October Horrordays

[piranesi]

We just got done carving our John Carpenter opening credits-themed Jack-O-Lantern:

 

 

We left room to the side for the titles.

[Marty Sugar]

12. Apartment 143 (2012)

A Spanish-produced take on the whole "Paranormal Activity" gimmick; while it doesn't reinvent the wheel, it does have some really great jump-scares in it. Also, the reveal of who is possessed by spirits was really well done. I didn't like the actual finish, as it seemed trite, but this was a lot of fun and scared the piss out of me in several spots.  GRADE: C+

[J.T.]

The Carrie remake was a remake.  Not terribly good but not entirely horrible either.  At least this movie shows the timeless quality of King's story because the modernization of the story was very seamless and the technology insertions (ie. Carrie has her humiliating shower experience posted to YouTube.) did not distract from the story.

 

Chloe Moretz puts on the excellent performance you'd expect her to and Julianne Moore is particularly effective as Carrie's ultra-orthodox crazy mother, but Piper Laurie and Sissy Spacek still own their respective roles.

 

If there was a huge mis-step in the reimage, it was the prom scene.

 

In the original De Palma production, Carrie snaps when she's doused in pig blood and she has a sureal vision when she sees everyone at the prom laughing at her as her mother said they would.  You don't really know if Carrie is hallucinating or if everyone really is taking pleasure out of her pain.  Carrie then randomly targets everyone in sight; even people who were sympathetic to her like the gym teacher.  She transitions from victim to monster just like that and it is fucking awesome.

 

In the remake, Kimberly Peirce makes the mistake of having Carrie show compassion smack dab in the midst of her madness.  She spares the gym teacher and lashes out at some students while ignoring others. 

 

The power of that scene in the novel and the original movie comes from Carrie's Psycho-Cinderella moment when the bloom comes off the rose and she goes apeshit.  It is a scene best played with moral ambiguity.  I am totally anti-bully, but it is a fact of life that teens can be cruel and it seems to be amplified more these days by technology and social ambivilence. 

 

I appreciate stories where the tormentors discover what it is like to be tormented and mend their ways, but the modern sentiment that all mean kids deserve horrible deaths or disfigurement just because they are assholes is pretty insane and that is what is going on here.  Carrie is supposed to be a story of unbalanced empowerment where the reaction is entirely disproportionate to action:  a Nietzchean fables about the peril of becoming the thing you hate most. 

 

When movies like this come out, I wonder if we fucking learned anything from Columbine.  Is it really a good idea to send a message to the tormented that becoming a tormentor makes you somebody?

 

IMO, the best reimage of Carrie to date is Chronicle.  Ironically, Alex Russell aka the hero from Chronicle plays Billy Nolan (the hoodlum boyfriend of Chris, Carrie's main nemesis) in this particular tale of psychic ability gone horribly wrong.

 

Peirce's ending is completely underwhelming.  De Palma's payoff is far more satisfying.

[J.T.]

January must be the new October. 

 

Both Devil's Due and Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones are slated for early / mid January 2014 releases instead of coming out now during Halloween.

 

I'm totally baffled as to why the only major horror release this month was Carrie.  It's been over a month since Insidious Chapter 2 came out and had no impact whatsovever.

[Reed]

 

This should be a feature film.

[Travis Sheldon]

 

This should be a feature film.

It already is, it's called Cabin in the Woods.

[KJL]

There's a ton of Bava on Netflix Instant at the moment. Black Sunday and Kill, Baby.......Kill! are just awash in Gothic atmosphere, and, WOW, did Bava know how to shoot a film. The dubbing isn't great, but the stories are a lot more coherent than most Italian horror. .

[Jingus]

DAY 14 of 31 : FRIDAY THE 13 PART 6

Weird, that just happens to be the only horror movie I've watched all week.  Still a damn fine flick, although I'm not entirely sure if it's still my favorite of the original run of the series.  Some of the acting and dialogue are still standard F13 crap, like the wince-inducing "Ya bang!" catchphrase.  But from the very beginning of the opening montage, it's clear that the cinematography, editing, timing, use of music, and general craftsmanship is far superior to most of the stuff that passes for "technique" in this franchise.  

