The Old Dark House/Satan's Little Helper/Halloween III: Season of the Witch
Now that Halloween is here to bring Scary Movie Month to a close, I figured I might as well go all out. Every day this month I've watched a new-to-me movie, so today it's two of those plus a perennial Halloween favorite.
I started with The Old Dark House because it ain't Halloween without a bit of Karloff and because Horror-Hound Hollywood Heath Holland recommended it earlier this month. It was great, and I have no idea why people seem to have forgotten it. It's gothic horror with the same light touch that director James Whale brought to The Bride of Frankenstein. Also, this was the first Hollywood film of Charles Laughton, who would go on to direct one of my favorite movies of all time, The Night of the Hunter (another great Scary Movie Month choice if you haven't seen it).
It leans more toward comedy than horror, but the gloomy atmosphere lends itself nicely to the Halloween season. Elspeth Dudgeon (a woman) is particularly memorable as the 100+ year old patriarch of the crazed family living in the titular house. There's no mistaking her for a man, but her performance somehow works anyway and it is, as they say, a hoot.
On to Satan's Little Helper. I had to watch it because Adam Riske said some things that made me curious. He said that it's not better than John Carpenter's Halloween, but he'd sooner rewatch it than Halloween. Those are strong words, and while I absolutely understand the concept of respecting or even loving a movie without necessarily wanting to revisit it, my brain still cannot process what he said.
That being said, this isn't a bad movie! I'm not sure if "amiable" is the right word for a movie about a small child befriending a serial killer and becoming his unwitting accomplice, but that's what this movie is. It's an unabashedly goofy little movie that never takes itself too seriously and it's a fun watch. It's all very cheap and silly (and it appears to have been shot with a cell phone) but that's part of the charm. Also, it was a nice surprise to see a cameo from Lisa G of The Howard Stern Show (era).
While I really enjoyed it, there were a lot of things that didn't work, the most egregious of which was the old horror movie trope where somebody kills a masked person only to pull off the mask to find a completely different person than they expected underneath. This happens multiple times in this movie to the same character, to the point where you're left wondering if they have a learning disability. Problems aside, it's still a fun & entertaining movie, even if I can't imagine anyone on the planet choosing to watch it over Halloween. Sorry, Adam!
Finally, we have Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a movie I watch every year on Halloween. It's a movie made by an insane person, possibly a team made up of nothing but insane people, and I love every batshit crazy second of it. It's had a terrible reputation for years because the plot has no connection to the plot of the first two Halloweens, but it's by far my favorite of the sequels (I also like Halloween 4 a lot and I appreciate what H20 was trying to do, but that's pretty much it for the rest of the series). This is a movie unafraid to commit to a crazy premise and that goes a long way with me. If you haven't seen it, forget about the number in the title, it's completely standalone. Watch it and bask in the glory of Tom Atkins' mustache facing off against a diabolical mask-maker and his robot minions who are plotting to wreak havoc on Halloween night with lasers made out of pieces of Stonehenge. No, really.
All in all, it's been a great Scary Movie Month, even with all the crappy movies I sat through. I'm still glad to have the opportunity to see so many new horror movies and chat about them with everyone over at F This Movie! and on Twitter. I appreciate everyone who's read these (especially those who have offered feedback) and I hope everyone's having a safe and fun Halloween! Don't forget to be in front of your TV at 9pm for the big giveaway. Put your mask on and listen for the Silver Shamrock jingle. Happy happy Halloween!
Friday, October 31, 2014
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 30
All Hallows' Eve
On Halloween night, two kids and their babysitter sit down to watch an unlabeled VHS tape that was dropped into one of the kids' trick-or-treat bags. This scary videotape, according to shots of the TV while they're watching it, is in anamorphic widescreen so rock on, forward-thinking VHS company!
The tape is our framing device for an anthology consisting of three stories and a wraparound, but I'm using the word story as loosely as possible. There's no real story to any of them, just a collection of nightmarish images that are just as hollow as a pumpkin on Halloween night. Those images can be scary, but truthfully this isn't even a movie that's interested in being scary, it just wants to be as "fucked up" as possible, which is frankly boring to me.
