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In for 31 + bonuses. Will I continue to watch weird garbage or watch some quality films this year? (haha I'm going to continue watching the weird garbage)
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Sep 29, 2023 17:28
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Crescent Wrench posted:Nailed the Dick Miller picture. Amityville: It's About Time has an out-of-nowhere Dick Miller cameo as a concerned neighbor, it was so weird to see him there.
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Sep 29, 2023 18:32
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 1) In Search of Darkness: Part III (2022) Trailer Seen on: Shudder  NEW-TO-YOUWatch 6 movies that you have never seen before - 1st new watch of the challenge. HISTORY LESSONWatch a movie from 5 different decades - the 2020s In the 2020 and 2021 challenges, I watched the first two installments of this and found them agreeable, if a little bloated and with some weird choices in which movies to highlight. I thought this 5-hour-ish conclusion was a pretty solid capper though, with what I felt like was a nice selection of films both big and obscure, including several I've watched and enjoyed over the last few challenges (including Amityville 2, Madman, Bloody Birthday, The Last Horror Film, Possession, etc.). It also actually tipped me off to some new films that I probably wouldn't have considered for the challenge, which is a nice bonus. The talking heads they got are a mix of people from the previous versions as well as some new ones, and I thought they all had some interesting things to say. The film features are broken up by the usual sidebars on general topics, include things like how the VHS home revolution supercharged the horror genre and the Satanic Panic. There are also some nice profile/interviews with actors and behind the scenes people, including Adrienne Barbeau, Dee Wallace Stone, Caroline Munro and Screaming Mad George. Again, as I said with the first two installments, if you're a genre fan there's likely very little new here for you to absorb, but it's still a fun enough watch. (these multi-part meta challenges are going to involve me building up the eventual X over the square line by line.) 
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Sep 30, 2023 12:29
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 2) Burnt Offerings (1976) Trailer Seen on: Youtube BIRTH OF HORRORwas shot in and/or set in your place of birth OR watch a movie that was made the year you were born HISTORY LESSON 2/5Watch a movie from 5 different decades - the 1970s (already done: the 2020s) NEW-TO-YOU 2/6Watch 6 movies that you have never seen before - 2nd new watch of the challenge A family rents a big mansion (the exterior is the funeral home from Phantasm!) for their summer retreat. At first, it seems like a fixer-upper, and the odd caretakers ask only that someone care for their elderly mother, who never leaves her room on the upper floor of the mansion. Slowly, though, a force begins to turn them against each other, and with each bit of pain or injury, the house begins to restore itself. I had high hopes for this one, seeing Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows, The Night Stalker, Trilogy of Terror, etc.) as the director of this adaptation of a novel that came out a few years before. The cast is stacked too - Oliver Reed as the dad, Karen Black as the mother, Bette Davis as Reed's mother and Burgess Meredith in a loopy bit role at the start - the kid actor playing their son (Lee Montgomery of the rat movie Ben) is also pretty good. As it stands though, there are a few creepy and unsettling parts, but it's a very slow burn and very soap opera-y. The house feeds off the pain and negative energy of its occupants, slowly rebuilding itself and turning the dad violent, the mom obsessed with the house and the care of the elderly lady (who we never see), and Davis' grandma senile. Many wondered if Stephen King took notes from this novel, as it resembles The Shining in a few ways, but they're mostly superficial. Reed and Black chew the scenery like there's no tomorrow - as far as his performances go, this one is actually pretty great, and one of the scariest parts of the film is when some horseplay between he and his son in the house's pool turns violent. He's also haunted by dreams of a great creepy grinning hearse driver. This one settles more for an unsettling mood than any shock moments, at least until the very end, and even though I saw it coming, it's done pretty well. Apparently Davis detested Reed and Black while working on the film, so that's a fun little undercurrent to everything as well.  3) Warp Speed (1981) Trailer Seen on: Youtube HORROR ADJACENTWatch a thriller OR a horror/comedy OR a horror/musical OR a horror/action movie OR a horror/scifi movie. HISTORY LESSON 3/5Watch a movie from 5 different decades - the 1980s (already done: the 1970s and 2020s) NEW-TO-YOU 3/6Watch 6 movies that you have never seen before - 3rd new watch of the challenge The first long-range spaceship launched by humanity, the Titan, sets out on a 5 and a half year mission to boldy go - well, it's going to Saturn. Anyway, Earth loses contact with the Titan about 9 months into the trip, but it eventually returns without a trace of life, and Starfleet (no, not that Starfleet) sends out a ship with a psychic to figure out what happened to the crew. It's very funny, for a movie called "Warp Speed," there's no warp speed in it. This is made by the production team of Allan Sandler and Robert Emenegger, who produced about a dozen or so cheapo sci-fi flicks between 1980 and 1983 - here, Sandler directs and Steven Spielberg's sister produces! Adam West is the only big name here, but Sandler and Emenegger also used to work with Cameron Mitchell (!) and here, the lead actor and actress are his son and daughter (!!). This one popped up on my radar about a year ago when I was looking for made-for-tv-horror movies for one of the challenges - a lot of people remembered seeing it on TV, but I couldn't find anything showing it was specifically made for it. It's essentially a feature-length Twilight Zone episode made on a shoestring budget, a sci-fi thriller film with some horror elements, including the spooky abandoned haunted house...I mean, spaceship, lots of spooky synth music, offscreen rape and murder. The central mystery is pretty standard - the ship suffers an explosive accident a la Apollo 13 and the crew falls apart trying to deal with the fact they won't make it back home while jettisoning weight and each other, a la The Cold Equations, which has also been remade a bunch. The psychic is scoffed at by the rescuing ship's commander ("Forgive me, Captain, but I place my faith in my God, my ships, and my men, not witchcraft"), and she wanders the Titan and watches scenarios from the past play out. The crew was addicted to the holodec- er, "pleasure center", and these scenes are every unintentionally funny (the crew basically fantasizes about murdering each other). Crew members are walking out of airlocks and murdering each other with ray guns when they're not playing poker as a means of who's drawing the short straw to get spaced. Some marketing descriptions for this film online mention an "alien force," but there's no evidence of that at all in the movie, which makes the incredibly abrupt ending even more of a mystery, because when it happens, there's literally zero explanation for the why of it. An odd little time waster.  4) The Hunger (1983) Trailer Seen on: Youtube NEW-TO-YOU 4/6Watch 6 movies that you have never seen before - 4th new watch of the challenge The relationship between two immortal vampiric beings (Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie) goes awry when the latter begins aging uncontrollably overnight. They seek out the help of a gerontologist (Susan Sarandon) who's been working delaying the aging process, but Deneuve eventually decides to replace Bowie with Sarandon as her lover.  I read the Whitley Strieber book that this film is based on over 20 years ago and barely remembered anything from it. The film, Tony Scott's directorial debut, has a banger of an opening credit sequence, with Peter Murphy and Bauhaus in a cage performing "Bela Lugosi is Dead" while Deneuve and Bowie enter the club and select their victims for the night. Lots of blues and whites (a motif carried visually throughout the film to great effect), sharp cuts, freeze-frames, eventually intercut with scenes of violence (one monkey in Sarandon's lab gruesomely tearing another apart). The first of the movie is pretty compelling too, especially due to Bowie's character, John, who is simultaneously pitiful (Denevue's Miriam knows that her lovers eventually wither away into heaps of dried flesh but nightmarishly remain alive, locked away in coffins, but she didn't tell him...) as he ages 60 years in the space of a day or so, but is not above murdering innocents to try and stop it. Dick Smith is credited with "makeup illusions" and his work on aging Bowie's character is excellent and convincing and adds to Bowie's story. Eventually though, he's locked away and we're left with Denevue and Sarandon, including an influential lesbian love scene between them. I originally intended to watch this for the LGBTQ+ challenge, but the truth is I don't feel that it applies here - lots of essayists talk about how the movie is filmed and its influence on the LGBTQ+ community, but in and of itself, the movie makes no overt issue of Denevue's bisexuality and the only character who opposes any of it is Sarandon's boyfriend, played an aggressive Cliff De Young - the film is more interested about the fear of aging, relationships and addictions, if anything. The second half is a little too languid in comparison to the first and the whole thing is style over substance, but it's an interesting watch. So these next ones are a two-fer - I'd seen the 1999 remake of The Mummy but never the 1932 original, so this weekend my daughter and I remedied that:  5) The Mummy (1999) Trailer Seen on: Peacock Rewatch* This probably could have arguably gone for the Horror Adjacent challenge or Picnic at Hanging Rock, but I already did the former and have other things in mind for the latter, so this can just go for: HISTORY LESSON 4/5Watch a movie from 5 different decades - the 1990s (previous: the 1970s, 1980s and 2020s) In 1926, a group of adventurers in Egypt find Hamunaptra, the City of Dead, and inadvertently awaken the evil priest Imhotep, who will stop at nothing to bring his lover back to life and rule the world. I've only watched this one a handful of times since it came out, but it's always an enjoyable experience. Brendan Fraser was basically born to play adventurer Rick O'Connell, Rachel Weisz is fetching as his love interesting, and the supporting cast is just about perfect. Even though the CGI is middling in a lot of spots, the creature action is fun and scary, and I always liked Arnold Vosloo's portrayal as Imhotep. My daughter, who watched a couple of Universal monsters movies with me last year (Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man), watch the trailers for this and the original, and she went with this because "I'm older this year and I want something scarier." She loves romance stuff in movies so Rick and Evie's relationship was her favorite part of the movie. Amusingly, she watched half of this with a blanket over her eyes - while the mummy stuff itself wasn't too scary for her, she is deathly afraid of bugs so the flesh-eating scarabs freaked her out, but the part that really bothered her was the poor American adventurer who has his eyes and tongue taken by Imhotep. Gotta love watching disturbing stuff when you're a kid. I think this one really holds up; it's funny, it's charming, it's scary and disturbing, but not too much.  6) The Mummy (1932) Trailer Seen on: Amazon HISTORY LESSON 5/5 - complete!Watch a movie from 5 different decades - the 1930s (previous: the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2020s) NEW-TO-YOU 5/6Watch 6 movies that you have never seen before - 5th new watch of the challenge A group of archaelogists in Egypt accidentally reawaken the priest Imhotep, who assimilates into society and seeks to reawaken his lover. Compared to the, well, everything of the 1999 version, I thought this was incredibly understated but still pretty effective. Although you only get to see Karloff in the mummy's makeup in the first scene, I liked how years pass and he bides his time (as Ardeth Bey) until Zita Johann's Helen shows up, and he recognizes her as the reincarnation of his love. I also liked that he's a much more subtle threat here, staying near his enemies and dispatching them with magic when needed. My daughter kept waiting for jump scares that never came, which was really funny, and she liked his "TV pool," where we get to watch the flashback sequence of how things played out in the past. Unfortunately, there was one thing about this movie that soured her on it, even for as fleeting and offscreen as it happens, when Helen's dog dies - my daughter hates watching movies where animals die, even if it's offscreen or otherwise, so she wasn't happy about that. Overall though I liked this just fine. 
