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Halloween Havoc : Season of the Witch


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Thanx for keeping this in spoilers, folks. I still haven't seen it. It was spoken highly of by a friend, who unfortunately saw it on opening night and had his experience ruined by talking teenagers -- definitely the wrong crowd for THAT kind of movie. 

The same friend, paradoxically, tends to have what I consider a shitty taste in horror sometimes (he'll tend to like any old crap, like World War Z for instance, but then say Nekromantik "sucked". What can I say, he's a millenial). So if it kept his attention, it must be good.

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5 hours ago, Contentious C said:

All this talk about how great Toni Collette is makes me wonder if I stepped into an alternate reality where the last 20 years didn't happen.

You mean she has been great for 20 years right? Because I mentioned I have been a fan since Muriel's Wedding. Hell, she even made Krampus worth watching. I mean, it was a date movie, but still.

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“They were still all beautiful and there was still enchantment and wonder, but she had crossed a line and now the fairy tale was green with corruption and evil.” 

 Stephen King, Carrie
 
“Henry,' at last said one, again dipping the spoon into the flaming spirit, 'hast thou read Hoffman?'
'I should think so,' said Henry.
'What think you of him?'
'Why, that he writes admirably; and, moreover, what is more admirable - in such a manner that you see at once he almost believes that which he relates. As for me, I know very well that when I read him of a dark night, I am obliged to creep to bed without shutting my book, and without daring to look behind me.'
'Indeed; then you love the terrible and fantastic?'

'I do,' said Henry. ("The Dead Man's Story”) 
 Hain Friswell 
 
Film: Tales From The Darkside: The Movie
Chosen by: jaedmc

 

I struggled mightily with what I should pick. Most of the participants have probably seen anything worth watching already. And I debated over certain franchise installments that I think are worth another appraisal. But in the end I went with an anthology film, a subgenre that I personally love, especially if the framing device is right. 

Tales From the Darkside has a ridiculous cast and crew behind it. Jullianne Moore, Deborah Harry, Steve Buscemi, Christian Slater, that dude from the New York Dolls, Rae Dawn Chong, and a young Matthew Lawrence. The stories have a good range, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to Stephen King, to Japanese Myth fitted to 80's New York. And the framing device, a combination of Hansel and Grettal and Arabian Nights, is one that I'd love to see in more movies. There's just something about kids being the ones to tell the most horrible stories that connects to me and my youth. 

It does a good job of knowing when to be humorous and when to get fucking disgusting, making it a film groups would particularly enjoy.

 

Reviewed by: nate

 

I have loved horror anthologies every since I first saw “Asylum”and Bava’s “Black Sabbath” on the “Late Late Movie” when I was a kid.  I always liked the conceit of, basically, four or five movies in one.  It didn’t really matter if there was a strong bookend tale to tell or not; just give me the main tales and I’m good.

Given that TFTD: TM is an adaptation from an anthology television show, it’s easy to have high hopes.  Rest assured, all four stories herein – three tales proper, plus the bookend tale that wraps around them all – are worth the price of admission.

Everything starts midway into a quasi-update of the Hansel and Gretel fable, as witch Debbie Harry plans for a lovely meal of roast Timmy, who we find out during the scene is a boy trapped in a cage in the kitchen.  To attempt to prolong his chances of escape, Timmy regales the witch with three stories of the macabre.

The first story, “Lot 249” – adapted from the short story by Arthur Conan Doyle – involves a college student who finds a way to resurrect an ancient mummy to seek revenge on his enemies.  Steve Buscemi, two years away from “Reservoir Dogs” and six away from his role in “Fargo”, is quite fun to watch.  His put-upon manner, plus the twist ending, makes this probably the strongest story of the bunch.

The next story, “The Cat From Hell,” is another adaptation of a short story.  Buster Poindexter plays a hitman hired by William Hickey (the voice of Dr. Finkelstein in “Nightmare Before Christmas”) to kill a common housecat.  Since we’re talking about a film segment based on story written by Stephen King and a screenplay from George Romero, this cat is anything but common.  A fairly lackluster story, I consider this one saved again by the acting, this time – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – the hammy chicanery of Poindexter in the hitman role; shamelessly he chews the scenery, but how would you expect to play a role opposite a demonic murderous feline?

The last tale, “Lover’s Vow,” is the weakest of the bunch.  This appears to be an original tale written for the film, and it’s just a standard “doomed lovers” tale with no real punch to its twist ending.  But, hey, it stars Rae Dawn Chong at the height of her role as “early ‘90s hottie” and HOLY CRAP, SHE’S 57!!