Horror movies tend to (falsely, for the most part) have a reputation of misogyny. That reputation is earned by movies like this in which women exist only to be raped, mutilated, terrorized, and murdered. I defy anyone watching this movie to tell me anything at all about the women in each segment. You can't, because they have zero defining characteristics beyond physical appearance. They're beyond thinly sketched, they're anorexically sketched (I may have made that word up, but you get the idea). That's not to say the male characters are any more fleshed-out (they're not) but the movie revels in violence against women in a way that's leering and ugly. Then again, leering and ugly seems to be this movie'a mission statement, for better or worse. Mostly for worse.
On Halloween night, two kids and their babysitter sit down to watch an unlabeled VHS tape that was dropped into one of the kids' trick-or-treat bags. This scary videotape, according to shots of the TV while they're watching it, is in anamorphic widescreen so rock on, forward-thinking VHS company!
The tape is our framing device for an anthology consisting of three stories and a wraparound, but I'm using the word story as loosely as possible. There's no real story to any of them, just a collection of nightmarish images that are just as hollow as a pumpkin on Halloween night. Those images can be scary, but truthfully this isn't even a movie that's interested in being scary, it just wants to be as "fucked up" as possible, which is frankly boring to me.
Horror movies tend to (falsely, for the most part) have a reputation of misogyny. That reputation is earned by movies like this in which women exist only to be raped, mutilated, terrorized, and murdered. I defy anyone watching this movie to tell me anything at all about the women in each segment. You can't, because they have zero defining characteristics beyond physical appearance. They're beyond thinly sketched, they're anorexically sketched (I may have made that word up, but you get the idea). That's not to say the male characters are any more fleshed-out (they're not) but the movie revels in violence against women in a way that's leering and ugly. Then again, leering and ugly seems to be this movie'a mission statement, for better or worse. Mostly for worse.
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 29
The Bay
Finally toward the end of it all, Scary Movie Month earns its name. I've watched good, bad, fun, silly, smart, and stupid movies this month, but this was the first that was legitimately, deeply scary. It's found footage (one of the reasons I avoided it until now) but the gimmick works much better here than in most found footage movies, and since the footage comes from multiple sources (news footage, surveillance cams, Skype, vlogs, etc.) the majority of it is not the nausea-inducing shaky-cam that plagues so many found footage movies.
There's something in the polluted waters of the Chesapeake Bay, something deadly. Thousands of dead fish have floated to the surface, and now people are getting sick and dying, quickly and messily. The story is being told by a survivor, along with the conceit that a Julian Assange-type has uncovered and assembled the footage we're seeing to show what really happened despite governmental cover-ups.
Everything is very immediate thanks to it being found footage, which manages to increase the horror of the situation. As we see doctors and the CDC scurrying around trying to figure out what's going on, the sense of impending doom is palpable and legitimately frightening, not dissimilar to Soderbergh's Contagion only much scarier. The ending is a bit abrupt, but the movie is tremendously fast-paced and the scares build throughout. There are even a few solid jump scares on top of the terror that's already building, so there's something for horror fans of all tastes.
The environmental message is of course a bit heavy-handed, but the movie never comes across as preachy. I imagine if, say, Richard Donner had directed it it could've drowned in its obvious politics, but the focus here is on scaring the shit out of you, which it does extremely well. I don't scare easy (at least not when it comes to movies), but this is the real deal. Terrifying.
Finally toward the end of it all, Scary Movie Month earns its name. I've watched good, bad, fun, silly, smart, and stupid movies this month, but this was the first that was legitimately, deeply scary. It's found footage (one of the reasons I avoided it until now) but the gimmick works much better here than in most found footage movies, and since the footage comes from multiple sources (news footage, surveillance cams, Skype, vlogs, etc.) the majority of it is not the nausea-inducing shaky-cam that plagues so many found footage movies.
There's something in the polluted waters of the Chesapeake Bay, something deadly. Thousands of dead fish have floated to the surface, and now people are getting sick and dying, quickly and messily. The story is being told by a survivor, along with the conceit that a Julian Assange-type has uncovered and assembled the footage we're seeing to show what really happened despite governmental cover-ups.
