October Horrordays

[Brian Fowler]

See, pira doesn't even like Liger.

[Brian Fowler]

People loved Rachel. And they didn't like Tina

- Danielle Harris

[piranesi]

 

For the first time, I think you feel like you’re inside this world and not watching a movie.

 

- Danielle Harris when asked how Rob Zombie's remake compares to the original

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wait...who liked Rachel?

[Brian Fowler]

At the premiere, they applauded when she [Tina] died

[piranesi]

 

At the premiere, they shouted down the composer and rioted

 

- "they" at the first performance of "The Rite of Spring."

[bobholly138]

I liked Tina. And didn't know people didn't like her until I got online. But then I never met in person someone who hated the Zombie Halloween. 

[bobholly138]

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matango

 

A question: is Swamp Thing the worst goddamn thing Wes Craven ever put out or what? I tried to watch some of it but just had to turn it off. 

 

My Soul To Take is by far the worst thing Wes Craven has been associated with and A Vampire In Brooklyn is a close second.

 

I can forgive Cursed because, well, we need as many werewolf movies as we can get.

 

 

Can't be any worse than Angela the fireworks woman.

[piranesi]

THE TINATION HAS SPOKEN!!!!!!!

[piranesi]

Lays Chips has the most deliciously horrifying cardboard display this year. 

 

You have to reach into its mouth to get your chips. 

 

 

 

[piranesi]

I'm sort of halfway watching one of the endless parade of SHAUN OF THE DEAD ripoffs called DETENTION OF THE DEAD.

 

How many "homages" can you do of what is already a "homage"?

It's really dumb ad simplistic but I'm kind of enjoying it at first.  Even thought it's supposed to be set like, today, it's a weird mixture of super-contemporary props and little cultural references (For instance the goth chick whips out her PSP in class...but uses it to watch NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD), but all coming from the most obvious cast of 90s-era high-school stereotypes.  Like the goth girl and the grundgy skateboarding asian kid...it's all weirdly dated on some levels and then not on others.    Like the writer/director is showing his age.  I mean, the goth chick is named Willow for fuck's sake.

The last time this guy was a guy that existed was 1999 or so.

Although the "shot on video quality" and the fact that everyone is clearly in their mid-to-late 20s also makes it look a little like an episode of the late-night Showtime grindfest COED CONFIDENTIAL.  Like if you freeze frame at any particular moment and pretended that whoever was on camera was about to pretend to fuck in that weird set of positions that insures there will be no visible shaft...this would be indistinguishable from that.

Case in point:
Can you tell the difference?  

 

I think even the classroom sets are the same (not that I've spent dozens of hours watching Showtime por...oh, fuck it, obviously I have, BACK OFF MOTHER SUPERIOR!)

It starts out kind of fun.  It's like an episode of Daria in the sense that it kind of feels like the 90s and everyone is a cartoon.  It's cheap and fun.  The guy from glee who looks like Ceasar from HEAVEN HELP US! is in there.  And the one girl from REVENGE and that one asian guy who shows up every so often in TWILIGHT.

But it's really just a reference fest.  They're piling up now.  They mimic THE BREAKFAST CLUB when they're sneaking through the hallways.  Right away there's a quick-cut "gearing up" scene like in SotD.  A funny scene kind of out or EVIL DEAD 2 when they talk to the severed head of a zombified teacher.

Special note: The teacher in question...I swear for a moment I thought she was a 40-something-year-old Holy Goddess Wendy Kaplan.


  You can see it, right?

But alas, it was just some human actress and not the Great Goddess Savior of Haddonfield.

The problem is since the movie was an exercise in formula, it doesn't really matter that it shows some flair here and there.  Sure, maybe it's a nice exhibition of this director's technique and that he can, indeed, put together something that looks like a zombie movie. But, it's boring.  Every step of the way, you are revisiting other stories and the characters never stop being their "type" to say or do anything outside of the most obvious thing they could say.  Army guy says army stuff.  Stoner says stoner stuff.  Cheerleader says:

 

"EWWW These Zombies are ruining EVERYTHING!!!"

Not to keep bringing up Showtime late night porn. But it really does eventually settle into the level of soft-core Showtime parody movie..The jokes and dialog are at exactly that level.  They seem to have blown their special effects wad in the first 20 minutes and then it turns into a slow rubdown in the lbrary, a real grind, just groping its way toward a climax that never happens...um...boobs.

 

Goddammit.  I had high hopes twenty minutes into this and now I'm ready to give up.  Shit, now they're getting high and confessing stuff and the fucking nerd even got detention because he brought a gun to school. 


"Fuck this movie, ammiright, Ally?"

From there...it falls apart like I never could have imagined into the shittiest dick joke slapstick with a zombie arm attached to a guys junk while someone else tries to pry it off.  Like,  seriously, the writers of THE LORD OF THE G-STRING and THE DEVIL WEARS NADA are ashamed of this.  GUYS, THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT THE HILLS HAVE THIGHS TO YOUR LATE-NIGHT CABLE T.V. SHAMEFUL FRICTIONAL THUNDERDOME OF QUIET FURTIVE CHEETO-DUST-LUBRICATED RUBBING WOULD NOT SINK TO THIS!
 

