It’s Friday…
Ahem…
I mean Frightday…
And I have some recommendations for you to enjoy this weekend…
Okay…
This Frightday’s theme is…
A Funny Thing Happened At Work Today…
Freddy and Frank were just two regular guys…
Working at Uneeda Medical Supply…
When all sorts of shit hit the fan…
And as messed up as their workplace was…
It was also a lot like most workplaces…
Filled to the brim with…
Dickhead bosses…
Creepy co-workers…
Bizarre rules…
And…
Timed confinement…
A place like that…
Already sounds horrifying enough…
But that being said…
A place like that…
Also sounds like the perfect setting for a horror movie.
So, let’s take a chronological look at my favorite, scariest, and possibly even unknown to you, Workplace Horror Movies…In the years following Return of the Living Dead.
Intruder (1989) – Okay…Let me start by saying that the DVD release of this film may have used a fair amount of false advertising…As you can see from the promotional artwork used…Bruce Campbell is given top billing, even though he has only a brief cameo, right before the end credits roll…And Sam Raimi, who plays Randy the butcher, a guy who despite sharing top billing with Bruce…Gets dispatched pretty quickly by the film’s slasher…But, for me, as the opening credits roll on the final slasher film of the decade best known for slasher films, it’s not about seeing A-List actors as part of the cast…It’s about seeing a name like, Greg Nicotero…Because, that can only mean one thing…That the kills are going to be legendary…And they were…This entire film takes place within the walls of a small local grocery store, similar to, and named after, the grocery store that director Scott Spiegel worked at in Michigan when he was younger. The confined space of a locked after hours grocery store works perfectly for this genre, as does the early setup of an outside threat…Thus creating a “don’t go outside” vibe, that makes the night crew, and the viewer, that much more claustrophobic…One by one, the staff of the Walnut Lake Market are being picked off…And in grand slasher movie tradition, the kills get ratcheted up a notch with each passing attack.
Session 9 (2001) – Directed by Brad Anderson, who despite creating some truly original and some genuinely haunting big-screen productions…Has become quite an active director on the small screen as of late…In this dark and undeniably eerie film…A team of workers enter the Danvers State Hospital…A now defunct asylum in Massachusetts that not only has a paranormally checkered past, but is also believed to have been the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Sanitorium…Which in turn became the inspiration for Arkham Asylum the institution which houses Batman’s rogues gallery…These workmen have one week to remove the asbestos from within the confines of a setting so fucking spooky that the director did absolutely nothing in the way of set design…Everything that you see there…Was there when they arrived on set…The film reveals the mystery within, in a purposefully measured pace…Which only serves to ratchet up the tension in an already tense film.
Pontypool (2008) – In this totally unique and totally messed up zombie movie…We meet shock jock Grant Mazzy, played by Stephen McHattie…Who works at a small town radio station in Ontario…He and two others are isolated within the walls of the station while a truly bizarre outbreak seems to be happening all around them…As the calls start coming in…The pieces of this puzzle start coming together…And as the details unfold…It becomes the first zombie film that I have ever seen that successfully messed with my head…Mindfuckery in a body horror film, is a pretty common thing, just ask Cronenberg…But rarely seen in a zombie film…I cannot say too much more without spoiling the crucial details that make this film the unicorn that it is…So that being said…Just climb aboard…Grab that rainbow mane with both hands, like a closet Brony…And take her for the ride of a lifetime.
Exam (2009) – In this film we see eight applicants who are applying for the same job…Locked in a room together…And forced to follow three simple rules…As they attempt to answer one simple question in eighty minutes…Sounds easy, right? Well, not so much…With racial and gender lines being drawn rather quickly…This film does a swift nose-dive into a nail-biting socio-political thriller…I mean it sort of feels like the CEO of this company just might be named Jigsaw…The setting is one of such confinement that the least claustrophobic among us would get a little twitchy watching this film…And the cast does an outstanding job, as well…I do have to give a shout out to this film for exposing me to two amazing, talented, and versatile actresses for the very first time…Pollyanna McIntosh, and Gemma Chan…A handful of other films try to tackle the “bunch of folks trapped in a room and forced to figure shit out” scenario…But in my humble opinion…Nobody did it as well as this one.
