October Horrordays

[The Z]

So yesterday I watched Re-Animator (1985).

I didn't know anything about this movie beforehand, so this went into some directions I didn't expect.

But I liked it, pretty good stuff.

[Curt McGirt]

I only caught the second half of Curse and bits of Zombie and Leopard because there was so much other shit on last night. I got to see almost all of Angel Heart and hot damn is that a great movie. The end of it is just extraordinary.Mickey Rourke really lays it on the line, DeNiro shows up all dolled up like his buddy Marty Scorcese, and Lisa Bonet goes into a sexual frenzy with blood dripping from the ceiling. Must-see film. I also caught the end of both Ginger Snaps and Puppet Master (my fave). 

[piranesi]

Does anyone know what this goo is?  I just bought this at Dollar General store for...well $1 and it is pretty awesome looking.

 

 

But it opens, and the goo inside is really stretchy and gooey and so temptingly purple.  It is some kind of edible taffy or something?  There is literally no information on this guy:

 

 

It indicates that the little skeleton guy is a choking hazard...but doesn't say "DON'T EAT THIS PURPLE GOO YOU FUCKING FOOL!!!!"  As a general rule, I assume everything at dollar general is edible unless it says otherwise...and yet...I wanna know before I eat it...but I do wanna eat it.

 

The barcode yields nothing.  The company is just a shell of DOLlar  GENeral corp.

[The Z]

Just eat it, but please give us a detailed report of your experience over at Land of Confusion.

[FluffSnackwell]

So The Unholy popped up on IFC today and I just had to catch it. Because 4^th grade me loved it so much even though current me could only remember the most basic details (red headed temptress demonic whore, gore, tits and monsters.) Holy sheep shit on a shingle was this gawdawful.

It was like a crackhead saw a double feature of The Sentinel and Hellraiser and got ideas and stuff. Hey, I’m all for practical FX and loathe CGI but I swear the grand demon here popped in some incarnation or another in a half dozen other things. Scout’s honor. One of those movies being the spider woman monster in the ultimate cult trainwreck (culled together from multiple scripts) Spookies. I sheet you not.

 

And the thing is it has a pretty nice collection of character actors (Ned Beatty, Boy Meets World’s Dad.)

But man no wonder I forgot this one. What a mess.

[FluffSnackwell]

Also I should mention like an idiot I had the willful misfortune of reading a chock full o'spoilers review of The Seventh Victim before it ran on TCM last night. Then again had I not read the favorable review I probably wouldn't have even bothered with it. As it is, by the end and seventy years later (I'm sure it was quite the jolt back in its day) the twist ending was pretty plain to see coming.

[Curt McGirt]

I watched The Unholy today too and couldn't sit through the whole thing, kept channel surfing. Soooooooooo loooooooong (2 hrs. 15 min.!) and the only cool stuff was the burning inverted crucifixion/disembowelment and some titties. Such an unconvincing monster. 

 

On the other hand, I just caught some of The Blob (1988) which is replaying in an hour, and I was digging it. The effects rang from completely awesome to totally unconvincing but they always look good. That stuff piranesi bought above is apparently what the Blob was made of, I believe.

[piranesi]

 

 

On the other hand, I just caught some of The Blob (1988) which is replaying in an hour, and I was digging it. The effects rang from completely awesome to totally unconvincing but they always look good. That stuff piranesi bought above is apparently what the Blob was made of, I believe.

 

 

Hmmmm.  So the question now is...Can I digest it from the outside-in before it can digest me from the inside-out.

 

 

I probably shouldn't have filled up on bread first.

[JRGoldman]

The woman decided to be kind and watch a horror movie with me tonight. I let her pick and she decided on The Shining because she had never seen it. I think she was expecting a different movie, and perhaps had really high expectations from people talking it up all her life. It also has to be weird to see it and see these amazing scenes and shots, but since they have been spoofed or imitated a thousand times before you've seen the original, they don't have the same resonance.

Interestingly enough, she did levy the same criticism that King famously did, in that she felt Jack was crazy to begin with, so it's not particularly sad or surprising when he does start to really fall apart. She also couldn't get over how awful Shelly Duvall was.

[Reggie20x6]

Halloween Music Video Tyme! (Non-Thriller Edition)

 

[Jingus]

Kicked it off with Hatchet 3. Sid Haig cameo!

So, what'd you think of it?    

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.

I'm a Lewton fanboy, and probably Cat People is my favorite of his productions, although he also made some fine Karloff features. But I gotta admit, Curse of the Demon is one that didn't hit the spot for me. Okay, the monster itself is cool, and it's rather odd that we get such a good look at it right at the beginning of the film. But that makes the rest of the movie a long fuckin' ride with our asshole skeptical protagonist, whom even Agent Scully would have eventually bitchslapped and screamed "IT'S A MONSTER, YOU IDIOT!". The villainous wizard keeps using complicated risky magic rituals to achieve the same results that a gun can achieve in two seconds. And seriously, what the fuck was up with that scene where our hero is wrestling with a pathetically obvious stuffed panther? That's some "Bela Lugosi with an octopus" level bullshit right there.I have watched... uh... pretty much dick for horror movies. I caught Hatchet recently, because I finally bought a copy ($5 at Walmart ftw) and hadn't watched it in a while after practically watching the sequels on a loop. It's still fun, but it's weird how slow and small-scale the whole thing is compared to 2 and 3, half of it is practically a sitcom. But I'll definitely get to my Halloween project pick at the very least, and I've been buying a buncha cheap DVDs recently so I'll catch some more horror at some point or another.