[ingrsco]

I watched Fright Night 2:New Blood  last night and let me tell yyou it is confusing. it is implied by the 2 in the title to be the followup to the 2011 reboot with Colin Farrell and it has new people playing all the same characters  (Charley, Peter, Evil Ed) but here is the catch: the events of the first movie have apparently never taken place inthis one. Charley doesn't know Peter, Peter dosen't know monsters are real, and Evil Ed has never been a vampire. This makes the whole thing confusing as fuck.

[piranesi]

This is a pretty awesome read:

 

http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-midnight-ghost-shows-1453449359/@barrett

[Marty Sugar]

13. Session 9 (2001)

A guy's struggling asbestos company takes a ridiculous lowball bid to clean up an old mental asylum that's been abandoned for 15 years...but it is really empty?

 

Not a lot of scares and chills in this one, as it slowly builds until a rushed finish. Some decent moments, but they tried so hard to be subtle that I think a lot of it gets lost in translation.  I was really looking forward to the buildup, as it teased a really awesome payoff...but then it just got so rushed that I'm left asking what was the point? Good performances by all involved, but I just wasn't satisfied with how the story played out.

 

GRADE: C

 

14. Quarantine 2: Terminal (2011)

It tries to play off the last one, like it's happening almost at the same time. The concept of "domestic biological terrorism" is...I don't know, it doesn't seem like they really thought it through. It's like these scientists want to bring about a plague to end the world, and put all this effort into it, but put zero effort into the antidote that is supposed to save them while they cull the herd. That doesn't even make sense. The old doctor with Parkinsons was entertaining in his cameo, trying to get people's attention while shit is hitting the fan.  Not horrible, but not something I'd ever need to watch again.

 

GRADE: C-

 

** I fell grossly short of 31 movies this year. Being an adult sucks. **

[EVA]

Certainly it has been remarked upon before, but it bears repeating: Tom Atkins is the pimpin'est guy of all-time in HALLOWEEN 3. Runs game on literally very female he comes across in that movie.

I had completely forgotten about the part at the end when the girl robot just keeps coming back over...and over...and over...Hilarious.

[piranesi]

Certainly it has been remarked upon before, but it bears repeating: Tom Atkins is the pimpin'est guy of all-time in HALLOWEEN 3. Runs game on literally very female he comes across in that movie. 

 

And robots.  He doesn't discriminate based on bio-prejudice.

[piranesi]

So, I finally brole down and watched (a little of) HALLOWEEN 6: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MEYERS tonight on AMC, to see if their is anything redeeming about it...since I seem to be able to find something to love about even the worst in this series

TINA FOREVER MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!

And while the whole mythos is incredibly stupid and derailed in this, and most of the movie is straight up weird and annoying at once, I really liked the opening sequence.  There is s a tremendous amount of energy and an incredibly amount of information crammed into it in order to restart a series that had been moribound for five years or so.  You have:1) Jamie being chased by Michael, through a bunch of different spaces (the basement of Smith's Grove?, the bus station, an abandoned barn.  In between cuts in this chase we have intercut2) Scenes of Loomis meeting with the guy who ends up being the main antagonist, setting up some tension and foreshadowing.  Loomis is listening on the radio to3) The shock jock who will show up later in the movie and who ends up being a running thread across this sequence and who provides us a ton of backstory about what the town is like and the idea the Michael is a folk hero figure now, and that they are trying to bring back Halloween.4) Meanwhile we intercut to scenes of who looks to be the final girl and the "new child in danger" (her son) as the kid is haunted by visions of Michael.  This links up, when she goes into her bedrom and notices someone across the street Charlie Brewstering her who turns out to be5) Paul Rudd, who is Tommy Doyle, the self-made, would-be successor to Loomis in trying to figure out Michael and believing he is still alive.  Tommy is calling into the same radio show that Loomis is listening to, and recording it which menas he6) records Jamie who calls from the bus station trying to reach out to Loomis to somehow help her, she calls because the speakers in the station are playing the same shock jock who is telling us about his plans to visit Haddonfield on Halloween...which leads to both7) Loomis heading into town just in time to find Jamie dead and8) Tommy hearing the bus announcements on the radio during her call, leading him to find the baby she has stashed there.It is a really nifty scene that provides a massive amount of context and backstory and sets like five different people on intersecting paths.  It does this all in the space of about 10 minutes with a lot of pace without ever stopping for someone to just blather exposition at us.Considering how bad the overall story is, and how hated the movie is, I was suprised by how well put together that was.  Right through to Jamie's death and Michael's cold-blooded and cruel reaction to her reaching out to him...it was pretty good.Also, I love when horror movies try to capitalize on some cultural phenomenon (like, in this case "shock radio" or in the later HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION "the information superhighway!!!!") that years later seems incredibly dated and so totally of a particular moment.