Everything is very immediate thanks to it being found footage, which manages to increase the horror of the situation. As we see doctors and the CDC scurrying around trying to figure out what's going on, the sense of impending doom is palpable and legitimately frightening, not dissimilar to Soderbergh's Contagion only much scarier. The ending is a bit abrupt, but the movie is tremendously fast-paced and the scares build throughout. There are even a few solid jump scares on top of the terror that's already building, so there's something for horror fans of all tastes.
The environmental message is of course a bit heavy-handed, but the movie never comes across as preachy. I imagine if, say, Richard Donner had directed it it could've drowned in its obvious politics, but the focus here is on scaring the shit out of you, which it does extremely well. I don't scare easy (at least not when it comes to movies), but this is the real deal. Terrifying.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 28
The Beast Within
So apparently supernatural rapists are a running theme this month. I didn't plan that and can't say I'm too fond of it, yet here we are.
We open on just-married Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch driving through the woods. Their car breaks down (because movies) and Cox goes to get help, leaving Besch to get raped by a creature in the woods. Cut to 17 years later and their son Michael is exhibiting strange behavior and alarmingly bad dental hygiene. I bet he never even sent the rape-creature a Father's Day card.
It's an oddly structured movie in that it's not a mystery, we know Michael is half-Carol Marcus and half-rapey-woods-monster from the beginning, but the movie sort of treats it like a mystery, as if that might be someone else tearing people's throats out in full close-up. There is a sort-of-reveal toward the end (along with one of the better decapitations I've seen in a movie, so it's got that going for it I guess) but it's deflated by how unsympathetic Michael is to begin with. He's already a part-time monster when we meet him, so we never really get a chance to know who he is outside of that.
The movie is notorious for a transformation scene in the climax, and it's impressively goopy but also very rubbery. While they use similar techniques to the famous transformation in An American Werewolf in London, it's nowhere near as effective and looks nowhere near as good.
It's not a terrible movie, but it's not a particularly good one either. As much as I love the commitment to 80s goopiness, the similarly-themed 50s classic I Was A Teenage Werewolf is still a more consistent and more interesting (and more fun!) watch. Better letter-jacket-attired-monster in that one, too.
So apparently supernatural rapists are a running theme this month. I didn't plan that and can't say I'm too fond of it, yet here we are.
We open on just-married Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch driving through the woods. Their car breaks down (because movies) and Cox goes to get help, leaving Besch to get raped by a creature in the woods. Cut to 17 years later and their son Michael is exhibiting strange behavior and alarmingly bad dental hygiene. I bet he never even sent the rape-creature a Father's Day card.
It's an oddly structured movie in that it's not a mystery, we know Michael is half-Carol Marcus and half-rapey-woods-monster from the beginning, but the movie sort of treats it like a mystery, as if that might be someone else tearing people's throats out in full close-up. There is a sort-of-reveal toward the end (along with one of the better decapitations I've seen in a movie, so it's got that going for it I guess) but it's deflated by how unsympathetic Michael is to begin with. He's already a part-time monster when we meet him, so we never really get a chance to know who he is outside of that.
The movie is notorious for a transformation scene in the climax, and it's impressively goopy but also very rubbery. While they use similar techniques to the famous transformation in An American Werewolf in London, it's nowhere near as effective and looks nowhere near as good.
It's not a terrible movie, but it's not a particularly good one either. As much as I love the commitment to 80s goopiness, the similarly-themed 50s classic I Was A Teenage Werewolf is still a more consistent and more interesting (and more fun!) watch. Better letter-jacket-attired-monster in that one, too.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 27
The Battery
Well, it took 27 days of swimming through Andy Dufresne's sewage-choked escape route to get here, but I've finally found this year's Dead & Buried, i.e. the one movie that stands head and shoulders above everything else I saw throughout Scary Movie Month. This is a truly great movie.