[Curt McGirt]

 

I probably shouldn't have filled up on bread first.

 

It might make a tremendous jam. (This just reminded me of me licking a hardened ball of Play-Doh when I was a little kid. It was like licking a brick of salt but worse, one of the worst things I've ever tasted.)

[piranesi]

If they didn't make Blob-flavored jam amd/or Lik-M-Aid in 1988, then someone in Hollywood failed!

[FluffSnackwell]

Hatchet III=Best of the bunch!

[Burgundy LaRue]

I'm trying to decide whether I like Hatchet II enough to watch Hatchet III.  The original was great, though.

[Brian Fowler]

I think Hatchet III was on a pretty comparable level to Hatchet II, well behind the original, but I'd be more than willing to watch a nonsensical part IV.

[Jingus]

Frowny face for not loving Hatchet 2, y'all know my feelings on that one by now, but do see the third one.  It's a nice conclusion for the story, answers some unanswered questions, gives us another great Danielle Harris performance as the gutsy protagonist, tones way down on the leering fratboy sexuality stuff, and has some incredible kills.  I'm usually not a Fangoria-reading kills-lover, but this movie has several vividly memorable ones.  Sid Haig's little part was awesome, hopefully he'll come back with more screentime if they continue the series.  

[Reed]

The woman decided to be kind and watch a horror movie with me tonight. I let her pick and she decided on The Shining because she had never seen it. I think she was expecting a different movie, and perhaps had really high expectations from people talking it up all her life. It also has to be weird to see it and see these amazing scenes and shots, but since they have been spoofed or imitated a thousand times before you've seen the original, they don't have the same resonance.Interestingly enough, she did levy the same criticism that King famously did, in that she felt Jack was crazy to begin with, so it's not particularly sad or surprising when he does start to really fall apart. She also couldn't get over how awful Shelly Duvall was.

 

People seem to be so divided over Duvall's performance in that film. I thought she was really great and few could have done it better, but people accuse her of over-acting and being annoying.

 

I don't know, your husband is trying to kill you and your son with an axe and chasing you around an abandoned hotel...can you over-act in a situation like that? Of course you'd be hysterical.

 

I think Jack being crazy from the get-go works for Kubrick's movie, even if it's at odds with the book.

[JRGoldman]

I actually really like Duvall from the baseball bat scene on. I think her facial contortions perfectly fit with everything else Kubrick was doing visually. Earlier in the film, when she has to deliver expository dialogue, it's like she's never acted before.

[piranesi]

If you think of her character as less of a person and more of a representation of willful, codependent denial then her stiff, goofy grinning early on is actually kind of haunting.

 

It's a little weird, though, because in what is one of Kubrik's more naturalistic films in terms of characters and overall look (somewhere between CLOCKWORK and FULL METAL), her character comes off more like someone from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and I think it's deliberate, like Kubrik himself wasn't quite sure yet if this was another symbolic setting or a real one.

[Reed]

I think what Duvall was going for was essentially this empty shell of a woman who's already been totally beaten down by life, her husband doesn't give a crap about her or their son, has physically abused the kid (maybe sexually too, if you believe that interpretation) and probably beats her up too.

 

She's a woman barely holding it together and she doesn't think her life can get any worse. And then it does.

[Jingus]

I just never found The Shining to be scary.  Of course, I was forbidden to watch horror movies as a young kid, and didn't see most of 'em until I was at least in high school, so naturally I happened to watch them at precisely the right time that I would be least scared of all the classics.  It's actually rather annoying, being so damn hard to scare, it makes watching horror films often rather tedious. 

 

As for Duvall's performance, I blame that more on Kubrick than on her.  Remember, this is the movie where Stanley allegedly went completely off the rails when it comes to filming a truly excessive number of takes, like over a hundred takes for the majority of scenes in the movie.  Kubrick was one of those cold-hearted asshole manipulators who liked to break down his actors in some kind of bullshit mental power game and work them like puppets.  

[Reed]

The Shining is more hypnotic than scary.

 

And, yeah, Kubrick was completely insane. I get being driven to detail and all that, but reading about what went on, everyone involved would have been perfectly within their rights to storm out and refuse to come back till he calmed down a bit. Poor Duvall must have wondered what was worse: the mad man she was facing on screen or the one she was dealing with off screen.

[J.T.]

Mama debuted on HBO this weekend and should be available On Demand now.

 

[Curt McGirt]

Lady Frankenstein (1971) was a late-night Netflix pick for me last night. Joseph Cotton is Frankenstein and his daughter Rosalba Neri is visiting. Turns out she's also a surgeon and scientist who knows exactly what he's up to. Of course the monster ends up with a damaged brain and goes crazy, killing his maker then running around crushing people in the village. Meanwhile Neri has her own plans to make a monster. Pretty evocative of the Hammer era, shot in lurid Technicolor and featuring some early '70s blood and nudity. Decent acting and some good dialogue between other characters and the drunken graverobber Lynch. There's one particularly nasty scene where they hang a dude down a well (!). Even though the monster looks fairly ridiculous (he reminds me of the early versions of Eddie that Iron Maiden came up with to walk around onstage) this was unexpectedly good. Plus as far as eye candy goes, you can go far worse than Rosalba Neri and Mickey Hargitay, depending on your preference.