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Oct 1, 2023 13:27
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 7) The Munsters (2022) Trailer Seen on: Peacock ROB ZOMBIE 20TH ANNIVERSARY CHALLENGEWatch a Rob Zombie movie OR watch a zombie movie. NEW-TO-YOU 6/6 - complete!Watch 6 movies that you have never seen before - 6th new watch of the challenge In this prequel to the classic '60s sitcom, Herman and Lily meet and fall in love while dealing with the manipulative ex-wife of The Count (aka Grandpa) Earlier this summer, our family decided to start watching the original series; I never watched it routinely as a kid, so a lot of it was new to me. It's an agreeable enough show, and in retrospect it really made me appreciate Fred Gwynne, whose Herman is the gentle heart of the show. Filled with goofy humor (and some surprisingly dark stuff, like the episode where a black widow attempts to marry Grandpa so she can kill him for insurance money) and rote family lessons, it's pretty inoffensive. I missed all the furor over the release of the trailer for this film, because at the time I didn't really give a poo poo about it. After watching the show, though, we decided to give this a watch and it was about what we expected, as far as the writing goes - it's the same goofy TV humor lacking any real bite. The blacklight coloration of the world is interesting, but overall it really just looks and feels like a TV movie. I like Daniel Robuck's take on Grandpa, and Sheri Moon Zombie is ok as Lily (a character that I also felt had nothing to really set her apart on the show), but something about Jeff Daniel Phillips' portrayal of Herman just really turned me off from the whole thing. He's no Fred Gwynne, that's for sure. There are some fun turns from supporting actors like Richard Brake, Jorge Garcia and Cassandra Peterson, but most of the film is focused on Herman and Lily, who again I felt were not up to snuff and just okay, and the plot is sitcom level (Grandpa's ex tricks Herman into signing over his castle and kicks them out), so there's not a whole lot here to really engage viewers. Ah well.  8) The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) Trailer Seen on: Youtube CineD HORROR THREAD POLL CHALLENGEThe movie is in the second posted list: https://letterboxd.com/goatgonzo/list/you-will-not-leave-this-house-alive-sa-horror/ AROUND THE WORLDWatch a movie from 4 different continents, excluding North America. (Europe) Detectives track down an insane doctor (Vincent Price) who is inflicting bizarre, Biblically inspired acts of revenge on those he blames for the death of a loved one. This is a pretty wild, campy movie with a great Vincent Price performance (who barely speaks) and all sorts of nifty traps and devices. He lives in a lair with creepy full-size wind up automatons that play band music, and when he's not out killing people, he's staging dance routines with his mute assistant, Vulnavia. Phibes blames a group of medical professionals for letting his wife die on the operating table (Caroline Munro, so yeah, I totally get it), so he visits the Old Testament plagues of Egypt on them, including some very cute bats and rats, a mechanical mask that crushes heads, flesh-eating locusts, and a brass unicorn head, which has the movie's funniest joke attached to it. The bumbling police (led by Peter Jeffrey) are always one step behind Phibes but are funny to watch nontheless. Peter Cushing was going to be in this as the lead doctor until his wife fell ill and he had to bow out. With great sets, setpieces and funny writing, this was definitely a treat to watch. (I didn't realize the bingo cards changed from 4x4 to 5x5 after that first afternoon, so here's my fixed version) 
Bruteman fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Oct 2, 2023 |
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Oct 2, 2023 10:25
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 9) Def by Temptation (1990) Trailer Seen on: Shudder THE EXORCIST 50TH ANNIVERSERY CHALLENGEWatch The Exorcist OR watch a movie that involves The Devil, demons, or demonic possession. HORROR IS FOR EVERYONE 1/3- A film by a black director, or a film that deals with themes related to POC. Joel is a kind, naive young man who's following in his father's footsteps and training to be a preacher. He goes to New York to stay with a childhood friend before making the final leap into the clergy, but there, he's confronted by an infernal succubus, Temptress, who's been set on destroying his family and sucking the life out of all the available horny men in the area. So this movie has an interesting pedigree. Director, producer and writer James Bond III - a former child star and one-time actor in a Spike Lee movie - leveraged his contacts in the industry and brought along some of his Lee alumni, including actor Bill Nunn and director of photography Ernest Dickerson (!) to make this neat little horror film with an all-black cast and a lot to say about morality. While I wasn't too impressed by Bond III's performance, Hardison and Nunn are great foils, and Cynthia Bond (no relation to the director) is excellent as the demonic Temptress, able to turn from sweet and sexy to horrifying on a dime. This is a Troma Team release, but you'd never know outside of the producer titles at the front - Dickerson's camera work is excellent, and while it definitely has the risque vibe of a Troma flick and the expected questionable humor and portrayals you'd expect to see of its time, it definitely feels like its own thing. The FX is decent, particularly a scene near the end involving a killer television set that feels a little like an homage to the waterbed scene in Nightmare on Elm Street (and also serves as a satiric jab at Reaganomics harming the black community). Samuel L. Jackson is featured on the box art on streaming services because he's retroactively the highest profile star in the film, but he's in it for all of three minutes, so don't get your hopes up.  10) Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) Trailer Seen on: Amazon *Rewatch FREDDY VS. JASON 20TH ANNIVERSERY CHALLENGEWatch a movie from the Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday the 13th series OR watch another “Monster Mash” movie Baggage clerks Wilbur and Chick (Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, respectively) get caught up in the machinations of Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi), who wants to reactive Frankenstein's Monster (here played by Glenn Strange) by using Wilbur's brain. Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) tries to help the boys fight Dracula while also simultaneously dealing with his lycanthropy. They're on a collision course with wackiness! Admittedly, this was one of my favorite films as a kid - watching it with my grandfather and seeing him laughing as hard as I'd ever seen made a real impression on me - and was a large part of the impetus of showing my daughter the original Universal films last year featuring these characters. It is an exceedingly silly film (Costello especially didn't want to have anything to do with it), but it ended up being a huge hit, and it's not hard to see why. If you're a fan of the duo, it's a real delight, but if you're not, I can see how it would grate. Personally I've always enjoyed their back and forth, and you get three monsters doing their thing, although Boris Karloff is missed. And as for my daughter? She thought it was hilarious, so yeah, it was definitely worth a rewatch. 
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Oct 3, 2023 09:41
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Random Stranger posted:Yeah, Bond is by far the worst part of the movie as you'd expect from an ego project. But everyone else is doing amazing work. Bond's "direction" was apparently so bad that Dickerson wound up being the actual director of the film, too. Gah yeah I forgot to mention that in my review, that for an ego project, it doesn't really feel like one. It comes off a lot better than the stuff that gets reviewed on RLM and other places with Neil Breen, etc., again likely due to the talent involved with the rest of the production.
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Oct 3, 2023 13:47
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 11) The Willies (1990) Trailer Seen on: Tubi BITE-SIZED HORRORWatch a horror anthology film OR watch 60+ minutes of horror shorts. "What's grosser than gross?" This is the question at hand when two brothers and their cousin (post-Goonies, pre-Encino Man Sean Astin!) try to out-scare and out-gross each other with tall tales while camping in the backyard. Rats will be fried, dogs will be microwaved, bathroom monsters will kill bullies and psycho-fly-torturing kids all get what's coming to them in this anthology film. Directed by Scuz from Return of the Living Dead, now a convicted sex offender! I remember seeing this one on the shelves of my local video store when it came out, but I thought it looked and sounded pretty cheesy so I never watched it. Teenaged me wouldn't have been impressed by it, but watching it now, I can appreciate it for being an odd duck of a film. Three of the stories are short vignettes that take place before we even get to the title card 12 minutes in! These include a short where a woman tries drying off her recently-bathed poodle in the microwave, which goes on for quite a bit and is kind of uncomfortable to watch. We then get a tale of a bullied kid at school who discovers a monster living in the bathroom, which according to research online was filmed a few years before all the other segments were done. His nasty teacher (Kathleen Freeman!) and some bullies get eaten by the decent-for-a-low-budget-film beastie. It's very weird, because I jotted down in my notes while watching that it shares more than a few beats with the old Stephen King short story "Here There be Tygers" only with a monster instead of a tiger, and when I did my usual post-watch googling, it seems a lot of people had the same assessment. The short also stars James Karen and has a Clu Gulager cameo, so I imagine director Brian Peck was calling in some favors. Speaking of, there are some odd TV cameos here - Dana Ashbrooke and Kimmy Robertson from Twin Peaks show up in the short vignettes; one of the bullies in the bathroom segment is Jeremy Miller, aka Ben Seaver from Growing Pains, and Tracey Gold and Kirk Cameron show up in a scene from Growing Pains as their characters and directly address the protagonist of that segment in a dream sequence! Speaking of which, the last segment, which goes on for way, way too long, is about a disturbed kid (Donkey Lips from Salute Your Shorts? I had stopped watching Nickelodeon by that point, so I missed out on all the early 90s stuff on the channel and have no point of reference), who likes pulling the wings off flies and gluing them into detailed dioramas, runs afoul of a local farmer who has developed manure which makes things grow very large. This one has some surprising gore at the end, and it also reminded me of a story I read in one of those "10 Tales Before Midnight" or similarly titled books that you could get through Scholastic Book Club in the 80s. The whole tone of the film is weird - I guess this came out the same year "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" did, and that's another show (along with Goosebumps) that I never saw because I was juuust beyond the age range for it. It's kind of mean-spirited in parts but somehow totally appropriate for that late 80s/early 90s period where PG-13 had been around for a bit and allowed for some darker stuff than PG could. A meta-Goonies joke directed at Astin is really the most clever thing the film does; the rest is pretty forgettable.  12) The Seventh Curse (1986) Trailer Seen on: Tubi AROUND THE WORLDWatch a movie from 4 different continents, excluding North America. (Asia. Previous: Europe) After adventurer Dr. Yuen is cursed by an ancient demon while rescuing a native girl from the evil Worm Tribe, he returns one year later to put an end to the cult's reign of terror and faces off against nightmarish foes, traps and an army of cultists. Here's a movie I've had on my list for this month for a few years now but never got around to watching it, and as in every challenge, there's always one movie I start kicking myself over for not having watched sooner. It's pretty amazing, a wild mixture of adventure and horror, like if Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was made as a grindhouse movie. Apparently based on a series of novels in Hong Kong following Dr. Yuen, the first 15 minutes or so had me thinking I turned on the wrong movie. It all starts with what feels like a standard Hong Kong action flick with wild martial arts and goofy humor, where we're introduced to Yuen's foil, a spoiled rich girl who wants to be a journalist (Maggie Cheung!). Once things start taking a turn towards horror, though, it goes wild - blood exploding from legs, maggots and melting faces, plenty of gratuitous nudity, a flying demonic baby creature, amazing fights with a wicked animated skeleton with glowing eyes, children being ground up for blood and a rubbery monster that would fit right into a Power Rangers episode. Holy crap, Chow Yun-fat is in this too! A lot of stuff is cribbed from the Indiana Jones movies as well, right down to the "fleeing a large rolling object" scene. An eminently entertaining film all around with nary a dull moment and probably the most fun I've had in the challenge so far. 
