October Horrordays

[FluffSnackwell]

The wife and I watched The Lords of Salem last night as part of our 31 movies.

 

What the fuck was that?

 

I'm not sure if I enjoyed it or not. At the moment, I can only say "It was a movie."

 

This much is actually debatable. The highest compliment you can pay Lords is that the long stretches of it where nothing happened were infinitely more interesting visually than the long stretches of The House Of The Devil where nothing happened. Then again thrown in the middle of THOTD's meandering wankery for horrifying effect

we see a quick glimpse what the Devil cult did to the real owners of the house. Much more chilling than hallway Sasquatch or turkey baster bastard Satan.

 

But that ending? The Lords of Salem could've acquitted itself well by crossing the finish line with gusto but instead we got a bad music video regurgitated all over the finish line. And that's too bad because I kind of liked

the final resolution being spelled out via a radio newscast which explained the deaths of all the local women being wrote off as a mass suicide and Heidi vanishing. That worked well enough. But everything other than the satanic bagpipes blew as far as the actual climactic scene goes.

[Ace]

     

   I'm pretty sure I wrote this up, along with the equally awesome 1985 made-for-t.v. IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR in last year's October thread.  But, sadly, that's all lost now.  I can, however, remind you of the greatest moment in a movie that features Thomas Dolby as villain attempting to kill someone using a giant ham bone in order to fulfill a prophecy....and Toni Basil as a super hot Vampire mom.        Whatever else you think about this movie, (you need to be pretty tolerant of nonsense to not hate it) Toni Basil knocks it out of the park.  She is fully committed to this and reminds us of just how awesome she is.  This song will get all up in your ears and snuggle in and stay there whispering itself into to your brain hole for months.  The choreography is infectious too.  The best woman.        

 

It's easy to believe Toni Basil as a vampire. Hell, she was 50 in Rockula. Woman barely ages.

[Lazlo Woodbine]

I'm frankly appalled that there was talk of The Monster Squad in this thread without anyone bringing up this catchy bastard.

 

Or indeed, Jason Hervey having a stupidity problem.

[Marty Sugar]

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)

 

This film is based on a real-life serial killer, dubbed "The Phantom Killer," who murdered five people in and around the town of Texarkana, Arkansas, in 1946. The poster for the film gives it away that the killer will not be caught at the end of this movie.  Oh, did I spoil it? Don't worry, you NEVER want to watch this garbage. It is the flipping WORST. It is essentially a 90-minute PSA warning teens that MAKING OUT IN CARS IS BAD! If you attempt to get to second base with a girl...YOU. WILL. DIE.

 

The acting is atrocious, the kill scenes are the pits, and the suspense is non-existent. Avoid at all costs. Dawn Wells (of Gilligan's Island fame), has a cameo...and even SHE sucks in this thing. So awful!

 

GRADE: F- (yes, an EFF-MINUS)

[Burgundy LaRue]

I recently watched The Town That Dreaded Sundown.  I didn't hate it, but found it to be disjointed.  The attempts at slapstick comedy weren't needed.  Had they eliminated that, it would have been an OK thriller.  Nothing great, but decent enough.  It was clearly trying to be a milder version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but without the visceral emotion, so it was always going to fall short.  But it still had a chance.  The movie makers just sort of whiffed.

 

Also, the killer's mask looking like a Klansman's hood didn't endear me to the movie.

[piranesi]

HOUSE (1977) Directed by Nobuhiko ObayashiMy Criterion 50% off stuff arrived.  On the "scary Japanese ghost prototype movies" I got this, along with KWAIDAN, KURONEKO, and JIGOKU.I started with HOUSE because the trailer on Criterion looked super awesome (particularly the disembodied fingers playing piano).Sadly, this was the wrong time for this.  There were a couple of right creepy visuals but it's really less of a ghost movie and more of a sort of live-action haunted house cartoon.  It's sort of like a more whimsical three-stooges short, but with most of the humor being directed at the cinematic or t.v. trappings of youth culture in the 1970s in Japan, which was apparently just as sunny and dumb as youth-culture in the 1970s in middle America.  Groovy teachers in hot dragsters, moony high school girls with made-for-sitcom personalities, and a pretty hilarious Hollywood dreamscape where doe-eyed damsels are perpetually wind-machine tossed and backgrounds are matte-painted to provide emotional subtext.

 

I think there is also supposed to be a Disney thing going on.  Seven girls with nicknames that are personality traits, led by a cat into a dreamy country house where a witch waits to eat them...but done with a kind of deliberately psychedelic flair that is meant to deconstruct it or something.

