Halloween Havoc IV

[Brian Fowler]

Welcome, dear children of the night, to the first installment of 2013's Halloween Havoc.  Oh, we have a special treat tonight.  Muwhahahahaha

 

Movie: Night of the Comet

 

Chosen by: JR Goldman (Who didn't give any explanation, oh bother.)

 

Reviewed by: The Mad Dog Marty Sugar

 

Night Of The Comet (1984)

 

This is a sci-fi/horror flick, revolving around the concept that for the first time in 65 million years, Earth is passing through the tail of a comet. The world doesn't know  how to take this: many people are actively scared that "the end is nigh," but this is an 80s flick...so many of us are out partying it up and wearing silly headbands with asteroids dangling off them. We were a lot of things in the 1980s, but fashion-conscious was not at the top of the list.  It was different back then...you kids wouldn't understand! Now get off my lawn!

 

Where was I?  Right: apparently, the comet ends up vaporizing nearly everyone on the planet; or at least in Southern California, which is essentially the whole world when you make movies.  Those that aren't vaporized are turning into some sort of psychotic zombie-type creatures at a varying rate of speed.  We have a few rag-tag survivors in L.A. trying to survive this post-apocalyptic nightmare, and a group of scientists intent on curing the problem. Or are they?

 

The concept is solid, and there's some neat ideas going on: the scientists in their underground bunker didn't end up being immune to the comet's dust (that apparently is causing the zombie madness gimmick), so a lot of their help is more than a little questionable. In fact, the very sanity of the entire scientific gang is questionable: case in point the lone female of the group, who thought a pair of legwarmers added to her standard-issue grey jumpsuit in a professional manner.  Yes, legwarmers: they have a big role in this movie. Also, teased bangs for days, wacky-ass clothes and the oddest interior decorating known to man. 

 

Along with their bangs, they tease other concepts, too: like is it wrong to kill a child if he's a fucking zombie? Or when everyone you know is dead, is it wrong to miss your sometimes fuck-buddy, even if in "real life" you never really cared that much for him? These concepts get tossed out there, but they don't get fleshed out.  But then again, there's only seven zombies in this film (and three are in a dream sequence, so they don't even really count), so to be fair...a lot of the basic zombie shit wasn't being fleshed out in a movie kind of about zombies, so you can imagine why the deep shit got a brief going-over, too.

 

There's a lot of obligatory 1980s stuff going on in this film: a music montage where our sister survivors try on clothes and makeup in an abandoned department store (to the tune of Cyndi Lauper's hit, "Girls Just Wanna  Have Fun," of course. Of course!), then they have an Uzi fight with the department store clerks who have now formed a rag-tag gang of killers in our post-comet world. Now at least the girls' Uzi ownership makes sense (their daddy is in the military), but where does your average department store carry them? Is that a mail-order thing? The leader of our little stockboy gang gets in some great dialogue (that doesn't make a lick of sense, but hey: he gives it all he's got for his 15 minutes of fame), before we move on our merry way to the real meat n' potatoes of this thing: SCIENCE IS BAD!

 

No, not really. Scientists just aren't as smart as they think. So let's dress up cool and have fun. Yay, 80s!

 

I'm not sounding kind, but this is a silly 80s flick and I'm responding appropriately.  But Hell, it's silly fun and was most-definitely a spectacular film to watch at the drive-in when you're 16-19, and more intent on getting to third base with your best girl, in your parents' station wagon.  It's not actively awful, it just isn't very good.  GRADE: C-

 

[Marty Sugar]

This guy sounds like a smart and sexy reviewer of movies...

[piranesi]

 

We were a lot of things in the 1980s, but fashion-conscious was not at the top of the list.

 

How dare you, sir. 

 

 

I will now demonstrate how your very own review contradicts that slanderous epitaph:

 

 

the lone female of the group, who thought a pair of legwarmers added to her standard-issue grey jumpsuit in a professional manner.  Yes, legwarmers: they have a big role in this movie. Also, teased bangs for days, wacky-ass clothes and the oddest interior decorating known to man. 

 

 

indeed.