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Oct 4, 2023 10:12
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TheKingslayer posted:9. Neon Maniacs (1986) I love that the Neon Maniacs all have professional headshot photos that they leave outside their lair. Also, I'm glad you picked up on the hats, I noticed that when I did my review of it a few years ago. You used to be able to buy those out of Starlog magazine (possibly Fangoria? I never read that when I was younger).
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Oct 4, 2023 14:35
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STAC Goat posted:
I loved this when I watched it the other year. One loving Hour put out a video about a month ago where they explain how wild the production of it was.  13) Tales From the Hood 2 (2018) Trailer Seen on: Peacock ”THAT GUY” CHALLENGE FEATURING DICK MILLER AND KEITH DAVID Watch a movie in which “that guy” character actor Dick Miller OR Keith David appear. A Donald Trump-esque private prison owner is creating "Robo Patriot" robots with advanced AI that can learn from stories. To this end, he hires Mr. Simms (Keith David, taking over for Clarence Williams III), one of the best storytellers ever, to feed the AI some tales about justice (and injustice). I really enjoy the original Tales From the Hood, but this one just feels all wrong, which is nuts considering original writer and director Randy Cundieff also wrote and directed most of the segments here. Granted, the world has slowly gone insane since the release of the original in 1995 so it could be argued that this entry is just a reflection of the times, but it just ends up feeling cheap compared to the first one. In general, the writing is convoluted and contrived, the acting is subpar, and the film looks low-budget and flat. None of the stories feel like they have the weight that some of the ones in the original did, and even though the stories themselves here have topics that are worth talking about (the proliferation of racist iconography over the years and its impact on culture; the sacrifices made for the civil rights movement), the way they're written and presented just sours the whole thing. The first story, involving a racially insensitive white girl who wants an evil golliwog doll, ends in, uh, a way I was not expecting. The second - about a group of gangstas who press a John Edwards-style fake psychic into contacting a former colleague they murdered for info - is probably the one closest in tone to the first movie, but it takes forever to get moving and connect all the dots. The third, about two date rapists who pick up the wrong chicks, is a storyline that has been done to death (and better) in other movies and anthologies for the last 15 years or so, and nothing about this one sets it apart from others of its ilk, other than it's boring and uninspired. The last segment involves the spirit of Emmett Till (and other civil rights icons) in a way where I know what they were going for, but it's wasted on a weak "A Sound of Thunder" scenario involving a black Republican politician backing a white racist governor candidate who's shutting down black voting locations. But I watched this one for Keith David, even though I knew he would just be in the wraparound segments, because the man is just that good, and oh boy, does he deliver. Even though they have him do a silly "THE *poo poo*" monologue just because Clarence Williams III said it a bunch in the first one, he still makes it good. And you can all do yourselves a favor and just watch this video of the very end, because this is what I came for, and by God, Keith David delivers.  14) Alligator 2: The Mutation Trailer Seen on: Tubi WHEN ANIMALS OF UNUSUAL SIZE ATTACK!Watch a movie featuring deadly, oversized animals OR watch a movie featuring deadly(they have to be deadly!) swarms of very small, tiny animals An alligator living in the sewers of a large city mutates into a gigantic abomination once exposed to illegally dumped toxic chemicals. A gruff loner police detective, a rookie cop, a scientist and an alligator hunter all try to stop the beast from devouring the local populace while a shady real estate developer tries to conceal his role in its creation. Lewis Teague's 1980 Alligator is up there among my favorite killer animal movies with its darkly funny John Sayles script, moments of real tension and terror, an impressive-for-its-budget giant alligator they're not afraid to show, and the great Robert Forster heading up the cast. Alligator 2: The Mutation is a pale retread of the original, which is disappointing, mainly because there's a lot of promise here. For starters, the cast is packed with genre regulars - Dee Wallace Stone, Richard Lynch (with a Southern drawl!) as the alligator hunter, Brock Peters as the "you're a loose cannon!" police chief, and Steve Railsback as the slimy gangster land developer. Even Kane Hodder shows up to be eaten by the alligator! But the alligator is part of the problem - I don't know if they had the budget here to pull off what they wanted, but it's way less impressive than the original. Depending on the scene, the alligator is either huge (the giant tail gets used for a lot of attacks, or we get a closeup of the giant alligator head carrying someone in its mouth) or a regular-sized one, but overall it's almost always dark when we see it, compared to the daylight horror of the original where it's seen everywhere. The script is also ho-hum - it feels like they're trying to do the humor of the first movie but it falls flat on its face and is filled with lots of subplots for characters who don't have the charisma to pull it off. I thought they were going to go with one interesting tack near the end, where they feed the alligator a bomb but it doesn't blow up, so now they have a giant walking bomb on their hands, but that setup is squandered as well. It's too bad, they had the potential for something better here, but it never quite gets out of first gear. 
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Oct 5, 2023 10:09
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Gyro Zeppeli posted:16. Phantasm (1979) I've seen 2 and 3 - 2 is definitely a fun watch and 3 was ok (really kind of like the 2nd one all over again).
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Oct 5, 2023 14:15
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 15) Infección (Infection) (2019) Trailer Seen on: Tubi AROUND THE WORLD 3/4Watch a movie from 4 different continents, excluding North America. (South America. Previous: Europe, Asia) When a mutant strain of rabies infects the residents of Venezuela, a recently widowed doctor must trek through the chaos to rescue his son. Apparently this is the first Venezuelan zombie film, and going into it blind, it's pretty standard fare. It's essentially 28 Days Later in Venezuela, complete with rage zombies, only we get to see the start of the chaos and breakdown that we missed in the other movie. It's filled with all of the greatest hits - people making bad decisions, other humans turning into deadly enemies, the people in power not listening to reason, etc. What it does have is some nice cinematography - watching this play out in some nice looking mountain valleys and villages is kind of neat. The acting is solid, most of the setpieces are solid, and while it doesn't really do anything new, it's not terrible. I did think that the end of the movie feels like they ran out of time or money so it just sort of hits the fast-forward button, especially after one of the more emotional scenes in the film, so it loses some impact. And then when I did my usual post-watch research, I discovered that the film was mostly crowdfunded and the shooting was messed up because of the political situation in the country and the arrival of the Zika virus, which explains some things. I also learned the director is apparently now in political exile and the movie banned from playing in its home country, because it's actually supposed to be a political take on the current situation in Venezuela, with refugees fleeing the country as it collapses under its current regime (and footage at the end of the movie showing migrants leaving the country is real). I admit my ignorance of the situation there, but reading many reviews online from people living in South America, this film apparently has a whole different meaning under its bog-standard zombie facade.  16) Wyrmwood Apocalypse (2021) Trailer Seen on: Tubi AROUND THE WORLD 4/4 - complete!Watch a movie from 4 different continents, excluding North America. (Australia. Previous: South America, Europe, Asia) Continuing on from the story of 2014's Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, this sequel follows a soldier making a living delivering live bodies to mad scientists in the hope of finding a cure for the plague. When he finds out the truth of the situation he's in, he joins in with the protagonists of the first film to try and set things right (or at least as much as you can in a zombie apocalypse). I really enjoyed the original film, and I liked this one even better. It smooths out the original's patchwork tone of horror, comedy, brutality and cartoonishness into something that still has all of that, but definitely leans more towards the action side. There's some awesome worldbuilding here, and I love how the residents of the world have built everything now focused around zombie-powered tech (if you haven't seen the first film - a meteor shower brings the zombie plague and renders all flammable material, like gasoline, inert - but the zombies exhale potent methane during the day, so they can be used for fuel). There's lots of cool improvised traps, gadgets and weapons. The action and gore is pretty good as well, and it feels like the filmmakers got more confident since their first outing. They actually bring back most of the original main cast too - very funny here as the protagonist is the twin brother of the villain from the first film! They also bring back siblings Barry and Brooke; the latter is a "hybrid" human/zombie who can mind control other zombies, allowing for some really neat moments of improvised zombie weaponry. The acting is all over the top - particularly the lead bad guy - and that might turn some people off, but this is meant to be tongue-in-cheek fun. It ends with an open hook for the third film, and if they ever make it, I'll be there for it. 
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Oct 6, 2023 10:20
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Nikumatic posted:7.) The Frighteners (1996, Tubi) (Rewatch) Seeing this on a Sunday matinee on its opening weekend is one of those moviegoing memories I will never forget. There were a handful of other people in the theater including my dad and I, and by the end of the film everyone was on the edge of their seat. When Frank goes to strike Bartlett down but gets pulled back to life, half of the crowd in the theater just shouted "NO!!" and it was awesome. It's a flawed film, but the flaws just makes the strong stuff stick out that much more. That last half of the movie is intense as hell and doesn't let up. Definitely one of my favorite movies ever.
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Oct 6, 2023 15:22
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Gripweed posted:
Hahaha I was thinking the same thing. That was one of my favorite reveals in the movie - the lousy PUA guy who hits on anything that moves BUT the succubus is because HE KNOWS and he's an X-Files cop!
