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Placeholder post to keep track of films watched this month, reviews to come. Aiming to hit 31 by the end of the month. * indicates a rewatch. #1. The Crawlers, a.k.a., Contamination .7, a.k.a., Creepers, a.k.a., Troll 3 (1993) #2. Head (2015) #3. Carne The Taco Maker (2013) #4. Mind Ripper, a.k.a., Wes Craven Presents Mind Ripper, a.k.a., The Outpost, a.k.a., Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes 3, a.k.a., The Hills Have Eyes III: Mindripper (1995) #5. Troll 2, a.k.a, Trolls, a.k.a., Monster Valley, a.k.a., The Return of Troll (1990) * #6. Rumpelstiltskin (1995) #7. Maniac Mansion, a.k.a., The Murder Mansion (1972) #8. Cries in the Night, a.k.a., Funeral Home (1980) #9. The Driller Killer (1979) #10. Incident On and Off a Mountain Road (2005) #11. Metamorphosis, a.k.a., Regenerator, a.k.a., Reanimator 2 (1990) #12. The Manster, a.k.a., The Split, a.k.a., Doktor Satan (1959) #13. Death Ship (1980) #14. Teenage Zombies, a.k.a., Teenage Torture (1959) #15. Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) #16. Tomb of Torture (1963) #17. Amphibian Man (1962) #18. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) * #19. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) #20. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) #21. Dolls, a.k.a., The Doll (1987) #22. Nightbeast, a.k.a., Night Beast (1982) #23. Ice Cream Man (1995) #24. The Autopsy of Jane Doe, a.k.a., The Jane Doe Identity (2016) #25. Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings, a.k.a., Pumpkinhead 2: The Demon Returns, a.k.a., The Revenge of Pumpkinhead: Blood Wings (1993) #26. Basket Case 2 (1990) #27. The Boogey Man, a.k.a., The Bogey Man, a.k.a., Spectre, a.k.a., The Boogeyman (1980) #28. The Brain, a.k.a., Manipulations (1988) #29. Splice, a.k.a., Chimera (2009) * #30. Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, a.k.a., A Nightmare on Elm Street 6: Freddy's Finale, a.k.a., A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Final Nightmare (1991) #31. Psychos in Love (1987) * #32. Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981) #33. Predator (1987) * #34. Blood Dolls (1999) #35. Basket Case 3, a.k.a., Basket Case 3: The Progeny (1991) #36. Q, a.k.a., Bird over New York, a.k.a., American Monster, a.k.a., Q: The Winged Serpent (1981) #37. Subspecies (1991) #38. Fangs of the Living Dead, a.k.a., Malenka, a.k.a., The Vampire's Niece, a.k.a., Malenka, Niece of the Vampire, a.k.a., Bloody Girl (1969) #39. Halloween, a.k.a., John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) * #40. Madman (1981) #41. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, a.k.a., The Haunting of Hamilton High, a.k.a., Mary Lou (1987) #42. Final Exam (1981) #43. Scream Blacula Scream (1973) #44. Don't Look in the Attic, a.k.a., The House of the Damned, a.k.a., House of the Cursed Spirits (1982) #45. Critters (1986) #46. Phantasm II, a.k.a., Phantasm II: The Never Dead Part Two (1988) #47. Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (1990) #48. Strait-Jacket (1964) #49. Blood (2000) #50. Halloween II, a.k.a., Boogeyman, a.k.a., Halloween II: The Nightmare Isn't Over! (1981) #51. Dog Soldiers (2002) #52. Hangman's Curse, a.k.a., The Veritas Project: Hangman's Curse (2003) #53. Bloody Pit of Horror, a.k.a., The Red Hangman, a.k.a., A Tale of Torture, a.k.a., Crimson Executioner, a.k.a., Some Virgins for the Hangman, a.k.a., The Castle of Artena, a.k.a., The Scarlet Hangman, a.k.a., The Scarlet Executioner (1965) #54. Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966) #55. Misery (1990) #56. The Mummy (1932) #57. Critters 2, a.k.a., Critters 2: The Main Course (1988) #58. Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil, a.k.a., Prom Night: Evil of Darkness (1992) #59. Dracula (1931) * #60. Critters 3, a.k.a., Critters 3: You Are What They Eat (1991) #61. Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a.k.a., The Last Halloween, a.k.a., Halloween 3 (1982) #62. The Invisible Man, a.k.a., H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man (1933) #63. Critters 4, a.k.a., Critters 4: They're Invading Your Space (1992) #64. Berserk!, a.k.a., Circus of Terror (1967) #65. Incubus, a.k.a., Leslie Stevens' Incubus (1966) #66. Robot Monster, a.k.a., Monster from Mars, a.k.a., Monsters from the Moon (1953) #67. New Nightmare, a.k.a., Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a.k.a., Freddy's New Nightmare, a.k.a., Real Nightmare (1994) #68. Frankenstein, a.k.a., Dr. Frankenstein (1931) #69. The Erotic Witch Project (2000) #70. Devil Times Five, a.k.a., The Terrible House on the Hill, a.k.a., Tantrums (1974) #71. Guru, the Mad Monk, a.k.a., Garu, the Mad Monk (1970) #72. Bride of the Gorilla (1951) #73. Drive-In Massacre (1976) #74. Grave Encounters (2011) #75. One Dark Night, a.k.a., Entity Force, a.k.a., Mausoleum, a.k.a., Rest in Peace, a.k.a., Dark Night, a.k.a., Night of Darkness (1983) #76. Revenge of the Radioactive Reporter, a.k.a., Atomic Reporter, a.k.a., Nuclear Mutant (1990) #77. Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead, a.k.a., Phantasm III: The Third Power (1994) #78. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, a.k.a., Halloween 4 (1988) #79. Dreams in the Witch-House (2005) #80. Grave Encounters 2 (2012) #81. Paranormal Activity 2 (2010) #82. The Wolf Man (1941) #83. Death Laid an Egg, a.k.a., A Curious Way to Love, a.k.a., Plucked (1968) #84. Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003) #85. Delirium (2018) #86. The Abominable Snowman, a.k.a., The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957) #87. Sorority House Massacre, a.k.a., Death House, a.k.a., Massacre (1986) #88. Trucks, a.k.a., Trucks - Out of Control (1997) #89. The Minion, a.k.a., Knight of the Apocalypse, a.k.a., Fallen Knight, a.k.a., Lukas, a.k.a., Minion (1998) #90. Grim (1996) #91. Poor Pretty Eddie, a.k.a., Heartbreak Motel, a.k.a., Redneck County, a.k.a., Massacre at Redneck County, a.k.a., Redneck County Rape, a.k.a., Black Vengeance (1975) #92. The Brain that Wouldn't Die, a.k.a., The Head that Wouldn't Die (1962) #93. Horror House on Highway Five (1985) #94. Haunts, a.k.a., The Veil (1977) #95. Isle of the Snake People, a.k.a., Isle of the Living Dead, a.k.a., Snake People, a.k.a., Cult of the Dead (1971) #96. Dracula, a.k.a., Horror of Dracula (1958) #97. I've Been Watching You, a.k.a., The Brotherhood (2001) #98. Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill, a.k.a., Death Valley (2004) #99. 60 Seconds to Die (2017) #100. 2 Bedroom 1 Bath (2014) #101. The Tooth Fairy (2006) #102. Splinter (2009) #103. Bikini Bloodbath Car Wash, a.k.a., Bikini Bloodbath 2: Bikini Bloodbath Car Wash (2008) #104. The Mad, a.k.a., Mad Zombies (2007) #105. It Conquered the World, a.k.a., It Conquered the Earth (1956) #104. Bride of the Monster, a.k.a., Bride of the Atom (1955) #105. Killers from Space (1954) #106. The Witch Returns to Life, a.k.a., The Witch (1952) #107. Halloween 5, a.k.a., Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) #108. Freddy vs. Jason (2003) #109. Horror House on Highway 6 (2014) #110. Puppet Master: Axis Termination (2017) #111. Dance of the Dead (2005) #112. Ghost (1990) * #113. Hood of Horror, a.k.a., Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror, a.k.a., Gang of Horror (2007) #114. Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, a.k.a., Shriek 1, a.k.a., Scary Video, a.k.a., Scary Scream Movie (2001) #115. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, a.k.a., Halloween 6, a.k.a., Halloween VI: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) #116. Trilogy of Terror, a.k.a., Tales of Terror, a.k.a., Terror of the Doll (1975) #117. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) #118. The Fall of the House of Usher (1950) #119. Halloween: Resurrection (2002) #120. The Rainbow Man, a.k.a., 虹男 (1949) #121. The Creeper (1948) #122. Scream and Scream Again, a.k.a., Screamer, a.k.a., Doctor Diabolic (1970) #123. House on Haunted Hill (1959) #124. Theatre of Blood, a.k.a., Theater of Blood, a.k.a., Much Ado About Murder (1973) Disqualified entries: The Clown Murders (1976), Guinea Pig: Devil's Experiment (1985) Darthemed fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Oct 2, 2018 05:13
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Wanna throw out some love for Tubi.TV, as I've used it for all of my entries so far this month. It's a free streaming service, and the movies in their catalog include Suspiria (1977), Peeping Tom, Deep Red, The Tenant, Spider Baby, May, Blood Feast, Shadow of the Vampire, A Field in England, The Stepfather, Alice Sweet Alice, Pieces, Simon, King of the Witches, High Tension, Prom Night, Honeymoon, Dagon, and more. If you have a taste for trashy horror, they've got that too, with a bunch of Ted Mikels and Troma. Downside? It's free because there are commercial breaks. But they're inserted at well-picked scene transitions, their volume is reduced compared to the movie's volume, and they're short. I've been getting about thirty seconds of commercials after half an hour of movie. To give this post some content beyond unpaid shilling of Tubi, here's something for fans of horror movies and sampling: Monkey Farm Frankenstein's Twitch of the Def Nerve: The Movie, in Part 1 and Part 2, a ~30-minute run through of cut-together horror clips chopped and spliced into musical form. For those curious but wanting a more compact taste, here's their track built from the Evil Dead trilogy, and their audio-only Halloween sampler.