 

 

music montage where our sister survivors try on clothes and makeup in an abandoned department store

 

indeed.  Good day, sir.

 

 

So let's dress up cool and have fun. Yay, 80s!

 

 

I SAID GOOD DAY, SIR!

[Brian Fowler]

Come in, come in, gather round in the darkness

 

 

Film: Texas Chainsaw (2013)

 

Chosen by: Jingus

 

I'm not sure of the protocol when it comes to nominating very-recent movies, but it sure seems like hardly anyone saw this. And NOBODY liked it, AT ALL, except for ME. I swear, with God as my witness, one day I WILL find someone else who loves this film!

In short, I think it's a damn fine modern slasher (which is rare enough already), but moreover it's a slasher which goes out of its way to avoid most of the standard slasher-formula crap. There's no Final Girl, there's no gratuitous scene of the cannibal family forcing their victims to sit down at the dinner table, no mysterious third-act thunderstorms where the phones and power go out, and especially no inexplicable lack of cops getting involved. And most hilarious of all, it proudly stands as an official member of the Texas Chainsaw Sequel/Reboot Club by joining all the others in flatly pretending that every sequel before this one simply didn't happen.

 

Reviewed by: Newb82

 

Texas Chainsaw (2013)

Your enjoyment of this movie may largely depend on four factors: whether you can tolerate a movie in which just about everyone does something really shitty to someone else, whether you can buy an attempted babyface turn for Leatherface (yes, I'm serious), and whether you can get over the timeline making absolutely zero sense, and finally whether you can buy the ending or not.

I could not, on all four accounts.

I don't see why this movie needed to be in 3-D, since the most that seems to be done with it is a chainsaw being pointed at the camera. Hell, I don't see why this movie needed to be made at all. It didn't make me actively mad like JASON GOES TO HELL or the Zombie HALLOWEEN movies do, but this is just a bad movie, that I never need to see again.

I could be snarky and say that the best part of the movie is when it shows scenes from the original to let you know that this is meant to be a direct sequel to that, and in this case, neither the original sequels, the remake, or the prequel to the remake apply. I won't, because I did like what immediately follows, which is the aftermath to Sally escaping the deranged Sawyer clan in the original, especially Bill Moseley, who played Drayton Sawyer (the father), as he did a good imitation of the original actor, Jim Siedow (Moseley also played Chop Top in TCM 2).

There are characters in that opening that show up later in the present day (it's shown to be present day because of some of the technology present), and...they don't look like they've aged forrty years. Twenty maybe, but not fourty. Hell, we're supposed to forget at this point that Leatherface would be ready for an AARP membership at this point, but given that he's supposed to be physically able to do what he does after essentially sitting in a small room for forty years, so his age would be the easiest thing to overcome there.

Where the lead character is supposed to fit in the Sawyer bloodline is beyond me. She's implied to be the baby from the opening, but that would be the youngest-looking forty-year-old in the history of the world. There's no way, given what the movie tells us, that she fits into the Sawyer family bloodline in any logical way, and I don't think the movies "scares" effected me at all because I was too busy trying to figure this out.

Now, there's the ending...

 

I don't buy Heather (the lead) deciding to stay in the house with Leatherface. Yes, he saved her from the cops and the mayor who wanted to kill her, but he still killed her friends, and now she's an attractive twenty-something willfully pissing any hope of a future away to remain tethered to him supposedly because of some familial pride. A family that she didn't know she was a part of 48 hours prior. Yeah, I don't buy it. If they make a sequel, it should be about her waking up and realizing what a dumb decision she made, and how she attempts to rid herself of Leatherface.

 

Even leaving all this out, you still only have a fairly bland slasher movie with the usual tropes, including dumb characters doing dumb shit to get themselves killed. The movie tries to get cute with several nods to the original (there's even a SAW reference thrown in), but doesn't come close to creating the tension and the terror of that movie.

On the plus side, Alexandra Daddario (Heather) is REALLY hot, and you get to see "Alex" from LOST in her undies, so there's that.

If you want to see a TCM movie, go with either the original, or even the 2003 remake, which is eons better than this one.