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Oct 7, 2023 01:54
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 17) Metamorphosis (1990) Trailer Seen on: Tubi BACK OF THE VIDEO STORE CHALLENGEWatch a movie that you choose based only on it’s rad looking video/DVD box art - I picked this one because, along with Frankenhooker and The Dead Pit, it formed the holy trifecta of interactive light-up and noise-making video boxes at my local video store in the circa 1990/1991. I always wondered what it was like, and let me just say, what a waste of a good box. An arrogant young scientist who's losing his funding over controversial genetic experiments decides to make himself a guinea pig to get results quick. Things don't work out the way he hoped. So if I told you Metamorphosis was 1) an Italian movie shot in Virginia 2) written and directed by George Eastman (star of films like Anthropophagus!) 3) released in 1990, but looked and sounded like it was shot in the early to mid-80s 4) and was somehow trying a rip off of Cronenberg's "The Fly," you'd think "huh, might be worth a shot," right? Well, it isn't...until it is, for one glorious moment, but more on that in a bit. This is a terribly dull movie for most of its runtime, with some of the most robotic actors I've ever seen in a horror film. It's hard to hear the actors sometimes because they get too far away from a microphone and the soundtrack is blaring over top of them speaking. It's an Italian horror movie, so there's also the obligatory weird little kid to get involved in the story (what is it with weird kids in Italian horror and kaiju movies?) as well as the obligatory nudity and misogyny - Laura Gemser from several of the Emanuelle films has a bit part as a prostitute our lead character decides to beat up (and she did costumes for the film!). Once our ersatz Christian Bale-looking lead starts with the metamorphosizing, however, things pick up a bit, with some decent makeup and blood, as he "de-evolves" into a reptilian form. At the very end, during the usual end pursuit, the police wait on the other side of the door - and then he bursts through in his final form, and I poo poo you not, I started laughing. The movie had done it! It made me feel something, finally! It is quite possibly the best monster reveal I've ever seen in a horror film. In conclusion, Metamorphosis is a land of contrasts, but I'd just stick to admiring the box.  18) Wolfen (1981) Trailer - note that this sucker has lots of flashing lights for some reason Seen on: Amazon CHILDHOOD TRAUMA Rewatch a movie that scared you as a kid but that you haven’t seen in at least 10 years(the longer the better). When a powerful New York property developer, his wife and his bodyguard are brutally dismembered in Battery Park, a world-weary detective tries to figure out what killed them. What he discovers is a primal force that has been preying on humanity for centuries. When I was a kid, I remember being aware of the marketing for this movie (see the cool poster above) and some of the TV ads for it that seemed scary. When it inevitably appeared on HBO, my parents watched it as I snuck in from the back of the room. I vividly remember the opening scene with the initial murders , as well as the creepy "thermographic" filter they put over the camera to represent the POV of the Wolfen - very neat in retrospect, considering Predator came out a few years later. Anyway, the initial murder freaked me out, and I also remembered a scene where glowing animal eyes appear at the top of a dark staircase...  ...and the climactic showdown, where at least one character is pretty horribly dispatched and Albert Finney's cynical detective (a role he could play in his sleep) is surrounded by the titular creatures. All of this scared the heck out of me, and I spent the next month or so watching for glowing wolf eyes in my bedroom. Watching it as an adult, it's not nearly as scary as I remember, but an interesting film nonetheless. This movie shows the dirty, grimy, bombed-out side of the South Bronx at the time, and it's very effective, contrasted with scenes from the top of the Manhattan Bridge looking over the city and the WTC in the distance. It's got some great actors in it, too - I had forgotten Gregory Hines was in this, playing the sardonic comic relief medical examiner, and there's even a weird little role for Tom Noonan as a zoologist. A young Edward James Olmos is in this as well, totally naked and hanging dong as a young Native American that Finney is tracking down (you get to see Gregory Hines' rear end too, if you're into that). The story overall is ok, although there are large parts that go nowhere devoted to a secret surveillance company that exist mainly to set up the ending - everything gets framed on a terrorist group because who would believe it otherwise? It has some surprisingly dark humor, but in the end gets a little too predictably preachy - humans are the real savages!! There's creepy little touches they throw in with the creatures but don't elaborate on (the Wolfen imitate baby cries to lure prey to them), but apparently they were greatly changed from Whitley Strieber's original novel. The movie plays around a little too long with "are they werewolves?" but the answer is kind of disappointing they're just spoopy ghost nature spirit wolves, driven to hide out in abandoned places, protecting their hunting grounds once the property developer guy started demoing their neighborhood. Also holy poo poo James Horner scored the hell out of this movie, perhaps 100 percent more than any other James Horner movie he's done. It really is shameless how much music he's cannibalized from himself - the music in the climactic scene is straight-up the combat music from Aliens! 
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Oct 7, 2023 10:15
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 19) Hellbent (2004) Trailer Seen on: Amazon THE SAMHAIN CHALLENGEWatch a movie set (or partially set) on Halloween HORROR IS FOR EVERYONE 2/3- A film by an LGBTQ+ director, or a film that deals with LGBTQ+ themes It's Halloween in Hollywood, and four gay friends are out to celebrate at a party downtown. Unfortunately, they made the classic horror movie mistake of taunting a devil-masked killer, and he begins hunting them one by one. In an interview online, director Paul Etheredge described how this movie got made: quote:Hellbent’s creation was something of a Hollywood fantasy. I worked on staff at a boutique production company in old Hollywood. One day, my boss literally yanked me into a meeting with horror heavyweights, Joe Wolf and Irwin Yablans. “We want to make a gay horror movie. We want to set it at the West Hollywood Halloween carnival. Whatdaya got?” I completely bluffed my way through the pitch meeting and landed the job of writing and directing Hellbent. I'd say he did pretty good for a first time. I'd somehow never heard of this movie until a day ago and decided to give it a shot. Marketed as the "first gay slasher film," it's low-budget but very entertaining. The four leads are personable, the humor isn't cringey (although it's very 2004), and it has some good suspense and decent kills. While the main characters are gay (and one is definitely bi), no further deal is made of that, outside of them dealing with their insecurities and wanting to hook up with people, or to be appreciated for who they are and not how they look. The killer is a buff dude in a devil mask who never speaks a word, and if I had a complaint, it's that we learn nothing about him or why he's doing the killings, outside of what the characters theorize, but he's effective all the same. There's a great moment with a sickle to the eye that doesn't play out the way you'd expect and a great end fight and closing shot.    20) Celia (1989) Trailer Seen on: Tubi PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK…..IN SPACE!!!Watch a period piece OR watch a movie that takes place in the future(as of when the movie was made). HORROR IS FOR EVERYONE 3/3 - complete!- A film directed by a woman, or a film with feminist themes It's the late 1950s in Australia, and 9-year-old Celia's innocent childhood world is falling apart. Her grandmother has died, her parents and friendships are influenced by the Red Scare, and the Australian government's attempt to control the rabbit population has dire consequences for her. As she tries to cope with the betrayals of trust and real-life horrors in her life, she begins to imagine those she hates as the evil hobyahs from the folk tales she's fascinated by, eventually leading to tragedy. So take a look at the three posters/video box cover at the top there - what kind of movie would those lead you to think it is? All three look like monsters are involved, and the last in particular (used to market the film in the U.S.) makes it look like a another "Bad Seed" ripoff. The film is really none of these, though, even though it is classfied with the "horror" tag on most streaming services, along with "drama" and "fantasy." Writer and director Ann Turner initially disliked having the film pigeonholed as horror, although she later came to realize that it brought more people to the film who wouldn't have otherwise touched it (like me!). Celia is definitely not a straight-up horror film but it definitely has elements of psychological drama and folk horror to it, along with the fantasy monster sequences. The real monsters in this movie are lovely kids who tease her, insecure parents who don't know how to handle her mixture of boldness and sensitivity, and the general conservative environment of 1958 in Australia. We hear the common refrain of "you'll understand one day, when you're older" when bad things happen to her. The only people in the film who comfort her either die or are driven away from her; when she finally receives a beloved pet rabbit, that ownership eventually ends up in trauma (two of the scenes here involving her and the rabbit were more harrowing than any of the other films I've watched so far this challenge; animal lovers and pet owners beware). Celia's relationships with the women and girls in the film inform most of what happens in her life, and in ultimately helping to keep secrets, no matter how deadly they might be, and the men are betrayers, even when they mean well. All in all, it's a pretty fantastic film, anchored by actress Rebecca Smart as Celia, who is excellent. 
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Oct 8, 2023 14:15
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 21) The Empty Man (2020) Trailer Seen on: Hulu This is to fill in the last square on my card: CineD HORROR THREAD POLL CHALLENGEThe movie is on the first list: https://letterboxd.com/goatgonzo/list/i-have-to-return-some-videotapes-sa-horror/ A retired cop investigates the disappearance of the teenage daughter of a family friend. His investigation leads to an urban legend called the Empty Man and a conspiracy involving a cult that worships it. "It's too big...we can't indict the cosmos." I remembered reading about this one a few years ago - it was unceremoniously dumped in theaters during the first year of the pandemic with nearly no marketing and the director (David Fincher protege David Prior) indicating that what got released wasn't his final edit. While the movie is maybe a little longer than it needs to be, I didn't really mind in the end because this is exactly the kind of weird slow burn and cosmic horror that I like. It hits the ground running with a great 20-some minute cold open that immediately lets you know you're in for some poo poo and then pivots back into normality for a while, until people start turning up dead. There are parts of this that feel like a general 2000s teen slasher, especially in the first hour or so, but once it gets into the weird stuff again, I was hooked good. Secret cults, time- and space-bending rituals, mantras and repetition, and an ending reveal that has been sort-of done before (to say where would spoil the fun) are all backed up by an intensely creepy soundtrack by Christopher Young and an industrial musician who goes by the moniker of Lustmord. It's definitely one of those movies where the flaws accentuate the good stuff, and one that I'm already planning on watching again sometime. All challenges complete! I'll do a summary at the end of the month.  I'm still doing my usual every year challenge of 31 new-to-me films, and I'm on 18 of those, so there's still more to watch!
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Oct 9, 2023 01:48
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 22) Popcorn (1991) Trailer Seen on: Shudder A group of college film students holds a horror movie marathon in an old theater to raise funds for their next project. One of the students, though, has been troubled by dreams of an insane murderer, and soon she and her friends are being hunted by someone who knows her well. Man, I never thought I'd be describing a slasher film as fun and bouncy, but here we are. A lot of Popcorn's charm comes from its central conceit - the movies they're showing at the marathon are William Castle-esque gimmick films, with giant flying mosquitos, shocking seats (a la The Tingler) and smell-o-vision, and the movies-within-the-movie are a lot of fun on their own (and this was two years before Joe Dante's Matinee!). The film is also kind of a celebration of the communal experience of seeing horror movies together in a theater, a theme also worked into the plot, where an avant-garde filmmaker is the killer come back for revenge...or is it? I was kind of surprised when the movie shows its hand with about half an hour left, when most films of this type would have saved a big revelation for the last 10 minutes or so - I actually enjoyed the villain. And it has a great genre cast - Dee Wallace! Ray Walston! Tony Roberts from Amityville 3D! Kelly Jo Minter! You have to suspend disbelief for a lot of the film, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Bonus points for the horror-themed rap song at the end of the movie.  23) The Mutations (aka The Freakmaker; 1974) Trailer Seen on: Amazon A college professor moonlighting as a mad scientist is trying to create plant/animal hybrids; his failures reside at a nearby carnival's freakshow. When a group of his students get a little too close to to the truth, they start disappearing and returning as unspeakable creatures. I've always had this movie in the back of my mind after reading about it in the early 1980s in a sci-fi movie compendium, and I finally got around to watching it. It's pretty skeevy! Donald Pleasance is the mad scientist; he's recruited a deformed circus freakshow owner (Dr. Who's Tom Baker, nearly unrecognizable under heavy prosthetic makeup!) to bring unwilling test subjects to him. There's way more nudity than I was expecting here for some reason, as all the pretty coeds end up on Pleasance's operating table topless; there's also long bath scenes as well. There's a whole subplot with Baker's character and the local carnival freaks - as they constantly remind him, he's one of them (a very, very heavy undercurrent of Tod Browning's Freaks is here, this movie was clearly partially inspired by that film), but he views himself as a temporarily disadvantaged handsome womanizer, as he's helping out Pleasance, who has promised to fix his deformities in exchange for being his muscle. I can't tell if the movie actually wants you to be sympathetic with his character or not, because it's really hard to feel bad for him - he goes to a prostitute (also naked) and she makes him pay extra so she'll say she loves him, but he also delivers up people to fate worse than death and verbally abuses the people at the carnival he runs, so welp. There is a really neat human/venus flytrap hybrid and a plant that gets fed rabbits, but not much else interesting.  24) Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor (1990) Trailer Seen on: Youtube A scientist experimenting on alien cellular tissue creates a bunch of mutant life forms. When one of the critters bites and infects him with the alien DNA, he mutates into a big goopy beast, and the shady corporation he works for will do anything to keep the experiments quiet. Five years before Species, we got a film with a similar plot - it apparently originally started out as a sequel to The Deadly Spawn, one of my favorite movies I watched for the challenge last year. There are echoes of it here, but it's by and large its own, uh, beast. This one really kind of impressed me - the acting is so bad it's good, and there's like three locations used for the entire film, but I know where the money went - to the fantastic and creative menagerie of alien critters the film shows off. They're really quite charming (including one that looks like a boglin, a fearsome but so-ugly-it's-cute yapping alien dog and a venus fly-trap thing). The big monster is shown a lot and it looks really good for a movie of this kind and budget. It shoots out tentacles to latch onto people and spits out flying parasites! There's also some pretty effective body horror and loads of goop and blood. The guy is shown slowly mutating and it's really effective and gross. The movie also gets points for not being afraid to kill anyone, although I took some of those points back by the end, as way too many people who looked like they were in for a toothsome end show up just fine for some reason. All in all I can't quibble too much, this is about as fun as trashy low-budget B-movie horror can get; if you're a fan of creature features, you might actually enjoy this one.
