Welcome to The Penny-Pinching Cinephile, a weekly spotlight of the best free flicks on the web. ‘Cuz sometimes you gotta eat.
On tonight’s special Halloween-themed Penny-Pinching Cinephile, we’ll be highlighting the scariest, goriest, most disturbing free horror flicks the Interwebs has to offer! Proceed if you dare…
One of the most controversial movies ever made, Meir Zarchi’s unflinchingly violent film marks a high point (or arguably a low point) in ’70s exploitation horror. Notoriously one of Roger Ebert’s least favorite films (he gave it zero stars when it was released in 1978), I Spit on Your Grave is known, rather crudely, as a “rape and revenge” flick. Jennifer, the film’s protagonist, is a New York writer who travels to a rural Connecticut cabin to work on her first novel, but is soon terrorized and repeatedly gang-raped by a group of young yokels. After their attacks, she hunts them down one by one, seducing and then killing them. Zarchi was inspired to write the film after helping a bloodied and naked rape victim he came across while walking with his family in a New York park. Some feminist critics have praised the realistic violence in the movie as necessary to convey the real horrors of rape and claim that Jennifer is really a feminist hero (this may have been Zarchi’s intention, as the film was originally titled Day of the Woman). A tough watch by any account, I found I Spit on Your Grave to be a well-made and satisfying revenge film that smartly reveals the terrible reality of rape culture as well as the female fantasy of violent retribution.
2) Evil Dead II
For my money, Evil Dead II is the apex of horror-comedy, and by far Sam Raimi’s best movie. Bruce Campbell revisits his role as Ash Williams, the sole survivor of a zombie massacre in The Evil Dead. Raimi plays fast and loose with the timeline, as the first part of the film is basically a retread of the original: Ash and his girlfriend visit a cabin in the woods where they discover an audio recording of the Book of the Dead that unleashes an evil force that wreaks havoc on the couple. But you probably know that in a film like this, plot carries little importance. What matters is the hysteria of the performances, the brutality of the gore, the horror makeup, the creature design and the filmmaking style. Evil Dead II has horror style to spare. From Raimi’s whoosing, zooming camera movement to Campbell’s legendary, one-handed, semi-possessed mania, the film has rightly earned its reputation as a low-budget horror classic.
The Devil’s Backbone is a Spanish-language ghost story from director Guillermo del Toro set at an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War. Carlos is a recently orphaned boy who arrives at the orphanage and begins to have visions of a ghostly visitor named Santi who gives him mysterious warnings about the orphanage and its caretaker Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega). Carlos is fascinated by the undetonated bomb buried in the middle of the orphanage courtyard, a relic of Nationalist attacks against the orphanage’s patrons who are Republican loyalists. Eventually, he learns that the bomb and Santi’s death are related and begins to unravel the events that lead to the earlier tragedy. Guillermo del Toro deftly weaves a narrative of childhood discovery with real moments of chilling horror, but never scarier than anything Carlos experiences; we witness the horrors of war and the cruelties of Jacinto and the bullies through the innocence of a child.
More a psychological melodrama than an out-and-out horror film, 1924’s The Hands of Orlac reunites the director and star of the German expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene and Conrad Veidt. Unlike Caligari‘s twisted set design and baroque horror, the setting of Orlac is more subdued and realistic. Veidt plays a renown pianist whose hands are damaged in a train accident and then replaced in surgery with the hands of a murderer. I’m sure that premise sounds familiar, as the film was remade in 1935 as Mad Love (starring a brilliant Peter Lorre), as well as in 1960 under the same title, and the theme of evil “grafted” onto the disfigured is a common horror trop. Still, what sets apart this original version is the compelling performance of Veidt, who uses his entire body to convey a man whose body is at odds with his mind. He twists and contorts his slender frame into the creeping gait of a murderer as he becomes consumed with the urge to kill. When the fingerprints of the murderer are found at a new crime scene, it appears Veidt has succumbed to his violent impulses–but he doesn’t remember doing it!
Watch it on Archive.org.
5) Gothic
Ken Russell’s film about the origin of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is appropriately horrific. Evoking Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (above), the film draws upon Shelley’s own history (the painting probably influenced her writing of Frankenstein), as well as the historical details of the stormy night when she conceived of the story. It’s 1816, and gathered at Lord Byron’s Lake Geneva villa are an 18-year-old Mary (Natasha Richardson), her lover and future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands), her stepsister Claire Clairmont (Myriam Cyr), Byron’s physician Dr. Polidori (Timothy Spall) and Byron himself (Gabriel Byrne). Fueled by drink, drugs and sexual exploits, this cadre of Romantics invent stories of supernatural horror to amuse themselves. This all-night creative orgy spawned both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre, which predates Stoker’s Dracula by eighty years. Russell evokes the nightmarish imagery of these stories sometimes to the point of absurd hysteria. Gothic isn’t a masterpiece by any means, but it’s an entertainingly surrealistic haunted house movie.
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