[Brisco]

The 2003 remake was my first introduction to the TCM franchise and scared the absolute shit out of me so bad I had to see it again. Great theater experience!

[Newb82]

In case you couldn't tell, I REALLY did not like this one.

 

Sorry Jingus, your search continues...

[Brian Fowler]

We have risen once again muwahahahahaha

 

Movie: Monkey Shines

 

Chosen by: Execproducer

 

George Romero. No zombies. Just one crazy ass monkey and a generous helping of studio tinkering. A divisive film, but I fall into the It's Good camp.

 

Reviewed by: Suicide King of Spades

 

My movie was Monkey Shines.

 

There's a guy named Alex, who's out jogging, gets hit by a truck, and ends up a quadraplegic.  Alex has a scientist friend named Jeffrey, a bit of an unstable fellow, who's been doing research involving injecting... um, I don't know the scientific term, but it's liquified human brains, into monkeys to try and make them smarter.  Jeffrey gives Alex one of the monkeys, a female named Ella, but he goes through an animal trainer to cover up that whole liquified brain experiment thing.  The idea is that the monkey is going to be trained to perform simple tasks for Alex, who's either confined to his bed or his wheelchair (there's also a human nurse around, to do the stuff that requires heavy lifting).  But the monkey is much smarter than anyone expects.  Also more evil.

 

So there are two very familiar names here.  The first is Stanley Tucci, who's just in a small role as one of Alex's doctors, and may actually have the fewest lines of any speaking character in the movie.  The second is the writer/director, a Mr. George A. Romero.  In a sense, I may have been one of the worst people to review this movie, because I think I tend to lean towards seeing more obscure things, so there are some big holes in what I've seen... what I'm trying to say is that I've never seen a Romero movie.  This was my first one.  So I can't be like "Oh normally in a Romero movie he does this, but here he does this."

 

The "no animals were harmed in the making of this movie" message at the beginning explains that the monkey who plays Ella came from the Helping Hands program at Boston University, so I guess trained monkeys helping people with physical disabilities is a real thing. The monkey was just generally super impressive overall.  You can tell there are editing tricks to splice in reaction shots, and I think there are even some little fake monkey paws being used at least once, but for the most part it seemed like the monkey was legit doing everything it was supposed to do - carrying items around, jumping up on people's shoulders, even turning pages of a book Alex is reading.  Makes me wonder how difficult it was to get all that done.

 

I liked the idea that the monkey was becoming attached to Alex, because it gives her a reason to kill anyone who was being mean to him (to protect him), and also any woman who was being nice to him (out of jealousy), which was pretty much everyone.  But there was also the idea that the two of them were forming a psychic connection, Alex was seeing through Ella's eyes when he went to sleep, and Ella's presence was affecting Alex's personality, making him much more irritable.  That starts to push the limits of believability, especially since there was no explanation given for it.  It also forced Alex to go through these bizarre sudden personality switches, which at their worst were almost laughable.  I think you could've written that stuff out of the movie without changing the plot too much.

 

I know this isn't a universal thing by any means, but what I'm kind of used to in a horror movie is buildup, jump scare, repeat.  This doesn't really get into the jump scares until late in the movie, but strangely, when it does, there is never any buildup at all.  Someone is in the middle of a sentence and then MONKEY ATTACK.  There's a part where Jeffrey is looking through Alex's house for the monkey, looks in a closet, and it felt like the monkey shouldn't have been in there and we gotta wait a little longer and let Jeffrey look in a couple more places to build things up... but nope, MONKEY ATTACK.  I'm not saying this is a bad thing, because I get pretty stressed by the buildup part, and I was very much not stressed here, just having fun.  But it's an interesting case study.  Are there any movies where they just keep building up over and over and never pay it off with a scare?

 

It's probably not giving too much away to say there's a part at the end where either Alex or Ella triumphs over the other.  That part is AWESOME.

 

Overall... pretty decent.  Couple of things I would've changed, and not the world's scariest movie, but a great animal performance, and more good than bad.