I rented this from the Video Place, along with “Jacob’s Ladder”, for a first date with a girl in high school who lived about four blocks up the road.  She said, “Pick anything … it doesn’t matter.”  After TFTD:TM, she stopped sitting on the couch with me.  Halfway through “Jacob’s Ladder,” she just went ahead and asked me to leave.  No second date.  So, thanks for fucking that up, “Tales from the Darkside.”

 

 

 

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Damn dude. That reminds me of bringing Napalm Death and Minor Threat records to a high school hangout with some random chicks and the neighborhood assholes I was hanging out with then and being told to leave after they listened. Only worse. (Jacob's Ladder though dude? Seriously?)

It also amuses me greatly that neither of you could remember David Johansen's name haha

As for the film itself, its fine. It's no Creepshow 1 or 2, and no Two Evil Eyes (ugh), so kinda middle of the road as '80s /early '90s horror anthologies go. It's still totally worth watching. And Buster is great.

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I debated on whether to post the film trailer or the series intro because I really loved that thing back in the day. If I could have found it, I would have gone with the commercial for the syndicated version that aired around here, which was show clips set to The Platter's Twilight Time. 

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I have to thank for JT his comments on Warlock from the previous page. Julian Sands and Richard Grant are two people I recognize and like in whatever I might see them in today but could never fucking remember what it was I first saw them in until those comments. I saw the Warlock movies when I was fairly young so they didn't really stick that well with me memory wise. That said I have to feel extra guilt for forgetting about them in Arachnophobia and Hudson Hawk since I love those movies.

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Since you like Richard Grant so much I hope you've seen Withnail and I. It's the funniest film about alcoholism ever, next to Barfly. (In fact those may be the only two films about alcoholism that are actually funny. Beerfest too, maybe, depending on whether or not you find it funny.)

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“There's wickedness, dark as night. There are things that are wicked and if you touch them, they know you. They know where to find you now".  
― S.P. Miskowski  Knock Knock  
 
“THEY are afraid of nothing,' I grumbled, watching their approach through the window. 'Together, they would brave Satan and all his legions.” 
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights 
 
Film: Mandy
Chosen by: Lawful Metal AKA The Man With No Review 
 
MANDY.  Is my pick.  Absolutely 100%.  If someone beat me to it, fuck them, I was talking about it first.   
 
Reviewed by: S.K.o.S.
 

I was the first one to sign up for Halloween Havoc this year, and then the first to drop out, as I realized I didn't have time to watch a bunch of movies in order to be able to pick something.  Then, a few days later, Execproducer let me know that someone needed to review Mandy.  I had seen it in the theater a couple weeks prior, so that worked out well in terms of time commitment, but I'm also having to go from memory on a lot of this.  Also I was still buzzing from drinks with dinner for like the first hour.

The plot is: Nicolas Cage plays Red Miller, Andrea Riseborough plays Mandy Bloom.  They live together and are happy.  Then a religious cult shows up, called Children of the New Dawn, I believe.  They try to recruit Mandy, she's not interested, and they end up killing her in front of Red.  Red is very sad, but then gears up and gets his revenge.  Except it might not be quite so simple, because the Children have ties to some sort of mysterious entities which are likely aliens.

The big draw here is the aesthetics.  It's sort of a psychedelic 1980s shield-and-sorcerer fantasy vibe.  There are scenes where everyone is bathed in a particular color of light.  Red and Mandy live in a house in the woods and we are shown some nice starry skies.  There are these crazy title cards, too, that pop up as we're introduced to Red and Mandy and then to the cult.  There's only two of them (I'm not including the "Mandy" title card in this, with the death metal font) and they appear for probably less than 30 seconds combined, but weirdly, they were a highlight for me.  It was the glowing colors and the fonts... just not something I've seen on the big screen anywhere else.  You'd have to see them to fully understand.  And if this isn't clear by now, this is very much a movie you want to see in a theater.

The other big draw is Nic Cage going insane, as Nic Cage so often does, and very violently murdering a bunch of people.  The standout scene in that department, which comes after Mandy dies but before the murdering starts, has Nic in a bathroom with this gaudy wallpaper, alternately crying and taking long swigs from a bottle of liquor.

It's an interesting choice that the aliens get killed before the cult members.  That's a bit of a spoiler, I guess, but I don't think this is a movie you can really spoil by talking about the plot, because it's about the experience of watching it.  Showing still pictures from the movie might do more to spoil it than text could. Anyway, it's interesting because the aliens are way more threatening than the cult so you'd think that they'd be saved for last.  But I guess the idea is that the cult killed Mandy, not the aliens, so the movie's more about them?  I don't know.