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Oct 2, 2018 07:22
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 #1. The Crawlers, a.k.a., Contamination .7, a.k.a., Creepers, a.k.a., Troll 3 (1993) Woof, off to a good start here. Didn't know before watching this that it was part of the not-a-series Troll series, but in retrospect, it kind of fits. There's plants involved, nothing too gruesome (outside of one stand-out scene), the low budget is persistently obvious, and, like the other Troll movies, it has a weird charm to it. It's radiation that's causing weird events, instead of magic, and the amount of scenes featuring roots attacking people by wrapping around them was downright impressive, considering the work needed for those practical effects to be set up, performed, and edited into convincing flow. Weird side-scenes, awkward line deliveries (and some glaring dubbing), minor characters who steal the show from the main actors, and laughable leaps of logic are par for the course. Not one I can imagine wanting to go back and rewatch, but still fairly fun, for what it is.  / 10  #2. Head (2015) Better than Happytime Murders (or at least less disappointing), not as good, ambitious, or imaginative as Meet the Feebles. Pretty much a camping-trip slasher played straight, except everyone is a puppet. Unfortunately, in an apparent effort to off-balance the gimmick, the dialogue is packed with swearing like a high-schooler's attempt at writing a script imitating Quentin Tarantino (e.g., from the puppet zombie short that leads the movie, "This is loving Night of the Living Dead, it's a loving classic, you loving idiot!"), and the twist reveal doesn't finish explaining itself. The puppet construction is plain, the mouth-flapping doesn't try to match the dialogue, and the film-makers seem to have named two of the characters Lenny and Bruce without being aware of the joke, despite stringing their names back-to-back a couple of times. There is one memorable piece of visuals involving a shrine tree (and one in a scene with a puppet wedged behind a steering wheel), but outside of that, it's definitely forgettable. / 10 #3. Carne The Taco Maker (2013) Not sure what I was expecting from this, but I ended up satisfied. Kind of like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 combined with Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, by way of a made-for-local-TV movie that could get away with gore, nudity, and swearing. The tacos are made from people! And they looked pretty tasty, too. Don Taco's actor had a nice weird charisma, but his henchman was so over-the-top in playing a glue-huffing dullard with come-and-go sexual issues that he detracted quite a bit from the scenes he was in, which made up the majority of the movie. The wandering structure of the movie, which just drifted from scene to scene, was kind of awkward, but also kind of fit with the portrayal of day after day selling tacos on a sidewalk of L.A.. None of the acting could be described as good, but some of the performers managed to seem pretty natural, which would really stand out in contrast, even if it was just three lines negotiating ordering a taco. Fairly predictable ending, but the specific execution was unexpected, at least. / 10  #4. Mind Ripper, a.k.a., Wes Craven Presents Mind Ripper, a.k.a., The Outpost, a.k.a., Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes 3, a.k.a., The Hills Have Eyes III: Mindripper (1995) Not the worst of the movies I've watched so far, but it is the one I've enjoyed the least. Directed by Joe Gayton (who also directed 1998's Sweet Jane, with Samantha Mathis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mary Woronov, and Bud Cort), produced by Wes Craven, and co-written by Wes Craven's son, Jonathan Craven. Lance Henriksen and Giovanni Ribisi play a father and son, respectively, with the latter wearing headphones for at least half of his scenes. The movie very slowly brings together two groups of characters, the first being researches in a desert bunker, the second being a family unit and wannabe-boyfriend of the daughter (Natasha Gregson Wagner, in a pair of scene-stealing shorts). Both groups are severely lacking in charisma, but that's kind of remedied by the antagonist, a beefcake with surfer hair who has a tongue that splits open to revel a phallic penetrator/stabber (think the brain-stalks from From Beyond, but spikier). I didn't care about anyone in this movie, aside from a few moments for the monster. The special effects were honestly not bad, with the make-up being particularly respectable, but that wasn't enough to salvage things. The pumpkin they might have earned gets cancelled out by the unbearable characters. The most interesting thing in the movie is probably the opportunity to observe a father-son dynamic written by Wes Craven's son. Outside of that, and Lance Henriksen pretending to fly a plane, this was dull. / 10
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Oct 2, 2018 20:50
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  #5. Troll 2, a.k.a, Trolls, a.k.a., Monster Valley, a.k.a., The Return of Troll (1990) Aww yeah, that's the stuff. Goofy but earnest, from the performances to the special effects, costuming, and that awesome score. Oddly effective in evoking dream logic, like 'I was talking to my dead grandpa, but then my family called to me, and when I looked back at him, he was someone else.' So many stand-out lines of dialogue, so much green food coloring, so many copyrighted set dressing items. Better than the first Troll, and the fact that someone decided to make a documentary about this ludicrous piece of VHS-era dreck is both bizarre and right. Always fun to share this with someone who's never seen it before. Creedence Leonore Gielgud should be more of an icon. / 10 #6. Rumpelstiltskin (1995) Well, this was a disappointment. That cover art would reliably scare me as a kid. Shame to find out the movie is pretty much just a retread of the original Leprechaun movie, just with a baby swapped for the gold. Some fun with the antagonist repeated trading up his means of pursuit (felt a little like Terminator 2 in that regard), and the guy under the make-up put in a pretty good performance, considering the script with which he was saddled. Some good cackling, and I liked how the main character launched into serious self-defense without wasting any time. Allyce Beasley in severe '90s outfitting was fun, too. Less fun was the quick dropping of the wish fulfillment angle, which felt like the main draw from the movie's start. A little surprising that this hasn't been tapped for a remake (that I know of, at least) considering the abysmal reboot that Leprechaun: Origins inflicted on the world. Just doesn't have the same recognition cache, I guess. / 10   #7. Maniac Mansion, a.k.a., The Murder Mansion (1972) A Spanish giallo! Would that make it an amarillo? Very '70s, to the point where the phrase "conjugal rights" gets used. Also kind of a mess, structurally speaking, but not to an unwatchable degree. No tentacle monsters, no mad nurse, no meteor, but some convoluted scheming (as befits the genre) and decent atmosphere, with the foggy cemetery being the highlight. A heap of flashbacks and vague allusions are more frustrating than informative, and the numerous scenes with people going to bedrooms, going to sleep, getting in and out of bed, etc., meant that I had to take a second viewing to finish it after drowsing off the first time. Neat (personally speaking) for seeing a Spanish reflection of the Italian work at the time, but not much reason to recommend it beyond that, and I'm sure there's better instances of that to be found. Also, that first poster for it is wildly misrepresentative. / 10  #8. Cries in the Night, a.k.a., Funeral Home (1980) Probably best described as 'serviceable.' Pulls plot touches from more movies than I can name, but gets points for showing the situation affecting the surrounding community, and for not cramming all of the events into one small time-frame. Some weird performances aren't enough to break the glaze of dullness, and the copy I watched was murky and muddy in scenes set in dark rooms. I'm already forgetting details of this one, but the refitting of Psycho's ending was kind of amusing, with the explanatory dialogue just running over the credits. Cute recurring black cat that affected none of the events. Not much to say about this one, really. / 10
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Oct 3, 2018 19:50
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Guy Goodbody posted:Amazon has the first 9 Puppet Master movies on DVD for $8.04. They also have the first 9 Puppet Master movies and the first three Killjoy movies on DVD for $7.99.
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Oct 4, 2018 04:22
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    #9. The Driller Killer (1979) Opening screen: "THIS FILM SHOULD BE PLAYED LOUD". I like it already. And then it gets better. An artist going insane trying to create something that both satisfies him and will earn money, NYC being a filthy city driving him insane, lovely living conditions, punk music playing at 3 a.m., a loosening grip on reality, trying to find connection with street bums, and commercials for big batteries. Abel Ferrara pulled all that together and made it work, while keeping the psychedelic touches restrained. Flaws are present, and obvious, but they're also forgivable. Ferrara himself (under a pseudonym) does a fine job as the main character, all-denim outfit aside, sliding around on his breakdown while maintaining relatable humanity, and the supporting characters have a similar sense of complexity, which I wasn't really expecting from a video nasty with the name The Driller Killer. And while the drill part is a fairly small part of the movie (outweighed by music practice and music performances), the attack scenes are done very well on such a limited budget. I'm going to be mentally chewing on this one for a while, and I might revisit it after a while, which is more than I can say for either of the other movies I watched the same day. / 10 #10. Incident On and Off a Mountain Road (2005) And back to disappointment. Don Coscarelli directing an adaptation of a Joe Lansdale story, with Angus Scrimm in a supporting role? Should be gold. But the flashbacks kept leaving the contemporary scenes in the dust in terms of interesting content (Ethan Embry playing a deteriorating rear end in a top hat certainly helping throw the balance in favor of his scenes), and the mountain road monster was way too bland for a Coscarelli production. Heck, his basement heavy machinery set-up was more interesting than he was, and had more character to it. The attempt at making a proactive Final Girl was laudable, but it came off kind of ham-handed, particularly with the stiff dialogue. Scrimm went just a little too far over the top, but with the lines he was given, it was understandable. I dunno, if it turns out that this was a rushed shoot, all the flaws would make a lot more sense. It's pulling an extra pumpkin entirely thanks to Embry's performance, but without that, this would be a really dull entry. I feel like I'm being harsher on its by-the-numbers technique because it's just so sad to see that coming from Coscarelli. / 10 #11. Metamorphosis, a.k.a., Regenerator, a.k.a., Reanimator 2 (1990) Directed by George Eastman!(!!) I wish that he'd gone a little wilder with this movie, which ends up being a slight variation on Cronenberg's remake of The Fly, with a bit of Re-Animator spliced in for a collegiate setting. A Cinemax-style softcore scene played much tamer than you'd expect from the veteran of so many nutty Italian films, but it also had the leads seeming more natural and comfortable than they did in any of their other scenes, so go figure. The college bureaucracy scenes were more tense and entertaining than practically any of the actual 'horror' scenes, and the big reveal came off as just goofy, with the last scene compounding its silliness. Also, a kid character who's amazingly obnoxious despite having no lines for most of his scenes. There's a lot in this movie that could have been improved, and it might even have turned out memorable if those improvements had been made (starting with the score, please, which was always painfully at odds with the tone of whatever was happening on-screen). As it is, there's only a few images to really catch in memory, while the plot is a near-complete wash. / 10
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Oct 4, 2018 23:34
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     #12. The Manster, a.k.a., The Split, a.k.a., Doktor Satan (1959) A little out of the ordinary for the time, but not by much. A reporter visits Japan, gets unknowingly experimented on, and starts misbehaving before growing a second head. Western fascination with Orientalism is heavy, from geisha girls, to sake, to hot springs, to wandering into a Buddhist temple and interrupting prayers with "I heard your singing." As ham-fisted as it is in that regard, the lead actor does a decent job of showing his emotional deterioration as something evil starts growing within him. This coming from the '50s, that's mainly expressed through womanizing, misogyny, insulting his employer, and being a drunk, all of which are treated as signs that he's just going through a rough patch, and which dove-tail right into the murders (all of Japanese people) without much between. Compared to the other films I watched this day, this one has more gristle for an analytical essay, but it's still pretty bad. There's a scene here which was replicated (intentionally or not) to an uncanny degree in Army of Darkness, so there's that. Also, the comeuppance for the villain is practically non-existent, to the point where I think it's covered by a line of dialogue while he's off-screen. The special effects are... not good, but they're masked by monochrome shadows to an effective degree. There's some stuff to dig into here, but not enough, and not enough style, to make for an actual recommendation. / 10 #13. Death Ship (1980) The Shining, but with a ship instead of a hotel, and the ghosts are Nazis! Some good atmosphere, and when things get bonkers, they really go wild. A kid who always needs to pee is repeatedly used as a way to advance the plot. There's a few deaths that are down to the character being in an incredibly specific spot on the ship (e.g., the chain of events leading to Saul Rubinek's death beginning with him planting his foot in an exact circle a few inches wide) or doing something reeeal dumb (an adult eating candy found on a ship so long abandoned that thick cobwebs are over everything), but those can be chalked up to ghostly influence. An (unintentionally) amusing example of that influence was when death rites are being read out of a Bible by the captain (George Kennedy!)... but the Bible is in German! Lots of scenes of the ship's machinery operating, which did provide better atmosphere than shots of the empty deck. Tonally, it felt like the screen-writer wandered a bit too far. With how real-world horrific the big reveal was (even if it was largely implausible), some of the sillier moments verged on bad taste. Is a scene where a woman spins around screaming in a shower with a ghost-locked door and water turning to blood awesome for a '70s horror movie? Oh yeah. Does it fit in a movie in which characters stare in mute horror at a pan of gold teeth removed from Jewish corpses? Mmm, no. While it could have used some serious tightening up, I came away from this movie respecting it, though I don't think I'll be rewatching it any time soon. / 10 #14. Teenage Zombies, a.k.a., Teenage Torture (1959) Pretty stock stuff for the late '50s, with the main stand-out being an untrustworthy authority figure, which I was not expecting. Yeah, there's a gorilla, for a few minutes. Pretty basic premise: teens are out boating one day, come across an island where everyone seems oddly out of it, then their boat goes missing. Their friends back on land mount a search for the missing teens, and fill in the blanks on the rest as you might imagine (but be sure to use Cold War science as the explanation). The cornball dialogue was more entertaining than anything else, with the potential for symbolism or an interesting scenario with zombified teens only scratched at superficially. I'm not sure whether the teenage boys not even considering leaving their girlfriends brainwashed is a sign of good taste in the writer, or due to lack of imagination. While the story-telling and technical execution is passable, the whole ends up too forgettable to forgive the wasting of such a good title. / 10  Not gonna count this one, but throwing down some thoughts, so no one else gets suckered by the poster art. This is a crime drama, not a horror, though it does dip into the POV of someone stalking the criminals at their hide-out for a few minutes, and has a pretty graphic hand-stabbing. John Candy is in it, and not just in a cameo, and the sheer number of insults about his weight (which, as young as he is here, is much lower than in his famous years) gets uncomfortable. If you've ever wanted to see a bunch of '70s yuppies dressed as clowns gang up and assault someone, here's your film. John Candy is, of course, the stand-out presence, and he puts some decent pathos into his character portrayal. Most of the reviews I saw for this were vicious in taking it down, which I suspect is due to the misleading pocketing of it in the horror category. As a mid-'70s Canadian crime drama, it's sub-par, but not terrible.  / 10
Darthemed fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Oct 5, 2018 |
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Oct 5, 2018 16:57
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With its title and the year it came out, I started it half-expecting some proto-slasher, maybe something that could have been polished up into Halloween. So yeah, I was pretty confused and let-down by the turn into squabbling over a sloppy kidnapping.