[piranesi]

 

Texas Chainsaw (2013) 

 

I usually totally disagree with Jingus in the October threads, but I just finished wathing this and I thought it was pretty good.  I found it easy enough to just retcon the original as happening 20 years ago instead of 40.  Based on the ridiculous stitches that they pass off as clothing, which are fully in line with the hideous late 90s exposed stomach look, I could have pretended this one was happening in 1995 up until they broke out the cell-phone cameras.I did actively dislike the group of lead characters (four of which were just so magnificently, painfully beautiful that it was borderline absurd) who spent the first 20 minutes or so essentially posing for an American Apparel photo-shoot they apparently thought was happening around them every minute of every day.  Die, motherfuckers.But I thought the initial house scenes were pretty good.  Just enough of the standard TCM imagery: Leatherface chasing someone down who almost escapes, (that big meat hook gives him the extra reach he needs!) the little quick glimpses of gore, the quick hammer shot to the head, the iconic meat locker.  I didn't get the impression that Leatherface was locked in a little room all the time, but that he had the run of the house when gramma was still alive at least sometimes.I also liked how that part and the expected chainsaw chase were quick and self-contained.  They got right to it.  The creeping around the house scenes were well directed and they made great use of the big complex spaces in the house.  Some of them rooms were huge and cavernous and spooky, some of them claustrophobic and panic-inducing (Marvin in the kitchen). The chase scene was fast and chaotic, but kind of made sense and of course relied on the male lead fucking up the getaway.  It makes no sense that there was a carnival right there and while that scene was fun looking (chaotic running, colors, lights and chainsaw sounds are literally like horror-movie pixie-stick dust), it really didn't make much sense.  But I really liked the pace of it.  And along the way there were some great shots.  The shot of Leatherface in the cemetary when Lost-Girl yells at him and he starts running toward her.  Pretty scary.  The Jurassic Park-esque scene of him running toward the back of the van seen through the back window.  I actually liked Leatherface as T-Rex in that scene. I also thought the mask-making scene was a nice gruesome touch.But you are right that the face-turn bit was kind of contrived.  But instead of seeing it as a face-turn it reminded me of those movies where the main monster at some point is used or unleashed in the middle of someone else's fight and just sort of incidentally causes chaos...and, shit, I'm having a hard time thinking of an instance...maybe like the T-Rex at the end of Jurassic Park?  Or like using getting Jason to turn on Freddie??? Dammit, I know there are movies where the "monster" is almost a side character, just a means to cause the Third act to go fucking bananas.  At least at first.  But fuck,

"Do your thing, Coz!" and everything after that kind of pissed me off.  A fucking hot-tag to Leatherface?  And a bunch of catch phrases? And then what, she's going to become a cannibal?  Teach him how to be a regular dude?  living alone in a cannibal mansion next to a town where he just killed, like everyone? and WHY NOT GIVE HER THE LETTER EXPLAINING ALL THIS ALONG WITH THE KEYS TO THE HOUSE????Like, nothing could be more annoying than there being a letter that explains everything...but no one gives it to her until after she figures everything out herself?  But with all her friends dead (okay, that part wasn't so bad).  Like, what the fuck is she going to do there?  Tweet?  Skype? learn to whittle?

One note:  I loved "Marvin" the gung-ho deputy who thought he was so tough.Sheriff [over the radio]: Marvin, we believe Jed Sawyer is in that house!  You STAND DOWN!Marvin: Copy that, chief, but a chainsaw don't make you bullet-proof.I liked that guy.  Poor, poor Marvin.  But the iphone camera thing was dumb.  I felt like I was watching HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION or something.

[Jingus]

Reviewed by: Newb82 Texas Chainsaw (2013) the 2003 remake... is eons better than this one.

          

But instead of seeing it as a face-turn it reminded me of those movies where the main monster at some point is used or unleashed in the middle of someone else's fight and just sort of incidentally causes chaos...and, shit, I'm having a hard time thinking of an instance...maybe like the T-Rex at the end of Jurassic Park?  Or like using getting Jason to turn on Freddie??? Dammit, I know there are movies where the "monster" is almost a side character, just a means to cause the Third act to go fucking bananas.

