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Halloween Havoc IV


Brian Fowler

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The things I do for art... you HAVE to watch a horror movie on Halloween, right?  I was thinking about doing the entire Hatchet Trilogy, back to back to back... but it would've been daylight by the time that ended.   So, desperate for anything that would seem street-credible enough, I threw in Nosferatu.  No, not Herzog's, I mean the original.  And then I remember why I never freakin' watch Nosferatu anymore, because I can never find a version with a soundtrack I like.  This one is at least trying, with some serious artistic ambitions; the notes are all black keys, it's all atonal and not sticking to any particular chord, and sometimes they just go full 70s with weird abstract sounds replacing music.  And it SUCKS.  Doesn't fit the movie at all.  I appreciate the effort and the thought behind it, but the execution just made me want to turn the damn thing off.  Especially not helping that they'd seemingly slowed down the frame rate a bit too much, or that the dialogue cards were always left hanging up there for insultingly long periods of time, or that there's a bunch of little extra footage here which isn't in the other versions but it's inconsequential shit with the townspeople.  And hey, I forgot that Nosferatu also helped start the trend of having odious comic relief being the worst part of practically any horror movie, the Renfield here... well, he's a Silent Renfield, with all the scenery-devouring melodramatic flourishes you'd expect.  

 

I really miss a version that aired on SyFy back when it was still Sci-Fi in the late nineties.  It had a beautiful, dreamlike synthesized score which fit better with the gothic Prussian gloom of this production than any of the instrumental scores I've heard.  It also had mild, subtle, but effective tinting of the different scenes in order to get different feelings from the audience.  Does anyone know what that version was, or where I can find it?  I've been looking for it over the past fifteen years, and never found it.  

 

And now, Fluffikins: 

 

 

 

Disparity in numbers there, sport. So the comparison sucks shit through a straw. Not the same plot at all but good try.

Did you even read what I said?  I didn't claim their plots were identical, nor nothing close to it.  I very specifically stated that the comparison came from the coincidence of having watched one movie immediately after the other.  And I already noted the game-changing difference in levels of carnage.  Try to pay attention before you start blindly throwing insults around.  

 

Also apparently there is misogyny in everything. "No tits or lewdness in horror for anybody."

 

Bah. I say that's nonsense and somebody who cries misogyny so incessantly ought to not watch anything. I mean it's obvious they don't want to like anything so why fool themselves?

Where the fuck is this nonsense coming from? Get that Rush Limbaugh bullshit outta here.  

 

 

Since you're so interested in comparisons, let's do one!  Let's compare how much I talked about misogyny in the original post, versus how much Fluffy complains about it here.

 

Here's me talking about misogyny: 

 

 

I just don't get the alleged "talent" of director Stuart Gordon. I've seen several of his movies (Robot Jox, The Pit & the Pendulum, Castle Freak, and Dagon) and all of them struck me as being too coldblooded, too sadistic, too dark-humored, too misogynistic. They're all cursed with wooden acting, unlikable characters, and implausible plot twists; and they always managed to look cheap no matter how big the budget was. 

The plot is in theory an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's story "Herbert West: Re-Animator", but it really has almost nothing to do with the source material. (Considering that it was one of Lovecraft's very worst stories which contained some really nasty racism, that may be a good thing.) It's a basic Frankensteinian tale of medical students who tamper in God's domain, but I found it hard to care about any of it. Our heroes are all passive weak-willed victims who are constantly manipulated by the loathesome amoral villains, so there's absolutely nobody worth cheering for. The only exception is West himself, played nicely by Jeffery Combs, but the movie seems like it can't decide whether he's an eccentric but admirable genius or a murderous blood-soaked mad scientist. 

Not helping is how damn long the movie takes to get the plot started; it finally picks up towards the end with some amusing stuff with the disembodied head, but that's not enough to make a good movie all by itself. And what's with the blatant soundtrack ripoff of Bernard Hermann? The theme music in this movie is a note-for-note steal from Psycho, I'm amazed they didn't get sued. I've heard this movie's cock sucked dry by many a zombie fanboy, but don't believe the hype.

 

 

 

 

And here's YOU talking about misogyny: 

 

Heh. You reviewed Re-Animator as if it was as overrated as that foreign darling turd Evil Ed or similar bogus hype heap ilk. Also dude who plays Herbert West has more charisma in his boogers than the entire cast of Dead Alive combined.  AND Re-Animator isn't even really an infected horde movie (one isolated morgue with a dozen or so people vs. a whole town of zombies?) Disparity in numbers there, sport. So the comparison sucks shit through a straw. Not the same plot at all but good try.

 

I do massively prefer From Beyond to Re-Animator but still put the latter in about the same tier as Dead Alive. Also apparently there is misogyny in everything. "No tits or lewdness in horror for anybody."

 

Bah. I say that's nonsense and somebody who cries misogyny so incessantly ought to not watch anything. I mean it's obvious they don't want to like anything so why fool themselves?

 

 

I'm sorry, but how did the blue lead to the red? 

 

 

 

My bad. I guess I misread "all of them" as "all of his movies" to include Re-Animator as well when you only meant those other movies of his you'd seen.  As it is, Megan Halsey's womanly intuition leads her to easily recognize what weirdos and/or creeps both West and Carl Hill are well before anybody else. I do see that you didn't give any kind of props to what a magnificent bastard Dr. Carl Hill was. 

 

Besides Re-Animator and From Beyond, I've only seen Dolls and his MOH episode. I believe the underwhelming Bride of Re-Animator was a Yuzna joint. But then again I'm not really a completist of any director. I've half-assed watched Dagon several times. Dolls was fine; so was his MOH episode. Dagon seemed too bleak and too weird.

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Whoa.  Thanks for the apology, I was expecting that argument to go on all day.  But yeah, of the Stuart Gordon films I've seen, they have included: gratuitous female nudity in every single movie (sleazy-feeling nudity, not terribly erotic or notably artistic nudity), a whole shitload of rape scenes, woman constantly being torn to pieces by monsters, male villains sadistically beating the hell out of helpless female victims for truly uncomfortable lengths of time, torture and mutilation of women... I mean, these things KEEP showing up in his films, over and over again, with similar violence happening not nearly so often to male victims.  Once in a while for shock value and with artistic execution is perfectly fine, but in every single movie?  I see no conclusion other than to believe that Stuart Gordon is indeed some form of misogynist.  Also, like I implied earlier, this review is years old and I barely remember anything now about Re-Animator, other than the infamous head scene and a few other little bits and pieces here and there.  I wanted to rewatch it for the project here, even had checked out a copy, and then just never got a chance due to my stupidly busy college schedule of classwork.  So, having no other choice nor content to contribute to the project, I threw that on here at the last minute.  

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