Compliance (2012) – Now I may get a bit of flack on this one…This film which was based on a true story…Most would not consider it a horror film, per se…But it is a frightening story…That grips you…And makes you squirm…Just as much as any gore-fest out there might…As I reshelve films in the horror section of my now imaginary video store…I think of the section as a home for films like this…Perhaps I should think about renaming that section…Instead of Horror….How about, Scary Movies…Has a nice ring to it…Anyway…This film’s director Craig Zobel tells the disturbing tale with the steady hand of a documentarian…Shying away from nothing…The performances from Dreama Walker, and Pat Healy were amazing, but keep your eyes on recent Emmy award winner, Ann Dowd (She won for The Handmaid’s Tale)…As the fast food manager, and the unwitting antagonist of this brilliant film.
Let Us Prey (2014) – In this dark and twisted little nugget that brings together characters from two of my favorite television shows…First…You’ve got my boy, Liam Cunningham, Also known as Davos Seaworth on Game of Thrones…As a mysterious stranger who wanders into a small village in Scotland…Carrying nothing but a list of names…He winds up in the local police station…As the prickly briar patch of a story begins to unravel…We start to discover not only the motivation of the stranger, but also the dark, secret corners of the lives of those he seems to be toying with…Thus bringing me to the second one…Queen of the Trash-People in The Walking Dead, Pollyanna McIntosh…Who is one character in particular that this mysterious stranger wants to bat around like a kitten with a ball of yarn…She feels like the moral compass navigating the viewer through a choppy sea that is sorely lacking in morality…This was a truly unique film…And the originality is one of the things that drew me in…The performances of the actors, and the rancid underbelly where they performed is what kept me enthralled for an hour and a half…This one was groovy…And I dug it…A lot.
Stung (2015) – I am a sucker for monster movies…Current ones with big budgets, and amazing effects…Older ones with no budgets, and super-cheesy effects…And everything in between…But one of my guilty pleasures are the small things that have turned big and come seeking revenge on the humans for inventing pest control…When I was seven years old…I saw ol’ Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner in the film, Kingdom of the Spiders…And I was hooked…And this film captures that magic for me…While Paul and Julia are catering a fancy party at a local mansion…Some experimental fertilizer mutates the local wasp population into giant killing machines…The thing I really dig, is that the film truly takes itself seriously…The characters are believable and so are the performances…Two of note are…Clifton Collins Jr. as the creepy little fucker who lives in the mansion…And of course…What would a horror movie be without Lance Henriksen in it? Folks…If you like monster movies…Or giant insect movies…This one’s for you.
K-Shop (2016) – This film tells the story of Salah, a young man who returns from university to help his ailing father run the family-owned kebab shop…After a deadly late night encounter with a customer…Salah takes a hard left at the fork in the road…And delivers a vicious variation of vigilante justice on the ever-incorrigible, shit-faced, late-night kebab-consuming crowds of weekenders, found aimlessly stumbling the streets of London…This film goes dark as fuck, as it follows Salah down his gore-plastered rabbit hole…But at the same time…Somehow…K-Shop manages to have a powerful message in it, as well…But…Don’t get me wrong…This film is by no means preachy, or dogmatic in the delivery of this message…But by the end…That message was received…Loud…And clear.
The Belko Experiment (2017) – This film sprang from the brain of James Gunn (Slither) …After writing the screenplay and getting a studio greenlight…Gunn took some time off due to his recent divorce…The studio eventually reached out and got the ball rolling again…The directing baton passed from Gunn to Greg McLean (Wolf Creek) and the production was off and running…John Gallagher Jr. who was in two of my favorite films from last year, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Hush…Stars as Mike Milch…A regular joe who works in an American office building in Columbia…One day, after going through a new series of security checkpoints, he and the rest of the staff of Belko Industries enter the building to start their work day…Everything changes when a voice announces over the loudspeaker that these office workers must start killing each other in order to survive a threat of imminent death from whoever is behind this experiment…Gallagher is incredible in this, and once again shows his range…And it’s a fast-paced, gory, frightenening look at who we really are…When it really counts.
The Video Store Clerk 
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