Zombies have been overdone to the point where I find myself actively avoiding anything featuring them. I love Romero's original Dead trilogy (yes, even Day, sometimes especially Day) and have affection for a few others like Return of the Living Dead, The Serpent & the Rainbow and Dead Heat (sue me, it's fun), but the amount of terrible zombie movies out there far outweighs the good ones. A lot of people I respect adore The Walking Dead but I tapped out two seasons ago, I found it to be an ugly and repetitive mess like so many other zombie stories (including Romero's later work, unfortunately). When looking for something new to watch, zombie movies are typically going to be toward the bottom of the list.
All that being said, The Battery is terrific, and a refreshing change of pace from the typical zombie fare. The story follows two ex-ballplayers who have managed to survive the first wave of the zombie apocalypse and are now traveling across New England, thrown together more by necessity than friendship. That's not to say there's no camaraderie between them (it could get grating if all they did was bicker like the Blair Witch kids, for example) but there's a tension between them that's always simmering beneath the surface. Both lead performances are strong, they each have moments where they could come off as completely unlikable but they somehow never do, even when making decisions that are not necessarily heroic.
There's a particularly audacious scene late in the movie, a single take that runs somewhere around 10 minutes that is so well staged that I didn't even realize I was holding my breath until I let it out before almost passing out. It was a moment so rare in movies, one where I realized I genuinely had no idea where the movie was going that took a situation I've seen in countless movies and made it feel completely fresh. That alone would have made this movie a win for me, but I found it genuinely engaging from beginning to end and giving me a zombie movie I've never seen before. I'm impressed, and I'm excited about whatever writer-director-star Jeremy Gardner does next.
Well, it took 27 days of swimming through Andy Dufresne's sewage-choked escape route to get here, but I've finally found this year's Dead & Buried, i.e. the one movie that stands head and shoulders above everything else I saw throughout Scary Movie Month. This is a truly great movie.
Zombies have been overdone to the point where I find myself actively avoiding anything featuring them. I love Romero's original Dead trilogy (yes, even Day, sometimes especially Day) and have affection for a few others like Return of the Living Dead, The Serpent & the Rainbow and Dead Heat (sue me, it's fun), but the amount of terrible zombie movies out there far outweighs the good ones. A lot of people I respect adore The Walking Dead but I tapped out two seasons ago, I found it to be an ugly and repetitive mess like so many other zombie stories (including Romero's later work, unfortunately). When looking for something new to watch, zombie movies are typically going to be toward the bottom of the list.
All that being said, The Battery is terrific, and a refreshing change of pace from the typical zombie fare. The story follows two ex-ballplayers who have managed to survive the first wave of the zombie apocalypse and are now traveling across New England, thrown together more by necessity than friendship. That's not to say there's no camaraderie between them (it could get grating if all they did was bicker like the Blair Witch kids, for example) but there's a tension between them that's always simmering beneath the surface. Both lead performances are strong, they each have moments where they could come off as completely unlikable but they somehow never do, even when making decisions that are not necessarily heroic.
There's a particularly audacious scene late in the movie, a single take that runs somewhere around 10 minutes that is so well staged that I didn't even realize I was holding my breath until I let it out before almost passing out. It was a moment so rare in movies, one where I realized I genuinely had no idea where the movie was going that took a situation I've seen in countless movies and made it feel completely fresh. That alone would have made this movie a win for me, but I found it genuinely engaging from beginning to end and giving me a zombie movie I've never seen before. I'm impressed, and I'm excited about whatever writer-director-star Jeremy Gardner does next.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 26
The Entity
Director Sidney J. Furie, who gave us the godawful Superman IV: The Quest For Peace and the #HeavyAction classic The Taking of Beverly Hills dips his toes into the well-populated waters of supernatural horror and creates, well, a Sidney J. Furie movie. On that note, I owe Paul Verhoeven a letter of apology. I thought Hollow Man was the sleaziest possible take on The Invisible Man, but Furie has proven me very, very wrong.
Here Furie presents a supposedly true story. When the poster says "based on a true story" and the credits say "based on a novel by" it seems like a contradiction. Novels are fiction, and of course fiction can be based on truth but still...pick a lane, movie. Considering Barbara Hershey is raped by a ghost in the first five minutes, I'm gonna go ahead and consider this a work of fiction. Such is my bias when it comes to ghosts, rapey or otherwise. The ghost keeps raping her throughout the movie ad nauseum, including once in front of her children which is the most vile thing I've seen on screen all month (and I remind you I sat through ABCs of Death 2 this month).