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Oct 10, 2023 02:26
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 25) Frankenstein's Army (2013) Trailer Seen on: Tubi At the end of World War 2, a Red Army squad pushes into German territory to film propaganda and soon runs afoul of zombie Nazi cyborgs reanimated by a relative of Victor Frankenstein. Gotta love the classics. Well, this wasn't quite what I expected. It's grim and nasty, and I definitely wasn't expecting it to be a found-footage film; they even have a clever setup for why it is and it factors through to the end of the film - maybe this is an alternate universe where camera tech for the time period is advanced? On the one hand, the handheld camera gives this some tension, but on the other hand it sometimes feels a little too much like a first-person shooter, like Call of Duty crossed with Bioshock, or one of the new Wolfenstein games, really. The creature design is the star of the show here - there's some really imaginative, very creepy stuff on screen, the sounds are terrifying and I always welcomed seeing some new shambling monstrosity come forth to attack the characters. Part of why it's not as effective as I'd hoped though is because the characters aren't given any kind of depth or any reason for us to root for their survival, and when terrible stuff happens to them, it's just more FX work. Karel Roden is good as the crazy doctor, but he only really shows up for the last act. The ending is anticlimactic as well, which is too bad, because they prep you to see some more crazy stuff but it just peters out. Better than I expected but it left me slightly unsatisfied.  26) Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Trailer Seen on: Shudder A disfigured young man plots his revenge against the crooked developer who burned down his house to build a mall on the property. Lurking both in and underneath the mall, the titular Eric tries to protect his former girlfriend when she and her friends get too close to the truth of what happened. Ok, when I saw this was an update of Phantom of the Opera set in a mall, AND the marquee stars are a pre-MTV Pauly Shore and Morgan Fairchild, I knew I had to watch this. It turns out it was pretty fun! I'm kind of surprised that it turned out as well as it did; it's directed by Richard Friedman, who did Doom Asylum - a horror comedy I watched a few challenges ago and thought was disappointing. He also did episodes of 80's horror shows like Monsters, Friday the 13th: The Series and Tales from the Darkside, and this movie has that kind of vibe to it, like it could have been a made-for-TV movie but loaded with gore and nudity. It's clearly coming in at the very tail end of the slasher phase and feels more like a thriller or whodunit than a slasher film (maybe a giallo, but that's pushing it). The acting is cheesy, the kills are well done (king cobra in a toilet is a highlight) and there's some great stuntwork, especially at the end. If you ever wanted to see a movie where Morgan Fairchild is violently yeeted through an office window and is impaled on a model mall, look no further. The cast is wild! Pauly Shore is understated (!!) in the role as the best friend, Playboy Playmate Kari Kennell is the phantom's girlfriend, Rob Estes does weird acting with his eyes, Ken Foree is a mall cop, and the main bad guy went on to play The Most Interesting Man in the World in those beer commercials! Eric is kind of like a more violent Batman - dressed in a letterman sports jacket, a ballcap and half of a mannequin head as a mask, he's a trained martial artist and gymnast and kills guys who perv on girls in the mall. When he's reunited with his girlfriend, though, he turns into a dick, which is kind of a bummer but I guess that's the fate of all the Phantom of the (insert location here) guys.
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Oct 12, 2023 02:08
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 27) Oasis of the Zombies (1981) Trailer Seen on: YouTube A group of college students (and others) travel to the deserts of Africa to discover a purported treasure cache of Nazi gold left behind by ambushed German soldiers in World War 2. What they find is that the soldiers just won't stay dead and will kill to protect their treasure. Usually when I watch movies for this, I jot down some notes on my computer about what I thought of the film. The notes for this one only read "Dull, dark and dreary," and I think that about sums it up. It's a perfectly fine concept for a zombie movie, but it's so utterly slow and padded to hell and back with long flashbacks, sex scenes and B-roll footage of the desert (maybe the one nice part of it) that it doesn't impress at all. The zombie makeup is hilarious, the sound and music are terrible (what the hell is that clicking/scraping noise whenever the zombies appear?!), and the acting is atrocious. I started watching this on Tubi but the print was terrible, so I found a copy on YouTube that was a little better, but still hard to watch. The climactic scene takes place at night and I couldn't tell what the hell was going on! Bleah.  28) The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) Trailer Seen on: Tubi A rich English lord has just been released from an asylum, where he was recovering from the death of his wife, which drove him insane. Unfortunately the guy's still nuts, and he lures strippers and prostitutes who look like his wife to his estate where he tortures and kills them. His closest friends and helpers encourage him to remarry, and that doesn't seem to go well either...especially once his wife appears to be returning from the dead. The box cover on Tubi drew me in, but this wasn't what I expected - it's pretty much just an Italian gothic/giallo type movie with lots of nudity, crisscrossing plots and webs of intrigue (everyone has a plot against someone), and barely any characters to feel sympathetic for. I'm not sure if the movie wants us to root for the protagonist or not, because he's a bit of a murderer and no one seems to care or do anything about it?! They just go "oh, he's still not doing well, let's go have more drinks." It's stylishly shot and has some brutal kills, and in what is becoming a common theme for moviess I watch this challenge, it just ends abruptly mid-scene. I find these kinds of movies fascinating, mainly because it feels like I'm watching someone working out their kinks while they make a movie.  29) The Blood Beast Terror (1968) Trailer Seen on: Tubi Peter Cushing plays a police inspector dealing with a killing spree in his small English town; all the victims are men and are turning up without any blood in their bodies, and the only living witness is insane, ranting about something attacking from the sky. Could the geneticist down the road experimenting with insects have anything to do with it? You know, the guy who inadvertantly created a female human/deaths head moth werecreature hybrid? Perish the thought! This is a very cozy (I can't think of a better word for it) British creature feature with a unique monster but it looks like it ended up being marketed in the States as a vampire movie anyway. It's a nice little mystery/police procedural that also has a sense of humor about itself; several of the secondary characters are clearly providing comic relief, as if the movie is saying "look, it's a movie about a WEREMOTH, we're just loving around!" Cushing is good, of course, as is the rest of the cast, although we get to see very little of the monster in action, which is too bad. The way they defeat the creature in the end also made me laugh. I enjoyed this one quite a bit.  30) I, Madman (1989) Trailer Seen on: Tubi A bookstore clerk (Jenny Wright, who some of you will probably know as Mae from Near Dark) reads an obscure pulp horror novel, the titular "I, Madman," from a reclusive horror writer. Reading the book appears to have the unintended consequence of bringing the book's creepy villain, a deformed serial killer doctor, into real life, and people start dying for real. I remember reading about this movie a long time ago in a genre magazine like Cinemafantastique or Starlog, and finally got around to watching it. It's directed by Tibor Takács, the guy who directed "The Gate," and it's really kind of neat, even though it's hitting all the "horror protagonist pursued by something and no one believes them" beats to a T. The weakest link in the film for me is Wright herself, who I didn't care for in Near Dark, nor do I really care for in this; her acting just doesn't quite sell what's needed here. The story itself though is good, with some nice tension; the film also shifts around time periods in some neat shots (when she's reading the period-specific parts of the book), and the killer is a legitmately creepy character, played by the guy who designed the makeup for it. There's also a stop-motion creature that looks like a larger cousin to the minions in "The Gate" but it doesn't look as good as the creatures in that film did; wisely, they use it sparingly. This was a nice surprise.
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Oct 13, 2023 23:48
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 31) Absurd (1981) Trailer Seen on: Tubi An unstoppable murderer, pursued by a priest who describes him as "evil," escapes in a small American town and threatens the lives of a babysitter and the kids she's watching. Sounds kind of familiar, eh? Welcome to Joe D'Amato's John Carpenter's Halloween! This was originally supposed to be a sequel to Anthropophagus until star George Eastman (who played the cannibal in Anthropophagus and also plays the killer here) rewrote it to be an American-style slasher film. It's interesting in that it's an Italian-made film but it was shot in English and was aimed at foreign markets, and Eastman must have seen Halloween, because man, it really feels like it. Overall it's a better made film than Anthropophagus, which was just dull outside of the outrageous gore moments. The killer here is created through some mysterious religious experiments and he's granted an accelerated healing factor, so any damage inflicted on him short of destroying his brain just slows him down, allowing him to go on his Michael Myers-esque rampage. It's Super Bowl Sunday 1980 (they mention the Rams/Steelers game on TV) and everyone in the town is focused on the big game, including the parents and the police, so that Eastman's killer escapes the hospital and not enough people are around to stop him. Charles Borromel (who I recognized from the Ator movies) is the police sergeant who tries to track down the killer with the priest. Michele Soavi even shows up to get killed! This movie is, of course, known for its gore, which got it on the UK's video nasties list. Some of it is really well done (circular saw to the head), and there's one uncomfortable-looking kill via oven. And yes, it's an Italian horror flick, so it has an obnoxious high-pitched-voice little boy who acts weird. The end sequence where the final girl (who was bedridden for most of the movie) faces off against Eastman is actually pretty good.  32) Blood Lake (1987) Trailer Seen on: Tubi Six Oklahoma teens go on a summer trip to a cabin by a lake to get drunk, high and mess around. Unfortunately, there's someone there who wants them all dead. This shot-on-video curiosity is just plain weird. The people making it clearly were having fun, but the lack of technical prowess shows and it just goes on and on without any real action. The most cringe/amusing thing about the film is the horny 12-year-old (I think?) pervert who spends the film making dirty jokes, drinking beer and trying to sleep with the 12-year-old girl that was brought on the trip with them. Everybody can't act, the dialogue is embarrassing - when they're actually close enough to a mic to pick it up - and the killer is almost an afterthought. The night scenes are also too dark. It still has a few standout moments, like the nonsensical ending with the lake all dried up (cited in the credits as special lake effects by "an act of God") that really feels like they were trying to do something like the ending of "The Beyond"! The synth soundtrack is pretty good though, and there's some rock/metal/saxophone heavy songs (credited to a band called Voyager) that just feel hilariously period-specific to the film, but unless this type of amateur film interests you, you'd probably be better spending your time watching something else.