Apparently there's an extra scene after the credits!  So don't walk away early, like I did.

I actually am a little surprised that this got so much love from people.  The two halves of the movie, before and after Mandy dies, are so different in tone, they're like an hour each, and you'd think people would be turned off by either one or the other.  I wouldn't say I loved it, but it's something to see, for sure.

 

Official Trailer.

Spoiler

 

 

Clean Version

Spoiler

 

 

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On 10/26/2018 at 11:44 PM, Curt McGirt said:

Damn dude. That reminds me of bringing Napalm Death and Minor Threat records to a high school hangout with some random chicks and the neighborhood assholes I was hanging out with then and being told to leave after they listened. Only worse. (Jacob's Ladder though dude? Seriously?)

It also amuses me greatly that neither of you could remember David Johansen's name haha

As for the film itself, its fine. It's no Creepshow 1 or 2, and no Two Evil Eyes (ugh), so kinda middle of the road as '80s /early '90s horror anthologies go. It's still totally worth watching. And Buster is great.

In my defense, I wasn't 100% up on what Jacob's Ladder was about at the time.  But, whoa buddy, Stephanie Pressley circa 1990s Newport, TN, was NOT having any of that shit.

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“Do you ever rub your eyes and suddenly find you're awake and not asleep, as you'd grown to suspect you were?” 
― Vincent Price, I Like What I Know: A Visual Autobiography  

 
“It's as much fun to scare as to be scared.” 
― Vincent Price  
 
“What's important about an actor is his acting, not his life.” 
― Vincent Price 
 
 “I have come more and more to the belief that we owe our arts a thousand times what we are paying them. We support our cigarette factories, soap manufacturers, beauticians, all the luxury and pleasure businesses of our over-indulged civilization, but we pay our painters an average wage... and yet when the future digs us from the past they won't care how we smell, what we smoke, or if we bathed. All they’ll know of us will be our architecture, our paintings, sculpture, poems, laws, philosophy, drama, our pottery and fabrics, the things which our hands made and our minds thought up - oh, the machines they’ll dig up too, but perhaps they’ll point to them as our destruction, the wheels that drove us down to death.” 

― Vincent Price, I Like What I Know: A Visual Autobiography

 
“I'm extremely profane, unconsciously so, when I see something great for the first time; I don't know why, but beauty and profanity are related to me in the same way. It may be that I want to think of art in the vernacular, but I have no control over what comes out of my mouth when my eyes take in great beauty...it might just be the reason I avoid going to museums with elderly ladies.” 
― Vincent Price, I Like What I Know: A Visual Autobiography  
 
Spoiler

 

 

 
 
Film: Tower of London
Chosen by: Sir Havoc.
 
"Because a Vincent Price film should be in every one of these. And what better film than one about one of the greatest villains in literature (if not in life), Richard III.   I have been a Price fan since childhood but reviewing Theatre of Blood for the Havoc a couple of years ago spurred me to seek out some of the gaps in my viewing. Everything ranging from film noirs (Shock), westerns (The Baron of Arizona), dramas (Dragonwyck), comedies (Champagne for Caesar) and this Roger Corman gem.  It also includes Universal's 1939 Tower of London where Price plays George, Duke of Clarence to Basil Rathbone's Richard." 
 
Reviewed by: jaedmc
 

TOWER OF LONDON (CORMAN, 1962)

Stick with me on this, we'll get to the movie eventually.

Back in 1959, Roger Corman directed his first Edgar Allen Poe adaptation, House of Usher. Up until that point it was the biggest production B-movie studio American International Pictures had ever undertaken. Despite the market not being hot for this type of film, it took in 1.45 million dollars at the box office off a 300,000 dollar budget. That kind of profit spurred on what would later be known as Roger Corman's Poe Cycle - a collection of eight films based on Poe's work, all but one starring the greatest horror film actor of all time: Vincent Price.

Of course Corman didn't know at the time that he would make eight films, and half way through the cycle he and his crew started looking for new horror material to adapt. Nathaniel Hawthorne was considered at one point, as well as Shakespeare's Macbeth, which featured witchery and ghosts. At this point they were approached by producer Edward Small, who liked the Poe films and wanted to get in on those profits. Small was an old school producer, getting his start with a war-time propaganda film in 1917, and going on to produce a ridiculous number of genre flicks that included noirs, westerns and assorted swashbucklers. He and Corman signed a three picture deal and their first collaboration would be on a film based on Richard III, Tower of London. 