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Oct 5, 2018 17:23
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 #15. Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) If you've seen the opening of Malcolm in the Middle, you've seen part of this movie; it's the googly-eyed monster that looks like the Cookie Monster was spray-painted green. I didn't know that link going in, so for two-thirds of this movie, I was wondering if there would be any monster showing up, as the movie spends most of its time focusing on a spy spoof, which the lead actor's terrible emoting (along with bad acting all around) effectively disguises as being just... uh... poo poo. There are lines which, had they been delivered by someone with a sense of comedic timing and multiple tones of voice, could have been funny. Stuff like "It was dusk. I could tell because the sun was going down," and "My years of work in espionage helped me realize that she was beautiful." So yeah, that goes on and on, and the crooks with whom the secret agent main character is traveling convince the Cuban crew that there's a monster about by squishing a plunger on the deck. But then there actually is a monster (I think that's the secret the movie poster asked me not to share), and it protects its domain, foiling their strongbox retrieval plans. The end. This sucked, but there were a few enjoyable moments. Oh, and this was directed by Roger Corman, with a screenplay by Charles B. Griffith. A real low entry for both of them, bring alcohol or other additives if you decide to watch this. / 10  #16. Tomb of Torture (1963) This was surprisingly cool. Very Poe-influenced, shot in sepia, people going mad while haunted by the past. Excellent spooky castle. Weird interlude of a meet-cute between a skinny-dipper and a broken-down motorist. Skeletons, cross-bows, hamsters that were supposed to be rats. Fairly stock characters, but they fit their roles well, especially the enema-happy doctor. So yeah, much more appreciable for visuals and atmosphere than dialogue and characters, this would be a great choice to throw on as background imagery at a Halloween party. Unfortunately, the emphasis on those qualities, along with the traditional plot, renders it more than slightly forgettable (I finished writing these three reactions before I even remembered the coffin-sleeping monster being in the movie), but the ethereality ends up giving it even more charm. / 10        #17. Amphibian Man (1962) Well, this wasn't horror, but it was a monster movie, so I'm gonna count it, same as I would Hocus Pocus. This was like Creature from the Black Lagoon crossed with one of the more romantic interpretations of Frankenstein. Also, it was a Soviet production set in a Spanish-speaking country. Well-respected local doctor fixed his son's bad lung with a bit of shark gill, and subsequently became enthralled with the idea of doing the same for many people, so that they can establish an underwater civilization. Unfortunately, the locals have the impression that his son (in his snazzy bedazzled full-body swimsuit and headgear) is a sea devil. Beautiful and sensitive girl is engaged to the main jerk who's into catching/killing the sea devil, sea devil rescues her when the jerk's negligence leads to her being endangered by a shark, Beauty and the Beast plotline plays out from there. There were some really beautiful shots in this, with a lot of underwater work. I might have to revisit it for screenshots at some point (the ones below come from IMDb, and don't capture the best lighting and color usage). Very earnest, and the film treated the naivete of Ichthyander (the sea devil) with a fairy-tale sentimentality instead of diminishing it. If not for some cheapness to the sets, and some under-performance from extras, I'm sure this would be a classic. Without a doubt, the sweetest movie I've watched this month. / 10 
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Oct 6, 2018 23:35
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       #18. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) The second rewatch of the month. Some guy with long fingernails is bugging kids while they try to sleep. Classic for many reasons, fun to watch again, fun to see someone watching for the first time. The booby-traps are still goofy, but neat in execution, though they do feel like they're gumming up the movie's flow a bit. More than anything, though, this time I was appreciating the sets and the details of their dressing (Nancy's untouched bed-side glass of milk, for instance). Whoever was in charge of those deserves more recognition. Watching the later ones, it becomes even more appreciable how much Craven's scholastic background contributed to the script, with reams of subtext and themes to be explored, while also running straight as a surface-level viewing. I also wish Freddy's maggoty insides and neon-green blood had stuck around for the sequels. / 10  #19. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) What the hell was going on with the dog? Did I miss the set-up for a dog to get vaguely possessed and end up resurrecting someone by pissing fire on their grave? Outside of that, this was better than I've been expecting from the way people talk about this one. More set-up for the dream master rhyme would have been nice, to pit the boogeyman and his rhyme against another piece of childhood ritual, but it came off OK as it was. Nice creativity with the dream scenes, and their direction surpassed my expectations of Renny Harlin. Silly resolution, silly 'soul food' segment, but the visual handling gets a thumbs-up (concentric floor pattern in the top-down classroom shot, what up). On the down-side, things felt pretty thrown-together, with big (non-dream) plot points just going unexplained, when searching out explanations was key to intensifying the situation in the original. A drop from ANoES 3, but not a hard decline in quality. / 10  #20. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) Here's where the descent becomes evident, though the dream scenes are still neat and show creativity (comic kid having all his color drain out when he dies being the personal favorite, with the motorcycle transformation being a strong contender). But man, Freddy had hardly any dialogue that wasn't one-liners. I didn't really care about his conception before seeing this, and I didn't care about it afterwards. I would have liked to have seen him as a human man (which there were a couple flashes of, lasting about five seconds), to contrast the increasingly cartoonish nature of his dream presence with a grounded and non-joking Fred Kreuger, child-killer. Jacob the unborn kid was an odd fit, but I guess as popular as these movies were getting with younger audiences at the time, it made total sense to the studio. Again, the visuals were the saving grace, with the need to at least try to be creative with the dream scenes rescuing what would have otherwise been a pretty dull slog. I mean, there were stretches where nothing interesting was happening, and the characters were sketched even thinner than in previous entries (nice of them to get those personalities all established in one scene right off the bat). But splitting up the big special effects scenes into different teams seems to have paid off, as they all came out distinctive, even when the concept was absurd (e.g., the womb battle). Turning to teen pregnancy as the focus might have yielded something more interesting if they'd done it a few years earlier, but here, despite giving another excuse for Freddy to do his thing, the waking life side felt unaddressed. / 10
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Oct 8, 2018 21:12
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  #21. Dolls, a.k.a., The Doll (1987) Would have been nice if the thematic part of this movie had influenced more of Full Moon's output, instead of leading Charles Band to jam puppets and dolls into 70% of their output. Characters are painted broadly, from the man who's a child at heart to the disinterested father and cruel step-mother right out of a fairy tale, two no-good British punks, mysterious old people, and the little girl caught in the midst of it all. They all get caught in a storm, find shelter at the home of the old couple, and their flaws eat them alive, helped along by some custom-made dolls who aren't above murder. The moralization may have been heavy-handed, but at least it gave the story a firm direction. Good effects (particularly in the transformation scenes), and a well-tuned performance from the kid actress (according to IMDb, this was her last acting gig, which is a shame). The most family-friendly movie directed by Stuart Gordon I've seen, and at 77 minutes, nice and quick. I liked the sense of exasperated fear the hero adult worked in his performance, and seeing Guy Rolfe in a pre-Puppet-Master-sequel role was a treat. Take out the early fantasy of a teddy bear dismembering people, and this could have been a TV movie. Not that that's a knock against it, just weird coming from Stuart Gordon. / 10 #22. Nightbeast, a.k.a., Night Beast (1982) A wrinkly, hairless gorilla alien in a disco suit comes down and starts shooting EVERYTHING with his ray gun. Rocks, trees, walls, cars, and especially people, everything gets vaporized. Hokey effects, worse acting, terrible dialogue, a memorably awkward sex scene, and some gross human-on-human violence against a near-mute woman. Still better than a lot of Troma-distributed fare, and the way it seemed to luxuriate in its low-budget standing, from indulging in scripting cliches ('The governor's coming! We can't cancel this party!') to holding shots on bad action (struggling to get over a wall for ten seconds) gave it some leeway. Not enough to save it from being a bad movie, as it certainly does follow formula in the path to resolution (while finding room for one poo poo-talking, woman-choking biker), but enough to keep it from being painfully tedious, and enough to elevate it (slightly) above its cheapness. Best taken with plenty of alcohol. / 10
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Oct 9, 2018 02:48
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Lurdiak posted:There is a single attractive woman in Night Beast but she's not the one in the sex scene. Instead two very ugly people go at it.
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Oct 9, 2018 05:04
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    #23. Ice Cream Man (1995) Another video store memory, this actually turned out better than I expected. It knew exactly what tone it wanted, and followed that with consistency. Clint Howard plays a man who was committed to a sanatorium as a young boy and recently released, and has picked up the ice cream business of the local vendor, whose murder is implied to have been a major reason for Clint's psychosis. Clint doesn't just drive the van around and sell ice cream, he makes it as well, with all the sanitary quality you might expect from a bare-handed Clint Howard. His customers (which include some non-terrible kid actors) get weird vibes from him, and when his murderous urges come through, a group of children try to make adults realize he's a killer. Bodies in the ice cream cooler, along with eyeballs, mice, and roaches; severed heads on giant waffle cones; ice cream scoopers as weapons; industrial mixers handling bodies; and sieving out a diaphragm and earrings from a fresh ice cream batch. If there's some goofy gore angle to be pulled with ice cream paraphernalia, it's more than likely in this movie. And that's without addressing the sanatorium scenes, which bring their own strangeness. The sets do a good job of setting tone with sparse decoration, though the numerous outside scenes do make the cheapness of the indoor ones stand out. Honestly, Clint Howard's performance is perfect for this. Weird and creepy, damaged and vulnerable, over the top while matching the rest of the movie, and his interactions with normal people are delightfully off-key. Sad that the Kickstarter for a sequel hit less than 1% of its goal in pledges, but also unsurprising. / 10  #24. The Autopsy of Jane Doe, a.k.a., The Jane Doe Identity (2016) Solid. Good atmosphere, an uncommon twist on angering an evil spirit, Brian Cox playing a crusty but caring father. Could have done without the cat death, especially with how little impact it had on the proceedings, and the bell chiming on things which had been shown to not have a bell attached was a petty annoyance, but on the whole, this was a pleasant surprise of quality. The set-up involves a woman's body being dug up from a crime scene, transported to a morgue for forensic examination, and bad poo poo starting to happen as the examination proceeds. It's close to being a one-location story, and for much of the movie, there's only two (speaking) characters, which did a nice job of concentrating tension and keeping the narrative pushing along with firm focus. Between myself and my viewing partner, we managed to guess both sides of the big reveal, though we didn't put them together until the movie made it explicit. Some fun mystery elements made for an interesting pairing with the clinical gruesomeness of the body's disassembly, even if a few of the clues and conclusions were a little ridiculous. I appreciated seeing good color scheme usage, effective and sparing use of CGI, creative threat-building, and a believable father-son dynamic, and outside of some minor detail-picking and some loose threads (I guess the spirit just has a real fondness for a Flintstones song that happens to tie in with the dead mother's name, since it keeps tuning it in on radios even when there's no relevance to any present characters), I really don't have any strikes against this film. The limiting of scope is intentional, and well-used, but the movie doesn't really immerse itself in the setting the way, say, The Shining does (and I admit the unfairness of that comparison). Very good performances, good visuals, decent score; thumbs up. / 10 #25. Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings, a.k.a., Pumpkinhead 2: The Demon Returns, a.k.a., The Revenge of Pumpkinhead: Blood Wings (1993) Aside from having seen the original, all I knew about this movie going in was that there was an abysmal video game tie-in. While it wasn't as good as the first Pumpkinhead, it wasn't complete trash. Linnea Quigley and Andrew Robinson (the dad from Hellraiser) were there, though neither seemed to be putting too much effort into their performance, and Kane Hodder gets killed as a bonus. The atmosphere and attention to lighting that served the first film so well are gone, some half-baked additions to the monster's mythology are thrown in, and the main story change-ups are the offending teens being in their hometown and the victims paying off decades-old evils. Not as much of a misfire as it could have been, but it does lose the sense of clueless intrusion on long-held traditions that really worked for the first. Eh, pretty lackluster all around, but not as bad as I thought it would be. / 10
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Oct 9, 2018 21:17