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Oct 14, 2023 12:19
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 33) Fiend Without a Face (1958) Trailer Seen on: YouTube In a small Canadian town outside of a U.S. military base, residents are beginning to turn up dead with their brains and spinal cords removed. The assailants are invisible and are growing more powerful by the day, thanks to the military's use of atomic power. An old scientist seems to have the answer, but is he also the cause? Fiend Without a Face is pretty slow for most of its run, with all the usual '50s subplots about nuclear energy bad and a budding romance between one of the military officers and a local farm girl, but what sets it apart from others of its kind are the goofy/creepy monsters that are menacing the population. Created from pure thought and bolstered by the ambient radiation, they invisibly crawl around with a weird heartbeat sound being their only tell (that and carpets and other things on the ground moving in their path). The last 20 minutes though are pretty memorable though as it turns into a siege film and we get to see what they look like - brains and spinal cords with legs, and when they're killed, they gooily sputter blood, a surprisingly gory effect! The stop-motion effects for the creatures are of their time and they look goofy as hell, but it's entertaining nonetheless. With this, I've now watched a total of 31 new-to-me films, which was my usual personal yearly challenge for this event  34) The Carrier (1988) Trailer Seen on: YouTube In the small god-fearing town of Sleepy Rock in the 1950s, Jake, a young man and the town's resident outcast, is attacked by a strange creature. Its wounds have made Jake the titular carrier of a disease that he spreads to any inanimate object he touches; if any living tissue then touches that object, they are dissolved, Wicked Witch of the West style, into the object. When people in the town start dying, factions spring up, cats are hoarded for testing objects, and everyone wraps themselves in plastic to avoid touching infected objects. Will a cure be found, or will the town shrivel up - literally? This low-budget oddity from Michigan is weirdly compelling and disturbing. It's got an interesting pedigree too, as several Evil Dead collaborators were involved in its production, including Peter Deming (Evil Dead 2's director of photography), Joe LoDuca (music for the Evil Dead franchise) and...Bruce Campbell?! (credited for recording sound effects!). While the movie's themes are pretty hamfisted - isolation ("I can't get near anyone without ruining everything," laments the main character in a funny bit of foreshadowing), mob mentality and health scares, religion vs. science - the action is anything but, as things get weirder and more post-apocalyptic for the townspeople (who can't leave, as a storm washed out the only bridge out of town). There's not really any gore, but the actors sell the dissolving deaths pretty well. There's a rape scene that doesn't end well for the rapist, when his victim decides to take them both out by touching a nearby infected object (it's established that if you touch someone currently dissolving, you start dissolving too). If you're a cat lover, the scene where the bored and angry townspeople start throwing cats and kittens against an infected object just to watch them die is hosed up (they use baby chicks as well). Neighbors turn on each other, they begin stockpiling infected objects to kill each other with, kids are threatened (and die!), and the rallying cry is "CATS OR DEATH." It's unlike anything I've watched this month, or in most previous challenges, come to think of it.
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Oct 15, 2023 11:17
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 35) Prison (1987) Trailer Seen on: Youtube Years after an inmate was wrongly executed at a Wyoming state prison, the guard who sent the man to his death is now warden of the re-opened, dilapidated facility. It turns out the spirit of the inmate is still around though, and he has a few scores to settle... This movie is apparently what got director Renny Harlin his Nightmare on Elm Street 4 job, and it's easy to see why - Prison is a solid little supernatural killer flick with a bunch of gory, imaginative kills that would be right at home in a NOES sequel (the standout for me was the isolation cells turned into ovens). Pre-fame Viggo Mortensen plays the ultra-cool Steve McQueen-esque car thief who has a possible link to the killings, and Lane Smith is great as the warden who slowly loses his poo poo as things start falling apart around him. Kane Hodder is apparently in the movie for a brief moment as the killer, and Tiny Lister is one of the inmates too! I liked how the spirit moving around is represented by a bright light moving through the catwalks and bars of the prison, a really striking and effective visual motif. Really enjoyed this one and wished I had seen it sooner.  36) The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1972) Trailer Seen on: Shudder The lives of a family of werewolves living in England is upended when the youngest daughter in the family brings home her new (unannounced) husband. I watched this because it has one of those famously weird movie titles, and there are only rats here because apparently the movie was too short when originally completed, so they added a bunch of footage of one of the characters buying man-eating rats based on the popularity of Willard! But, man, gently caress this movie. There's a sequence where one of the younger daughters in the family, shown to be a sadistic poo poo, essentially tortures a live mouse on camera with candle wax, a knife and a hammer and nail (the last is really implied, but still). My already low expectations were pretty much gone by that point; it was a difficult scene to watch but I know why it was thrown in - because 99 percent of this movie is just loving people talking and talking and talking, constant exposition and terrible acting, and it needed SOMETHING provocative to happen. There's essentially no action or any blood or real makeup effects until the last 10 minutes, and by that point, I was doing my best Tom Servo "END! ENNNNNND!" impression. Ugh.  37) Skinamarink (2022) Trailer Seen on: Shudder Two young children are trapped late at night in their house and tormented by an unseen presence. To say that this has been one of the more divisive horror films released in recent memory is a bit of an understatement. I can totally understand why people don't like it, you either vibe with what it's doing or you don't. I enjoyed this for the most part because it has some great moments of dread ("Look under the bed") and freaky imagery, but I really, really hate the jump scare visuals/sounds that are essentially used to "end" different scenes; they cheapen the skin-crawling moments that come before. I also think this one bothered me more than most films because I have a kid, and moments where kids are in peril in movies like this bugs me a lot; while not a lot is shown here, the kids here are put through a lot of hosed up stuff. I could also see how a lot of this is going to seem silly and over the top to some without that kind of touchstone.
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Oct 20, 2023 10:29
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Name Change posted:Half the plot of this movie was added on after the fact when the original story didn't have enough screen-time to be shown theatrically, so they went back and tacked on the man-eating rat nonsense because this was the same year Willard came out. Truly garbage filmmaking. I know, I said that in the first line of my review! But yes, definitely agreed on the "garbage filmmaking" part.
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Oct 20, 2023 10:47
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Name Change posted:That will teach me to try to read posts at 3 AM I've been there before, no worries lol.
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Oct 20, 2023 11:15
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gey muckle mowser posted:Everyone talks really fast too, like they’re rushing to deliver all their terrible lines before the next scene that’s just more of the same YES, I forgot to say that in my review but I was definitely thinking about that. I thought there were one or two actors in the film who could have been ok if they'd just slowed down, but there were some (like the new husband) who just have zero emotion in their line readings and it's just neverending. Gyro Zeppeli posted:God, thank you! I'd seen this movie aaages ago and enjoyed it, but could never remember the name. Totally didn't remember Viggo being in it though. Definitely gonna rewatch this one ASAP.  Yeah, it was a surprise for me - I wasn't sure what to expect because aside from remembering the video box as a kid, it doesn't get discussed too much anymore; apparently video was the only place you could watch it for a very long time, until it got a U.S. DVD release in the early 2010s.
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Oct 20, 2023 13:30
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 38) The Day it Came to Earth (1977 or 1979 depending on the source) No trailer that I could find Seen on: YouTube A meteorite lands in a lake where an executed mob victim was dumped. Some local kids and a scientist find the meteorite and abscond with it, but what they don't know is the meteorite has reanimated the corpse and it rises from its watery grave to begin pursuing them. This is a pretty obscure local Arkansas production that apparently did well on the drive-in circuit; it feels like a deliberate homage to earlier films of its type from the '50s and '60s - like The Blob but with a zombie - but I could see it being a completely earnest amateur film as well. The creature looks like a slightly less messy version of the patriach from the Father's Day segment of Creepshow, and I swear it's a Don Post monster mask that I used to see in old magazines (the mummy in the top row here) and it's wisely kept in the dark for most of the runtime. What really brings this down is (again, assuming it's hewing to its roots) is all of the expository dialogue that just goes on and on, and sometimes it feels like they're parodying the science speak from older films. There's not really any gore here or anything scary (the film has a PG rating); the creature is creepy in spots but overall it's just dull.  39) Witchboard (1986) Trailer Seen on: Shudder A woman introduced to a Ouija board during a party thinks she's contacting the spirit of a 10-year-old boy, but she's actually contacted something much worse that's trying to kill everyone around her and take possession of her. Kevin Tenney's directorial debut is much more subdued than his later Night of the Demons, but it still manages to have a little bit of flair to it. While the acting and dialogue is just ok (the two male leads in a love triangle with Tawny Kitaen are a cheesy hoot), there's a fair bit of tension here, even when we know where the movie is going. I liked the Evil Dead-esque camerawork that pops up when the spirit is around, and I also really liked the first big kill setpiece in the film which was a surprise. Kathleen Wilhoite, who I enjoyed in Dream Demon a few years ago, shows up briefly as a Valley Girl psychic who is also subject to a grisly doom; the spirit in this movie really likes its defenestration, and one shot near the end is particularly neat in how it was filmed, even if it looks a little weird.  40) The Dark (1993) Trailer Seen on: YouTube An rear end in a top hat retired fed (Brion James!) and a grizzled research scientist (Stephen McHattie!) are at odds with each other tracking down a giant prehistoric ratlike scavenger creature that lives in a graveyard. The local police get involved (Neve Campbell?!) but it might be too late to stop the mayhem. Wow, this was a weird one. The former is hunting down the rat monster for killing his partner, but the latter has discovered that the creature is secreting a liquid that accelerates the healing process and might explain its longevity, and he wants to capture it alive. The monster itself is a pretty decent creation kept in the dark most of the time, and they actually manage to make you feel a bit of sympathy for it; yes, it's a scavenger eating dead bodies, but it leaves people alone unless you threaten it, which is of course what happens here. There's some uncomfortable stuff here; McHattie's love interest is a waitress who is being verbally and physically assaulted by a biker in the diner she works in when she's saved by him (in a ludicrous sequence involving a big gunfight and explosions! What movie am I watching?!), and she just comes along for the ride for no reason at all other than the movie wanted to have a sex scene pretty early in and to have an expository audience stand-in for the rest of the film with zero personality. Neve Campbell's deputy is also sort of swept to the side for most of the film. Still, it's a decent enough monster movie with some great over-the-top performances by the leads, especially from Brion James, who chews on more scenery than the giant rat monster.