 

 

Hmmm. 

 

 

I actually have watched a lot of fake porn, haven't I?

I think I need to stop watching this shitty movie and take stock of my life.

 

Also, Fake Wendy Kaplan head says:

FUCK YOU, FOWLER!!!!

[Jingus]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matango

 

A question: is Swamp Thing the worst goddamn thing Wes Craven ever put out or what? I tried to watch some of it but just had to turn it off.

 

My Soul To Take is by far the worst thing Wes Craven has been associated with and A Vampire In Brooklyn is a close second.

 

I can forgive Cursed because, well, we need as many werewolf movies as we can get.

 

Can't be any worse than Angela the fireworks woman.

The Hills Have Eyes PART TWO

[Brian Fowler]

This is off-topic, but outside PM (hm...) I don't know a better spot to ask it:

 

piranesi, are you at all familiar with the play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You by Christopher Durang?  I think you'd really really like it.

[piranesi]

Man.  Talk about lost childhood memories.  People freaked out about that when I was a kind in Catholic school back in, maybe 1981 or so?

[Brian Fowler]

Sounds about right.  Written in 79, revived in 80 or 81 when it was paired with The Actor's Nightmare.

 

It's understandably dated now, but it's a great show.

 

Apparently there was a Showtime movie adaptation in 2001, but I've never seen it.

 

 

Wait, October, horror...  Um...  Did I mention that I own that awesome new Halloween box set?

[piranesi]

 

 

Wait, October, horror...  Um...  Did I mention that I own that awesome new Halloween box set?

 

I get it on Saturday.  In preparation, enjoy the following promo:

 

 

 

 

Some of you may not like Tina.  Oh, we hear you.  And you can chant and you can complain and that's fine because Tina shows up to this dance for you too.  So you have a voice.  Tina is here every Halloween season, year after year to fight for your right to express your opinion one way of the other.

But you know who Tina is really here for?  Tina is here for that little kid, dressed like a pink princess who needs someone to believe in!  Tina is there when that little girl is stuck in the weird hospital/orphanage thing and needs someone to help her make-a-wish but Rachel needs to "get away for awhile" like any other part-timer. 

 

Tina is the one who shows up with a big fluffy dog and tells Loomis to shut the hell up because he's a creepy old man with bad breath!

And everyone may think the odds are against her.  Oh, I've heard it all before. 

 

"The monster Michael Myers is unstoppable." 

 

"The monster Michael Myers is immortal." 

 

"Oh, Ladies and Gentlemen, My name is Dr. Terence Wynn!  And I'm The One behind The One in October Thirty ONE!" 

 

And all Tina has on her side is a weak-armed child who can't even speak and a crackpot valet who can't even hold a gun steady 'cause he's eighty-eight years old.  And, Oh yeah, twitter, Tina is a scatterbrained ditz who cares more about making funny faces and wearing wacky colorful outfits than 'bout kickin' ass. 

 

But you know what, Jack [O-lantern]??  These colors mean something!  These colors mean that no matter what

TINA.  SHOWS. UP!

Because ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT when Michael Myers puts on his scary mask, Tina WILL put on her sexy vampire costume. 

And ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT when Michael Myers eats a dog, Tina WILL scare the shit out of her abusive gearhead douche boyfriend.

And ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT when Michael Myers tilts his head to the right and tilts his head to the left,

well he might as well tilt his ass all the way back to Smith's Grove because love her or hate her the one thing that you can count on is that TINA WILL BE HERE AND TINA

WILL NEVER GIVE UP!!!!!

LET'S GO TINA!

TINA SUCKS!

LET'S GO TINA!

TINA SUCKS!

 

[Brian Fowler]

Then she gets stabbed, dies, and there is much rejoicing.

 

(Also, boy, those "LETS GO TINA" chants were really quiet.)

[Brian Fowler]

(Oh holy hell, there was apparently an episode of Phil Donahue's show devoted to the controversy around Sister Mary, and efforts to close it's run in...  St. Louis!  No wonder it was part of your childhood.)

[piranesi]

Dead?

 

She'll have surgery and be back in a week to get her heat back. 

 

[Jingus]

I'm a Christopher Durang fan too.  I ran sound tech for a pretty damn good community theater performance of Betty's Summer Vacation; my parents walked out during the rape, but on my old Hi-8 videotape of the show you can hear my college friends laughing their asses off.  

[piranesi]

A now practically yearly ritual of finally seeing the last PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movie around abouts the beginning of October continued with THE MARKED ONES.

As mentioned in other threads here, a lot of this was pretty great as a standalone found footage movie.  The characters were a lot more likable and changing the setting to someplace crowded and with a large community of people around, in other words showing that you don't have to be in a big isolated house detached from the world for scary shit to happen to you, was a really nice new angle.