In between all the ghost-raping there's Ron Silver and Alex Rocco taking this all too seriously. Maybe they think they're making The Exorcist, but they're not even making Exorcist II: The Heretic. Congratulations, Sidney. You managed to make a movie I like less than Superman IV.
Also, bonus points for having one of the worst scores I've ever heard, each "haunting" is accompanied by an electric pounding that sounds like a migraine set to music.
Director Sidney J. Furie, who gave us the godawful Superman IV: The Quest For Peace and the #HeavyAction classic The Taking of Beverly Hills dips his toes into the well-populated waters of supernatural horror and creates, well, a Sidney J. Furie movie. On that note, I owe Paul Verhoeven a letter of apology. I thought Hollow Man was the sleaziest possible take on The Invisible Man, but Furie has proven me very, very wrong.
Here Furie presents a supposedly true story. When the poster says "based on a true story" and the credits say "based on a novel by" it seems like a contradiction. Novels are fiction, and of course fiction can be based on truth but still...pick a lane, movie. Considering Barbara Hershey is raped by a ghost in the first five minutes, I'm gonna go ahead and consider this a work of fiction. Such is my bias when it comes to ghosts, rapey or otherwise. The ghost keeps raping her throughout the movie ad nauseum, including once in front of her children which is the most vile thing I've seen on screen all month (and I remind you I sat through ABCs of Death 2 this month).
In between all the ghost-raping there's Ron Silver and Alex Rocco taking this all too seriously. Maybe they think they're making The Exorcist, but they're not even making Exorcist II: The Heretic. Congratulations, Sidney. You managed to make a movie I like less than Superman IV.
Also, bonus points for having one of the worst scores I've ever heard, each "haunting" is accompanied by an electric pounding that sounds like a migraine set to music.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 25
Chopping Mall
Sorry to steal Patrick Bromley's thing here, but while I was warned that this one was awful, it wasn't. It was...fine. Those who are familiar with Patrick know precisely the tone of frustration mixed with resignation with which that "fine" should be said.
For an 80s movie directed by Jim Wynorski and featuring teens being hunted through a mall by laser-equipped killer robots, it still manages to feel utterly generic. Cameos by the likes of Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, and Dick Miller are always welcome, but they don't do the movie any favors in the "I haven't seen this before" department.
The characters are the thinnest of cardboard, not even the sturdy corrugated stuff. I've already forgotten all their names, and I finished watching it maybe 10 minutes before I wrote this sentence. Still, it's not actively bad and there are a few fun moments (one very cheap head-explosion in particular made me laugh out loud) but it's not good either, and certainly not worthy of either great title (apparently "Chopping Mall" was the title once it hit video, the original title was the more generic but also more apt "Killbots"). Lastly, I've said it before and I'll say it again: stop wasting Gerrit Graham, movies! He's the best, and one scene ain't enough to enjoy it.
Sorry to steal Patrick Bromley's thing here, but while I was warned that this one was awful, it wasn't. It was...fine. Those who are familiar with Patrick know precisely the tone of frustration mixed with resignation with which that "fine" should be said.
For an 80s movie directed by Jim Wynorski and featuring teens being hunted through a mall by laser-equipped killer robots, it still manages to feel utterly generic. Cameos by the likes of Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, and Dick Miller are always welcome, but they don't do the movie any favors in the "I haven't seen this before" department.
The characters are the thinnest of cardboard, not even the sturdy corrugated stuff. I've already forgotten all their names, and I finished watching it maybe 10 minutes before I wrote this sentence. Still, it's not actively bad and there are a few fun moments (one very cheap head-explosion in particular made me laugh out loud) but it's not good either, and certainly not worthy of either great title (apparently "Chopping Mall" was the title once it hit video, the original title was the more generic but also more apt "Killbots"). Lastly, I've said it before and I'll say it again: stop wasting Gerrit Graham, movies! He's the best, and one scene ain't enough to enjoy it.
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