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Oct 21, 2023 11:25
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Ambitious Spider posted:
 STAAAY! (sorry, couldn't resist)
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Oct 21, 2023 13:04
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It's funny that I consider this movie to have one of the most unnerving sights I've ever seen, but Goldie Hawn's eyes clouding over as the second act goes on just freaks me the gently caress out. M_Sinistrari posted:Pretty much the main bit of trivia with this is Mickey Hargitay who plays the executioner was once married to Jayne Mansfield and is Mariska Hargitay's father. Mickey Hargitay owns in that movie, it's a fun watch.
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Oct 21, 2023 15:56
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The Vindicator was in heavy rotation on USA Network in the late '80s iirc and I always thought it owned. Great suit, cheesy as hell, and I always thought the "guy can't touch the people he loves or he'll kill them" angle was a creepy touch. I always thought the most laughable effect in the movie was the acid guns or whatever that Pam Grier's people use, it's just like animated beams.
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Oct 21, 2023 23:27
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 41) Timesweep (1987) No trailer that I could find Seen on: YouTube A group of people who enter an old movie studio that's about to be condemned find themselves instead trapped inside the building by an acid fog and fighting for their lives as the building appears to travel through time and space, unleashing horrific attackers on them. I'd never heard of this one before, and it's pretty wacky. It's like someone watched the end of My Science Project and decided they wanted to make a horror movie out of it. According to one extra's YouTube video comments I found while trying to search for a trailer: "The fellow who was the prime mover of this flick was a B-movie fanatic who had cashed in all of his savings to make this movie ... he was living out of his Honda Accord (parked in the freight bay of this building)." It certainly does feel like a fan film, as it's one of those movies that gets real cute about its genre references (characters named H.G. Lewis, Florrie Ackerman and Mike Romero, among others) and directly references lost or meta joke movies like London After Midnight and See You Next Wednesday. We're introduced to a large group of characters, but don't worry about figuring out who they are or get attached to them, as about 8 minutes in people start dying - stabbed by spears, attacked by savages, eaten by cockroaches, dismembered by bizarre monsters and hunted by alien zombies. There's something here for everyone! The acting is terrible and the makeup and gore effects aren't too bad, although some of the creatures are laughable. Also get used to a lot of corridors and claustrophobic filmmaking because that's all you're getting here. The whole thing just sort of peters out in the end, but it's a fun little oddity to watch regardless.  42) Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975) Trailer Seen on: Tubi A beautiful young American girl traveling through Mexico leaves a trail of dead bodies drained of blood behind her, and the local cops and U.S feds are close to tracking her down. But who's the sinister man in black who's following her with malicious intent of his own? (It's John Carradine!) Some striking cover art for this U.S./Mexican production, that's for sure, although naturally there's nothing representative of it in the film. This is probably closer to a giallo in terms of style and content than anything else, but it lacks the visual flair you'd expect from a production like that. The titular girl is compelled to drink the blood of who victims, who she seduces and drugs, but she's not your typical vampire - there's references to an ancient death goddess that might be influencing things, but Mary doesn't burn in sunlight, etc. There's plenty of nudity, car chases, and what looks like the on-screen death of a shark? I couldn't tell if it was fake or not. The acting is all over the place, and Carradine shows up for a few minutes at the end to warn Mary about what she's becoming and to stop her, but by that point I didn't really care anymore.  43) The Prey (1983/1984 depending on source) Trailer Seen on: Tubi A group of college kids hiking in the California mountains are picked off one-by-one by an unseen murderer. Filmed in 1979 but not released until after Friday the 13th and its ilk defined horror for the early part of the '80s, The Prey is a pretty standard slasher nonetheless. There's apparently several verisons of this one out there, all of them offering up various amounts of padding. Now don't get me wrong, it's good-looking padding - the cinematography of the mountains and surrounding wildlife is actually quite good, and if the movie does one thing well, it creates a great sense of place - but the movie's actual content is slight. We're treated to lots of POV shots of the killer with a heartbeat underneath it all; the college students are all the typical sterotypes, and famous character actor Jackie Coogan shows up to eat his lunch and provide the movie's backstory. Carel Struycken plays the disfigured murderer (the poster says "It's not human" but it clearly is!), although we don't get to see too much of him, which is too bad. If there's one thing the movie nails, it's the downbeat ending with a chilling, uncomfortable implication that I wasn't expecting.
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Oct 23, 2023 10:35
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Vanilla Bison posted:
"We sit in the sun and wait. We sleep...and we dream...each of us dying slowly in the prison of our minds." Yeah, that ending creeped me out.
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Oct 24, 2023 19:36
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twernt posted:48. Lifeforce I definitely want to see this version of
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Oct 25, 2023 00:54
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 44) Frightmare (aka The Horror Star; 1981/1983 depending on source) Trailer Seen on: Tubi When vain and murderous horror film actor Conrad Radzoff dies, the local college film group decides to do a "Weekend at Bernie's" with his corpse. Unfortunately for them, Conrad didn't plan on staying dead, and with some handy black magic and technological wizardry, the college kids discover they're in a real-life horror movie of their own making. Well, this one was going for something different. It's very tongue-in-cheek and the tone bounces between comedy and horror but doesn't quite stick the landing. Longtime British actor Ferdy Mayne is having fun as the bad guy, and this movie is apparently Jeffrey Combs' first major role (and later video/DVD releases make a big deal of that) - no surprise, he's a lot of fun for what little he has to do. There's telekinesis, pyrokinesis, swords, flying coffins, gas traps and more used to thin the cast - I loved that the guy built a mausoleum and turned it into a death trap! Even for a goofy horror movie, though, it really asks you to stretch your belief about the plot, as most things happen with no rhyme or reason, just that the script demands that this part happen next. It's like a Scooby-Doo episode where the villain is real and does get away with it, gently caress those meddling kids.  45) The Kindred (1987) Trailer Seen on: YouTube When his scientist mother dies, a young doctor discovers that she had been dabbling with some questionable genetic experiments using his DNA and sea life. Heeding her request to destroy her work, he brings his friends to her old house and discovers that he has a little brother named Anthony he never knew about - a very icky little brother with murderous tentacles and a major love of slime. Hey, you - do you like mad scientist and monster movies? Do you like your monster movies slimy? I mean, really slimy? Then have I got the movie for you! This movie owns, and I'm sad that it took this long for me to see it. In the first 15 minutes alone, we have a fiery car crash, Rod Steiger (devouring the scenery every moment he's on screen) experimenting on a skinless mutant cat, and a guy being killed by a basement full of deformed mutants! And those mutants have nothing to do with the rest of the film! What a value! Seriously, the creature effects in this one are pretty good - Anthony is an ugly little sucker and there are some impressively gruesome kills - never thought I'd see a kill scene involving a car, a watermelon and a tentacle up the nose, but it's here and it's great. Amanda Pays, my major 1980s pre-teen crush, is in this too, and she has a secret that culminates in another shocking FX moment. My favorite part about the entire movie is the real hero isn't the lead actor, but instead the guy from Grease 2 who sang "Let's Do It For Our Country" - he plays the flippant comic relief who has a great Chekov's gun setup and does a lot of the heavy lifting that saves everyone's rear end in the end. The last half hour or so of this movie is extraordinarily gooey and it never stops being entertaining. If you like creature features, you should definitely check this one out.  46) Bog (1979) Trailer Seen on: Tubi A prehistoric bipedal fishman is awoken by dynamite fishing in a backwoods swamp, and the town's police and resident scientists have to figure out how to act threatened and not laugh at one of the lamest movie monster costumes I've ever seen. Shot in Wisconsin and looking all the world like a Bill Rebane movie, yet having nothing to do with him, Bog is a real snoozer. And I really mean it about Rebane, this movie has the same "small town cop, older male and female scientist" combo trying to figure out what's going on, like it's this director's take on the Giant Spider Invasion, but even that movie had cool VW bug spiders. The monster in Bog is on screen for about 2 minutes for the whole film and for good reason - it looks terrible. I liked that at one point they consult an eyewitness' drawing of the creature and they know it's so bad that they don't even bother to show the viewer the drawing either. The film opens with a love song, the acting and writing is very bad, and the story meanders everywhere. The creature needs the blood of women to reproduce for its egg sacs, but don't worry, there's no Humanoids From the Deep action here, although it propbably wishes it did. Hope you enjoy the romance between the scientists because it gets more time here than the monster does. Very disappointing.
