October HorrorDays 2014

[Nice Guy Eddie]

So, I have fallen for crass marketing, and I went to see Saw on the big screen. It's still a really good concept, the execution still ranges from mediocre to awful depending on which element you are discussing, it's still ultimately not a bad experience.

But holy shit, there was a guy in the theater who had this LOUD obnoxious laugh who laughed at literally nearly every moment of the film. Usually just one absurdly loud HAAAA at, like everything. The few jokes? Laughed. The gore/scare scenes? Laughed. Random camera cuts that just moved from one character to the other with no joke or scare or gore? Laughed. And he and the guy he was with kept talking every once in awhile (which was about the only time he wasn't letting out that laugh every 15 seconds or so) and suddenly, I had an urge to chain two people up in a shit-hole bathroom.

I'm not talking "interact with the movie great horror film experience" I mean just having brief conversations with each other.

At any rate, I never saw any of the Saw films in the theater during their original run, and I hadn't watched Saw in probably 6 or 7 years, so I'm glad I went. And I got a pretty bad ass all red "Shawne Smith in the reverse bear-trap" one-sheet poster for free.

I had considered going to see Saw last night. I saw it when it came out and I saw a few of the sequels. I forget where I stopped, maybe after the third one. Anyway, I went to see RiffTrax: Anaconda instead. I was a big fan of MST3K and I saw Manos: The Hands of Fate last July. I've seen Anaconda before, but it struck me again how god awful it really is. The next Rifftrax I'm going to see is December 4th. The feature is the Mexican film Santa Claus from 1959.

[EVA]

I'm watching THE MONSTER SQUAD right now for the first time since I was a kid.

That opening scroll. "THEY BLEW IT."

I love that the pilots of the cargo plane have a 15-second character arc.

"I hate my job!"

"What? This job is great!"

"You're right. I love my job."

SCENE

[piranesi]

THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN remake is great.  I thought it was clever at first how they made it an extension of the original rather than just a remake.  But I also kind of thought it was then going to follow form but just be more stylish.  And while it has a final girl and all that, it's just so rich and full of stuff.  We don't just follow her around.  So many characters and so many bits and pieces of this town.  So much of the past, and the fake past, and the unknown past all mixed in and so many nifty little shots and edits thrown in to keep things interesting.  And it's got a whodunit vibe that really actually has tension and seems to matter.

 

I'm in the middle of it, but so far the murders are not over the top "Hey, let's see what tricks we can do with gore effects!" But they are still really vicious and violent without it.  The trombone stabbing has almost no "blood" but it's really gruesome just the same.  And they do a great job of showing how quickly the killer gets to his victims to overcome the "why don't you just drive away" problems.

 

An amazing cast to.  A lot of stargazing and OH SWEET JESUS THT'S DENIS O'HARE MY IMMORTAL BELOVED DENIS O'HARE!!!!! DENIS OHARE AND GARY COLE ARE IN A MOVIE TOGETHER RIGHT NOW ON MY TV>!!!!M!M!L!

[EVA]

Man, I forgot what a pussy Dracula was in MONSTER SQUAD.

Despite clearly being the most powerful member of his crew, he constantly delegates the dirty work to his incompetent and unreliable subordinates. And when the children make off with his amulet, he gets WAY passive aggressive and blows up their clubhouse in retaliation. That's a bitch move, Dracula.

[Jingus]

Man, I forgot what a pussy Dracula was in MONSTER SQUAD.

Despite clearly being the most powerful member of his crew, he constantly delegates the dirty work to his incompetent and unreliable subordinates. And when the children make off with his amulet, he gets WAY passive aggressive and blows up their clubhouse in retaliation. That's a bitch move, Dracula.

The casting didn't help.  The dude who played Zorro in the 90s TV show, really?  It's that movie's one glaring weakness.  

[piranesi]

Dammit, a lot of great things only showed up on DVR yesterday or this morning, and I don't think it's fair to leave them to oblivion.

