Monstrous Wildlife: Graboids

Monstrous Wildlife from Frank Robnik on Vimeo.

Having seen the entire 'Tremors' movie franchise and Sci-Fi Channel television series, this parody educational video brought a bemused grin to my face.

ZotB: zombie snail

The original slow zombie.

Happy 40th Earth Day

It almost slipped my notice that today is Earth Day, and the fortieth anniversary of the holiday to boot. As luck would have it, we've been compiling a list of seasonal horror films to watch throughout the year for a Darkley Niche special calendar post, among which includes Earth Day. So as a sneak peak of the calendar, here's what we recommend for your viewing pleasure.

'Swamp Thing' (1982)

The original DC Comics' 'Swamp Thing' had a strong environmentalist message and the movie adaptation tells the origin story of the film's namesake, a man once known as Dr. Alec Holland with aspirations of creating a plant/animal hybrid and is tragically turned into such.

Additional Earth Day suggestions:
- 'Little Shop of Horrors' (1986; plant with an appetite, Audrey II)
- 'Creepshow's second story, "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" (1982; meteorite creates unusual plant growth)
- 'Eight Legged Freaks' (2002; toxic waste creates giant spiders)
- 'Mutant'/'Night Shadows' (1984; toxic waste creates zombies)
- 'Attack of the Vegan Zombies!' (2010; witchcraft creates plants that turn people into zombies)

If you have any additional suggestions or remarks, then by all means be sure to include them in the comments. We appreciate the input. Anything related more specifically to trees, however, would be appreciated for Arbor Day.

Goosebumps: Stay Out of the Basement

Getting back into a reading habit tends to have a slow start, but I'm picking up some momentum, now. With the end of Welcome To Dead House, it was time to move on to the next Goosebumps novella. Presenting the second, on-going installment of the Niche's R.L. Stine series reviews, here's Stay Out of the Basement. (WARNING: spoilers ahead)

This is a book cover! What great artwork.

The setup is somewhat familiar to that of Welcome To Dead House, featuring a family of four with two children, one of each gender, with the daughter as the primary protagonist. My hunch predicts this will be a common trend in most of Stine's series. That aside, the similarities in stories ends there.

Hailing originally from Michigan (my home state, so it gets some brownie points for that), Margaret and Casey's family live in the warm, sunny state of California, though the state of the family itself is overcast. Their father, botanical scientist Dr. Brewer, had been laid off from his position at PolyTech and has, since then, been holing himself up in the basement working on a personal project. The neglect, though unintentional, still takes its toll on the children and likely their mother as well, but the story reads from their perspective. Noticing the basement door left slightly ajar, Margaret and Casey attempt their first excursion down. They only make it a few steps down before their father, hand bleeding, sternly yells the warning from which this book gets its name.

To shorten the summary, it develops into a pattern of the children, usually Margaret, noticing Dr. Brewer growing stranger. Not just in behavior, but quite literally. Leaves grow from his head and, on separate occassions, Margaret spies her father eatting plant food and green blood seeping from his wound. Adding to the pattern, the Brewer children find several opportunities to sneak back down into the basement, trying to learn what their father's experiments entail and the reason for his transformation. Between seldom being around and giving vague, often suspicious explanations, Margaret and Casey need to find the answers for themselves. A half-truth, Dr. Bower relates to the children that his experiment entails growing plants that are spliced with animal genes. The plants are fleshier, move slightly on their own accord, some with tendrils that can grasp, and apparently breathe. But it doesn't explain their father's condition, which he sidesteps as "just a side effect", or the desperate banging noise.

By now you've likely deduced the truth, as I had. In a final excursion down into the basement, the Brewer children break open a boarded-up supply closet door, the source of the sound. A collection of plant-human aberrations, subject rejects, spill out onto the floor and further inside is Dr. Brewer, bound and gagged. Cue the appearance of other Dr. Brewer, it turns into a climactic confrontation of the doubles. Unfortunately both appear physically identical, right down to the wounded hand and leaves growing from the scalp. Margaret, defensively holding onto an axe, is pressured to choose as both men vie for the weapon. However, she deduces a way to solve this dilemma by cutting the previously imprisoned Dr. Brewer's arm. Bleeding red from the gash, this is evidence enough to convince the children that this is their real father. This is further proven after Dr. Brewer chops the doppelganger in two, the fatal wound revealing a stalk without human bones or organs.

Later, Dr. Brewer details that during his experiments, which was splicing just plants in an attempt to create a type of super plant, he accidentally mixed his own blood from an open cut. A result was his hair falling out and replaced by the leafy growths, but more importantly to the botanist, he had stumbled upon a method of splicing human genes with plants. Too involved, too excited, Dr. Brewer kept experimenting without regard for his failed specimens, which he discarded in the closet. This finally caught up with Dr. Brewer when he made a specimen that was nearly identical in almost every way, even in thought and memory. Gaining the advantage, the plant-man overpowered the doctor and imprisoned him in the closet, taking his place and continuing the experiments.

Mr. Martinez, Dr. Brewer's previous boss, who was also kidnapped partway in the story and imprisoned alongside, asks Dr. Brewer to return to work at PolyTech and the doctor has the plants in the basement destroyed. Everything seems to be right again... But alone in their garden one weekend, Margaret hears a whisper at her feet. A small, yellow flower nudges her ankle, whispering, "Margaret, help me. Please -- help me. I'm your father. Really! I'm your real father!"