There's plenty of movies like that; just think of various crossovers. The Universal House Of Dracula/Frankenstein flicks, various Godzilla and other kaiju mayhem stuff, countless martial arts flicks.

and WHY NOT GIVE HER THE LETTER EXPLAINING ALL THIS ALONG WITH THE KEYS TO THE HOUSE????Like, nothing could be more annoying than there being a letter that explains everything...but no one gives it to her until after she figures everything out herself?  But with all her friends dead (okay, that part wasn't so bad).  Like, what the fuck is she going to do there?  Tweet?  Skype? learn to whittle?

He did give her the letter along with the keys. Go back and watch, he audibly stresses that she needs to read it. She was just chattering with her friends and not paying attention, and forgot about the letter once all the drama started happening. The lawyer even reminds her about it later, when they meet in the bar right before the ending sequence.

 

But the iphone camera thing was dumb.  I felt like I was watching HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION or something.

I liked the camera phone, because I thought they used it well to help heighten tension, build a little character from the dialogue exchanged while they were using it, helped get a few pretty sweet camera shots, and helped punctuate that one really sick joke which wouldn't have been as funny if they weren't using this phone and couldn't see and hear each other.Halloween Resurrection did it poorly, indeed; as did Scream 4, which was really pathetically lazy in not even trying to do anything interesting with the idea of live streaming video. But I thought it worked in this situation, for the aforementioned reasons.Overall, I just don't see the point in getting held up over the timeline issues. Yeah, the numbers don't add up; so what? Who cares? How many years has it been since Bruce Wayne's parents were killed, anyway? It's a long-running franchise, you have to simply accept that eventually they're gonna have to start fudging timelines. It's the pinnacle of tightly-knit canon compared to the crap going on in all the other big slasher franchises anyway; this minor continuity boo-boo is minor indeed compared to pretty much any single Friday the 13th sequel.As for Leatherface turning, er, face: I didn't mind it, I actually kinda liked it. It was a different idea for the character, making him somewhat sympathetic while still making him menacing and dangerous as all hell. And I've always been a sucker for redemption stories or tales of good and bad people forced to team together, so that was all up my alley.

[Curt McGirt]

Now you guys just made me think of a mascara contra mascara match with Leatherface. 

[Newb82]

The timeline, while one of the big four issues for me, wasn't the only one, and the movie didn't keep me interested enough in what was unfolding to keep my mind from trying to work it out. Take out the camera phone and the wall in the police station that tracks every cop car, and I could have accepted this as taking place in the 90's.

 

A good (or at least moderately entertaining) movie can allow me to get immersed in it and usually not even notice holes like that. That this one didn't shows how uninterested I was in what it had to offer.

[Brisco]

Could a business or police station not have a wall tracking their cars in the late 90s early 00s as a service of a cell phone company? I am thinking it was whoever sold the huge yellow phones.

[piranesi]

Oh, they could. 

 

But it was really only good for building glitch lists.

 

Clearly those vehicle headlines should not be running off the car batteries.

 

In fact, the tech. goes back farther by at least a decade:

 

[Brian Fowler]

And we press on into the long night, full of darkness and evil.

 

Movie: Q - The Winged Serpent

 

Chosen by: The Mad Dog

 

It is so ridiculous and over the top, but when I watched it at my friend's 9th birthday party (in 1984, on BETA!), we thought it was great. The opening moments will explain why. Everyone is clearly just fooling around in this film, but they seem to be having fun...so hey, give it a whirl.

 

Reviewed by: Execproducer

 

Q: The Winged Serpent (1982)

"It's name is Quetzalcoatl... just call it Q, that's all you'll have time to say before it tears you apart!"
 

  Stop-motion animation is almost as old as cinema. In the silent era, it was used largely to give movement to inanimate objects. Later, it would bring to life giant monsters and mythological creatures and allow experimental film-makers to explore the limits of their imaginations. Later still, it would make its way to television to bring families together on holidays as well as to sell raisins. Today, it has brought to life the irreplaceable dog, Gromit. In Q: The Winged Serpent, we have the terrifying nightmare of what may be the flying incarnation of an Aztec deity hunting it's prey over the gritty, urban roof-tops of pre-cleaned up  NYC. 
 