 

For instance, the first season Halloween episode of THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES reaches its peak when the Clampetts, never having heard of Halloween go to visit some of their neighbors to figure out why no one is being friendly.  When they see the neighbors kids in Halloween masks, they of course, decide it's because their children are horribly deformed.

 

The solution:  Call out to their hill-folk relatives with a horrifically ugly daughter and tell them they finally found some kids for her to play with!

 

That is some dark shit.

 

On the comedy side, the Halloween WALKER: TEXAS RANGER features (of course) evil satanists kidnapping children, because that is literally what you grandpa thought was happening every week since Clinton got elected.  So they hired the scariest guy who somehow managed to be too black and too European (Luther Mahoney!) to literally be Satan and enlisted the help of someone else both too black and too European, but also kind of hot (Downtown Julie Brown) who owns an occult bookstore to help them.

 

A particularly funny touch is that wherever they go in any episode of Walker, it is an excuse for a fight...so when they go to the occult bookstore (a type of place not particularly known for violent street thugs) all the "occult bookstore patrons" surround them and start saying "We hate, PIGS MAN!!!" so we can have an extra one.

[Brian Fowler]

I shall keep Halloween in my heart all year.

 

New wall art I've gotten the last two days:

 

 

Free one-sheet they were giving out last night at the theater.

 

 

I know F13 VIII was pretty terrible, but Christ that poster is awesome.  Can't believe it took me this many years to buy it.

[HumanChessgame]

The Saw movies aren't the most popular in the world, but I really enjoyed them and really need to watch them all back to back to get all the subtleties and references.  Have they released a box set of all the films together?  I've found a set of 1-5 and a complete set that was only released in the UK.

[Brian Fowler]

There is an absolutely bare-bones 3-disc blu-ray complete collection of the unrated cuts for under 20 bucks on Amazon.

 

If you don't have a blu-ray player, or you want commentaries/deleted scenes/etc, I don't know.

[Marty Sugar]

Was only able to get through 23 movies this October, instead of 31.  Best one had to be Bug (2006), while the worst by a wide margin were Frankenstein Unbound (1990) and Descendents (2008; Solos in its native Chile).

[FluffSnackwell]

Man, I forgot what a pussy Dracula was in MONSTER SQUAD.

Despite clearly being the most powerful member of his crew, he constantly delegates the dirty work to his incompetent and unreliable subordinates. And when the children make off with his amulet, he gets WAY passive aggressive and blows up their clubhouse in retaliation. That's a bitch move, Dracula.

The casting didn't help.  The dude who played Zorro in the 90s TV show, really?  It's that movie's one glaring weakness.

The steak tartare Dracula in Waxwork was far wussier. Plus he starred in all those awful shameless Conan rip-off Ator movies. Besides I thought Monster Squad's prick Dracula was a blast so I don't even know what you guys are on about.

[Jingus]

Admittedly, I'm really hard to please when it comes to people playing Dracula. That's a role which I think is all too easy to fuck up and very very hard to get right.  Bela Lugosi and Gary Oldman are the only ones I ever thought really nailed it (I count the bald Nosferatu version as a different character, otherwise Schreck and Kinski could be up there too).  Yeah, I wasn't even that impressed by Christopher Lee in the part, he never talked enough and the movies reduced a complex character into a generic snarling monster.  

[Curt McGirt]

I don't know what you're looking for if you don't see a good Dracula in Christopher Lee. Complain about the scripts all you want (and he would too) but as far as ability and presence goes, the man had them both in spades. 

[nate]

I hate that no one got banned during Halloween, to think we'd see Johnny Cash replaced by the villain werewolf from "Cursed" giving the finger.

[J.T.]

The Saw movies aren't the most popular in the world, but I really enjoyed them and really need to watch them all back to back to get all the subtleties and references.  Have they released a box set of all the films together?  I've found a set of 1-5 and a complete set that was only released in the UK.

 

The first SAW was great.  I am so bummed that the franchise devolved into a vapid series of torture porn films. 

