For the week of October 8th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation to Blu-ray. Maybe it's because I've finally lost my mind, but Hotel Transylvania 3 stands as one of the most enjoyable theater experiences I've had all summer. I can tell you with utter certainty I liked it more than The Incredibles 2, and I'd rank it about on par with Mission: Impossible - Fallout. In my defense, there's something to be said for a series that knows its limitations and revels in them. At no point do the Hotel Transylvanias aspire to anything other than agreeable time-wasters, and Part 3 continues the trend: it might be the plottiest of the three (we've gone from two movies of essentially no conflict to now Dracula pitted against his mortal enemy Van Helsing), but lest you risk confusing "plot" with "import," know that Dracula-vs.-Van Helsing is the B-plot to the otherwise aimless happenings on a monster-themed cruise ship. Co-writer/director Genndy Tartakovsky cares more about turning Dracula's dad (Mel Brooks, a friggin' delight, as per usual) into an unlikely sex symbol on the ship or watching Blobby the Blob (the series' breakout character and my best friend in the whole world) accidentally create a Blob-son out of his own body (and then a Blob-dog for Blob-son) than it does pitting a bad guy against a good guy. The second we meet Van Helsing's great-granddaughter Ericka (a very funny Kathryn Hahn), we know she and Drac (Adam Sandler) are gonna end up zinging, not fighting, so we're able to appreciate the Spy-vs.-Spy-esque stalking as spirited foreplay to the big romance. More importantly, as visually stunning as the previous two movies were, you can tell Tartakovsky is free to indulge in whatever flits across that genius brain of his as long as he keeps the trains moving on schedule and the runtime under a hundred minutes. He is having so much fun devising sight-and-character gags: I'd tell you the opening montage, where we see Van Helsing (Jim Gaffigan) doing his best Elmer Fudd imitation and suffering at Dracula's hands over and over again, is the movie's high point, except then Tartakovsky will throw in that great Gremlin Airways sequence that has the protagonists flying on an airplane being simultaneously piloted AND destroyed by gremlins, and I just don't know what to think anymore. Or maybe it's the dance-off between Drac and Blobby as Drac unwittingly evades death at the hands of Ericka - Tartakovsky's command of movement and timing recalls peak Chuck Jones. No - I'm going with the long, borderline trippy underwater sequence that has the cast snorkeling alongside undersea flora and fauna, and all while a giant underwater volcano bubbles in the background. Or maybe the day-care center overrun with the Wolfman's terrifying brood. Or the revolting/hilarious form the elder Van Helsing has taken. In playing ball for Sandler and Sony, Tartakovsky gets to let his Id run wild.
But the Halloween-themed hits just keep on coming! From Scream Factory comes new special-editions of the Warner catalog titles House on Haunted Hill and Trick 'r Treat. I'd rank these as almost-not-quites, but they still offer a lot of fun for the discriminating horror buff. To House on Haunted Hill's credit, it's the best kind of remake. Its source material, the William Castle-Vincent Price shocker of the same name, is enjoyable schlock, so remake director William Malone isn't defacing any sacred icons. You can't blame him for wanting another crack at the material, given the irresistibility of Castle's premise: a theme-park mogul (here played by Geoffrey Rush, slumming hard after his big Oscar win) offers five strangers (Peter Gallagher, Ali Larter, Taye Diggs, Bridgette Wilson, and Chris Kattan) $1 million each if they can spend a night in the old Vannacutt Insane Asylum, only to discover an evil far more insidious behind any publicity-stunt tricks. Malone shoots the hell out of the titular house (David Klassen's expressionistic production design always offers something interesting to look at), and he stages a couple of phenomenal gore effects courtesy of KNB makeup. It's just that...how to put this gently...House on Haunted Hill is stylish, but it isn't very scary, especially once Malone starts over-relying on some terrible late-'90s CGI. And the less said about Kattan's jittery comic relief, the better. Trick 'r Treat fares better - in fact, this anthology feature has gained quite the reputation as a new Halloween classic. And at times, it deserves its cult appeal. Writer/director Michael Dougherty gives the film such a rich, autumnal hue (it's part Tales from the Crypt, part Ray Bradbury), and unlike House on Haunted Hill, his comic instincts work more often than not. Dylan Baker is a hoot as a cheerfully psychotic school principal, and the final segment, a battle between Brian Cox's Halloween-hating grump and a terrifyingly persistent trick-or-treater (Quinn Lord), plays like Trilogy of Terror's Zuni Doll as told by Chuck Jones. That said, I can't shake the feeling that Trick 'r Treat is somehow less than the sum of its gorgeous surfaces. There's not a lot of there there. George Romero's classic anthology Creepshow feels more substantial, and it's clear Dougherty wants a shot at that title. Still, it's fun. Nothing more than that, but fun all the same.
