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God Told Me To was tremendous. For something so low-budget the ever inventive Cohen did his best to make a super realistic film on the streets of New York, probably using no permits, filming riot scenes with police and protesters, stock footage of building collapses, etc. Tony Lo Bianco (who you might remember as the out-of-his-depth Italian heroin smuggler in The French Connection) kills it in his role here, which takes a serious left turn a quarter of the way through the proceedings. There's a great monologue done by an older actress who I swear I've seen before, and the cult leader from I Drink Your Blood shows up as a pimp! To really go in-depth on it would be to give away the twist so I just recommend watching it cold. Great movie.

EDIT: Nevermind, not the cult leader from I Drink Your Blood, the black dude from I Drink Your Blood. He was so crazy in that movie I couldn't not remember him. 

Spoiler

Idrinkyourblood.jpg

 

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57 minutes ago, J.T. said:

Urgh.  It is that time of year again where TCM does the awesome and unthinkable thing of showing the absolutely king sized Kwaidan at some ungodly hour in the middle of the night.  

I will comb through the schedule and make sure I DVR it this year.

 

Hey what day is that? Can't find it on the list. The Baby is on Sunday at 1 AM so that seriously needs to be DVRed. 

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We Are Still Here was pretty fun. I liked it playing with the conventions of the current haunted house trend. The pacing is messy, but I liked the premise of the characters being trapped between two different supernatural forces trying to kill them. And I had no idea Barbara Crampton was in it, so that was a pleasant surprise. 

After years of aborted attempts I finally sat through Suspiria. I'm not sure how it got such a great rep. Technically it's pretty neat, but I didn't find anything outside of the first five minutes compelling at all. In fairness I'm not a huge Argento fan to begin with, but I would certainly rate Opera over this. The Goblins soundtrack rules though. 

Berberian Sound Studio isn't quite horror, but I'm not sure where'd you place it outside of maybe psychological thriller. I loved seeing Toby Jones as a lead. The movie within a movie was quite amusing coming off of watching Suspiria. I saw some wild theories about what's going on, as the movie sort of abandons a narrative in the last half hour, but it seems to be a pretty straightforward parable about being desensitized to violence or  aggression in general. It's weird, uncompromising, and very well made, but I wouldn't call it a fun watch by any means. 

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Technically it's only one supernatural force trying to kill the tenants in We Are Still Here in order to sacrifice them to another supernatural entity. When they renege on their end of the bargain it then falls to the townsfolk to get the job done. Although to be fair there's probably far more explained in the credits via the newspaper clippings than is explained in the actual movie.

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I totally forgot about the direct to video remake back in 2009:

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Excellent jacket art for what is reported to be a really awful movie.

Larry Cohen, the director of the original, completely panned it so I will avoid it like the plague.

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52 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

Shame that the last thing Larry directed was "Pick Me Up" for Masters of Horror back in '06. He's credited for the It's Alive remake's screenplay so if he panned it, it must be bad.

Cohen had a really bizarre career spanning from horror to sci-fi to blaxploitation.   He had a talent for doing more with less. 

Q, The Stuff, and It's Alive all had B-Movie feels and they were still fairly well received critically and they managed to make a little money.

He's definitely one of my grindhouse idols.

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I watched a movie called Solo (not the Van Peebles one, this one is from 2013) on Shudder the other night, and despite its strange plot set-up, I quite enjoyed it as a movie to turn your brain off for 90 minutes. Basically, a girl is a new camp counselor, and as part of her training, she has to spend a few nights alone on a woodsy island, because sure, why not? Anyway, creepiness ensues, as you'd figure. If you need a simple movie to fall asleep to, it's not bad.

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Thank God for the Internet. I've been able to track down nearly every fragmented memory of weird things I happened to see on television as a kid. In this case it was something I only saw a few minutes of at my grandparents' house while I was prepping to go trick or treating probably 25 years ago. It terrified me, so naturally I've just discovered it was actually a horror comedy made for ABC in 1985 called The Midnight Hour.

Spoiler

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I don't know if I would have been quite so spooked if I'd tuned in for the bobo-Thriller musical number.

Also, I ended up on William Ragsdale's IMDB after watching Fright Night, and I was reminded of another huge movie from the same time in my childhood, Frankenstein: The College Years, which, if you're not familiar, is Encino Man with The Monster. 

Spoiler

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I'll have to give that another watch and program it with Big Man on Campus, which is essentially the exact same movie but with The Hunchback of Notre Dame. All of this stuff is on YouTube for anyone that's interested.

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ABCs of Death 2.5: In each ABCs of Death they have a contest open to the public to determine the 26th short.  In ABCs of Death 2 that was for the letter M, won by M is for Mastication.  This is like the next best 26 shorts from that contest, so they're all for the letter M.  A title card at the start said they were picking from about 500 submissions.  I didn't see any directors' names that I'd ever heard of before.  It's a lot more difficult to remember exactly what happened when all the shorts were for the same letter, but I can think of seven that I thought were at least very good (Make Believe, Manure, Matador, Meat, Mobile, Mom, Mormon Missionaries) and a hit rate of roughly 25% exceeded my expectations.  There was also one example of "this looks really good but clearly you only had enough money to make it 75 seconds long" and one of "this short is so terrible I can't believe you would even waste your time making it" (but it did end up getting picked for this, so hey).

Also watched The Wailing this past weekend.  Good first two hours and great final half-hour + ending, and it did keep me off-balance all the way through, but not sure if the script was a little too smart for its own good.  Would need a rewatch.

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Since pre-Halloween plans fell through on Sunday due to a pet emergency, I got together with my buddy and his girl last night after we did our Misfits cover band Teenage Martians on Saturday (which turned out pretty good despite having had exactly zero practices with all members there at the same time). He hooked up a Youtube playlist that was all horror themed and it lasted five fucking hours. Seeing the Thriller video, the Count on Sesame Street, and hearing the theme song to the Munsters brought me back to my childhood in a big way. There was also this which was jaw-droppingly awesome:

So all in all, a damn good Halloween. Happy Samhain/Dia de los Muertos!

EDIT: Okay, Dia de los Inocentes. You know what I'm driving at

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