 

Plots that were supposed to be clever really weren't and the focus shifted from a superb study of the human condition engineered by one of the most interesting horror movie villains ever created to the stupid traps and finding new ways to mangle the human body.  Sad.

 

The films managed to replace the charismatic Jigsaw with Hoffman, one of the most unlikeable douchebags ever in any genre of cinema, and that is when this franchise started swirling south.  I went to see the last SAW (in 3D no less) movie out of morbid curiosity.  There was a standing ovation when Hoffman finally got what was coming to him.

[S.K.o.S.]

The first SAW was great.  I am so bummed that the franchise devolved into a vapid series of torture porn films. 

 

Plots that were supposed to be clever really weren't and the focus shifted from a superb study of the human condition engineered by one of the most interesting horror movie villains ever created to the stupid traps and finding new ways to mangle the human body.  Sad.

 

 

As someone who just couldn't stop going to see them in the theatre every year, I thought the first three were worthwhile (the third one I remember being seriously unsettling, something about how they dealt with Jigsaw finding out he's going to die.  Also surgery freaks me out).  Past that, don't bother.

[J.T.]

Now that you mention it, there were some elements of Saw 3 that were pretty awesome.  

 

So yeah, avoid everything after the third movie.

[Curt McGirt]

I liked Saw in the theater when it first came out. The premise was novel, the villain was good, and the end was a big shocker. On rewatch, however, I found Cary Elwes to be absolutely unbearable and the the movie as a whole far less interesting. The second one was both just plain nasty -- the eye intro, the pit of needles -- and ludicrous with a big laugh coming from Jigsaw's obvious dummy double being slung around by Wahlberg to laughter in the audience. After that I didn't really bother. I love gore but this stuff really doesn't do anything for me.

[Brian Fowler]

The first one is an absolutely brilliant concept executed fairly poorly.

 

Elwes gives a fairly bad performance that looks Oscar worthy next to Whannell, but the parts in the bathroom are very much the best part anyway.  The dialogue (also written by Whannell) is fucking terrible (a trend that would continue to plague II and III as well) and Wan was a far cry from the director he is now.  A lot of the flashbacks and such are pretty useless for any reason other than "lets have a violent murder" but ultimately, I think the movie still mostly works.  The concept is just that damn good.  Two guys wake up locked in a shithole and have to slowly unravel how and why they are there at the whims of a maniac.

 

 

I actually like II quite a bit, despite some major flaws.  I kinda wish they had just done the move Bousman originally wrote instead of forcing it into being a Saw sequel, though.

 

I hate III with a fiery passion.  IV and V are both pretty damn bad, but not nearly as bad as III....

[Niners Fan in CT]

That's alright because they get worse from there.. I think part IV might have been the last one I would consider "ok".. SAW 3D is one of the worst films I've ever seen. Any genre.

[Brian Fowler]

I just finished the series... I actually thought VI was the best since two. (Low bar)

Seven was fucking awful. The guy playing the cop was so bad.

[Jingus]

The first Saw is a gimmicky thriller with too much padding and a twist ending that makes zero sense in hindsight.  And the series goes downhill from there.  

 

Saw 7/3D is one of the very worst pieces of shit to ever masquerade as something that's supposed to be entertaining.  (Except for the final thirty seconds, which were pretty much perfect.)  That movie ANGERED me in ways that very few films ever manage to achieve, on many different levels.  

 

I could write an entire book about why I hate this fucking movie so much.  And hey, I practically did: 

Saw VII: 1/10
Well, here we are, finally at the end. I’ve never liked this fucking series, and have never exactly hid my distaste and contempt for it. But even I was shocked by just how amazingly bad this final entry is. Saw VII(aka Saw 3D) is a lazy, stupid, soulless piece of trash which at times seems to be actively spitting at its own fanbase. It gives the series something which most horror franchises never get: a clear, unequivocal worst installment. I racked my brain trying to think of any other big horror series which had one film which was so much disgustingly worse than all of its brethren; the only one I could come up with was Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. And we are indeed playing on that level of quality here, folks.