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  #26. Basket Case 2 (1990) Well, this went in a different direction than the first one. It would make for a great double feature with Nightbreed, at least. Having survived the end of the first Basket Case, the Bradley brothers are rescued to a freak commune, where deformed Belial fits in, and normal-looking Duane feels alienated. Tabloid reporters put further pressure on the situation, bringing things to a violent head. To be honest, I didn't like this one too much. I really enjoyed the grimy NYC dread of the original, in which Belial was just a different kind of monster among many, and this one felt comparable to the tonal switch of Return of the Living Dead 2. Almost family-friendly (outside of the monster puppetry sex scene), and safer in a lot of ways. Where the first had Duane cautiously navigating the city and relationships while following his quest for revenge, this one pulls the brothers into insulation against the outside world, and the situations that setting enables were a lot less interesting to me. In centering the movie on a whole gaggle of freaks, there's some undeniable exploitation at play, but those characters are made into such physical impossibilities that it dodges most of the grossness that would have come with realistic birth defect depictions. I wouldn't call that half-assing things, but it did make it feel oddly insincere, especially with how those characters do very little but serve as mumbling set dressing. The story (or at least its specifics) is odd enough to win some points, but it's hard to shake the sense of it being limited, whether by the funding company putting some content demands on Henenlotter, or by his story tastes having changed in the eight years since the original (the latter seems kind of unlikely in light of Frankenhooker coming out the same year as this installment). Disappointing overall, but with a few odd spots giving it some shine, and capable execution of its chosen story. / 10  #27. The Boogey Man, a.k.a., The Bogey Man, a.k.a., Spectre, a.k.a., The Boogeyman (1980) A non-lovely Ulli Lommel movie that isn't The Tenderness of Wolves? Biggest surprise yet this month. Not that this was great, as it had a lot of Italian-style horror dream logic and causality to it, without the style to back it up outside of a few zinger moments. Rambling creepiness outside of the opening, which has a focused build of sleazy unease. Deaths were abrupt enough to undercut the tension at times (the kid who climbs a trellis just to stick his head through a bathroom window and yell "Boogieman!", before the window-frame drops on him [with nowhere near enough force for the kill it inflicts] being a good example). But at the same time, there was a sense of gruesomeness and dread to the haunting that went beyond what was being shown. Cutting over to scenes of people entirely uninvolved in the main plot being killed by the evil force anyway, and then just flipping back to the farmhouse, could (not inaccurately) be described as sloppy. But it also brought a real sense of nightmare framework to the proceedings. No one was safe, it didn't matter what you'd done or not done, and things would catch on fire without warning. Some striking single images (like the red-bathed mirror, or the green stare with a mirror fragment over the eye) would have probably been pretty haunting if I'd seen this late at night as a kid. And, like virtually every other review I've seen for this movie, I've got to give props to the excellent grimy synth score. But for all the little pieces that work, there's a lot more that just feels unfocused, flabby, and pointless. That doesn't bring it down as much as it should, though. It's weird. / 10  #28. The Brain, a.k.a., Manipulations (1988) (Videodrome + They Live) / (a creature feature * talk shows) = The Brain. A small-time motivational speaker runs a TV show called Independent Thinkers, and some of its viewers start to have hallucinations, with lethal consequences. The reason? He's got a big-rear end brain with a face hooked up to machines at the broadcasting station/research institute, and he's using its superior brain-waves to brainwash those viewers, along with people treated at the clinic. It's up to one plucky and misunderstood super-smart high school kid to bust this racket up, Rowdy Roddy style. This was a lot of fun. The film-makers were clearly having a good time putting the hallucination sequences together, the brain was emotive to an impressive degree, and the main villain (played by David Gale, of Re-Animator, Savage Weekend, and the live-action The Guyver) had sinister charm with a hint of ham (after seeing an assistant get eaten by the brain, "That's food for thought!"). All of the effects were pretty drat solid, but the acting did have some weak spots, more in the line deliveries than the physicality (of which there was plenty, and which they kind of rocked a few times). The brainwashing scheme was vague and was probably riddled with plot holes, if I'd cared enough to give it close attention, but the movie zipped along with enough speed and energy to gloss right over them. The cutting between what the hallucinators were seeing and what everyone else saw was handled really well, and they didn't overplay it. If they'd diverged more from the usual body snatchers formula, I'd be recommending this with fewer caveats, but as is, it's only recommended for those who wanna see a bad-rear end killer brain movie that doesn't aim for anything more than that. / 10
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Oct 11, 2018 02:07
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    #29. Splice, a.k.a., Chimera (2009) * First time revisiting this since seeing it in a theater. Among the pantheon of bad scientists in horror movies, the pair in this movie really put in some effort be exceptional gently caress-ups. Vincenzo Natali writing and directing, Guillermo del Toro producing, KNB on effects... this should be fantastic, but the script lets it down. Even allowing for it to be a big comedy about how terrible the scientists are at handling their experiment, there's just such a chain of compounded bad decisions that it's hard to take any of it seriously. The effects are great, with some really nice work on designing the growth of the creature, and when broken down to an extremely basic level, the storyline should work. But whenever the movie tries to be serious in a way that's not just luxuriating in the effects work, it falls flat. Hashing out relationship issues, handling science lab drama, or wringing their hands over their own sloppiness, the leads are maneuvered with all the gravity of a spoof, and it works against my ability to care for the characters as more than punchlines. Kudos for having the gumption to try that ending, though. / 10   #30. Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, a.k.a., A Nightmare on Elm Street 6: Freddy's Finale, a.k.a., A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Final Nightmare (1991) Yeesh, and I though Freddy was cartoonish in Part 5. A perfectly reasonable landing from the trajectory of the series, but still a stinker. Setting aside the fun of the opening dream, and the silliness running through the movie, the script is just painfully loose. We set a character somewhere, let them wander around, move them to another location to expand the group, let them wander around, move them somewhere else, let them wander, bring it back to the second location, wander to a finish. With a recent rewatch of the first ANoES, it's even more egregious. The clip show from Fred Kreuger's life was slightly interesting, but buried in the crap of the movie's remainder, it didn't come close to redeeming the whole affair. A waste of Yaphet Kotto is maybe the most unforgivable part. It'll be a while before I rewatch this one. / 10 #31. Psychos in Love (1987) * Another rewatch, this time of a video store discovery. Filmed (entirely?) on short ends, with a lot of scenes filmed in the writer/director's apartment, scored with a Casio cheez, with the director's (then-)fiancee as one of the leads, this movie was made on the cheap with a vengeance. Two psycho killers meet and fall in love, then continue psycho killing through the ups and downs of love. That's pretty much it, but the movie is made with such heart that I find it really endearing in spite of the many flaws. Debi Thibeault is adorable, Carmine Capobianco fully owns his schlubbiness. Gore (well, gallons of fake blood) is present in abundance, as are rants about how much the main characters hate grapes, with the verbatim repetition used as a joke multiple times, and not losing too much to the recycling. Some of the slickest fourth-wall breaking I can recall from a comedy. Definitely not to everyone's tastes, and I understand how this could be an extremely annoying experience for someone, but I have a huge soft spot for it. / 10
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Oct 11, 2018 04:49
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 #32. Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981) Another nice surprise! For years I'd thought this was a pretty straight (and probably crappy) slasher, but it turned out to be more of a supernatural revenge drama. With some kills, of course. Larry Drake (Dr. Giggles, Darkman) plays Bubba, a developmentally-challenged man who's friends with a little girl. When the girl gets attacked (by a dog), some assholes (led by Charles Durning, as a skeezy and hateful mailman) see it as a chance to kill Bubba, and do so in a cornfield. Slipping conviction, they soon begin seeing a scarecrow lurking in the distance, and then the group begins dying off. Though it was a TV movie, everyone involved brought strong performances, with the prosecuting lawyer being the only one to really ham it up. Good southern horror atmosphere, good script (it really makes you hate the mailman, and Durning plays that very well), good pacing and cinematography. Solid all around, high recommendation, especially to anyone looking for something with an autumnal vibe. / 10   #33. Predator (1987) * This might be the ultimate amplification of the basic slasher framework. If not, then at least the most macho. A couple too many characters in the main group, but they get killed off quickly enough that it doesn't make much difference. Though none of them are complex, the actors playing them do a great job of giving you a sense of who they are, even if it's just through behavioral quirks. Once it's down to just Schwarzenegger, things really take off. Love that shot of him reverting to just 'SMASH WITH ROCK.' Jesse Ventura's best film role? Disappointing how much of the spirit of this one the sequels just completely missed. / 10  #34. Blood Dolls (1999) Ugh. This was like a stew of all of Full Moon's worst habits and indulgences. Crappy-looking doll-work, a near-plotless string of scenes, paper-thin characterization, and some half-baked music (that last being provided by an all-woman band in a cage, which Band allegedly intended to spin off into a real band [called Blood Dolls] for Moonstone Records, and absolutely failed to do). Weak attempts at witty dialogue that devolve into just quoting Shakespeare to make the villain seem intelligent. In some ways, it's kind of what you'd get if you threw the weakest parts of House of 1000 Corpses and 31 together, then had Full Moon produce the script. No reasons to recommend this, only gets points for the main villain design and the tagged-on 'hey, we couldn't decide which ending to go with, so here are both.' / 10
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Oct 12, 2018 18:19
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  #35. Basket Case 3, a.k.a., Basket Case 3: The Progeny (1991) And the average for this series goes down again. Released the year after Basket Case 2, this one keeps the costumes for the commune's freaks, adds a handful of new ones, and moves the lot to a new location. Annie Ross as Granny Ruth is the stand-out performer. Hell, she practically takes over the movie, holding Duane prisoner, maneuvering the plot, and telling everyone what to do. The actual plot is a straight continuation from the last movie (even opening with a clip of the monster-puppet sex scene), and while the pregnancy of Eve, Belial's love interest, is the central thread, she's pretty much a non-character. A little gore and an odd dream scene with topless bikini girls stand in the way of this being a family movie, but for weird pre-teens, I'm sure this would have been very engaging at the time. Coming at it as an adult a quarter of a century after release, though, the mix of goofy and gross feels a bit too much like The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, minus the snot, farts, vomit, and musical numbers, but plus a police station getting murdered and a string of babies being pulled out of a uterus. If it had taken a broader divergence from the last movie, this would have scored more points, but it just retreaded too much. / 10  #36. Q, a.k.a., Bird over New York, a.k.a., American Monster, a.k.a., Q: The Winged Serpent (1981) Aw yeah, Larry Cohen delivers again. Crime drama meets fantasy, monster movie results. I loved all the little human moments the main characters got, from the negotiation doodling to Michael Moriarty's staunch petulance. The matting hasn't aged too well, but it does the job, and the stiller moments of the creature look good. The on-the-street reactions were great, but I would have liked for the balance between monster and Moriarty to be skewed just a little more towards the monster. The ending was a little stock, but it did enough right on the way there to be forgiven. Also put me in the mood to see more movies where the main characters put their knowledge of a monster to work in handling their enemies. / 10 #37. Subspecies (1991) I was zoned out for most of this one. Just had a hard time caring about what was happening, maybe due to lingering resentment of how bad Blood Dolls was. The vampire's long fingers were a good look for him, but I didn't catch (if it was explained) why they turned into tiny demons when cut off, outside of a Band mandate to match the poster they'd already made for it. It did seem to be telling a more focused story than most Full Moon fare, and the run-down Eastern European setting did a lot of work for the movie. Sad to see Angus Scrimm getting to do so little in his role. Not sure if I'll try more entries in this series this month, or hit the snooze on Full Moon for a while. / 10   #38. Fangs of the Living Dead, a.k.a., Malenka, a.k.a., The Vampire's Niece, a.k.a., Malenka, Niece of the Vampire, a.k.a., Bloody Girl (1969) Kind of a weak twist on the Carmilla story. Low on lesbian vampires, but good gothic visual atmosphere. The most notable point is probably that this was directed by Amando de Ossorio, three years before he did Tombs of the Blind Dead. Anita Ekberg does her thing, Paul Muller pops up in a minor role, and the whole thing feels kind of like faux-Hammer (insert your own bad Tolkien joke). There's not a lot to distinguish it (at least, not in the movie itself), but at least it kept the spooky vibes up. / 10
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Oct 12, 2018 23:06
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married but discreet posted:Explain how/why
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Oct 14, 2018 06:27
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       #39. Halloween, a.k.a., John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) * Watching Halloween this time, I ended up focusing on the kids more than the teenagers. And while JLC, PJS, etc., earn the praise they get for their work in this, the kids do a great job too. Tommy's increasing tension and fear over the course of the night are played well, as is the way the other kid reacts to his fear, and while they tend to go unmentioned when people are talking about Halloween, their (believable) presence in the film helps fill it out in ways that would have gone unaddressed if it had just been teenagers and adults. Also, Doc Loomis' self-absorbed satisfaction when he scares some random spook-seeking kids is great. / 10  #40. Madman (1981) Not bad, but not great. A solid little camping slasher with some variety to the kills and life to the characters. With how early it came out, the more clichéd script choices were more forgivable, but it still felt a bit hacky with the story. Nice locations, which, along with some of the coloring, really lent things an earthy, moldering feel. Enough to make it believable that a crazed murderous farmer had been living in an abandoned house thereabouts. Individual characters were pretty flat and forgettable, but their actors did a good job, generally speaking, particularly the brunette who hid in a fridge. I kind of liked the way the ending went against the usual finish, but at the same time, it left me a little disappointed. Can't say this one left much of an impression, but it was enjoyable enough in the moment. / 10  #41. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, a.k.a., The Haunting of Hamilton High, a.k.a., Mary Lou (1987) And this series takes a turn. Hey, did you know that if you're a hedonistic enough teenager, you can come back from the grave for revenge against those you resent? Instead of the solidly non-supernatural slasher route the first Prom Night took, this one turns into a ghostly possession tale likely to put you in mind of Carrie. Mary Lou Maloney is all set to be crowned prom queen until her date, who walked in on her making time with another guy, decides the best response is to drop a stink bomb on her. Shoddy Canadian craftsmanship leads to her fatally catching on fire as a result. Flash forward a few decades, and her date is now Michael Ironside, principal of their former high school, Mary Lou's spirit is soon set free from its basement confinement, and people start dying off. As unprepared as I was for the total shift of this movie from the way of the first, it ended up being a lot of fun. References pop up without being overwhelming (the main character's surname is Carpenter, and there's a Mr. Craven and Mr. Romero among the faculty), the effects work is enjoyable, and there's a good mix of malicious and playful energy from the antagonist. Some of the effects do get a little goofy (like the meat-paste from someone getting slammed between lockers), but I don't have much to knock against this movie. The villain's single-minded pursuit of such a simple goal was down-right endearing, and there were enough weird touches put into the acting (not all of them from Ironside, surprisingly enough) to give the majority of the performances distinction. Also, quite a nutty finale. / 10
