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October HorrorDays 2014


Burgundy LaRue

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Am I the only one who hates the Coffin Joe movies?  Especially the first one.  I never understood why one of the townspeople didn't just murder the cocksucker and be done with it.  He's got no superpowers, no Rambo-like special skills, no nothing.  He's just a sociopath and nothing else.  And he's cutting off people's fingers in a crowded bar, constantly bragging about murdering folks, kidnapping the women, etc.  Why doesn't someone just shoot him?  And too many of the scenes made me feel like the writer/director was getting off on the stuff he created, like when he's slapping girls around (with REAL slaps) or having giant spiders crawl all over naked actresses who are clearly legit freaked out by having to enact this bullshit.  

 

The way I understood it, the townspeople were too afraid because Coffin Joe was godless--eating meat on Friday, killing his wife on a religious holiday, etc.  They saw him as being the living embodiment of the Devil.  Still, they could have gotten a priest to perform sort of ritual to at least protect them from Coffin Joe, I would think.

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We watched FT13: The Final Chapter and I caught something that bothers me that I never caught before.It may be a poor edit or something but...

When Jason kills Crispin Glover's character, Teddy is in the next room watching a movie while the girl Glover hooked up with is upstairs. Jason kills Glover, then instead of going to the next room to kill Teddy he goes outside, CLIMBS THE FUCKING HOUSE, waits for the girl to look out the window so he can break it and throw her to her death, goes back inside, gets the knife/cleaver he used on Glover and then goes in the next room and kills Teddy. I'm all for suspending disbelief in slasher films but this pattern of kills just baffled me.

 

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Part of the Coffin Joe movies are about insulting Catholicism and the religious in general, portraying them as ignorant and superstitious, which is why the townspeople never have the guts to just string him up. To me that's a more interesting philosophical conceit to explain a dumb plot-point in a horror film than "the teenagers always decide to split up and get killed because of that", for example. The films also seem to exist in their own hallucinatory world as well, somewhat outside of actual reality with frequent breaks in the mental state of the character and due to that I tend to overlook things that don't make any sense. 

 

EDIT: It's interesting how well Mojica was playing to his audience too. The documentary on him opens up with some kind of live gig he's doing and it's like a tent revival, with him telling the audience "you are dying and burning in Hell" and they react like it's actually fucking happening. Apparently rural Brasilians were indeed that superstitious because he had the effect of a snake-handling Southern preacher on them which was honestly shocking to see.

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Am I tripping or was the cut of Friday V on AMC that just played different than the one I've always seen? I remember a closeup of Jason pulling the machete out of the dude's belly, which was always hilarious to me because they cut it backwards as he actually killed that guy first. 

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Watched Monkey Shines last night for the first time since I was a kid. I didn't realize it was a Romero film! Anyway the lead is funny to me when he just overacts his anger/rage scenes. Wife and I got some good laughs out of this. 

 

Monkey jump scares don't get me like they used to.

Edited by ingrsco
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V/H/S 2

 

This was light years better than the first anthology.   The quality of the shorts is still uneven and this outing gets off to a very slow start but it picks up relentless steam in the middle and offers a rather satisfying conclusion.

 

The third short, Safe Haven, is one of the most disturbing things I've seen in a while but overall, I found A Ride In The Park to be the most riveting piece.  Just when you thought you couldn't dress up the zombie genre anymore, here comes this excellent short that manages to cleverly gimmick together found footage with shambling undead corpses.

 

Slumber Party Alien Abduction was mean spirited fun.  I usually don't fall for jump scares, but this one got me a couple of times.

 

I wanted to like Phase 1 Clinical Trials and its interesting take on The Sixth Sense, but it just devolves into a cheap version of The Eye with Hannah Hughes's boobs thrown in as a very effective distraction.

 

If you enjoyed the first movie, then you are sure to dig this one as well.

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Oh yeah, VHS2 is so much more fun. Like you I thought the eye prosthetic one was the weakest. It wasn't bad, it just didn't seem to click. The other ones worked really well, I'm especially jealous of whoever came up with the zombie piece. Great idea.

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Safe Haven was amazing.  I watched it through disreputable means and my copy somehow didn't have any subtitles, but the lack of subtitles took nothing away from it.  That's how well done Safe Haven is.  Oh, and I'll second JT's assessment of the rude titties.

