31 Days of Halloween

Leprechaun (1993)



Last week was the 20th anniversary of Friends, so it seems fitting to launch this years 31 Days of Halloween with the Leprechaun. It stars Jennifer Aniston in her film debut as a young woman who moves into a house where the previous owner was an Irishman who stole 100 coins from a leprechaun. So this leprechaun, played beautifully by Warwick Davis of Star Wars and Harry Potter fame, tries to kill her and her friends unless they deliver the gold.

As a kid, this was one of my favorite horror movies. I still have fond memories of watching it every October. But as an adult who has explored the genre, I'm very disappointed with Leprechaun. There's nothing new or fresh in the movie. Even the main character is just an attempt to cash-in on the success of Chucky. The only reasons to watch this movie is for Warwick Davis' hilarious performance and to laugh at Jennifer Aniston.

Even more disappointing is the fact that the filmmakers had a good story within the movie and ignored it. The Irishman stealing gold from a leprechaun should have been the actual plot and not the typical teenagers-in-trouble nonsense.

D+ says Doomsday

Where's day 2? Getting lazy on me, Coop?

So we're fully migrating this now?  Alright, reposting my first one:



The horror genre has gone through a lot of phases over the years, some of them more reputable than others. One phase that people like to forget is one that emerged in the late 80s and early 90s just as the initial slasher-movie craze was starting to wane and the post-Scream slasher revival hadn’t started yet. These movies all shared one common trait: they were all about upper class (or at least upper-middle class) people and families being plagued by an outside threat. These weren’t all horror movies really, many of them would better be classified as thrillers, but they definitely shared some conventions with more conventional horror movies. In fact, as these movies got more popular some argued that these movies are really just Freddy Krueger movies with a veneer of sophistication that’s been painted onto them.

The commercial highpoint of the genre was almost certainly the 1987 film Fatal Attraction, in fact the very existence of the genre may be entirely attributed to screenwriters ripping off that blockbuster, which is probably why almost all of them are about people who suddenly have crazy people enter their lives. These movies were respected at the time, well at least more respected than other horror movies. Many of them had high profile directors and featured fairly famous actors who would have never been caught dead starring in conventional horror movies at this time. And yet, this is a movement that is largely forgotten about today and those who do remember it do so with a certain amount embarrassment or at least disinterest. This is why I’m pretty curious to see how they hold up, so I’m going to watch the yuppie horror films I’ve yet to see as part of this special Halloween installment of the Crash Course.

The Stepfather (1987)

Almost every time the police capture a serial killer you hear people who knew them say they seemed like the nicest most unassuming people they ever knew… which is pretty far removed from the serial killers you saw in most 80s horror films like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. The Stepfather is in many ways an attempt to bring the conventions of 80s slasher films to a slightly more realistic and down to earth murder story. Based on the story of real life killer John List, the film opens by revealing that a man has murdered his family and casually left them behind. It then shifts to one year later and we’re horrified to learn that he’s remarried to a widow with a teenage daughter and seems to be replaying the cycle all over again.

Terry O’Quinn (yeah, John Locke himself) plays the titular stepfather, and the movie is probably best remembered for his performance. Indeed, he does a great job of showing the many sides of this psycho and does a great job of shifting from being an upstanding family man to being an obsessive killer. That said, pretty much every other performance in the movie is really lousy. That extends to a lot of things about the film because as much as this anticipates the yuppie horror trend it also keeps one foot firmly planted in the world of low budget slasher movies (it is not a coincidence that this is the only of the yuppie horror movies here that was made before Adrian Lyne classed up the genre with Fatal Attraction). The film has a lot of Friday the 13th style stedicam shots, a jarring scene of gratuitous nudity, and a truly horrendous John Carpenter-wannabe synth score.

So why is such a poorly made film considered something of a well-remembered genre classic? Mainly because it’s actually pretty thematically rich for what it is. While most slasher movies are about the horrors of the world invading idyllic suburban lives, this movie suggests that maybe the pursuit of that idyllic lifestyle is where that horror begins. The titular stepfather is a man who seems to be obsessed with the idealized “Leave it to Beaver” nuclear family and lashes out when his new families are unable to live up to that ideal. In many ways the film could actually be viewed as an allegory for domestic violence as it’s perceived by children in the way that the stepfather uses the veneer of wholesome family life to hide his violent tendencies and the way the wife puts up with his erratic behavior for reasons the daughter cannot really understand. So, if you’re the kind of person who likes to over-analyze exploitation B-movies (and I sort of am) then this movie will give you food for thought but if that doesn’t interest you I wouldn’t really recommend it.
**1/2 out of Four

With apologies to our resident Tim Burton expert:




I remember seeing this in theaters back in ’93 (I would have been about six at the time) but hadn’t really revisited it since. I finally re-watched it now as research for an upcoming project and can definitely see why I liked it when I was younger. Looking at it now it feels awfully small scale and cheap compared to some of the later stop-motion movies that it inspired, but there’s a certain charm to that I guess. The whole movie is something of a roller-coaster ride of clever haunted house type stuff and the basic “Halloweentown invades Christmastown” premise seems to hit a very natural wavelength of child-like thought patterns. I also thought the songs were very well written (which is good, because the movie is almost wall-to-wall musical numbers) but I did think that Danny Elfman may not have been the best choice of singing voices. In fact I was generally not a fan of the way Jack Skellington was voice acted, the voice just seemed… odd. Anyway, the movie as a whole just seemed a bit slight. I feel like it was trying to be a Halloween spin on those old Rankin/Bass Christmas specials and think it might have worked better as a television special than as a theatrical film.

*** out of Four

It was a necessary evil. Without this movie, stop-motion would be dead right now. And without this movie, Pixar wouldn't have gotten the greenlight on Toy Story. They did all the digital effects and it fit in so well with the stop-motion, which is basically bringing toys to life, that Jeffrey Katzenberg decided to gamble on the studio. 

If this place still exists next year, I might explore some Larry Cohen movies. He was responsible for a few gems.

I need to check out The Stuff (I think it's on Netflix) and Maniac Cop 2.

Day Three: Only Lovers Left Alive (2014)

Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive is about a pair of intellectual artists who are so culturally astute that they find themselves isolated from society and harboring beliefs that most humans are “zombies” who don’t truly appreciate art and are destructive to the world and to the environment. That’s right; this is a movie about hipsters… who also happen to be vampires. Indeed this is one of the humanized look at vampirism you’re likely to come across. Its characters are not monsters, they get their blood supply from hospitals and mostly keep to themselves. The movie probably wouldn’t be all that different if these characters had been mere immortals rather than vampires, but it does have fun finding examples of what life would be like for a pair of chilled out vampires living in a modern world. Indeed, this isn’t really a horror movie at all, like most of Jim Jarmusch’s films it mostly consists of a series of conversations without a whole lot of narrative backbone behind it all. It does a very good job of establishing these two characters and painting a portrait of what a couple of days in their lives would be like, but it doesn’t really give us a whole lot of a reason why we’re following them over the course of these specific nights. I think we’re supposed to be left with a feeling like this night was something of a turning point for the two leads, but I feel like the film could have done more to back that up. So, as is the case with a lot of Jarmusch’s movies, I’m left thinking there was a very good idea here that the director was a little too relaxed about to fully exploit.
*** out of Four

The Stuff is like the sister film to They Live. 

That reminds me: I have a Blair Witch "review" somewhere at CS!. I gotta dig it up. And yeah, it sucks. I hated it even when it was released.