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Oct 15, 2018 23:29
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 #42. Final Exam (1981) OK, first off, there's a school prank in this movie that would absolutely never fly today, and it's the most memorable part of this movie by a looong shot. It's one of the best scenes you could pull from cinema to demonstrate to someone how different American societal standards in the '80s were from today. Setting that scene aside, I really enjoyed this, even with the weird little quality showing how early in the formatting of slasher conventions this movie was. The slasher villain is, quite literally, 'just some guy.' He doesn't get a motivation revealed, his name isn't given, he doesn't even have a gimmick (besides being able to grab an arrow out of the air before it hits him). He's just some guy in a green jacket who likes killing people who attend college. The rest of the characters have lots of shading and idiosyncrasies, by slasher standards, from the nerdy Radish (with his room of computer poo poo and posters on his wall including The Corpse Grinders and Murder is My Beat), through the domineering jock Wildman (who really likes to hold frat pledges tightly from behind), to the dickish drunk of a security guard, to the disguised exasperation of final girl Courtney (Cecile Bagdadi's only acting credit). The easy normality of the character interactions was probably the movie's strongest point, as none of the actual murders besides the first one were all that memorable. Kind of looking forward to revisiting this one after a while, when I'll be able to watch it without the shock of that prank overshadowing everything else. / 10  #43. Scream Blacula Scream (1973) Despite some reservations on my part, this turned out to be even better than the first Blacula. A power vacuum left within a voodoo community by the death of their high priestess leads her petulant son to resurrect Blacula (Prince Mamuwalde, played by William Marshall). Of course, a resurrected vampire is a hard thing to control, and the son's plans are soon rendered insignificant. This took a lot of what made the first one enjoyable and refines it, while adding more touches of interest. Marshall is fantastic in this; his silent presence, even when standing out-of-focus in the background, would just dominate a scene, and his eyes and expressions were always wonderfully communicative. Pam Grier is present, playing the adopted heir apparent to the priestess' position, and she soon draws Mamuwalde's interest, naturally. His interactions with the black community were the highlights of the film for me, with moments like Mamuwalde correcting a professor of African studies on the provenance of a royal necklace (before going into exacting detail on its original context) and his angry reaction to being shaken down by a pair of pimps ("You made a slave of your sister, and you're still slaves, imitating your slave-masters!"). His accumulation of servant vampires at his home, and his thorough disdain for them, were interesting, and while they didn't get that much development compared to other parts of the film, their presence in a film released just half a decade after the Summer of Hate was gently provocative. Deserves a better reputation than its dismissal under the blaxploitation horror umbrella seems to have given it. In short, Blacula and Scream Blacula Scream are both great, though the sequel improves on the original, and they'd make a sweet quadruple feature with the Count Yorga films. / 10 #44. Don't Look in the Attic, a.k.a., The House of the Damned, a.k.a., House of the Cursed Spirits (1982) Geez, this movie is already fading from my memory. I remember thinking 'OK, so this is like A Bay of Blood meets The Hearse or The Nesting or some other low-key, slow-burn haunted house movie,' but I'm having to go off of the memory of that thought, because so much of the movie has already drained right away, even though I watched it fully awake and sober. There's some haunting activity for new tenants of a house where people have been murdered, there's a creepy butler-type guy, and there's a lot of conversational scenes. There's a scene of someone getting hit by a car, and it ends up feeling low-impact despite the rushing camera and screaming. I don't even remember the twist reveal scene so much as I do a character in the following scene saying 'Wow, can you believe [character] was a [twist]?'. Go with Don't Look in the Basement instead. / 10
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Oct 16, 2018 04:00
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      #45. Critters (1986) Man, there was a lot of weird poo poo thrown together in this, and I loved it. Little animalistic aliens with quills and needle teeth, big humanoid aliens with BFGs and changing faces, a stressed farm family, a young Billy Zane as a preppie slime, a drunkard protagonist, a young boy in the mid-'80s dressed in pink shirt and pink hat, and lots of poo poo blowing up, from firecrackers to houses. That sequence for the first face transformation was great, as was the playful tone that the film kept up, whether shifting into a fake music video, naming a housecat 'Chewie,' or having a toy E.T. get chewed up (Dee Wallace plays the mom). Looking forward to seeing how the sequels do in comparison. / 10    #46. Phantasm II, a.k.a., Phantasm II: The Never Dead Part Two (1988) A strange follow-up to a much stranger film. The stories of studio interference almost eclipse the movie itself, but under all the weird changes and mandated exclusions, there's a lot of charm, due mostly to Reggie 'Reggie' Bannister. Angus Scrimm is pretty much flawless in delivering what's called for by the script, and while the story change to hunting the Tall Man across a mid-apocalyptic America is abrupt, it keeps enough of a dreamlike vibe going to make the shift work to a fair degree. Respect for the quad-barrel shotgun, even if it does go under-utilized. Some more slime would have been appreciated, but the addition of acid to the embalming fluid was a neat jump. Felt like they overplayed the spheres a bit, but the busting through repeated doors was an excellent moment. In spite of all the fun moments, the movie ended up feeling disappointingly limited, even with a plot sprawling all over the map. / 10 #47. Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (1990) Goofy supernatural killing fun. Delirious to a degree that surpasses Evil Dead II at times. An opening shot of a Hell in which chained women dance in '80s underwear and tights leads into a story which turns the possession angle from Prom Night II into reality-warping hijinx. Tubby science teachers get staked with ice cream cones, then gutted and filled with banana splits, a couple has sex on an American flag while patriotic music plays, a thrown football turns into a cork-screw, a jukebox shoots saw-edged 45s, and more and more. Courtney Taylor is gorgeous in her debut film role as returning villain Mary Lou Maloney, Tim Conlon is amusing as the lead, a high schooler who can't stand how average he is, and Cynthia Preston is a lot of fun as his mortal girlfriend, who channels her anger into baked goods. Absurd and delightful, I just wish the contrast had been a little sharper in the underground scenes. / 10
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Oct 17, 2018 00:22
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       #48. Strait-Jacket (1964) Joan Crawford in a Robert Bloch script directed by William Castle. Dig it. Surprisingly reminiscent of Vertigo at times, though they copy Psycho's 'let's explain this for the dim bulbs in the audience' post-ending scene. After coming home one night to find her husband in bed with another woman, Crawford's character snaps and chops them to pieces with an axe (in a scene that's surprisingly brutal for the time). Twenty years later, she's released from the asylum, and comes home to live with her daughter, who's recently become engaged to a man with wealthy parents, and tries to deal with her memories and the suspicions of other characters towards her. I didn't see the twist coming at all, but in retrospect, it was clearly set up in the film, so that was satisfying. Lots of personalities to the different characters, even the small ones, and Crawford did a fine job separating her character's haggard and rejuvenated modes. My main complaint is that things were generally too airy or over-played to let Crawford's character have scenes of earnest suffering, so most of the moments which focus on her dealing with her trauma tended to turn into overwrought screaming. Good, but not as good as it could have been. / 10 #49. Blood (2000) I've had the DVD for this sitting on my shelf for years, and finally used this month to push myself into watching it. It wasn't as bad as I'd expected based on the pull quotes and Asylum distribution, and while it wasn't actually good, it was at least interesting. The film begins with a young woman held captive in a house full of junkies, and soon rescued. The reason they were holding her was because her biochemistry has been altered to give her blood narcotic properties when ingested, and her rescuer is the scientist who caused that alteration twenty years earlier. Once she's safely installed at his home, his curiosity eventually gets the better of him, and things begin to spiral out of control. There's a lot of amateurism on display with this film, with the blocking, lighting, sound, and acting, but the dialogue is usually natural-sounding, and the premise is an inventive twist on vampirism. The young woman (Lix, short for Elixir) needs to feed on blood to replace what she loses to draining, and so her users have to become her servants in that capacity, even while keeping a tight hold on her. The movie did a surprisingly good job of working the metaphor to depict the slide from curiosity to indulgence to dependency to addiction, and while other parts of the story suffered from the movie throwing itself into focusing on that one aspect, it was easily the most interesting part anyway. / 10  #50. Halloween II, a.k.a., Boogeyman, a.k.a., Halloween II: The Nightmare Isn't Over! (1981) Yeah, didn't live up to the standard set by the first Halloween. With three years between the two, it's a lot more disappointing that they didn't go the 'disconnected stories that all happen to be set on Halloween' route with the series. The third act was the best part, once Michael was outright stalking Laurie, and the scenes of him just pressing forward were head and shoulders above the hospital staff kills. Loomis running around town causing trouble was also more interesting than the hospital stuff, which felt like it was populated by Friday the 13th characters. On the petty side, Michael's hair looked weird, and while his way with cruelty and unnecessary embellishment to the kills had been established in the first movie, the scalding hydrotherapy bath behavior still felt like an odd fit. I'm sure there's a pretty good fanedit out there that splices the good parts of this one onto the first Halloween, but as a full separate movie, it runs too long with too little substance. / 10
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Oct 17, 2018 03:04
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   #51. Dog Soldiers (2002) This one put me in mind of 28 Days Later, between the British protagonists, military characters finding themselves in the midst of a twist on a horror staple creature, surprise betrayals, and willingness to kill main characters right off. No one on the level of Cillian Murphy, sadly, and while it was interesting seeing a werewolf movie that focused on them ripping things up instead of their conflict over the curse, it didn't end up doing much for me. The characters felt too thinly-drawn, the American special forces guy was practically a caricature, and the ending felt like a weak end to an otherwise alright story. I recognize that it was partially a comedy (the dog tugging on the guts did get a laugh out of me), but it just didn't have any of the stuff that interests me when I'm in the mood for werewolves, and the costumes weren't great enough to make up for that or the bland 'come on, boys!' dialogue. I was going to say I'm surprised there's no sequel, but it looks like there's one in development. / 10  #52. Hangman's Curse, a.k.a., The Veritas Project: Hangman's Curse (2003) Quite possibly the strangest film I've seen this month. On the face of it, the story is about bullies at a high school being cursed to die by the hand of a ghost of a boy who was bullied to the point of hanging himself. But then the main characters are introduced: A nuclear family of investigators, with the son and daughter high-school age, who go undercover to solve crimes and mysteries. And it's presented in that light Lifetime glossy style. And the third act reveals that the deaths are actually due to brown recluse hybrids bred by the school's star pupil, who is revealed to be the nephew of the hanged boy. But there's still witchcraft, with pentagrams, black robes, and curse shrines, only it's not doing poo poo beyond making the goths feel better. And there's a scientist/government contact by the name of Algernon, played wildly over-the-top by the film's writer.  The opening screen. As much of a mess as the story was, it was put together competently on the technical side, and the camera-work got creative more than a few times. The acting is passable, with David Keith (not Keith David) as the dad, Mel Harris as the mom, and a bunch of TV bit players filling out the rest of the roles. Some Christian flavoring comes up but doesn't overwhelm things, and it could easily have been much worse. You'll most likely find this the same place I did, at the back of a Dollar Tree DVD bin. / 10    #53. Bloody Pit of Horror, a.k.a., The Red Hangman, a.k.a., A Tale of Torture, a.k.a., Crimson Executioner, a.k.a., Some Virgins for the Hangman, a.k.a., The Castle of Artena, a.k.a., The Scarlet Hangman, a.k.a., The Scarlet Executioner (1965) Oh dear, the cheese. Hammy overacting all around, and some of the worst scoring I've heard in any film (in one scene, you can hear the record the score is being played off of hitting a bump and looping; in a better film, this would have been a neat way of showing the characters' derangement, but going by everything else in this film, I can't believe it was anything but incompetence). The actor handling the role of the main villain (Mickey Hargitay, husband to Jayne Mansfield) is clearly exuberant about being the reincarnation of the Crimson Executioner and punishing sinners. Said sinners are are group who came across his castle while looking for a place to photograph models for horror pulp covers, since you can't do that in a studio or anything. Pretty dull for the most part, and Hargitay's gleeful capering once he takes on the Executioner persona is the only thing brightening it. A little amusing how, despite having the women lashed to torture devices, there's very little gore or nudity; the extremes for both are a line of fake blood from a single blade, and being topless while lying face-down. It hit something of a sweet nostalgia spot for me with the washed-out colors, clearly fake dungeon sets, and bare-chested Phantom outfit of the villain, but it's not something I would actually recommend or rewatch anytime soon. / 10   #54. Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966) And the cheese continues. I'd seen the sister film, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, a few years ago, and while that one had mad scientist set dressing to liven things up, I kind of liked this one more. John Carradine as Dracula goes for the gusto, communicating that he's exerting his hypnotic influence on people by bugging out his eyes. He also plays the character straight when he's attempting to persuade people that vampires are nothing more than superstition, and in those scenes, he does bring a chilly charisma suitable to Dracula to the portrayal. A lot of time is spent going back and forth on the 'he's a vampire! No, vampires are a superstition!' disbelief, without affecting much of anything, and the showdown in an abandoned silver mine is nowhere near tense. Big flapping rubber bats are the biggest special effect I can recall, and most of the story is transplanted whole-sale from any given pre-Hammer/post-1931 vampire movie, but the ease with which that's dropped into the Western setting does earn it some points. At only 73 minutes, it's a quick enough entry if you're looking for weird curios. / 10