Michael Moriarty stars as Jimmy Quinn, a pathetic loser of a small-time crook, whose unearned ego is matched only by his rotten luck, but completely dwarfs his marginal jazz piano skills. Fleeing from a botched heist, Jimmy stumbles upon the lair of Q: The Winged Serpent atop of the Chrysler Building. Between the freshly picked clean skeleton and giant egg he discovers, Jimmy has a secret that he hopes to turn into a big pay-off. We are also given the Superstar genre team-up of David Carradine  and Richard Roundtree, two NYC police detectives, investigating the sudden rash of headless window cleaners and body parts dropping from the sky. These dudes are seriously overworked because they are simultaneously trying to crack the case of a string of ritual murders with apparently willing victims. Fuckin' New York!
 

I love this film. Directed with a sure hand by B-movie legend Larry Cohen and top-notch cinematography from Fred Murphy and Robert Levi (especially the gliding aerial shots over the city), Q: The Winged Serpent features many layers expertly stretched over the frame of the standard Samuel Z. Arkoff formula. Half of the fun, of course, is seeing all of the B-movie conventions that play out on-screen: The tough-guy dialogue ("Fry up about 500 pounds of bacon, we're going to have us some breakfast!" Carradine's Sheppard says before lighting up Q: The Winged Serpent's  egg with his machine gun), the fact that most of the uniformed police officers look like hippies and porn extras, the cheesy gore effects, and on and on. 
 

Though this isn't ancient Arabia or the ice planet Hoth, the stop-motion Q: The Winged Serpent marries surprisingly well with the early 80's urban background, probably mainly due to the economy with which Cohen uses to present the flying monster.
 

But the main event here is Michael Moriarty giving what may be the single greatest performance in a flying monster movie....or for that matter,  any kind of monster movie. He is truly something to behold. There are some negatives, to be sure. The pairing of Carradine and Roundtree doesn't really amount to much. Shaft is a bit under-used... though the scene with the four cops driving in pursuit of the ritual killer, one cop in mime drag, might bring a smile to your face...and Carradine is overly nonchalant for someone making the connections that he does between the deaths and their cause. In fact, everyone seems just a little too quick to accept the reality of a giant flying killer before it has even been spotted. And while the climatic battle with Q: The Winged Serpent is a helluva lot of fun, some of the SFX  surrounding it are a little less successful than the monster itself.   
 

Still, a fun romp and recommended.
 

Stop-motion animation: 4 out of five stars.

Story and presentation: 3 out of five stars.

Michael Moriarty: A MILLION BILLION STARS!!!!!!

[Marty Sugar]

My favorite part of watching Q now, is that the mysterious "ritual killer" is the guy who fixes the Skittles leak in present(ish) day...

 

[Brian Fowler]

First, some house cleaning: I have a review that I'm about to post, and then I have 2 more from other people, and my own.  Also, I am going to be out of town until sometime Sunday night, so there won't be a Saturday night review.  If you haven't done your review yet, now would be a great time (says the horrible hypocrite who never did his book review this summer...)

 

Moving on

[Brian Fowler]

Oh, not hiding under the beds already, are we boil and ghouls?

 

 

Movie:  I Saw The Devil

 

Chosen by: Lawful Metal

 

I suggest someone review I Saw the Devil, even if it's not really a horror movie. Still, probably the best movie I've seen on Netflix.

 

 

Reviewed by: Brisco

 

I Saw The Devil (Jee-Woon 2010)

 

Evil comes in many forms, but the scariest form of

evil is the evil that comes from within. This

Korean thriller examines how far a man of the law

will be driven to extract revenge when his

pregnant fiancee is murdered. The hero Kim Soo-

hyeon is taken to an extremely dark place in his

pursuit of the killer. In essence he adopts the

"To catch the monster, you must become a monster"

mantra where he plays catch and release with the

killer. This inspires Kyung-Chul, the serial

killer, who intends to win this little game by

attempting to deny Soo-hyeon the satisfaction of

revenge.