Almost immediately there was trouble. Just before shooting Small informed Corman the movie would be shot in black and white to save money. He believed that because Vincent Price was attached to play Richard III, distributors would buy the film based off his name and just assume it was in color. By the time they found out the truth, it would be too late and Small and Corman would still get paid. Small apparently was unaware that they were firmly in the 1960's and black and white audiences were now conditioned to know black and white meant CHEAP. Corman claimed that Small would make changes nearly every day of the 15 day shoot, and by the end they both decided to not make another picture together.  

So what was the result of this tumultuous relationship? I told you we'd get to the movie. 

Tower of London starts off with King Edward IV on his death bed. His brother, Richard III strolls in and finds out Edward has named their other brother, George, protector of the young prince. Richard is like "...awesome.... hey George, let's take a walk and talk about how awesome this is...for you." Before they go, their mother is like "Do you mean it Richard? you think this is awesome for George?" And Richard is all "That what I just said, mother." Richard then takes George downstairs and kills his ass. 

Despite it being super obvious what happened, everyone really just watches. Every death is like "How could this've happened!?" and you cut to a group of people giving side eye to Richard. No one is really proactive about anything, they just let it happen until the script says they need to leave. But who cares about them when you have the greatest icons in cinema giving one of the wildest performances of his storied career. 

Vincent Price is incredible. This is not mere scenery chewing. This is him enveloping the camera with his presence so that there is no set. There are no co-stars or props. There is only Price. As Richard slips further and further into madness, haunted by the ghosts of his victims, Price unleashes his face into contortions to match his crooked spine. It is a morbidly grotesque performance that Nicholas Cage probably probably cribbed from at some point(His uncle Francis worked on the film as a dialogue director). Outside of Price a lot of the mood and spirit of the Corman's Poe films are present here, so if you're a fan you should certainly check it out.

Tower of London opened well on October 24th, aided by a Vincent Price audience wanting something spooky a week before Halloween. Unfortunately the distributors took one look at the screen, saw not an ounce of color, and quickly phased the picture out of their screens. It has since remained in obscurity, as the bastard picture made during perhaps Roger Corman's most potent artistic output. 

 

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Damn, I need to see that. I honestly didn't recall its existence even though I've read Corman's autobiography. 

The other Tower of London I remember loving as a kid. The Price cameo where Rathbone challenges him to a wine drinking contest is classic, as is Boris Karloff as an ultra menacing executioner.

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He's among the most consistently watchable actors ever. His body of work is incredibly long, and no matter how bad, he's always worth watching. Few can say that.

And while he's a great all around actor, few can even touch his contributions to horror. Karloff, Lugosi, Cushing, Christopher Lee, I don't think they beat him in importance and consistency. No one in the last 20-30 years has really done what any of those guys did as a macabre actor. Maybe Robert Englund, but his non-Freddy parts haven't had the draw. Maybe Jamie Lee Curtis, who seems to do well any time she comes back to the macabre.

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1 hour ago, jaedmc said:

He's among the most consistently watchable actors ever. His body of work is incredibly long, and no matter how bad, he's always worth watching. Few can say that.

And while he's a great all around actor, few can even touch his contributions to horror. Karloff, Lugosi, Cushing, Christopher Lee, I don't think they beat him in importance and consistency. No one in the last 20-30 years has really done what any of those guys did as a macabre actor. Maybe Robert Englund, but his non-Freddy parts haven't had the draw. Maybe Jamie Lee Curtis, who seems to do well any time she comes back to the macabre.

Are you only talking about people playing heels? Otherwise, I would say Bruce Campbell. 

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Jamie is really fucking funny on Eli Roth's History of Horror. Her face and reactions are super expressive. 

Fun fact: Vincent's favorite movie of his was Dragonwyck. He was asked the question at a Fangoria con interview before he died and he named it, saying he liked playing a man who was a monomaniac. 

BTW, I caught that voiceover love letter to Vincent that John Waters does on TCM today again and really, everyone should see it. Beautifully heartfelt. And of course, it would be interesting just hearing John read the phone book, so hey.

 

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“Jesus Christ-" 
"Is Not here right now," the man in black replied,"and even if he were, he could not save you.” 
― Brian Keene, A Gathering of Crows

“Monsters are created. And they’re created by monsters." 
― Chris Miller, A Murder of Saints

 

Film: Cube Zero

Chosen by: Ultimo Necro

my pick is Cube : Zero. Everyone has seen Cube but I feel like the series is better than people give it credit for. Particularly the prequel. I don't think this has been done before!  