How bad is it? So bad that I’m gonna dust off my old Dissection Of Doom~! style for one more go-round.

-The plot is basically identical to the previous several films: the cops hunt for Jigsaw’s dark apprentice Detective Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), while Jigsaw’s widow Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell) puts more of her husband’s ever-growing posthumous game into practice. Meanwhile in a totally unconnected B plot which acts like it’s the A plot, an opportunistic self-help speaker (Sean Patrick Flannery) is punished for the crime of lying about being a Jigsaw trap survivor and is subjected to a lethal obstacle course wherein he must save his friends and family from grisly fates. If you change the motivation behind that last character’s trap, you would essentially have parts V and VI all over again, they’re the exact same goddamn movie!

-One aspect which is particularly recycled is the nature of the trap dungeon. Just like in part 6, the main guy's buddies have all been placed in traps and the only way to save them is if the main guy either manages to complete a difficult task or submits himself to an excruciating torture. But this time around, he doesn't save any of them. Every single trap in this film goes off as planned and kills the victim. It turns into a marathon of repetitive kill scenes, and feels incredibly nihilistic and pointless.

-What the hell is Hoffman’s motivation for playing the game anymore? The only thing he seems to care about is taking revenge on Jill. He never shows the slightest aptitude for doing ye olde force-them-to-appreciate-life routine. Not one single word of dialogue is spent explaining why he targeted the self-help conman. Similarly, there’s never any reason shown for the trap which opens the movie, a particularly nasty affair involving a glass booth in the middle of a crowded park with a huge crowd of spectators. Hoffman appears to have left Jigsaw’s work behind him long ago; why is he doing any of this? His character has literally degenerated to the level of Jason Voorhees, killing for no other reason than because the script says so.

-Furthermore, how does he do all this shit? The traps in Saw VII are the most elaborate in the entire series. It would take an entire construction crew weeks to put all this shit together. Hoffman is just one guy, without any help, no apprentices he can call on. How does he manage to build all this? (I pray with every ounce of my being that there will never be a Saw VIII which answers these questions.) Hoffman doesn’t have Jigsaw’s background in mechanical engineering, so how does he have all the technical knowledge to construct this incredibly complicated Rube Goldberg shit? Where does he get the materials, and how does he pay for it? How does he manage to get his hands on a military-issue heavy machine gun? How does he manage to single-handedly kidnap and transport all the victims, and have them wake up at the exact right time? How does he pull off that stunt at the end, where he apparently uses psychic precognition powers and a knife to pull a Terminator on an entire police station? These plans are so ridiculously fucking complex that you’d need an army of Jokers to pull it off, but we’re expected to believe that this one guy can somehow do it all by himself.

-This movie commits one lazy sin which is more common in slasher sequels: vastly inflating the body count.Saw VII ends with a higher percentage of the characters dead than King Lear. The film repeatedly throws in a bunch of nobodies which have nothing to do with the main plot, just in order to show us more kills. Hell, one character is killed twice, once in a dream-sequence fakeout and then later for real. That sort of padding doesn’t speak well to how the filmmakers see the audience. They think their fans are such attention-deficit morons that they’ll walk out of the movie if there isn’t a hideously gory death every five minutes.

-And make no mistake about it, these are hideously gory deaths. Saw VII is far and away the bloodiest film in the franchise; and christ, think about that for a minute. I thought you couldn’t go further than the previous entries did, but they proved me wrong. It’s such a vomitorium that the movie frequently turns into an endurance test, and I’m not ashamed to say I looked away several times. This also raises my contempt for the MPAA even more for letting this torture porn (and I’ve never seen a film which fit that definition better thanSaw VII) get away with an R rating. If this isn’t rated NC-17 for violence, then they should never ever demand that any film ever cut any violence ever again in order to receive an R. Children should not be allowed to watch this movie, period.

-But even the gorehounds might be pissed off, since there are several makeup effects which look decidedly fake. Some of the effects are just plain dodgy. Especially the pathetic scars on the lying motivational speaker, who looks like he nicked himself a couple of times while shaving his chest.