All of that is great, and the visuals are amazing....a mixture of Argento-esque primary colors and deep shadows but transferred into a Douglas Sirk world made up of wildly idealized landscapes, with a big handful of pop-art YELLOW-SUBMARINE-esque visual jokes.  For a ghost movie, it's actually really bright and vibrant, which is sort of the main joke I think.  Instead of the lumbering, grey purgatory of something like JU-ON we have somethign more like PETE'S DRAGON...but with an animated human-eating house instead of Mickey Rooney.

 

You can clearly see who screened and went ape over this leading up to 1980.  Sam Raimi pulled a few moments directly from it (not least of which the ocean of blood shooting out of a hole in the wall, the cackling head, the dancing limbs), If not Spielberg, then at least John Williams who wholesale ripped off (or homaged) the main theme song for the lullabye in POLTERGEIST, and let's not forget David Cronenberg who I'm sure got a few ideas from the habit of various bits of furniture to display hidden teeth (I'm looking at you VIDEODROME).If I was in the mood for visual novelty and welcome mockery of youth and its idiotic optimism, this would have been great.  Unfortunately, I wanted something scary.  And this is about as scary as the average episode of SCOOBY DOO (although it still managed to be both funnier and scarier than FREDDIE'S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE...the reason I bring it up is that I actually thought of that movie during the scene when the light fixture is eating the Kung-Fu girls head).  Yes there were some great shots (the aforementioned floating head, the dancing skeleton, and a few disturbing shots of the piano girl entwined in the strings of the piano, her body parts all mixed up with the metal and wood frame of the instrument (we meet again, Cronenberg!).  But they were too few and far between for this to be an October movie.  And the MONKEE's-style parody of dreamy teen pop culture and empty self-absored adults was lost in my growing disspapointment that I was not going to get any good scares out of this.

 

I should revisit it again sometime...in the Summer. 

[JRGoldman]

I was watching Hellraiser last night, and Hillary sat down with me and actually got pretty in to it. She was was intently watching by the time the cenobites showed up...then Pinhead spoke, and explained that instead of demons, they were explorers searchinteen the further reaches of experience. she started laughing, said 'I didn't realize that the monster in this movie was a stoner from a yoga retreat that is trying to bang me' and left the room.

[Curt McGirt]

I hope that was some personal shit on her part because it was a pretty brutal and careless diss. Despite that, it's fucking hilarious. Someone should e-mail that to Clive, I think he'd get a kick out of it.

[Marty Sugar]

Got back on track with Friday The 13th, Part III. It's not "great," but at least it's a horror/slasher franchise that knows what the eff it's doing. I thought it had a good mix of horror/comedy, and some nifty kills.  Really wish I could've seen it in 3D, because they really seemed to go all out with the gimmick. Also found it interesting they bucked the "don't have sex" trend, as the girl who refuses to sleep with the loveable nerd pretty much gets killed first. Not sure what message THAT was trying to convey: nerds need love, too?

[Brian Kenny]

I watch V/H/S last night and I didn't like it. Each one of the stories had a cool moment or interesting idea but the stories as a whole just weren't good. The only one I really liked was the one titled "Tuesday the 17th" which was a pretty cool take on the slasher film. I probably check out the sequel, as I hear its much better.

[Burgundy LaRue]

ParaNorman is very cool.  That is all.

[ingrsco]

I watch V/H/S last night and I didn't like it. Each one of the stories had a cool moment or interesting idea but the stories as a whole just weren't good. The only one I really liked was the one titled "Tuesday the 17th" which was a pretty cool take on the slasher film. I probably check out the sequel, as I hear its much better.

I can understand that. I actually feel this way about both of the films. Each one has some good basis or goings on but on the whole I find myself analyzing them after and finding them more flawed then good.The wraparound of V/H/S 2 in particular really bugs me

[ingrsco]

Just watched a film called The Godsend (1980) off a Scream Factory horror movie marathon DVD and while I admit I'm generally not a fan of evil child films to begin with, holy crap is this bad. Long feeling 90 minutes with an ending that was pretty unsatisfactory.

[Marty Sugar]

Speaking of "evil child" films.

 

 

7. Alice, Sweet Alice (1976)

 

Alice is a troubled and brooding adolescent who's younger sister (Brooke Shields), is the apparent golden-child. Alice quickly becomes Suspect Number One with the police when little sister is murdered before taking her first communion.

 

Interestingly enough, this film was released three times: in 1976 as Communion, then again in 1978 as Alice, Sweet Alice. The third release, as Holy Terror, came out in 1981 to market off the new-found popularity of Brooke Shields (this film is her acting debut, by the way). It also has a spot on Bravo's "100 Scariest Movie Moments," for a scene which comes early in the film, when Alice terrorizes her sister in an old warehouse.

 

Okay, I was totally going to go on a tangent with this movie, that the whole "evil kid" gimmick doesn't work in the 21st century when Alice clearly has issues that the school and  her parents won't address; I even had a joke that if these shitty parents were just lazy enough to pump Alice full of Ritalin, they'd still have two kids...and then there's the big swerve and I was fucking blown away.  So good! Great ending, too. Loved this film, and Paula Sheppard was amazing as Alice.