 

Reviewed by: Brian Fowler

Cube Zero

Ernie Barbarash

 

This is apparently the third Cube movie, and a prequel. I never saw the first two, so any callbacks are lost on me. 

In trying to figure out a quick explanation, my mind kept going back to a sci-fi film I loved as a kid. I haven't seen Fortress since the VHS days, but I loved it then. Dystopian future, a high-tech prison. Cube had a lot of that in it. 

But it's also deeply reminiscent of some of the Saw movies. Particularly the later ones, where a group of people are thrown together to navigate a series of traps and one by one they get killed off and the rest move on.  Here it's a dystopian future prison. The impression I get is if they escape, they're allowed to live. But it's not completely clear. Maybe the other two movies explain it better. 

So, yeah, Fortress meets Saw V sounds about right. It's never scary, but it's bloody and gory, it's violent as hell, and it has an interesting "cake and eat it too" happy/bleak ending.  

The acting is all uniformly "ok." Nobody really stands out, for better or worse. Michael Riley as Jax certainly gets the most fun character.  

A big problem is two days after watching it, I already have to look up the character names. And it definitely at times drops into generic torture porn, a genre that was never my favorite and now seems very dated. But it's fairly well done by those standards, so I can't hate on it too much for that. It feels like it wants you to wrestle with the same moral questions two of the characters (Winn and Dodd, technicians observing the prisoners crawling through the traps) but I can't imagine anyone actually finding it a tough call morally.

 

Anyway, all three are on Netflix, so I might check out the other two. If you subscribe, and like gory sci-fi, have at it. I give it 2.5 bloody skulls out of 5.

 

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To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death.” 
― Edgar Allan Poe
 
"This is indeed one of the true tragedies of lycanthropy, that the subject of such evil pacts and nefarious deeds is ignorant of his place in the plot that besieges this humble hamlet.”
– Aleister Creed, Witchfinder
The Trial of John Goode by Gabriel Salmon and Thome Ward”  
 
Film: The Pit (1981)
Chosen by: driver
 
driver: "My choice is The Pit. Not sure if its been done before or not."
Exec:  "Is this the 1981 film aka Teddy? or 2013 aka Jug Face?"
driver: "The 1981 Teddy. It's available on Youtube."
 
Reviewed by: twiztor
 
 

The Pit (1981)

I am going in to this movie completely blind. It stars nobody i've ever heard of and is directed by someone completely unknown to me. All i know is that it is something to do with a kid with a teddy bear (I found out that much to make sure i had the right movie).

so, this movie is really bizarre and i'm gonna have major spoilers in here. fair warning for a movie 37 years old.

Anyway, yeah, it definitely is about a 12 year old kid who has a teddy bear, but there's so much more than that. This boy, Jamie, is really quite weird and has no friends. He talks to his teddy bear (named Teddy, which is also the name of the novelization of this film, and is said to be more streamlined in its brand of horror) and Teddy talks back to him, although it is only in Jamie's voice. This would lead to you believe that it is all in Jamie's head, but you see Teddy moving his head at one point when Jamie is nowhere around, so straight up Teddy is alive.  This never really gets expounded upon, it's basically just background information or something.

So if that's not enough for you, Jamie discovers a big pit about a mile outside town, filled with five trollolops (they mean troglodytes, but why they changed the name i don't know). He begins to feed them first cheese and chocolate, then meat from the butcher's shop, and finally he lures unsuspecting people he doesn't like into the pit. Ultimately, he throws them a rope so they can escape, and they kill and eat a few more people. The police refuse to believe anything is seriously wrong, and instead of calling in experts they round up a hunting posse and kill the trolls.

Oh, also Jamie is a major perv. There's a hint that he has a weird relationship with his mother (possibly incestuous?). He gets in trouble at school for bringing in a porno book from the library. He cut out one of the nude women and glued a pic of the librarian's head on it and sent it to her. He also prank calls her and forces her to strip in the window so he can get a topless picture of her, which he gives to his Teddy. The whole plot of this movie is that Jamie's parents are out of town for an undisclosed amount of time and hire a babysitter/housesitter. She is, of course, the object of Jamie's desires and he peeks on her in the shower (sorta) and is just generally weird about her.

 

I quite liked this movie. The music is simple tones but still manages to set the mood for the most part. I definitely wish some of these plot ideas would've been more fleshed out, but that's the beauty of low budget Canadian B Horror movies. None of the violence happened on-screen, which is usually a downer for me, but i kinda found it endearing in this one.  This kind of weirdo horror movie is the reason that i signed up for this contest a few years ago. bravo, sir or madam who made this selection.

 

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