 

I checked out Deliver Us from Evil over the weekend.  It was thoroughly average; nothing amazing but not terrible.  It had some good ideas and at least gets some points for being a horror film not based on a haunted object or house.  The story is about a New York cop (Eric Bana) investigating a series of paranormal-related crimes linked to Iraq war vets.  The guy from The Soup plays the sidekick, which sucked.  The Jesuit priest on the edge character is played by a dude who looks like a male model, so there's something for tha ladiez.  There's a good exorcism scene at the end, but it has to be the fastest successful exorcism in cinematic history, spectated by a stereotypical AW HELL NAW black guy.  In the end, you'll shrug and say, "eh, it was allright, I guess."

 

I tried to read the book, which is supposed to be the true memoirs of a cop who helps out with exorcisms and hauntings, but the cop in question is so incredibly religious that it was a turn off for me and I only got maybe 50 pages in.  Luckily, the movie only used the book as a general idea and the creators of it elected to make the film as a sort of prequel to the book, where the cop has not yet been born again.

 

But anyway, check it out if you have nothing else to watch.  Not great but not the worst thing I've seen.  YMMV.

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Man, fuck Dish. You need to at least switch to DirecTV... we might be missing some good OWN/Oxygen/Lifetime updates from you after that but hey.

 

I actually enjoyed watching the end of Friday VIII. The drowning in the drum of nastiness is even better than the boxing fatality to me. All the reactions of the locals to Jason stomping around on their territory (either anger or apathy) is great too and I always laugh at the punx listening to hip hop on the ghettoblaster. The beginning of Jason Goes To Hell is always great but I can't stand to bother with it after the heart-devouring. The FBI agent woman might be one of the finest in the entire series.

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Awesome.  Patton Oswalt I think did a whole blog post about "The Thing on the Fourble Board" awhile ago.  He said it messed him up in a big way just hearing it in his car one day.  The ending very well might get to some of you.

 

Another famous one:

 

 

 

"Look.  My portrait.  IN RATS!!!!"

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Man, fuck Dish. You need to at least switch to DirecTV... we might be missing some good OWN/Oxygen/Lifetime updates from you after that but hey.

 

I actually enjoyed watching the end of Friday VIII. The drowning in the drum of nastiness is even better than the boxing fatality to me. All the reactions of the locals to Jason stomping around on their territory (either anger or apathy) is great too and I always laugh at the punx listening to hip hop on the ghettoblaster. The beginning of Jason Goes To Hell is always great but I can't stand to bother with it after the heart-devouring. The FBI agent woman might be one of the finest in the entire series.

 

But why does it turn him back into a 10 year old boy?  And, wait, they run toxic waste through the New York sewer system at midnight every day?  What?  Man, they clearly had no idea how to stop Jason outside of "trap him at the bottom of the lake."

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Yeah none of that shit makes ANY sense whatsoever. Jason's melting face is cool though. 

 

Something I was thinking of: I wonder how many people get thrown through windows, dead or alive, in the series total. It seems like there are at least two per film, either one person dying from it or another just a dead body tossed through one for a scare. Or Jason busting through a window or door. We need to calculate these.

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Do you know how hard it is to throw a dead body through a window?

 

I like to picture both Jason and Pamela in those moments like Kurt Angle on Shane McMahon, doing a belly-to-belly suplex in order to get them up and over.  But that is a lot of extra work to go through just for the effect of it.  And then you have to sit there and wait and hope that she chooses to cower right by the right window otherwise you have to pick up the body and run to the other side of the cabin.

 

Or have a few bodies ready, one at each window.  But still that's a lot of running around to then have to lift and throw someone who's dead weight.

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Now I just imagined Jason German suplexing somebody with their head and upper body just splattering. I mean we know he has a hell of an Iron Claw...

 

Did I mention how much I hate JGTH's soundtrack? Manfredini really fucked that up, it's so irritating. And I forgot how much I love Jason X, this movie is hilarious. 

 

EDIT: Ha, this is turning into Jason vs. the Colonial Marines. An Omen marathon is on AMC this weekend just y'all know.