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Oct 17, 2018 22:59
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Franchescanado posted:The Hangman's Curse is 100% a Christian film. Frank Peretti is "the Christian R.L. Stine"
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Oct 17, 2018 23:26
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 #55. Misery (1990) Misery is kind of a frustrating movie for me. Bates and Caan give excellent performances, the tension and pacing are managed skillfully, the impact points of the story are delivered with great direction, and the score is pretty good, too. But there's just so much hinging on coincidence for the story to unfold with maximum drama, that it ends up kind of annoying me. Wilkes' control of the situation, despite being the guiding note of tension, feels too pat to me, with the strained lunacy injected only where it wouldn't threaten the direction of the narrative. I feel like I'm explaining my objections clumsily, and maybe a better way to put it is that, despite being a story about a writer being forced to write for the sake of his life, the writing of the script doesn't rise to the occasion outside of a handful of scenes. It's probably been argued that by being so pedestrian with the handling of the narrative, the movie is matching the airport fiction style of Sheldon's own writing, in which the explanation of a rare bee sting reaction to justify a character's false death is considered, by a big fan of his, as some of his greatest work. And there may be much better treatment of this in the book, which I haven't read. But in the movie, we don't really get to spend any time with Sheldon's writing, outside of a few sentence-length excerpts. It could be an inherent problem with translating the subject to movie form; compare it to Videodrome, which is (on a basic level) a movie about the way watching movies affects movie-watchers. Very reflexive and self-examining. On rough lines, a book about a book-writer being forced to write a book could, debatably, strike a lot of the same notes on points of process examination and a transformative consumptive experience of its own medium. Misery the movie doesn't give me any of that, and I recognize that it never makes any claims that it intended to do so. But I can't shake that longing for it to do something to address the elephantine potential in the situation, and do more than just the limited (though well-done) hostage situation and power struggle to which it sticks. / 10        #56. The Mummy (1932) I'd really like to rate this one higher. Outside of a couple glaring contributions, the acting is great. The sets are on-point, even when starkly decorated. The physical bearing Zita Johann and Karloff bring to their roles is great, and they really earn an extra pumpkin for the rating on their strength alone. The flashback is handled beautifully, and the idea of framing it as a regression to silent film language, as I saw pointed out in another review, is kind of astounding for the time. But the film is kept so tight and speedy that it denies itself chances to expand its story and breathe some extra life into the mythos it's hurling at viewers, and it's hard to shake the impression that they just plugged in beats from Dracula whenever they got a little stuck. Story components like Ardeth Bey's social integration following his reanimation are implicit to an extreme, and while the film-makers have the talent to make it work, it still feels like a bit of a cheat. / 10   #57. Critters 2, a.k.a., Critters 2: The Main Course (1988) And here's where the Gremlins comparisons for Critters actually get some traction. Sillier, a little cheesier, and Eddie Deezen shows up. Setting it at Easter, while the Critters' eggs are shown on the verge of hatching, was a really inspired script idea. And if you're set at Easter, well, why not have the Easter Bunny crash through the church window and knock over the altar after being attacked? Critters 2 takes that opportunity, and quite a few others. There's plenty of ideas in here that I wouldn't have expected the sequel to pull in, but it plows right ahead and takes them in stride, like the shape-shifting alien accidentally including a scaled-up staple in its torso (from the center-fold it was using as a source sample), and the Critters bonding together into a massive rolling super-Critter. I couldn't believe this was from the same director that gave us the dreadfully dull TV version of The Shining. I was disappointed that they decided to sweep away the town believing/remembering the Critters from the last incident. Having them take the reappearance in stride seems like it would have been more in line with the film's tone, and would have cleared out some time-killing arguments over what was happening. It would have made the plotting trickier and disrupted the usual 'rural town reacts to an alien invasion' formula, but the film seemed to have such fun bucking so many other defaults that the regularity of it sticks out as one of the bigger flaws. While I respect that they continued to take chances while holding to the necessary reiterations, the points against it (particularly the stuttered momentum) combine to bring it in lower than the original. / 10
Darthemed fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Oct 18, 2018 |
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Oct 18, 2018 05:42
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 #58. Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil, a.k.a., Prom Night: Evil of Darkness (1992) Aww, they broke it. Mary Lou Maloney is gone, traded out for a boring religious whack-job who bleeds from his palms and feet, not that anything comes of that. Locked away for thirty years in the depths of a church, the psycho escapes and starts killing off students at a four-person post-prom party. That's pretty much it for the story. Nikki de Boer does a fine job as the final girl, but there's not much for the movie to work with, and it's not stylish enough to make the single location striking. There's a few stalker POV shots, Halloween-style, and a fiery climax, but the blunt camera-work, lighting, and framing undercut the tension, there's nothing unpredictable once the story's in motion, and prom really isn't even a factor aside from being something that happened earlier that night. What a shame for the series to end like this. / 10        #59. Dracula (1931) * Lugosi and Van Sloan steal scenes in which they don't even appear. What was up with that tiny coffin for the bee? Keeping in mind that this movie set so many standards for the vampire movie in place makes the pacing after leaving the castle more tolerable, but as Nosferatu had already set a higher bar, some of it still disappoints, though that's only on the story side of it. The sets are quite nice, Dracula's castle being the highlight. Swapping around Renfield and Harker was annoying, but I'm assuming that had already been done in the play from which this was adapted. As much of a dash through the story as it is, it's still understandable how this ignited the monster movie craze. / 10 #60. Critters 3, a.k.a., Critters 3: You Are What They Eat (1991) Alright, I'm starting to get tired of Charlie. And things have been scaled back down, from rampaging across a town to just tearing things up in one apartment building. The presence of young Leo DiCaprio is probably the most entertaining part of the movie, though there are some decent gags. The Critters have some good life to their puppetry, but the time spent on watching them eat things in a kitchen doesn't really bring anything new to the series, or serve to amuse that much beyond seeing them belch soap bubbles and fart. OK performances from the human cast, but nothing noteworthy. Plays it safer than any previous entry in the series, and that's the worst mistake it could have made. The 'to be continued' credits scene doesn't give me much hope for the quality of Part 4, but I might as well finish this off. / 10
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Oct 18, 2018 18:12
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     #61. Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a.k.a., The Last Halloween, a.k.a., Halloween 3 (1982) A welcome change-up after the disappointing Halloween II, with Tom Atkins' mustache and Dan O'Herlihy warming me right up. The plot's absurd when considered for more than a minute, but the movie keeps up enough energy and vibrancy to make it easy to go along for the ride. The pyrotechnics team put in some great work, the side characters get some fun touches, and having a plot explicitly targeting children is a refreshing change of pace from what I've been watching lately. It would have been nice if this hadn't received such backlash, and Halloween had continued as a series open to any horror script set at the holiday, but even as a one-off, this is quite a special experience. / 10      #62. The Invisible Man, a.k.a., H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man (1933) drat solid, and much larger in scope than I remembered from my kids' book adaptation. Claude Rains gives a great performance, the villagers' reactions are overplayed to an amusing degree (save for the stalwart old man who loses his hat), and while the love interest seems extraneous, her actress does a fair job with her lines. The special effects still hold up well, the snowy environments are quite nice, and there's some wonderful use of the cameras. Even with the screeching of the pubmistress and gags like stealing and chucking a bicycle, the film does a great job of building tension, and while the jumps to espionage do feel kind of abrupt, the groundwork is at least laid by Griffin explaining his plans to move into that activity. The conclusion is a little too pat, but shot and acted well, and Griffin's fade back to visibility is a haunting final shot. / 10   #63. Critters 4, a.k.a., Critters 4: They're Invading Your Space (1992) And we end on the series' lowest point. Jumped forward a few hundred years from the last movie, the Critter eggs are found in suspended animation by a generic '90s spaceship group of misfits, and things go predictably from there. Series staple Ug is now a villain, for reasons that are never adequately explained beyond "Things change," and a lot of time is wasted on trying to build lame drama between the bland spacers. Once they thaw and get active, even the Critters are disappointing, and we get Chekhov's Juggling as a big moment. It is kind of remarkable how steady and even the descent in quality is over the four films. I'd estimate that we're about four years away from a reboot on this series. / 10
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Oct 20, 2018 21:00
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    #64. Berserk!, a.k.a., Circus of Terror (1967) Pretty forgettable, unfortunately. Joan Crawford runs a circus, which (since it's a circus) is having hard times with money, and then its performers start getting killed. The actual death scenes are done well, but they're swamped down by undercooked drama of every stripe you'd imagine for a circus setting, with bland romantic tensions, vague police pressure, dissension in the circus act ranks, substance abuse, and mother-daughter stresses. The script is more at fault than the actors, but Crawford still walks off with the show pretty easily. There's also some padding problems, like the inclusion of a ~5-minute scene of trained poodles putting on their show segment. Good costuming and decent sets, but the finish lasts about three minutes from killer reveal to divine punishment to credits. / 10 #65. Incubus, a.k.a., Leslie Stevens' Incubus (1966) This was something special. Filmed in Esperanto (with the various actors all having their own idea of the pronunciation rules), this had a dreamy, drifting atmosphere very reminiscent of Carnival of Souls, but with even fewer characters. A community of women in an ambiguously isolated part of the world (could be an island, could be inland, could be post-apocalyptic for all the information given) lure men to watery deaths. One of these women becomes dissatisfied with just sending sinners to the women's Dark Lord, and decides to set her sights on conquering a Saint. That's William Shatner, of course, a veteran living with his innocent sister in a cabin near an untended church. As the woman's plan pushes her against Shatner and sis, the feverish qualities of the film increase, and eventually the Incubus itself is summoned. This might just end up sticking with me more than any of my other films for this month, and part of that is the amount of trivia attached to it. Aside from being written and directed by Leslie Stevens, creator of The Outer Limits, this film also (allegedly) had a curse put on it by a hippie-type who got in an argument with the actors and crew shortly after their arrival in California. A year later, the main actress had committed suicide, the Incubus' actor a murder/suicide, Shatner was signed to Star Trek, and the negatives and prints were accidentally destroyed. Decades later, a French print was uncovered, restoration work was done, and the film pulled some extra arthouse cred. Like Carnival of Souls, Incubus is in monochrome, the acting is a bit stilted, and the music, while strange, isn't exactly memorable. But several scenes are shot just beautifully; one in particular I initially thought was an underwater shot, until the camera angle was slightly shifted and I realized it was tree limbs and shadows. If it weren't for the subtitles being hardcoded over big black caption blocks (at least on the DVD I rented), it would have been easy to forget about the Esperanto gimmick. Kind of a blend of fable and demonology, and while the ending doesn't quite deliver on the set-up and journey, it's still a lavishly strange and distinctive trip. / 10   #66. Robot Monster, a.k.a., Monster from Mars, a.k.a., Monsters from the Moon (1953) Woof. This really does earn its steaming reputation. Felt like five pages of script stretched over the hour and change of the movie, although I did fall in love with the shots of Ro-Man just bumbling across the landscape by the end of it, he was just too cute. The annihilation of the human race (mentioned about ten minutes in) has left eight people alive, all in the same five-mile patch of land, and the Ro-Man alien Ro-Man, from the planet Ro-Man, is trying to finish the job so his boss will stop calling him up and bitching at him. The bubble machine is specified in the opening credits. A rocket is discovered, launched, and manned by two men, and ends up not really impacting the story. Dinosaurs are reanimated to rampage across Earth, and end up not really impacting the story. Ro-Man kidnaps a woman, gets a crush on her, and it doesn't affect the story for more than a few minutes (but does lead to the wonderful line "Where do 'must' and 'cannot' intersect on the graph?"). It turns out that about 98% of the movie was a dream. Good grief. / 10  #67. New Nightmare, a.k.a., Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a.k.a., Freddy's New Nightmare, a.k.a., Real Nightmare (1994) Not great, but absolutely a welcome change after the last few sequels in this series. I dozed off towards the middle, didn't fight it since it was an Elm Street movie, so it felt appropriate. It was neat how much Heather Langenkamp looked like Neve Campbell when she had her hair tied back. Gonna rewatch the half-hour or so I slept through and expand this response when I get a chance. e: The Freddy make-up seemed really inconsistent, I could have done with a lot less of the kid (though I can't come up with a better excuse for Langenkamp to not just gtfo of California once her husband's offed), and the movie seemed to spin its wheels a lot for something with a premise which could have gone so crazy and interesting. Why does getting stabbed disrupt Freddy's physical distortions? What's with all the snakes? Why couldn't they have committed more firmly to a scary/serious Freddy once the movie's in his realm? Could have really done without that terrible CGI transformation. All in all, just not nearly weird enough to make good use of its meta ideas, but at least it cracked things open for Scream to come along. / 10
Darthemed fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 22, 2018 03:14
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Thirteen 2018 horror films on Tubi, if anyone's looking for some under-the-radar items to hit that challenge. Anne Another Soul Apartment 212 Asylum of Fear Attack of the Southern Fried Zombies Bad Apples Delirium Evil Bong 777 Headgame Lost Creek Moma's Spirit Party Bus to Hell Tempus Tormentum