 

GRADE: A

 

P.S. Here's my thing, though...we were really supposed to think Alice was ever a bad kid? I mean, her sister is a colossal bitch, her mother is useless, her dad is never there, her aunt is a total cow and the landlord is a disgusting pervert. Plus the entire system set up to nurture her is a complete joke. If and when any of these people start dying...do we boo her or cheer her? Just a thought. I cheered when that disgusting landlord bought it, FWIW. And Auntie deserved worse, the old hag.

[Burgundy LaRue]

I think we're left to form our own opinions about Alice.  As you mentioned, she had a lot going against her.  Having a pesky little sister that everyone thinks is perfect is annoying, but can be somewhat ignored.  But how do you get past the dumb mother, judgmental aunt, deadbeat dad, AND kiddie-loving landlord trying to lure her into his pissy cat house?  Not to mention that she's got the Catholic Church ready to condemn her for being a bad kid.

 

I think Alice was a bit messed up but would have been OK with some real guidance.  But where was it going to come from?  The ending showed that Alice would likely go down the wrong path, with no one being aware enough to stop her.

 

What's funny about Alice, Sweet Alice is that many of the people involved didn't do much after the movie.  Paula Sheppard did one more film, I think, and then disappeared.  Still can't believe she was 19 when she starred in the movie. The nasty landlord died about three years after the movie first came out.  His background is interesting--he worked as a bouncer for Patterson's one gay bar and pretended to be a priest as old ladies gave him money to say blessings at their loved ones' graves. Director Alfred Sole only had made one movie before this, and it was a porno of sorts.  He made two more films, one that had Vanity (yep, Prince's one-time girlfriend) as the star.  Then, nothing.  Throw in that the mom is Jackie Gleason's daughter and Jason Patric's mom, and you've got a motley crew of folks involved in a cult classic.

[Travis Sheldon]

Last week I caught up with Dario Argento's Dracula 3D (2012) I'm a big Argento fan, but I couldn't help but think this film looked like the best Asylum picture I'd seen so far. (It's not an Asylum film.)

I can't really say it's a retelling of the Dracula legend, it just features characters from Bram Stoker's story. 4/10 (Praying Mantis style, baby.)

 

This weekend didn't watch as much as usual, lots of stuff going on IRL.

 

The Conjuring (2013) Really liked this one. Great atmosphere and acting. Good haunted house/possession flick. Good mix of old school pacing and scares. 9/10

 

Room 237 (2012) Caught this one on Netflix. It's a documentary featuring a number of theories about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. They don't dwell on one theory, like The Shining Code, so they're able to keep the interest level up that way. Lots of crazy theories, that I don't put much credence in, but they never bored me, so I'll give it that. The Shining is one of my favorite films, so that may have played a bit into my enjoyment. 5/10

[J.T.]

HOUSE (1977) Directed by Nobuhiko ObayashiMy Criterion 50% off stuff arrived.  On the "scary Japanese ghost prototype movies" I got this, along with KWAIDAN, KURONEKO, and JIGOKU.I started with HOUSE because the trailer on Criterion looked super awesome (particularly the disembodied fingers playing piano).Sadly, this was the wrong time for this.  There were a couple of right creepy visuals but it's really less of a ghost movie and more of a sort of live-action haunted house cartoon.  It's sort of like a more whimsical three-stooges short, but with most of the humor being directed at the cinematic or t.v. trappings of youth culture in the 1970s in Japan, which was apparently just as sunny and dumb as youth-culture in the 1970s in middle America.  Groovy teachers in hot dragsters, moony high school girls with made-for-sitcom personalities, and a pretty hilarious Hollywood dreamscape where doe-eyed damsels are perpetually wind-machine tossed and backgrounds are matte-painted to provide emotional subtext.

 

I think there is also supposed to be a Disney thing going on.  Seven girls with nicknames that are personality traits, led by a cat into a dreamy country house where a witch waits to eat them...but done with a kind of deliberately psychedelic flair that is meant to deconstruct it or something.

All of that is great, and the visuals are amazing....a mixture of Argento-esque primary colors and deep shadows but transferred into a Douglas Sirk world made up of wildly idealized landscapes, with a big handful of pop-art YELLOW-SUBMARINE-esque visual jokes.  For a ghost movie, it's actually really bright and vibrant, which is sort of the main joke I think.  Instead of the lumbering, grey purgatory of something like JU-ON we have somethign more like PETE'S DRAGON...but with an animated human-eating house instead of Mickey Rooney.