-Where the fuck is everyone getting all these pig masks from? I know you can probably make most of Jigsaw’s signature stuff with a simple trip to Home Depot, but where the hell do you get that specific kind of pig mask? And why do people keep wearing them? You wouldn’t want to be caught with one of those things, since it’s basically admitting “hi, I’m a Jigsaw killer!” to the whole world.

-If I could give one bit of grudging praise to the series, it might be that Saw tends to mostly avoid the misogyny which permeates a lot of violent horror films. Well congratulations part VII, you broke the streak. This movie has issues with women. A disturbingly high number of the nastiest deaths are committed upon female victims, high enough that it really sticks out in comparison to the other films. And the film casually treats women as garbage, helpless whining lying whores who are nothing but pawns in a game played between male opponents. The opening trap in the glass booth is probably the worst example, where the film acts like a woman deserves to be cut in half because she’s a two-timing tramp. But there’s plenty of other worrisome hatred for the vag, such as when you realize that one of the trap victims is a completely innocent and good person who doesn’t “deserve” her fate even by the offensive standards of this series’ twisted “moral code”.

-The acting blows. Saw has always been known for shitty acting, but we’ve never had such a bunch of useless miserable performers as here. I mean, seriously, they expect Costas Fucking Mandylor to carry the entire film, along with a bunch of anonymous spear-carriers who mean nothing to the plot. Cary Elwes and Tobin Bell’s incredibly brief cameos easily blow away all the other actors in the film, and those two aren’t exactly Marlon Brando in the first place. And speaking of which, why were those cameos so incredibly brief?

-Let’s go back one more time to that public glassed-in trap. That’s where the movie practically tells its audience that they’re horrible people. This trap features a giant crowd of hundreds of spectators, and the film gives us some incredibly feeble subtext about how it’s wrong to be a voyeur. There’s a bunch of jackasses filming the carnage with their cell phone cameras, and the obvious message is “people who enjoy watching this suffering are wrong”. How dare they. How fucking dare they. I agree, it is wrong, but it’s not as wrong as presenting all this suffering for our enjoyment in the first place. The movie is trying to pass the buck to its audience: “Why yes, this is a bunch of staggeringly immoral sadism, but we only do it because people want to see it!” That’s the same excuse used by paparazzi as they hound Brangelina for pictures of their latest adopted black baby.

-I rewatched the first Saw right before this one. I’d never properly seen the entire thing in one sitting, snd I had the Rifftrax, so why not. Seen back to back like that, it sharply hilights just how low the artistic standards have sunk. The cinematography is the best example: the film is slackly shot and flatly lit in the most don’t-give-a-fuck manner possible. They basically just plunked the camera down in the most obvious place, turned all the lights on bright, and sometimes had the operator shake it around for no real reason. Nobody gave a damn if this film looked good or not, and it looks like crap.

-In fact, the whole film feels like it was made by people who didn’t want to make this movie. As it so happens, that’s exactly what occurred. Director Kevin Greutert was literally forced to make this film. He was the editor for parts 1-5 and directed 6, but he wanted to go make Paranormal Activity 2 next. That one isSaw’s only competition as a now-traditional Halloween horror franchise, so the studio somehow exercised a clause in his contract to literally make him direct a film that he wanted nothing to do with. It’s reported that he didn’t read the script until the first day he arrived on the set. It explains a lot.

-I notice that the screenwriters for Saws 4-7, Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, also wrote the Feasttrilogy. Well, it’s nice to know that I shouldn’t waste my time on those. I’d kinda wanted to check out the first one, but not after discovering this piece of information.

-After all this bitching and moaning, you might wonder why I rated this as highly as a 1 instead of the old 0. Well, I must admit, I liked the ending. Hoffman’s eventual fate is a bit anticlimactic, but how it goes down is absolutely fitting. It’s predictable, but it’s predictable because it’s the one conclusion which obviously makes the most sense in terms of closing out the series. So thank god for small favors. Yet even this is marred by plot holes, of the “how did they find him” and “why didn’t they do anything before now, it’s already too late” variety. Man, this movie fucking blew.