Stay Out of the Basement ends on this cliffhanger, but the story leads myself at least to believe that the plant-man Dr. Brewer had no ill intent towards the family. I'd venture to guess that it legitimately cared for them and believed that it was, in fact, their real father. Sometimes the duplicate believes it's the original, which is not an uncommon plot element. As for the flower in the garden, it's possible that the plant-man Dr. Brewer planted seeds in the garden before it was killed. There was an earlier scene where the children found him standing by their garden's rose trellis, examining the flowers. Again, these are my own conjectures. Although a bit predictable, Stay Out of the Basement is a good story all in all. If you like 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers', you'll probably enjoy this read. I give it four out of five Goosebumps Gs.

The Rats

Having finished 'Brutal' on my list of horror movies that Hulu is featuring, next was 'The Rats', a 2002 flick about, you guessed it, rats.


Now I've seen a couple of movies with rats as the theme, namely Stephen King's 'Graveyard Shift' and 'Willard' (2003), so I decided to give 'The Rats' a try. Certainly, there are a few "natural horror" films out there that can pull it off, like the former two just mentioned, as well as Hitchcock's 'The Birds' or Spielberg's 'Jaws'. However, most tend to be rather lukewarm and in this case my expectations were pretty accurate. It had its moments, but it was nothing outstanding by any means.

Brad Douriff as Tucker Cleveland, the rat exterminator
in 'Graveyard Shift' -- if the exterminator in 'The Rats'
was anything like him, it would've made the movie

Crispin Glover in 'Willard' (2003)

The rodent problem starts with a young woman getting bitten in the changing room of Garsons, a large department store in Midtown of New York City. Susan Costello (Mädchen Amick, 'Sleepwalkers'), who manages all the details of the department store, is able to satisfy the customer, believing it to have been a loose carpenter screw. But it's not long after that the young woman is hospitalized, having contracted a serious case of Leptospirosis, a.k.a. Weil's Disease (except in reality the disease is spread by urine, not bites). But speaking of urine, it's after the store contracts a discreet rat exterminator named Jack Carver (Vincent Spano, 'Tales From The Crypt' season 5, episode 6) that we find the little buggers have been marking their territory all over the third floor of the store, and I mean all over.

You have to feel sorry for the schmuck who has to clean this up.

While the focus of the rat problem is at Garsons, it starts to hit home for Susan and her daughter Amy (Daveigh Chase, 'The Ring' 2002) when one tries to get through their apartment window. They call the supervisor, who doesn't actually plan on doing anything about it since he is a rodent sympathizer. That evidently becomes a mistake when more of the black, aggressive rats appear in his basement apartment, swarming and killing him. (As an Easter egg of sorts in this movie, 'The Fly' (1958) plays on the super's television set.) Oddly enough, his disappearance is never noticed or mentioned hereafter.

Later, another rat incident occurs at an indoor, community swimming pool in Midtown's recreational center, which Amy happens to use for practice and fun. In some respects, the scene reminds me of something out of 'Jaws'. People scramble to get out of the water while the rest yell rather redundant exclamations, like "Get out of the water!" or "Swim faster!" Like the swimmers don't realize that already. And while it's been established that Amy regularly practices at the pool, for whatever reason she's the last one to get out. It's more dramatic that way, sure, but doesn't make a lot of sense.

As it turns out, when Jack talks to a friend in NYC's health department, there is a whole slew of recent reports ranging from rat bites to infestations across Midtown. But of course it's been swept under the rug, like the pool incident, using a cover story of pranksters and practical jokes. The city has some important, upcoming festivities scheduled, so they don't want to lose face or business. Big surprise. And speaking of business, the same goes for the owner of Garsons, who is rather relieved when Jack and Susan tell her that the rats are originating from somewhere in the sewers. Since it's not on the department store's property it's a city matter, only the city government isn't doing anything about it, either.

This aggravates the protagonists all the more and continue their investigation, which leads them to an abandoned lab in Midtown. No real surprise that these rats aren't natural. And judging by the records left behind, they were part of an experiment using a specific flowering plant for medicinal purposes. In addition to that, Jack estimates that having two years to breed and multiply, the lab rats have amassed into a colony around half a million in size.


As if having a swarm of rats swimming after you in a pool is bad enough, Amy is startled once more by a rat that comes up through their apartment toilet. (Makes you wonder if the girl has an aversion to water from that point on. Apparently not, since Daveigh later ends up in a well.) Eventually, Amy and Susan piece together that the rats are attracted to the flower used in the experiments, which happens to be the key fragrance used in "Flame of the Forest", a perfume carried at Garsons and which the girls have been using. This bit of deduction comes just in time, but not before another incident where the rats are accidentally shocked out of their nesting grounds and swarm into a halted subway train. If you ever played "the floor is lava" game as a kid, this scene is reminiscent of that with the passengers, only in this instance the floor is live rats.

Going back to the Midtown recreational center, they set up a trap by throwing bottles of perfume into the empty pool and lining the siding with explosives. Although why they didn't pull up the grates first before covering the bottom of the pool with broken glass is beyond me. The whole sequence of this final plan is out of order. But sure enough, the rats spill into the pool from the drainage pipes. "Spill" is actually an understatement, as they literally shoot up in geysers.

Who would've thought pest control would be like drilling for oil?

After Susan gets the worst of it by accidentally falling into the pool full of rats, Jack fishes her out and sets off the explosives. Problem solved, right? Well, as it turns out before the credits role, a smaller swarm of surviving rats appear in a park garbage receptacle. Fortunately, no one has taken advantage of this open ending to film a sequel. Aside from the attacks, 'The Rats' is a mediocre movie with a generic storyline. Not horrible, but not great, either. I give it two out of five mousetraps.