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Oct 26, 2023 01:56
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 47) Night Vision (1987) (Fan-made) trailer Seen on: Tubi A naive small-town Kansas writer moves to the Big City, where he doesn't fit in among the hardened and calloused cityfolk. Amid falling in love and befriending the best short gangster you'll ever see, he winds up with a demonically possessed VCR in his apartment that allows him to see the future and possesses him. Hope you like "you're not in Kansas anymore" jokes! This was not what I expected from something with that cover. The horror element of a cult who videotapes their ceremonies and curses a VCR feels completely tangential to everything else going on. What takes up most of the running time is a coming-of-age or fish-out-of-water drama with some comedy and romantic elements with the horror stuff bolted on. The main character feels like he belongs in a 1984 afterschool special and everyone he runs into is a very, very broad stereotype (the hardened, guarded girl with a heart of gold, the short guy who acts tought to survive, the nosy battleaxe of a boarding house owner, etc.). There's not a whole lot I found interesting here, it's not scary or particularly interesting, and the tone is all over the place (some very, very broad comedy here too), but it does have heart, I guess. Just don't expect Videodrome.  48) Macabre (1980) Trailer Seen on: Tubi One year after a woman witnesses her lover die in a gruesome car accident and is released from a psychiatric hospital, she moves back into the boarding house where she held her affair. The nice young blind guy who takes care of the place suspects something's up though when he hears the woman talking to her lover in the throes of passion...is she nuts, or is he back from the dead? The answer will shock and terrify you! In past challenges, I've seen Lamberto Bava's The House of Exorcism (wild trash) and Shock (standard giallo elevated by a good Daria Nicolodi performance). Macabre is what he directed after those films, and it definitely lives up to the title. Bernice Stegers (wife of Mike Newell!) really goes for it as a woman who doesn't give a poo poo about her family - her pre-teen daughter is a Bad Seed-style little poo poo who is not afraid to lie, murder and blackmail people, as a result - and who is obsessed with her dead lover, a little too much. This is one of those films where you go "no, that's not what's happening, that's too easy a guess" but it does it anyway and then it keeps going. What's interesting is most of the movie is sort of told from the point of view of the blind character, and we're shown things he can't see, which leads to some tense scenarios. The last half hour keeps escalating everything, and the last shot of the film is a classic Italian horror non-sequitor  moment that was not informed or telegraphed at all by anything that came before it. A fun watch, if you can keep your head about you. 49) Don't Go In the Woods (1980) Trailer Seen on: Tubi In the forests of Utah, an unseen animalistic killer is mowing down campers left and right. That's it, that's the movie. Another slasher film with a video box I remember from when I was a kid, Don't Go in the Woods is a bad movie, but fortunately, it's a so-bad-it's-good movie and it kept me fascinated and entertained. I'll give it this much, it rarely gets boring - there's killings nearly every five minutes here, like an extraordinary amount of victims and gory kills! The movie will cut away from our ostensible main characters just to introduce one or two people who'll act goofy for a few minutes (including goofy synth music on the soundtrack) and then they die. Jason would be envious of this guy! Speaking of the music, it's a terrible synth soundtrack that will live in your head for days, with its weird squawky/blippy minimalistic sounds and tonally inconsistent composition. The "killer is stalking someone" music just sounds like a clumsy synth version of the Jaws theme and it's played CONSTANTLY. The acting is wooden, the handheld camera bounces all over the place, and I'm pretty sure all the dialogue in the film is ADR'ed. The killer's costume is great too, my notes say "Viking who went to Mardi Gras" and apparently some other people on other review sites were thinking the same thing when I checked. Look, I can't promise that this is a good movie or worth anyone's time, but I can't say it was the worst thing I watched this month either.
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Oct 30, 2023 00:15
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Ambitious Spider posted:
Yeah the spoilered part owned. When I watched through the first 10 or so of these the other year, this one really struck me as trying something different because it's the first time in three movies that they actually have a scientific crew come check it out instead of just defaulting to the church.
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Oct 30, 2023 00:19
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 50) Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998) Trailer Seen on: Tubi Directly picking up after Phantasm III, Mike and Reggie are separated as they both take different strategies on how to approach dealing with the Tall Man once and for all. After the agreeable action/horror shenanigans of Phantasm II and III, IV tries to makes a hard swerve back into the fever dream/nightmare feel of the first film, and I'll be honest and say I don't know that it completely succeeds. There's a lot of narration and flashbacks, including the use of film from the original Phantasm that didn't wind up in the first movie, which is kind of neat. The movie as a whole is very melancholy and downbeat, as the characters begin to deal with the inevitability that they might not beat the Tall Man and that the world is not going to make it. Mike is turning into...something else...thanks to the Tall Man and a lot of his stuff in this movie feels like Jedi training? or something like that? as he develops otherworldly powers. Angus Scrimm also gets to do more than just scowl, as the film explores what he was before he became a nightmare guy - I like that he gets more to do, but I didn't feel the need to have his origin explained. The biggest mistake is just giving Reggie the same stuff to do - he gets a diet version of the last two films, where he gets beat up, shotguns monsters, creeps on a girl who isn't what she seems and is the butt of the joke. I liked this stuff in II and III but since he's the only one doing it here without the support of the rest of the film, it stands out like a sore thumb. I'm this far in and I still like these characters, so I'll eventually check out the fifth film, but it really feels like diminishing returns at this point.  51) Harbinger Down (2015) Trailer Seen on: Tubi After a fishing vessel pulls the frozen wreckage of a Soviet spacecraft out of the Bering Sea, all hell breaks loose when the mutant tardigrades in the wreckage thaw out and things get real slimy. After Amalgamated Dynamics had a bunch of their practical FX work replaced in post in the 2011 The Thing prequel, heads Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. decided to make their own practical FX monster movie with blackjack and hookers. Turning to Kickstarter for funds, the film received nearly $400k (and some additional money from outside backers), and Harbinger Down was born. I feel bad that these guys had their work replaced, but unfortunately this movie just kind of sucks. It's like a Sci-Fi network movie with slightly better effects than usual. Lance Henriksen is the only name actor in the cast, and as you'd expect, he's good but he can't save the film. The rest of the actors are unknowns and not very good (Stan Winston's son plays the early human antagonist to the hilt, which I kind of enjoyed), the writing is filled with bog-standard cliches, and with its low budget, the movie looks very cheap. The biggest disappointment are the creature FX - mutant tardigrades sounds like a cool idea for a movie monster, but the result here looks like a combination of the 1982 The Thing, the 1988 The Blob and maybe Leviathan (which this movie reminded me a lot of). Lots of tentacles, teeth, and pulsing masses of flesh, but there's no clear design and the monsters are sort of translucent so it just doesn't stand out like it should. It even copies a kill from the '88 Blob that was scary there but here is just kind of laughable because there's no weight behind any of it. So disappointing.  52) Planet of the Vampires (1965) Trailer Seen on: YouTube Two exploratory spacecraft set down on an alien planet to check out a distress beacon. What they find instead is a whole lot of fog and invisible aliens that are trying to take over their bodies. This Mario Bava film was a real treat; it's like the Italian horror version of Forbidden Planet. The science dialogue is typically overwrought (the "meteor rejector" device on the ship is a major plot point) and the acting is not much to write home about, but the real standout here is the visual design. Everyone wears awesome black leather spacesuits and the alien planet is a colorful, fog-filled haunted house. There's a much balleyhooed scene where two of the astronauts explore the planet's surface and find a derelict alien vessel with giant alien skeletons in it which clearly looks like it inspired the similar scene in Alien (apparently Ridley Scott and Dan O'Bannon denied this for years, but O'Bannon came out more recently and admitted he took it from this, I guess?). It's a really creepy scene, as is the part where a bunch of the astronauts that been killed and buried on the planet's surface are reanimated by the alien villains and wrench themselves up from their burial plots, tearing their way out of the plastic bags they've been buried in. Overall I really liked this, and it has a great Twilight Zone-esque ending as well. And that's all I'll get to watch or write up, so I'm all done. Wrap-up post tomorrow! Bruteman fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 10:21
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Wrap-up post! In total, I watched 52 films – 50 new to me and 2 rewatches (for challenges). I met my self-imposed challenge of at least 31 new watches and filled out the bingo card. I handily beat my count of 39 from last year but still fell short of my personal high of 64. 1) In Search of Darkness: Part III (2022) 2) Burnt Offerings (1976) 3) Warp Speed (1981) 4) The Hunger (1983) 5) The Mummy (1999) *rewatch 6) The Mummy (1932) 7) The Munsters (2022) 8) The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) 9) Def by Temptation (1990) 10) Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) *rewatch 11) The Willies (1990) 12) The Seventh Curse (1986) 13) Tales From the Hood 2 (2018) 14) Alligator 2: The Mutation 15) Infección (Infection) (2019) 16) Wyrmwood Apocalypse (2021) 17) Metamorphosis (1990) 18) Wolfen (1981) 19) Hellbent (2004) 20) Celia (1989) 21) The Empty Man (2020) 22) Popcorn (1991) 23) The Mutations (1974) 24) Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor (1990) 25) Frankenstein's Army (2013) 26) Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) 27) Oasis of the Zombies (1981) 28) The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) 29) The Blood Beast Terror (1968) 30) I, Madman (1989) 31) Absurd (1981) 32) Blood Lake (1987) 33) Fiend Without a Face (1958) 34) The Carrier (1988) 35) Prison (1987) 36) The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1972) 37) Skinamarink (2022) 38) The Day it Came to Earth (1977/1979) 39) Witchboard (1986) 40) The Dark (1993) 41) Timesweep (1987) 42) Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975) 43) The Prey (1983/1984) 44) Frightmare (1981/1983) 45) The Kindred (1987) 46) Bog (1979) 47) Night Vision (1987) 48) Macabre (1980) 49) Don't Go In the Woods (1980) 50) Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998) 51) Harbinger Down (2015) 52) Planet of the Vampires (1965) And here’s how the challenges shook out: CineD HORROR THREAD POLL CHALLENGEThe Abominable Dr. Phibes: https://letterboxd.com/goatgonzo/list/you-will-not-leave-this-house-alive-sa-horror The Empty Man: https://letterboxd.com/goatgonzo/list/i-have-to-return-some-videotapes-sa-horror FREDDY VS. JASON 20TH ANNIVERSERY CHALLENGEAbbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein BIRTH OF HORRORBurnt Offerings ROB ZOMBIE 20TH ANNIVERSARY CHALLENGEThe Munsters PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK…..IN SPACE!!!Celia ”THAT GUY” CHALLENGE FEATURING DICK MILLER AND KEITH DAVID Tales From the Hood 2 THE EXORCIST 50TH ANNIVERSERY CHALLENGEDef by Temptation HORROR ADJACENTWarp Speed WHEN ANIMALS OF UNUSUAL SIZE ATTACK!Alligator 2: The Mutation CHILDHOOD TRAUMA Wolfen BACK OF THE VIDEO STORE CHALLENGEMetamorphosis BITE-SIZED HORRORThe Willies THE SAMHAIN CHALLENGEHellbent Meta challenges: NEW-TO-YOU 6/6In Search of Darkness: Part III Burnt Offerings Warp Speed The Hunger The Mummy (1932) The Munsters HISTORY LESSON 5/5The Mummy (1932) - 1930s Burnt Offerings - 1970s Warp Speed - 1980s The Mummy (1999) - 1990s In Search of Darkness: Part III - 2020s AROUND THE WORLD 4/4The Abominable Dr. Phibes - Europe The Seventh Curse - Asia Infección (Infection) - South America Wyrmwood Apocalypse - Australia HORROR IS FOR EVERYONE 3/3Hellbent - A film by an LGBTQ+ director, or a film that deals with LGBTQ+ themes Def by Temptation - A film by a black director, or a film that deals with themes related to POC. Celia - A film directed by a woman, or a film with feminist themes Personal awards: Favorite five: The Kindred, The Seventh Curse, Wyrmwood Apocalypse, Planet of the Vampires, Prison. Bottom rung: Oasis of the Zombies, Bog, The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! Best low-budget monsters: Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor Most slime per moment: The Kindred Best opening: The Hunger Weirdest movie: The Carrier Best defenestration of Morgan Fairchild: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge -- Thanks to Basebf555 for organizing the challenge! I liked how the challenges were set up this year, it allowed a lot of flexibility to combine them (or not). Also thanks for everyone for posting their reviews!
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Nov 1, 2023 09:53
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:17 |
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I'll opt out of movie codes as well, if it's not too late - someone else will have more fun with them!
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Nov 2, 2023 18:28
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