 

While I tagged this film as a thriller, and at its

heart it is, it contains more than enough violence

to drift to the horror genre. The amount of

violence can be unsettling from a simple dick

beating to straight up cannibalism. The violence

is the engine that drives the film to the very

depths of the humanity. Soo-hyeon deals with some

truly messed up people, while at the same time

finding himself increasingly pushed in that

direction. His antagonist Kyung-Chul is one of the

worst human beings in cinema. He kills for

seemingly no reason at all and does not flinch at

the violence he commits. Director Jee-Woon does

not hide the violence from the viewer, and

truthfully the violence helps set this apart from

other great revenge thrillers. I am not one to be

against film violence but this was pretty brutal

and is a necessary evil to take the viewer to the

dark depths the characters have sunk to.

 

I have seen some talk about the portrayal of women

in this film. The killers do attack women 99% of

the time, but I do not see this as women being

weak. A man who kills for fun certainly would not

want to get caught and I see this as the killer

having a comfortable pattern of stalking women or

finding them in prone positions. And really, does the

fact that a serial killer chooses women as his main prey

really an indictment on women as a whole? The argument is weak.

 

This film caught me by surprise, for one this was

the first Korean film I have had the pleasure of

watching. Second, I expected an over the top pick

from the board as opposed to a spectacular well

rounded film. Lead actors Lee and Choi are

absolutely amazing, playing their roles to

perfection. I cannot recommend this film enough.

5/5

[Curt McGirt]

Yeah, that movie is really, really, really good. 

[Brisco]

I hope my review isnt full of ranting redneckery and the copy and paste from notepad messed up the formatting somehow but the movie was amazing. Go out and see it if you haven't already.

I really thought JT picked the film, I was obviously incorrect in this assumption. Great pick LM.

[Lawful Metal]

I Saw the Devil is one of the best movies I've watched on Netflix ever.  I like a movie I can't see coming, and I honestly could not see any of the surprises or revelations coming, even though they almost always made sense. I was blown away by the performances as well, as Storm Shadow and Oldboy swapped alignments way better than anyone could have foreseen.  Choi Min-Sik as the killer was particularly loathsome every minute and every second he's on the screen. and Byung-Hun Lee has such starpower and radiated such energy he needs to be in way better movies than GI Joe. 

 

I cannot recommend this movie enough.  Just an incredible film that makes me shiver to think about.

[Brian Fowler]

Did you all manage to calm your fears over the weekend?

 

Good, good, come back in...

 

Movie:  Black Christmas (1974)

 

Chosen by:  Wait, wait, wait, what kind of moron chooses a Christmas themed film for Halloween?  *Looks it up*  Oh, right, me.

 

An oft-overlooked absolute classic that is as important for the template of slasher films that John Carpenter would perfect 4 years later Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho, the two much more famous films that get all the credit.  Should be more widely celebrated.

Reviewed by:  Lacelle

 

Black Christmas

I was delighted that this was an older horror movie cause I do find many of the newer ones a little too slick for my liking. This movie was all about mood. The tenseness was palpable and I found the acting which is usually suspect in this genre to be more than adequate. I could have swore the old doll was Shelly Winter but alas, it was not. Margot Kidder was a nice little surprise as was Andrea Martin. I was a tad disappointed by the main characters decisions at the end of the film but aside from that, it did the trick for me, which is to keep me interested, entertained and enthralled. I genuinely wanted to see what would happen next.

[jaedmc]

Holy crap Black Christmas is one of my all time favorites. I love the house that everything goes down in and the creep factor of the killer. The scariest part was the eye behind the crack in the door. I was unsettled by that shot.

[Lawful Metal]

I don't remember which Christmas horror movie I remember from when I was a kid, Black Christmas or Silent Night, Deadly Night.  Actually, now that I look at that cast, it's probably the latter.  I wouldn't have forgotten Olivia Hussey.  Now I need to see Black Christmas.  Should I even bother with the remake?

[Newb82]

Fowler's not the only one who picked a Christmas-themed movie...

[Brian Fowler]

The remake is one of the dullest, most insipid slashers ever made, and it's barely a remake.