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Personally I would have been offended if a schlockspoitation series took itself too seriously to eventually:

 

1) Go to New York and

2) Go to space and

3) Go up against another IP

 

It's textbook.  In it's way it is pure and authentic.

 

Plus there were some pretty decent moments of dread and suspense in JASON X.

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13. Halloween II: This isn't bad, though not a patch on the original.  I do like the fact that Donald Pleasence is directly responsible for the death of an innocent teenage boy and it's just kinda swept aside (In case you don't remember, he sees a guy dressed like Michael Myers and pulls his gun on him, while he and the cop wrestle over whether or not he should shoot him, the guy runs across the street only to get smashed into by a speeding cop car, pinned against a van where he burns to death.  Later on a group of teens tell a cop their friend never made it home after a party.  And the really messed up thing is that as the guy is pinned against the van, Pleasence and the cop run off when they hear something on the radio and the cops just leave him there to burn!).  Apparently, according to IMDB, John Carpenter (who didn't direct this time) filmed a handful of gory scenes and edited them into the movie because he didn't think it would succeed without some gore despite the new director's attempt to mimic the feel and style of the original.  So, yeah, not bad.

 

14. Halloween III: Season of the Witch: This, however, is just genuinely TURRIBLE.  Tom Atkins plays a doctor who has a patient come in one night and ends up getting killed by a guy who sets himself on fire afterwards.  Attempting to help the man's daughter get some answers, they drive to a small town with a Halloween mask factory and everyone is kinda spooky and people mysteriously die and...oh God it's just so bad.  Apparently, also according to IMDB, the plan with the Halloween series was to make a new Halloween-related scary movie every year, turn it into an anthology, so there is no Michael Myers or anything related to the first two movies (Save for the original playing on a TV) but this bombed badly and they went back to Myers the next year.  Also, there is no witch.  Just thought I'd better add that.

 

15. Scary Movie 3: This is my favourite of the series.  It's so stupid but the funniest one, as it eschews the gross-out gags in favour of 'Airplane' style parodies.  There's nothing else in the series that makes me laugh as hard as the fat guy riding the upside down chair in 'The Ring' video; the reverend telling the guy to "Swing away" at which point he repeatedly bashes that little kid with the baseball bat while trying to save him; or the flashback which parodies 'Signs' where the guy has hit Reverend Charlie Sheen's wife and is sitting on the curb and says "Tom, I'll need a ride home afterwards."  It kinda falls apart in the end with the aliens and the rappers but, hey, what do you want?!

 

16. Blacula: I expected this to be...better.  It is one of the earlier instances of a sympathetic Drac...er...Blacula but, eh...  The sound is awful, the stereotypes are bad, and the homophobia is really dreadful.  Blacula's a pretty badass vampire, though, and there's one really good terrifying scene.  Maybe I'd over-anticipated this one since I've wanted to see it for like 22 years and finally got around to it.

 

17. Child's Play 2: I actually thought this was quite a bit better than the original.  So, despite four people who would have corroborated the story of the evil doll at the end of Part 1, Andy has been placed in foster care and told that what happened was a bad dream/fairy tale and his mother is in psychiatric care (i.e. she didn't want to do another movie).  Meanwhile, the toy company has, for reasons that make no real sense to anyone, acquired the burned-up Chucky doll and put it into a new doll who, of course, comes to life and goes out looking for Andy.  I thought the plot structure of this one was way more entertaining with Chucky terrorizing Andy and no one willing to believe him. I also thought it was pretty funny that the other child in Andy's foster home is played by a 25-year-old actress who looks even older so it's especially hilarious when she says stuff like "Next year I'm going to be on my own" leaving you to yell at the TV "You're 25...get a job already!"  Anyways, the end stretch is particularly grotesque with Chucky getting maimed in new and creative and horribly off-putting ways.

 

18. Garfield - In Disguise: Man, this is, bar none, the scariest kids Halloowen special ever.  It terrified me and my siblings when we were little with Garfield going out trick or treating and having to deal with evil pirate ghosts.  Watching it, it kinda struck me that you don't see Halloween specials like this anymore with mentions of death, drunk pirates, and terrifying old men and ghosts.  Kids nowadays are such sissies.
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