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Oct 22, 2018 21:01
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        #68. Frankenstein, a.k.a., Dr. Frankenstein (1931) It's a great movie, of course, but I still have to whine about the divergences from the book. As with Dracula, I'm sure most of it can be chalked up to second-hand adaptation through the stage-play rendition, but I'm still miffed about missing out on an early-'30s Universal imagining of an ice-floe chase. And at pulling 'Victor' from Frankenstein's name and throwing it to some other character. And at having a terrible assistant be pretty much the only thing causing the creature to be a monster. I guess it's not a movie I really like that much when I'm thinking about it instead of watching it, but Karloff does put in a great performance, I love the odd angles of the lab castle's walls, the reanimation scene is golden, as is the mourning father passing through the celebrations. But so many of the original story's themes are gutted, there's not nearly enough build-up for the Frankenstein nuptials to develop into anything more than a celebration scene, and the happy ending (even if the Hays code mandated it) is incredibly out of place. In spite of all that, the atmosphere is darker and more effectively developed than in Dracula, and Karloff's work in his role is so good that the reports of people of the time fainting when his face looms up on-screen are easy to believe. / 10 #69. The Erotic Witch Project (2000) Three film-making friends head into the woods in investigation of a local legend, and soon find their behavior deteriorating, presumably under the effects of that legend's mysterious power. The early interviews with locals show some bad acting, really hamming it up. Good camaraderie between the leads, they seemed very fond of each other. The roaming gorilla was a bit of a loose thread, but I think I get what they intended with it, at least until the blow-up doll popped up. I guess that could have been scavenged from one of the piles left outside of the tents. The effects of the witch started hitting and escalating much more rapidly than in the original, and the characters went with the changes with hardly any shock or disorientation. Decent homage to the original ending, but the apology scene adaptation is a real step down. Could have used some sharper editing, too, trim out a few minutes of wandering in the woods footage. / 10  #70. Devil Times Five, a.k.a., The Horrible House on the Hill, a.k.a., Tantrums (1974) Killer kids find their way into a house of obnoxious adults, the obvious ensues. If not for a coating of mid-'70s grossness (like the woman who tries to seduce the mentally disabled man, Ralph, for minutes on end) and some really awkward editing (the slow-motion capabilities added about five minutes to the run-time on their own), this would be completely forgettable. Ralph was easily the most sympathetic character, but the script dumped him long before the half-assed conclusion. Gets points for a practical effect of someone being set on fire, I guess. / 10  #71. Guru, the Mad Monk, a.k.a., Garu, the Mad Monk (1970) I'm not sure where to begin with this one. The titular monk lives on an island housing a reformatory church (since there's no other monks, I guess you can't call it a proper monastery), and he's pretty much the only authority figure to be found. His hunchbacked assistant Igor handles the menial stuff, there's a woman with vampiric (delusional?) tendencies, an innocent young woman who's caught in the middle of all the nonsense, and the monk has mirror conversations with an evil presence within himself, one who's basically discarded after the mirror scene. Uh, the costumes were charming? The coloring had that tasty aged look, the lead actor was at least fairly earnest in the weirdness of his role, and the sets were suitably grimy. It left me curious to see more of Andy Milligan's work. / 10
Darthemed fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 03:39
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   #72. Bride of the Gorilla (1951) Pretty much none of the stuff on those posters actually happens in this movie. This is kind of like a crappy retread of Cat People, but with sexuality, striking shots, and character tensions dumped for a vague voodoo curse that makes a guy think he's turning into a gorilla. You could maybe read some colonialism critique into this, but you'd have to really work for it. Lon Chaney Jr. is here, looking miserable but putting decent effort into bad lines. Might score higher on a rewatch, but with how lifeless the impression from the first viewing was, I'm in no rush to give it that second chance. / 10  #73. Drive-In Massacre (1976) A weird but enjoyable entry, with the schlubby detectives trying to figure out what the hell's goin on contributing most of the film's charm. An amazingly nonsensical story, to the point where you could imagine it was assembled by cut-up or Mad Libs. A {drive-in theater} has been constructed on the former location of {a carnival}, and now someone is killing {movie-goers} with {a sword}. The theater's owner is amusingly rough-edged, could have been Sid Haig's younger brother for all the scuzzy anger he projected (stand-out scene might be when he's berating his worker for bringing a ham sandwich with lettuce and mayo). A significant chunk of the movie is spent investigating a car peeper, far less is spent on fruitful work. I still don't know who the killer is, since the movie finishes with two people in a projection booth, the shadows show one clearly being face-stabbed, and then the room is forced open to show the implied stabber impaled against the wall. No supernatural stuff shows up, so I doubt they were going for a Michael Myers-ish survival. I'm having trouble coming up with reasons to recommend this, as outside of the killing scenes, there's a lot of stuff that plays like a weird cop drama spoof. Good sting on the final explanation text block, though. / 10   #74. Grave Encounters (2011) Watched, along with the sequel, on the recommendation of my girlfriend's friend. Cute premise, good escalation, likable characters. Splitting the characters between their show personas and 'actual' selves was an interesting bit, one I wish they'd explored more. Once things started going wild, a lot of the tension built from the teasing scares was lost, and since that was the strongest thing it had going, the movie gets quite a wrench in the gears at that point. Some of the hauntings after that work (arms through the wall and ceiling reminding me of the haunted house segment from V/H/S), but most of the on-camera apparitions lean into bad yelling ghost jump scares. While there's some goofiness in the earlier parts of the movie, it's put to good work in humanizing the characters, while keeping the ghost side pretty straight-faced. The third act drops that handling hard, and given how much I'd been enjoying the slow escalation, that was a big disappointment. Got some smiles out of characters yelling at each other about the continued filming, but the movie managed to justify including that cliché to my satisfaction. With just a little tweaking, I'd consider this a great movie, as it puts a good twist on the found-footage standards, manages its humor well, has human-feeling characters (even if they do devolve into the usual yelling and blame-slinging), and some moments that probably would have given me goosebumps if I'd been watching with the lights off. Like someone else said, this is possibly the best film version of House of Leaves that'll ever come out of Hollywood. That third act brings it down too much, though. What a shame. / 10
Darthemed fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Oct 24, 2018 |
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Oct 24, 2018 04:20
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     #75. One Dark Night, a.k.a., Entity Force, a.k.a., Mausoleum, a.k.a., Rest in Peace, a.k.a., Dark Night, a.k.a., Night of Darkness (1983) Raymar, a renowned psychic provocateur, has died and been interred at the local mortuary. As his estranged daughter learns more about the nature of his powers, a young woman (Meg Tilly) is angling to get into a three-woman clique called the Sisters, and their intended final hazing for her is to stay the night at the local mortuary. Oh man, I loved this. Picked it out because the thumbnail poster made it look like it was an animated film in the style of Reiji Matsumoto, but I'm totally happy with what I got instead. Extremely '80s, very weird grounding on which the simple premise operates, and wonderful special effects. The play between the Sisters pulling pranks to try and freak out Tilly's character is angled neatly against the burgeoning resurgence of Raymar's spirit, their bitchy infighting earlier is fun while building a sense of their dynamic, and the movie really cuts loose as it hits the finale. Corpses all over, drawn-in blue lightning, pink fog, Tilly (allegedly) actually freaking out in the mortuary, a psychic showdown, telekinetic rampages, and more. I hope Arrow or Vinegar Syndrome or someone has put a clean-up of this out on Bluray, I'd love to see it in clean contrast and vibrant coloring. / 10  #76. Revenge of the Radioactive Reporter, a.k.a., Atomic Reporter, a.k.a., Nuclear Mutant (1990) This was one that tended to catch my eye in the video store as a kid, but I never got around to renting it, because I'm sure my mom wouldn't have agreed. That's a shame, because I feel like I would have been really gonzo for this at that age. Melty practical effects, creative set-piece kills, one-liners, Canadian DTV scuzziness. A villain who's picky about people calling him 'Dick' instead of 'Richard'. It's pretty much a low-rent rendition of Darkman as part of the body-melt horror pool. The actor for the main character's brother is maybe the worst part, giving his lines weird intonations and flat dramatics. But by and large, it's a movie that hits the right note with indulging in and enjoying its low-budget schlockiness, coming out somewhere between the average '80s Troma output and Radioactive Dreams. / 10    #77. Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead, a.k.a., Phantasm III: The Third Power (1994) Things are more on track with the first movie than in Phantasm II, Mike is Mike again, Reggie's horning it up, dreams and reality melt together, and we've got a militant black woman who likes nunchaku. Too bad she lets Reggie worm his way in. I'd also like to see a fanedit that excises the kid as much as possible. Put in some more shots of the car instead. But Scrimm is great (though the Tall Man is a little too chatty for my liking), the weirdness is at a good level, the exploration of the metal spheres' nature doesn't detract from their presence and mystery too much, and the shift back away from the Hollywood vision for Phantasm earns it a lot of good will. The repetition of the last shot is becoming more of a joke than a sting at this point, unfortunately. At this point in the series, I'm starting to accept that the first was lightning in a bottle, but I'm holding out hope that part 4 will catch a little more spark. / 10
Darthemed fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Oct 25, 2018 |
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Oct 25, 2018 01:17
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 #78. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, a.k.a., Halloween 4 (1988) Man, it would blow to live in Haddonfield, at any point along its timeline. MMyers breaks loose again, goes hunting relatives again, gets shot down again. Danielle Harris was the bright spot of this movie, as Donald Pleasence seemed a little confused to be back in this franchise. Not much of this really holds up when thought about, but it spins enough atmosphere to float past all but the most glaring nonsense. Multiple Shatner faces was a cool visual, but why would such a small town have allowed the continued sale of those masks? Especially in the first few years after '78, the chances of getting shot for wearing it had to have been high, and it seems like something the local stores would have just gotten used to dropping from their seasonal orders. I'm picking on such a small dumb detail because there's not much in the film that really stood out to me otherwise. Having Michael get so action-movie-ish with his pursuit really didn't work for me. The ending felt completely like a twist thrown in just for the sake of having one, and since it's supposed to stick around as a detail in the next two sequels, it's even more annoying. What I did like was the lighting and camera-work. The kid's nightmares were probably the best part of the movie for me, more giallo-like delirium would be a welcome shift in the series at this point. Pretty gross having a cop's daughter wear a "POLICE DO IT BY THE BOOK" shirt. / 10 #79. Dreams in the Witch-House (2005) Expectations were low for this (a post-'80s Stuart Gordon Lovecraft adaptation without Combs or Crampton?), but it did the limbo right under them anyway. Took one of Lovecraft's more cosmic stories and stripped all of that right out to get it down to TV budget, hosed around with the chronology of the elements kept from the original climax, inserted a fistfight with a witch as a replacement climax, and had the protagonist being suspected of infanticide instead of having his geometrical lucidity disintegrate. Ezra Gooden did a fair job in the main role, and the lighting, sound, and other standard technical fronts were decent, but trying to update the setting to a semi-modern version brought more problems than benefits, especially with Gilman having a computer only when the scripting thought about it for a scene. Gordon's need to stick in some nudity was painfully at odds with the tone of the story, the effects for the familiar were embarrassingly bad, and there were moments when the cheapness of production would really show through. In the context of the chopped-down script, though, they got from start to finish with general clarity. Still a let-down all around, though. / 10 #80. Grave Encounters 2 (2012) Some neat ideas, but what a mess of execution. Film school dweeb is too deep into the first Grave Encounters movie, decides to visit the actual filming location with a whole gaggle of acquaintances, and a lot of stuff from the original gets repeated in sloppier fashion. Footage is included that doesn't even make sense with the framing device of the film dweeb's own footage being sold to the original film's distributor, cuts go by like they were processed in a Slap Chop, there's so many characters dragged along that it's hard to tell who was even originally present, and the ghosts lost any sense of subtlety. I did like that the first film's survivor was still banging around in the tunnels, and his derangement, while played really broadly, was one of the more entertaining parts of the film. As sloppy and jumbled as the progression of the film was, I feel like it generally earned the spin into chaos at the end. I may be pulling harder for it than I would have been if the friend who recommended this series hadn't been commenting "This is so bad," every five minutes or so. Still want a third entry that treats this one as a real film and goes investigating it. / 10 #81. Paranormal Activity 2 (2010) And a much less engaging spin on found footage, though it's better about sticking to things that could have been filmed by the camera set-up shown. Apparently this is a prequel to the first Paranormal Activity, but it's been so long since I last watched that one that any connections were lost on me. The ramping of the haunting effects was handled well, the father being an overbearing piece of poo poo and getting worse once things started getting weird was too, and the movie did a good job of making me dislike everyone but the character who got kicked out at the end of the first act. The baby monitor interference seemed kind of underused, and having the non-dad characters ignore the possibility of checking footage after they'd done it earlier in the film got weird. You could argue that there was ghostly pressure or fear keeping them from doing so, I guess, but it didn't quite gel for me. The Poltergeist scene rip was a bit of an eye-roller for me, but I'm glad the animal violence didn't go any further than it did. Good pulse-check on where mainstream horror was at the start of this decade. I don't have anything more complimentary than that to say about it. / 10
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Oct 25, 2018 06:19
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Sweet Home would be a pretty great follow-up to Hausu, it works from a very similar base but goes in a more grounded direction with it.
