Fangoria Weekend of Horrors: The Movie!
A review by Michael O'May
This one I was exspecting to suck. It’s never talked about, bootlegged or even brought up in drunken reminiscing with friends over pizza on a Friday night it’s just there with the rest of the unmentionable movies of the 80’s but it doesn’t deserve to be. The Fangoria Weekend of Horrors documentary is actually very good.
It starts off like most documentaries on the horror culture as it finds the widest section of people who are not at all like the norm at horror conventions and uses them as the example of general horror fan. This has and always will piss me off. We are always immediately shown the most Goth, socially challenged, stink nerd types you can find at a horror convention and they are used as our representatives to the world at large, which doesn’t do us any favors. Thankfully it quickly moves away from that and gives us more perspective to show that hey those are just some of the zany people you will find at a convention by showing the vast majority of convention goers are just regular folks who keep their love of horror tucked away till convention time. You’d think that this being shot in 1985 would give you a funny look into the past of horror fans with big hair and goofy clothes but shockingly we haven’t changed at all. Everybody is wearing the same thing, the standard horror fan garb, the black and white silk screen T shirt and maybe a leather jacket. In 20 some odd years we have not evolved at all, I love it.
The movie bounces back and forth between interviews with directors and stars and footage from the convention. You get the standard fare of convention regulars (even today 20 years later) as fans swarm the new kid on the block Robert Englund, as Wes Craven continues to babble on about how he’s an expert in making horror movies (Bullshit), Dan O’Bannon comes off as a pissed old codger and Tobe Hooper tries his hardest to act like he’s interested. Oh yeah and lest I forget Savini is there being the center of attention as he always does, in this he’s balancing his baby in one hand (never understood the appeal of that, what if he dropped her? Movie magic then too?).
We get some grainy clips of up coming and currently popular movies of the times as well for what I’m assuming is promotional purposes. What’s funny though is there isn’t a bad one in the bunch, we get The Return of the Living Dead
All the while we meet new and more eccentric people at the convention including a yet to be discovered Chas Balun who has a much foreshadowed love of Fulci style gore.
The documentary ends with 2 fan competitions, one for short films, and the other for costumes. The films and the costumes for the most part sucked. But that’s what you come to expect at a horror convention, the good and the bad. The single greatest aspect of this though is a brief interview with Clu Gullagher. What he says in no uncertain terms reflects in many ways the feelings of all horror fans.
“Give me the Guts, Give me the Gore, Give me the Blood or I’m leaving”
“You have movies today like Return of the living Dead, and Nightmare on Elm Street that while they may be no big deal now in 10 or 15 years they will be classics”
“Horror when done right isn’t good- it’s poetry”
Truer words have never been spoken.
And then it ends with the voices of fans saying “see ya man” “had an awesome time” and you remember why you love conventions, you’re around your people, and as weird as they may be, your just as weird too, they speak your language and they have the same aspirations, loves and fears you do. Horror conventions aren’t just conventions they are community, and this documentary in the end reminds you of that. Thanks Fangoria.
Five Z’Dar out of Five