 

[FluffSnackwell]

Admittedly, I'm really hard to please when it comes to people playing Dracula. That's a role which I think is all too easy to fuck up and very very hard to get right.  Bela Lugosi and Gary Oldman are the only ones I ever thought really nailed it (I count the bald Nosferatu version as a different character, otherwise Schreck and Kinski could be up there too).  Yeah, I wasn't even that impressed by Christopher Lee in the part, he never talked enough and the movies reduced a complex character into a generic snarling monster.

Back to the Monster Squad Dracula briefly. Well, one must strongly take into consideration this was a movie where a big boned lad named Horace evaded Wolfman via kick to the nards, stymied Dracula with pizza to the face and flat out blew Creature from the BlackLagoon the fuck away. Besides Dracula had his get right down to business moments like backhanding cargo plane pilot Richie Aprile and snapping the necks of half the police force. And Duncan whathisface really nailed the finishing stretch nicely with "give me the amulet, you bitch!" and the hissing. Of course, my favorite part of the Monster Squad doc is hearing Tom Noonan go about what a pompous ass the guy was. Again if you want to talk downright embarrassments to the character what about that wuss in Van Helsing who made no impression at all?

As for Lugosi, can’t it be argued that the inherent hammyness of his Dracula is what truly lasted in the collective consciousness?I mean cereal mascots and muppets like Count Chocula and The Count clearly were clearly inspired by Lugosi’s Dracula. Lee's just a little too badass to have inspired stuff like that. When’s the last time Lugosi’s Dracula came up in popular culture even if indirectly? I’m thinking Dave Chapelle’s bit about the Count off Sesame Street being a pimp.

Now certainly Shreck as Orlok is the go-to classic scary image from early film. And it’s not like there hasn’t been a fair share of takes on Orlok: Dafoe, Kinski, Mr. Barlow’s look which was a tweak of the creature.* Even if you consider Orlok a different character, it’s still worth pointing out that character has become even more iconic than Lugosi’s Dracula as far as imagery of early icons of fright go. Besides on Stephen King’s recent special from several years back on TCM he pretty much said Lugosi felt passe by the time he was a teenager and that even he felt Lee overtook Lugosi as the Dracula because of how much scarier he was as the character. I’m sure there were lots of kids in the fifties and sixties who viewed Lugosi’s Dracula as being just as cheesy as somebody like the Dracula from Monster Squad is considered now; especially when compared to Lee’s fresh new more menacing and feral portrayal.

Sure, Lugosi’s hypnotic gaze is still an iconic image but like I said I’m not so sure Lee’s version didn’t renderhis obsolete at the time. Then of course when Oldman did his thing that took the character to a whole other level.

While Lugosi still deserves all the reverence he gets for being so genre-defining, 83 years later there’s no need to pretend his movie remains remotely scary or that his original portrayal of Dracula holds up. I certainly don’t see him as owning the role over Lee.

*Funny ass thing about Mr. Barlow from Salem’s Lot; I’d never read the novel so I assumed the fiendish vampire in the 1979 version was being faithful to the book and thus when TNT announced a mini-series starring Rutger Hauer as Mr. Barlow I just assumed Hauer was going to be transformed into some Nosferatu-esque snaggle toothed iteration of the vampire as opposed to some tens of thousands of years old aristocrat. Don’t ask me why I was looking so forward to this but I damned sure was.

[Brian Fowler]

For Fowler and anyone who jumped on the HALLOWEEN box set, if you haven't gotten to Part 4 yet, Anchor Bay is issueing replacement discs due to audio sync issues.  You just have to email them.  We were just watching and it was kind of annoying, like Youtube video out-of-sync.

 

http://halloweenmovies.com/2014/10/10/halloween-4-audio-sync-issue/

 

Got my replacement disc via FedEx today, fwiw.