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Oct 25, 2018 19:05
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     #82. The Wolf Man (1941) The doomed love story of a pushy creeper. A step down from the Universal horror of a decade earlier, but still great. The establishing of the werewolf mythology is handled a bit clumsily at times, but practically everyone puts in very fine performances, and Bela Lugosi playing a Roma named Bela is quite cute. The way each character carries their own doubts and fears about Larry's apparent homicidal craziness is my favorite part of the story, with the misty moors being a close second. The werewolf transformation still holds up pretty drat well 77 years later, even if the hairy man appearance hasn't. And even though it was common for the time, that sharp drop ending is too abrupt for my liking. Outside of that, solid, though I'm still confused as to why the pentagram is the sign of the wolf. / 10  #83. Death Laid an Egg, a.k.a., A Curious Way to Love, a.k.a., Plucked (1968) I'll admit it, I didn't know what was going on for most of this movie. I mean, it was a giallo, so that's pretty par for the course, along with its inclusion of beautiful Italian women in states of undress, black-gloved killers with blades, and scenes meant to just take advantage of an interesting location to which the film crew had access (in this case, a poultry farm). But beyond there being a love triangle and some killing (of prostitutes, I think?), the rest left me baffled. There was something about experimentation causing mutant chickens without heads or legs, but if it went anywhere beyond causing some character tensions, I didn't catch it. The visuals went above and beyond in carrying the film, with the close-up shots of the mechanical automation lit and tilted in hypnotic fashion. Big points also go to the score, which was wonderfully strange improv(?) jazz. If I'd been able to get just a bit more of a handle on what was going on, there'd be an extra pumpkin for this rating. / 10  #84. Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003) I originally picked this up as a $1 DVD pack with the first two movies in the series from Goodwill, still in its Walmart shrink-wrap. But the disc with this one on it didn't work, so I ended up having to rent it. I should have let fate keep me from seeing it, as this ended up feeling like a waste of time. While it's been a while since I last saw the first one, I remember it being decently spooky. This was not. Too much time is spent on pointless high-schooler kvetching, the film kills its momentum by just sitting in one location for a long stretch, and Ray Wise comes off as the only actor lasting more than three minutes who's seriously trying to act. Too much exposition and camera exposure of the Creeper, especially when it's bumbling around on top of a school bus for so long. Maybe the third will be better, but probably not by much. / 10  #85. Delirium (2018) But then this one made everything seem so much better. A group of bros are initiating a new member by having him visit a house reputed to be haunted, and it turns out to be haunted. The movie starts out as found footage, but then the film-makers either forgot they were doing that, or decided it was too hard to maintain but didn't want to go back and retool the parts that had already been shot. Dialogue is cookie-cutter garbage, often down to the point of having characters describe what's happening (e.g., pushes a door open, "It's unlocked." Walks into dark room, "It's really dark in here," etc.). Tries to crib the photo finish from The Shining, and of course fumbles it hard. Characters were mostly interchangeable apart from their haircuts and the token 'smart' character. The ghosts have the bare minimum of effort put into their costuming and characterization. I mainly watched this because it looked like that was Anne Hathaway on the poster thumbnail, and it gave me the impression that it would be something of a slow-burn haunted house movie. It wasn't, on either front, and the character that's supposed to be doesn't look like that anyway. Don't waste your time on this. / 10
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Oct 26, 2018 07:06
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gey muckle mowser posted:BTW I appreciate you posting all the alternate/international posters, some are really cool. And how terrible the DVD covers can be.
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Oct 26, 2018 19:05
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    #86. The Abominable Snowman, a.k.a., The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957) One of those movies where the environment does more than the characters for the story. I mean, Peter Cushing does a great job portraying the inquisitive but soft-hearted scientist on an expedition with some loud-mouth Yanks to find a yeti, but the shots of the snowy mountains are incredible. There's nothing (to my eye, at least) to betray that they were done on sets. The story isn't quite as engaging. The deterioration of the search party in the snowy isolation was reminiscent of the '80s The Thing (almost always welcome), but the cuts back to the girlfriend having nothing to do but wait and worry at the base camp felt really unnecessary. A nice out-of-the-ordinary conclusion, which went with the setting to put me in mind of At the Mountains of Madness, just scaled down a bit. Good call in keeping the yeti almost entirely off-screen. If you're a Cushing fan and haven't seen this, it's worth tracking down. / 10  #87. Sorority House Massacre, a.k.a., Death House, a.k.a., Massacre (1986) This was pretty far from what I was expecting, but I liked it. More in line with Halloween (II) than Slumber Party Massacre, with a man who killed his family decades earlier escaping from his psych ward and hunting down the occupants of his old house (one of whom happens to be his sister, though she has a mental block on the family slaughter). The lead girl has psychic flashes, which helped set this apart from the more common slasher fare. Generally likable victims, even if they are fairly flat, and while the kills are nothing special, the movie did a fair job of keeping the spookiness up without many fumbles. It helps that things are kept to just a couple of locations, so once the story hits the action point, it barrels along from there with little fuss. Not expecting much from the sequel, since it's directed by Jim Wynorski. / 10  #88. Trucks, a.k.a., Trucks - Out of Control (1997) Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuggggghhh. Remake of Maximum Overdrive with less than a tenth of the energy, nuttiness, or memorability. I guess it's shot OK for a TV movie? I can't think of any other complimentary things to say about this. There's a redhead from the late '90s, if you're into that. No Green Goblin truck, though. Real crappy, despite being decent with all the technical parts of the film-making. / 10  #89. The Minion, a.k.a., Knight of the Apocalypse, a.k.a., Fallen Knight, a.k.a., Lukas, a.k.a., Minion (1998) Not good, but kind of neat. Part of that late-'90s wave of Christianity-inspired horror like End of Days, Stigmata, and Resurrection. This one has Dolph Lundgren as a monk/Special Forces soldier who's part of the Knights Templar and is tasked with stopping the titular minion from getting the key to the bottomless pit and unleashing the devil upon the world. While I generally like Lundgren, he couldn't do much to help this movie, which tries to jumble a few too many things together. You've got the Native anthropologist and her strained relations with her family, brain infection for the minion to possess people, the Knights Templar as a secret society, a romance subplot that's barely developed, a manhunt pasted over from Highlander, and the Revelations stuff. None of it is given enough time or focus to develop into something of substance, though the manhunt does go on for a while and jumps to a gas station attendant jamming a shotgun in the leads' faces. It motors along with a good amount of energy though, so while it is a jumble, it's not offensively bad, and it does about as good a job as you could hope for with the base concept. / 10
Darthemed fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Oct 26, 2018 |
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Oct 26, 2018 21:26
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   #90. Grim (1996) This would be a pumpkin lower if not for the creature design. Fooling around with a Ouija board awakens a troll-looking creature in the catacombs under suburbia, spelunkers wind up in the caves, start to get killed off. There's some ill-defined magic at play, the script makes meager efforts at giving the characters something more than their faces to identify them, the sets are passable, and that's about the extent of what works. Possible stress-lines for interactions (e.g., marital tensions) don't amount to more than dressing, the creature doesn't kill anyone on-screen (that I can remember), and the story doesn't even manage an arc beyond 'the people get into a bad situation and eventually leave.' Oh, and the same guy who scored Night of the Demons scored this. / 10  #91. Poor Pretty Eddie, a.k.a., Heartbreak Motel, a.k.a., Redneck County, a.k.a., Massacre at Redneck County, a.k.a., Redneck County Rape, a.k.a., Black Vengeance (1975) This is probably going to end up being the top stand-out film from what I've watched this month. Deeply uncomfortable. The cast includes Ted Cassidy, Shelley Winters, Leslie Uggams, Slim Pickens, and Dub Taylor, plus Michael Christian (in his biggest role outside of Peyton Place). Uggams is a popular singer who passes through the wrong town on her vacation, with a broke-down car stranding her at the hotel of a has-been starlet (Winters), the caretaker (Cassidy), and the general-purpose worker (Christian, as the eponymous Eddie). As days go by with the car repair going unfinished, the hotel and surrounding town begin to suffocate Uggams' character. Despite the trashy titles, this was a surprisingly artful film. The acting is nuanced, with a lot of communication through the eyes from the main characters, and a significant sense of their backstory told just through the quirks of how they interact. Once the singer steals a car to try and get free, she comes into contact with the other townspeople, and things get really oppressive at that point. I'd love to see an essay by K. Waste examining everything that's going on in this film, and to have a restoration of it on BluRay. I don't think it would serve the movie well for me to try and pick through the events of the film as explanation of why I fond it so interesting, as it's one of those where the experience is much more than the sum of the individual occurrences. Also, that second poster (a DVD cover, presumably) has no resemblance to anything in the movie, which has that warm '70s look saturating its scenes. I can imagine Quentin Tarantino recommending this to unwary people when he was working in a video store. / 10   #92. The Brain that Wouldn't Die, a.k.a., The Head that Wouldn't Die (1962) Lived up to my expectations. A real sociopath of a main character, seeing people just as components for his experiments. I wish I'd had a copy of Frankenhooker around to do a double feature comparison. Kind of amusing to see the idea of organ and limb transplants treated as mad science. Shows some '50s horror structuring lingering on with how much of the film is driven by nothing more than conversation, but the dialogue and ideas are sharp enough to make that work for it. The conclusion was disappointing, especially after the strength of the second act, but it all averaged out to a clever film that rose above its low budget. / 10  #93. Horror House on Highway Five (1985) Low-budget and really weird. Involves the sons of a Nazi scientist, a killer in a Nixon mask, black magic, human sacrifice, model rockets as weapons, insects breeding in someone's brain, dancing as a means to escape imprisonment, and more. Weird and choppy editing and scene transitions don't keep the film from flowing along in wacked-out fashion. Trivia page on IMDb says this was filmed on weekends, which makes a lot of sense looking at the end result. Apparently Vinegar Syndrome put out a BluRay restoration, I might have to pick that up at some point. No idea what I can say to recommend this movie to people while referencing things that actually happen in it, but if skeezy low-budget horror with a sense of humor that goes beyond late-Troma 'haha, we don't have any money for this, so here's some tits' appeals to you, or you want to see a bonkers independent slasher with sub-local-theater acting, this will meet your criteria. / 10
Darthemed fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Oct 27, 2018 |
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Oct 27, 2018 20:06
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 #94. Haunts, a.k.a., The Veil (1977) Whoa. This had a lot of surprises. It's an American giallo that's genuinely good; on top of that, it's a Cameron Mitchell movie that's actually good! Admittedly, his screen presence is the minority of the movie, but still. A woman dealing with assorted repressions and years in an orphanage following her mother's suicide has returned to live with her father (Mitchell), but as women around town are murdered with scissors, her instability increases. Great balance between the bizarre and grounded, with a real strength for slipping between the two. Another one I'd love to see cleaned up by Vinegar Syndrome or some similar folks. Originally at 6/10, gets another pumpkin for how it's congealed in memory since initial viewing. / 10       #95. Isle of the Snake People, a.k.a., Isle of the Living Dead, a.k.a., Snake People, a.k.a., Cult of the Dead (1971) Boris Karloff's final movie, though I didn't know that going into it. Better than it could have been; just look at Bela Lugosi's finish. Still embarrassing. A slopping of introductory voodoo mixed with the old zombie-raising scientist staple, spiced up with a dwarf version of Baron Samedi and some snake-dancers for Damballah. A commandante-type is interested in the military applications, of course, and some visitors are horrified by the situation, of course. Very few surprises in the plot, but the oddity of the filler scenes steps it up to compensate. I don't even have much impression of the film beyond those stretches of Samedi twisting around, and poor Karloff as the scientist doesn't get anything to match. Most of his scenes are just him sitting and providing exposition. Still, the willingness to get real weird with the physical performances carries the film higher than it really deserves, even if that's still short of earning it recommendation. / 10           #96. Dracula, a.k.a., Horror of Dracula (1958) Hell yeah, nice. Still jumbling up some details, but at least this seems to have more reason behind its story and character alterations than the '31 rendition. That shot of Lee as Dracula raised to blood-shot fury is golden. Provides a pretty direct shot of the essential Hammer flavor, with Cushing managing to upstage Lee through presence alone. While turning Lucy into the sister of one of the men who were trying to marry her is more than slightly strange, his character is an enjoyable component of this version, with the breaking down of his disbelief into desperation making him probably the strongest audience surrogate (tempting as van Helsing may be). It did strike me how much the child's acting improved for the last scenes, I wonder what happened to cause such a sharp turn in quality. Looking forward to the sequels in which Lee comes into stronger form. / 10
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Oct 29, 2018 06:25
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Grizzled Patriarch posted:I'm kind of curious to watch the '82 remake just to see if it captures any of the atmosphere of the original.
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Oct 29, 2018 07:31
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