praised is simply that it transcended the barriers of the conventional B-horror film to become something more terrifying altogether. Chainsaw and Poltergeist are very Gothic at their core, with the latter heavily focusing on the brutishness of the wilderness outside of society and the uber-Gothic imagery of decaying homesteads with trapdoors and hidden rooms, and the latter focusing on pairing the very old-school Gothic concepts of hauntings and beings beyond human comprehension and pairing those ideas with the aesthetic of contemporary suburbanism.