 

 

Also "Mommy, it's raining!  It's raining red!" is a great bit of audio and a nice way to set up a body reveal.

[piranesi]

Oh, and HALLOWEEN 6 is also one in a long line of movies that subscribe to the idea that if there is a door or gate locked with an electronic, like, keypad lock.  Then your best strategy is to shoot the keypad.  That will immediately open the gate or door.  It will absolutely not just brake the keypad and leave the gate locked.

[Brian Fowler]

Curse isn't the worst of the franchise (Resurrection and 5 are easily a lot fucking worse, and the first two acts of H20 probably are as well, although the third act blows it away) but it is the strangest.

 

If you can handle most re-watching slightly different edits of the first two acts, and really shitty VQ, then I do recommend tracking down the "producer's cut" as, although I'm not sure it's "better" it certainly isn't as choppy, and it's fascinating to see just how much reshoots can change a movie.

[piranesi]

I just watched the ending of that on Youtube.  It seemed bizarre to me that Michael would do a clothing exchange with Wynn, but otherwise it was at least an ending and not an offstage shriek.

 

You know what little bit of the series is really great?  The title sequence for Part 4...just the super creepy images of Halloween decorations around a farmhouse with no music at all. 

 

It's like the Sergio Leone look for a slasher film opening scene.

 

I actually think the biggest misstep in the series was the choice to go with a standard slick slasher look for everything from that point on.  Like, by 1988 the teen slasher was such an established and standardized and slickly produced genre, and they tried really hard to fit into that instead of doing what worked so well in the original, hiring a young director with a new eye and letting him do something that didn't look like anything previous.

 

I get goosebumps thinking about how awesome Part 4 could have been if it had kept that simple tone of the opening shots instead of going so sort of slicky-looking and trying to make it look "like a real movie."

[Brian Fowler]

4 is pretty good overall.

 

I wish I had saved the review Jingus wrote for it the year I did the first Halloween Havoc, because he got pretty into that (awesome) title sequence as well.

 

What I like about 4 is how they take the time to make the things that happen in every slasher movie make sense.  Like, there's a reason the power goes out.  When Rachel and Jamie run to the roof, it really does come across as their only option.  They even make the group splitting up seem reasonable.  The cops believe Loomis the second he arrives in town.  It's like someone took the standard slasher script, and went "how can I bring basic human intelligence to this, without losing any of the major story beats" and I love it for that.

 

Also, the ending is sick and wrong and awesome.  Great title sequence, great last scene...  As long as the rest doesn't completely suck, you'll come away from any movie with a great start and finish pretty happy.

[Reed]

IMO, horror movies are actually scarier when the characters do smart, realistic things. It's more frightening when you see characters doing what you would do in that situation...and they're still fucked.

[piranesi]

Or when they don't have a choice.  The scene in THE LEOPARD MAN when the young girl had to cross under the train bridge to get to the other town to buy whatever her mother was sending her to get.  The previous scene established how (correctly) scared she was to be out at night and how (correctly) terrified she was of going through that space in particular.

 

But she was stuck.  She just had to try to get through as fast as she could.  It made it so much more tense than just "Hey, dude, let's explore this dark cave!!!" because in that situation your brain is always saying "the only reason to do that is to move a horror movie toward a kill...this is artificial and therefore not at all worrying to me."

 

But that poor girl.  She stood there and looked at that tunnel...she tried to see inside it...there was just no other way.  Also, fuck her stupid-ass mamacita.  GODDAMN, FUCK HER!!

[Jingus]

I wish I had saved the review Jingus wrote for it the year I did the first Halloween Havoc, because he got pretty into that (awesome) title sequence as well.

I reeeeeallly need to finish archiving and collating my reviews, because right now they're sort of scattered all over the internet.  Every time I have to go search for a simple request like this, it takes forever.  