That said, for a true horror masterpiece, head to Sam Raimi's landmark cabin-in-the-woods feature The Evil Dead, which is getting a 4K pressing this week. The film is responsible for kickstarting one of the most tonally adventurous horror series of all time: who'da thunk that this violent chiller would have led to the Looney Tunes-inspired mayhem of Evil Dead 2 or the thinly veiled A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court parody that is Army of Darkness? Yet this first entry proves most bracing as both a gory endurance test AND as a marvel of no-budget innovation.
I miss this version of Sam Raimi - we lost something when he made the jump over to superhero movies and four-quadrant blockbusters, given how brutally effective he is at putting audiences through the ringer. Raimi metes out such violence against his five young leads (Ellen Sandweiss, Hal Delrich, Betsy Baker, Sarah York, and Bruce Campbell, who debuts as a square-jawed hero here but would soon become the franchise's put-upon Daffy Duck) after they unleash an ancient evil in the woods that you're either gasping in shock or breaking out into stunned laughter. The last twenty minutes present such an orgy of bloodshed that there are parts for which I still cover my eyes. What leavens the gore is twofold: Raimi's clear cinematic virtuosity (how good is Raimi? He had Joel Coen help edit the picture) and the homemade aesthetic of the whole endeavor. Even in 1981, it was clear Raimi put together Evil Dead on little more than spit-shine and a dream, but that lo-fi quality actually proves beneficial. We can see all the seams and obvious patches behind the grisly effects, and so we're able to better appreciate the energy of Raimi's chops and how he makes these bargain-basement components work for him. Compare this Evil Dead with the 2013 remake - that latter film devotes such care and detail to its photorealistic effects that the whole endeavor takes on the unpleasant pallor of a snuff film. That's no good for Raimi. He wants us to have fun, and have fun, we do. One of the most important horror films ever made.
It isn't a horror film, but A Prayer Before Dawn (which arrives from A24 and Lionsgate) is easily more horrifying than any of the week's other releases. Scratch that: this is one of the most repellent moviegoing experiences that I've had in a long time. In adapting Billy Moore's memoir A Prayer Before Dawn: My Nightmare in Thailand's Prisons, director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire turns Moore's on-screen proxy (Joe Cole, in a fearless performance) into our Dante through the Stygian nightmare that is the Thai prison system. Everything we see unfolds as one human-rights violation after another, and then coated in about fifteen layers of blood, sweat, and vomit. It doesn't help that Moore so aggressively resists our sympathies - he's drug-addled brute, alternatively lashing out violently or recoiling from the various beatings/stabbings/assaults around him - or that Sauvaire strips any slickness from the proceedings. In particular, he stages a gang rape made all the more brutal by how matter-of-fact it is - just a lot of hushed, agonized grunts that go on for far too long. And this incident occurs within the first half-hour! Moments like these make you think Sauvaire is daring you to stop watching. Yet I have to acknowledge the film's uneasy power. It wants to make viewers feel as crappy as possible, and on those terms, it succeeds wholeheartedly. Sauvaire's approach here reminds me of a more expressionistic Jacques Audiard: he shoots handheld for the entire film, pushing his vérité camera so tight on Moore that we experience his world as a series of disorienting traumas. It's fitting, considering Moore himself spends the runtime stoned, or imperiled, or both. Sauvaire makes us feel the chaos of the prison in 360 degrees. Only in the film's final third does this approach disappoint. Ostensibly, we're supposed to find a redemptive arc in Moore's run as a Muay Thai prison champion, except we can't always tell what's happening. The fight choreography reminds me of the brawls in Batman Begins. Still, part of me respects Sauvaire's insistence on denying us any of the conventional signifiers we might expect from prison movies; he makes Midnight Express seem like The Shawshank Redemption. You have been warned.