 

You can clearly see who screened and went ape over this leading up to 1980.  Sam Raimi pulled a few moments directly from it (not least of which the ocean of blood shooting out of a hole in the wall, the cackling head, the dancing limbs), If not Spielberg, then at least John Williams who wholesale ripped off (or homaged) the main theme song for the lullabye in POLTERGEIST, and let's not forget David Cronenberg who I'm sure got a few ideas from the habit of various bits of furniture to display hidden teeth (I'm looking at you VIDEODROME).If I was in the mood for visual novelty and welcome mockery of youth and its idiotic optimism, this would have been great.  Unfortunately, I wanted something scary.  And this is about as scary as the average episode of SCOOBY DOO (although it still managed to be both funnier and scarier than FREDDIE'S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE...the reason I bring it up is that I actually thought of that movie during the scene when the light fixture is eating the Kung-Fu girls head).  Yes there were some great shots (the aforementioned floating head, the dancing skeleton, and a few disturbing shots of the piano girl entwined in the strings of the piano, her body parts all mixed up with the metal and wood frame of the instrument (we meet again, Cronenberg!).  But they were too few and far between for this to be an October movie.  And the MONKEE's-style parody of dreamy teen pop culture and empty self-absored adults was lost in my growing disspapointment that I was not going to get any good scares out of this.

 

I should revisit it again sometime...in the Summer. 

 

HOUSE is available on Xfinity OnDemand but only for online viewing.

 

Check it out if you have TAFKA Comcast.

[Reed]

I re-watched Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows. Kind of a mess, and I'm still not sure what they were trying to say about the first one. Was the idea meant to be that we couldn't trust the footage in the original movie, or what?

[Marty Sugar]

8. Don't Torture A Duckling (1972)

 

I don't know a lot about the giallo genre of film. I do know that one of two female leads in this film, Barbara Bouchet, is stunningly beautiful. She's probably the only reason I stuck this out for 102 minutes.

 

The film revolves around voodoo and black magic and revenge, but it takes about 100 years to get anywhere.  It has some interesting moments, but it's so disjointed that it just bored the piss out of me. Sorry.

 

GRADE: D

 

9. The Strangers (2008)

 

Liv Tyler rejects her boyfriend, Scott Speedman, the night he proposes to her...right before they spend the evening at a secluded summer cabin. A psychotic trio of strangers than terrorizes them in the middle of the night. Madness ensues.

 

I was expecting a big twist in the end with the boyfriend, but it never came. I was a little disappointed, but then I realized that would be too damn obvious after Scream, etc.  Liv Tyler is a pretty shitty actress, but she was a solid little Scream Queen, and there was some really good jump-scares in this.  I can see why reviews were tepid on this, as it is often "paint-by-numbers," but I had fun.

 

GRADE: C

 

[Curt McGirt]

I haven't seen it in years, but recall Don't Torture A Duckling being a nice little indictment of superstition and small town idiocy. The chain whipping scene is just vicious, and the end is good too. I don't know how much of a giallo it is, it's way more like a historical drama with some serious violence. Which Fulci always was big on. For a real giallo from him, check out Lizard in a Woman's Skin, or the hyper-nasty/misanthropic/misogynistic The New York Ripper.

[Curt McGirt]

So what do y'all think about Graveyard Shift? I've always thought it was one of the more underrated King films, with a bunch of solid character actor roles, some great effects, and an especially greasy performance from Brad Dourif. You can see where Feast was a real love-letter to little flicks like this. Also, it seems like nobody stops sweating in this film.

 

Also, in news that's never new, The Return of the Living Dead is still the shit. 

[Curt McGirt]

Curse of the Demon on TCM right now followed up by I Walked With A Zombie. Get your B&W on.

 

EDIT: The Leopard Man is on afterward too. Jacques Tournier mania!

[Travis Sheldon]

I know this is not the right thread, but 'I' considered this a horror movie.

 

Watched "Atlas Shrugged Part 2 - The Strike" and it was almost as atrocious as the first one. Horrible cinematography and storyline. The acting was fine, but the script is the problem. Samantha Mathis, Diedrich Bader, and a cameo by Teller were the high spots. The Fox News gang of Juan Williams, Shaun Hannity, the old guy, the chick (Sorry I don't know their names, I'm too lazy to care), and Rush Limbaugh get cameos as well. Kept waiting for Ted Nugent to come out and play Wango Tango, but alas it was not to be. 

The only reason I watched this movie is because I saw the first and hate to leave a turd hanging. 2/10

 

This film made The Bell Witch Haunting (2013) look like a good movie.

[ingrsco]

Just watched Paranormal Asylum on Netflix...because I hate myself apparently.

[piranesi]

Curse of the Demon on TCM right now followed up by I Walked With A Zombie. Get your B&W on.

 

EDIT: The Leopard Man is on afterward too. Jacques Tournier mania!

 

 

Awesome.  Dvred all this.  I saw the martin Scorecese narrated doc. on Val Lewton last year and I've been meaning to see all of these since.