 

 

 

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers: 7/10

Let’s start this out by noting that I’ve never been a particularly huge fan of the Halloween series. I liked the first one, sure. But “liked” is about as strong as I’d go with. And I’ve never had any use whatsoever for any of the sequels, all of which struck me as crappy or crappier. Heck, I was actually somewhat amazed when people bitched about how Rob Zombie supposedly “ruined” the franchise with his remakes. What was he ruining? The first one created the “masked slasher kills people for no reason” genre, which is hardly something to brag about; and the rest of them were weak, stupid retreads. So I’m frankly amazed at how much I liked Halloween 4, and consider it very much an outlier in a heavily overrated series. 

Our setting is ten years after the events of the first two movies. (The apparently non-canon events of part 3: Season of the Witch are never even mentioned.) Somehow, Michael Myers survived the ridiculous beating he took in part II, and has been in a coma for the past decade. But wouldn’t you know it, on the ten-year anniversary of his crimes, he wakes up. And kills a lot of people who randomly cross his path on the way back to the haunted streets of Haddonfield, Illinois. Naturally, he’s chased by Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), who is not looking too sane himself these days. In the intervening decade,Jamie Lee Curtis became WAY too expensive for cheap slasher flicks Laurie Strode has died in a car accident; however, she left behind a daughter, young Jamie (Danielle Harris, in her film debut). Michael fixates on her, and it’s a cat-&-mouse game all over town and all night long. 

This movie just plain knows how to creep you out. Look at that opening montage. All it involves is a bunch of farm equipment, shot at unusual angles; but god-damn, doesn’t it give you the willies? This movie gets a lot of mileage of far-away shots of Michael just staring in the general direction of the camera. And that’s despite the fact that these were mostly reshoots, since they decided the original mask didn’t look good, and really the new footage should clash with the original stuff much worse than it did. Several times, we don’t even see the violence; only its horrifying aftermath. Michael has smashed through here like a fucking tornado, and left nothing but death in his trail The performers all do fine; Pleasance underplays most of his moments nicely, which is a pleasant surprise for such an inveterate scenery-chewer. But of course the biggest discovery here is Harris, the finest child actor of her generation. Her character isn’t given much to do besides acting terrified the whole time, but Danielle sells it wonderfully. 

It’s a good thing we get the creeps from the little moments like that; sadly, this movie has one huge flaw. They made Michael WAY too strong. He’s doing a lot of Jason Voorhees bullshit out there, pulling people’s heads apart with his bare hands (although not in a very graphic manner; this was the late 80s, and the MPAA was a harsh mistress at that time), and other various stuff which is physically impossible. The laughably implausible things that he’s capable of doing (how the hell did he manage to hang onto that pickup truck?) tends to undercut some of the menace here. I know, he’s supposed to be Inexplicable Pure Evil and all that jazz. But that doesn’t begin to describe exactly how this guy does things which the human body isn’t capable of, especially when one of the characters helpfully points out that after being in a coma his muscles should be atrophied to the point of uselessness. 

But so many of the other details are so great, especially by slasher-movie standards. Like, very few of the people do standard Stupid Horror Movie Bullshit. Every one of their actions makes sense, from an emotional standpoint. Even when some of the heroes say “let’s split up!” at a dumb moment, the script and its execution make you believe that these characters genuinely thought that splitting up would be the best option, and we don’t feel like they’re morons for doing so. The movie bothers to explain why the phones are out and when the reinforcements will arrive, which are welcome logistical details that so many shitty horror flicks let hang. The best part: almost everybody has guns. What slasher flick ever lets that happen? Movies like Scream would be over in five minutes if everyone had a shotgun. That’s the neat part of this movie: it actually sold me that Michael regards firearms as no more than an annoyance. I don’t believe that he’s bulletproof, but I believe that Myers thinks he’s bulletproof. Which is a heck of an accomplishment for what should have been little more than a tawdry cash-grab sequel.

[piranesi]

BIG LOTS MOTHERFUCKERS!!!

 

[J.T.]

Shit, it is almost October, isn't it?  Where has the summer gone?

 

Occulus is sitting in my Redbox queue waiting to be watched.

 

I am looking forward to comparing viewing notes with fellow horror core fanatics; Burgundy and Jingus.

 

I miss Manos99 but he has moved on to serious journalism.

[jaedmc]

Shit, it is almost October, isn't it?  

Not really.

[odessasteps]

Just because hallowe'en stuff is in the stores doesnt mean its fall.