The problems were the same with all of these.  They haven't actually moved things forward since the end of part 2.  I was annoyed as shit that Part 3 was literally just a re-enactment of stuff they already told us happened in part 2.  And then Part 4 was just a slight re-enactment of all that again.  So even though this let us start in a different place, we still had:

1) us not following the now fairly large group of past characters who do know what's going on (although they drift in and out of the background) and instead starting all over with characters who don't know anything...who, in fact, know way less than we do so we have to watch them go through the same process all to

2) END UP IN THE SAME PLACE FOR THE SAME OUTCOME!!!  AGAIN!!!!  They didn't even make a dent!  Three (four?) years since the clever ending of Part 2 and we are literally in the same place we were then.  This is some NWO shit at this point.

There were some nice moody moments early on.  The scratching under the trap door.  The shower curtain.  The guy fucking with the dog was disturbing too.  

A big annoyance was when the guy said they should call the cops.  And the girl was like "They won't believe us!"  Man...I just watched a swat team bust in on a guy playing Call of Duty because some douche called and said someone was abducted and gave his address.  This shit isn't complicated.

 

I also kind of didn't like the "demon is inside the dude" right from the start instead of the "demon is kind of in the air around them."  I miss that part.

[JRGoldman]

If we ever have a DVDVR meet and greet and I get a few beers in me, I promise to tell a pretty awesome story about Durang, Patti Lupone and the show they were trying to put on to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first Julliard class.

[piranesi]

Epix Drive-In is playing the two Count Yorga movies, which seem like they were supposed to become a B-movie franchise in the early 70s, but were so astoundingly bad that they stopped after two.

 

Apparently the original concept was for a softcore porn movie, but Robert Quarry said he'd be willing to play the lead if they took the porny stuff out.  So we got COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE and then THE RETURN OF COUNT YORGA.

 

 

But the only thing that really came out of all this that was worth anything was the poster for THE RETURN OF COUNT YORGA...which is the most amazing thing:

 

 

Sadly, in the movie his body is not made up of one leg and zero torsos, with an extra eye on one claw and an extra mouth on another.  Can you imagine that guy hopping after you?  Trying to put his hand-mouth on you and checking you out with is other-hand-eye?  Like, I'm guessing maybe two, to two-and-a-half feet tall?  Yelling "Rowrrr!!!!!  RRRRROOWWRRRRR!!!!!"

 

Although, I suppose the real questions is how this sketch, when the poster designer showed it to the movie distributor, was not simply met with the following response:

 

"What the fuck is that supposed to be?"

 

Or maybe it was and that first response was then followed with:

 

"Well, we have to have this piece of shit in the drive ins the day after tomorrow, so that...is our poster."

 

 

Somehow, in some versions, the extra-eye-and-mouth hands end up coming out of his head like antenae:

 

Or possibly this is him doing jumping jacks.

 

Like, now you're really just fucking with us, movie poster guy.

 

I mean, nothing could live up to the promise of that poster, but just look at the state of Vampirism in this:

 

 

Caroline fled in terror when she realized that the home body wave had become weaponized and airborne.

 

Anyway it's pretty badOH MY GOD SOME GENIUS MADE A PAINTABLE FIGURINE OUT OF THE MOVIE POSTER VRSION OF COUNT YORGA!!!!
 

 

THIS IS A FUCKING THING YOU CAN BUY!!!! WHAT WORLD AM I LIVING IN!!!!?!?!?!?!??!??!??!?!

 

Yes, in this form, tiny three-pronged Yorga does resemble Michael McKeon as Leonard "Lenny" Kosnowski.  But, come on...mere hours ago I did not know these movies existed.  And now I live in a world where you can buy a 3d model of the bizarre poster fever dream image used to advertise them.

 

That, is Utopia.

[nate]

This - as well as for many other reasons - is why 3-D printers must be stopped before it's too late.

What if the computer in "Evilspeak" was hooked to a 3-D printer, huh? We'd all be fucked. Clint Howard would be our overlord.

[piranesi]

The more I look at that poster, the more I love it.  I love how enthusiastic the hand-mouth is, like "Rowr, we're gonna' eat 'em all!!!!"  Meanwhile the hand-eye, looks kind of wistful and worried, like that's the part that understands how unworkable this plan is...like:

 

"Guys, look, I know you're into this and I don't wanna be "that guy", but our anatomy is just not conducive to doing much of anything.  You guys know we're two feet tall, right?  We can't "hold" anything and we can't really locomote forward without falling on our giant unbalanced head part."

 

"Rowr, come on, guys let's eat everything!!!"

 

"Nope. Our best strategy is to just stand here, carefully and hope some wounded vermin drifts by."

 

That eye-in-the-hand is burdened with self-awareness and the rest of little Yorga is not.  I imagine we all have parts of ourselves that are optimistic and enthusiastic and others that are realistic and anxious.  Let tiny, helpless-yet-viscious Count Yorga be your model of self discovery.

[JRGoldman]

I watched Lords of Salem tonight. I think my brain thinks Sherri Moon Zombie looks like Mary Louise Parker, and I think that subconscious association adversely effects my enjoyment of Rob Zombie's movies.