31 Days of Halloween

Platinum Dunes’ Texas Chainsaw remake series ended after two movies when “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” underperformed at the box office. From there the franchise seems to have entered the Terminator Death Spiral where a franchise keeps putting out “soft reboots” with every movie, each one doing just well enough to inspire future installments but not well enough that they want to stick with whatever direction the last installment went in. The first of those soft reboots was 2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3D, which as the year and title would suggest was made towards the end of the post-Avatar boom in 3D films. That felt like a pretty odd choice on its face to me as the Texas Chainsaw franchise is generally rooted having a raw and grainy look which would seem to be the antithesis of what 3D represented in that era. It also means that if you’re watching it in 2D years after the fact you’re occasionally treated to stuff being awkwardly pointed towards the screen. This takes the Halloween H20 approach of being a direct sequel to the original film which discards all the other sequels that came before. We get a prologue in which we learn that a lynch mob drove up and killed most of the Sawyer family after the events of the 1974 film but that one infant was saved from the carnage and the movie follows her years later having grown up ignorant of her roots. The action picks up in present day with her now in her early 20s (the math on that doesn’t add up but, whatever) learning that she’s inherited property that the family owned but when she tries to claim it she finds out Leatherface is still around and ready to unleash some carnage. In broad strokes this is actually a kind of different and daring take on the franchise which takes some risks with continuity and has this unconventional ending that was certainly daring to envision, but it really doesn’t pull any of it off in execution. The 3D stuff is corny, the film’s look is boring, the rampages feel pretty stock, and the movie’s cast is you typical assortment of bland slasher victims. There have certainly been worse Texas Chainsaw movies than this, but this one is pretty forgettable all told.
** out of Five

I checked it out. Solid ghost story but in the end just a ghost story.

But effective creeps and a good tone with a couple fun creatures/ghouls.

7.5/10

Orna.

Day Nineteen: A Terrifying Binge


All Hallows' Eve



With the recent success of Terrifier 3 it seems past time I actually make the effort to catch up on the spooky tales of Art the Clown, horror cinema's newest icon. We begin not with Terrifier 1 but All Hallows' Eve, an anthology horror film where Art plays a major role across all three stories. The film boasts a pretty good hook for an anthology: a kid finds an unmarked VHS tape in his candy bag after trick r' treating and the tape contains the three shorts. That's fun and the wraparound at the end is one of the most effective bits of the entire film. Unfortunately, All Hallows' Eve strikes me as pretty subpar. At its core these shorts just aren't that great. The first just feels like a collection of disparate ideas that don't come together in a particularly meaningful way and suffers a bit from some cheap costumes. The second is actively terrible, a stupid alien home invasion story with awful production value and which barely features Art, who, in addition to being the reason I'm watching this, is also the star the movie is structured around. The third short does a lot to pull things together. It's a simple story of Art the Clown hunting down a random woman but the filmmaking effectively conveys the feeling of being trapped in a nightmare and the obscene gore is in line with what I've heard about this series. But even this short makes some odd choices, namely the whole thing using a filter to emulate cheap 70s exploitation flicks clearly inspired by Grindhouse. It's not exactly wrong but given the frame story I don't know why you wouldn't ape VHS effects instead. Beyond that the move just looks really cheap and digital. If All Hallows' Eve was its own little thing I might be more willing to cut it some slack but I have good reason to think better is coming so I'm not willing to settle just yet.

D+


Terrifier



All Hallows' Eve was still feeling out Art the Clown as a horror monster but feature film debut Terrifier is much more in line with my understanding of this series: essentially slasher movies that just really, really push the limits of gore in the violent murder set-pieces. This film certainly delivers in that regard. Terrifier is very bloody, with one kill in particular that's just absurdly gross. The movie is perhaps worth watching if you're a gorehound for that reason alone but I must say I'm still not sold on these movies. Even by the extremely low standards of slasher flicks, Terrifier has a paltry amount of story or character. It is transparently a slashing gallery for Art with nothing else to get in the way. There's interest there but the film also peaks at the mid-point with that aforementioned really gross kill and from there the movie just kind of circles for a bit. It also doesn't help that the film essentially and that makes all the brutality, however extreme, feel pretty empty. Terrifier lacks the truly dismal lows of All Hallows' Eve but it also never creeped me out as effectively either.

D+


Terrifier 2



It's a good thing Roger Ebert is already dead because otherwise I suspect these Terrifier movies would have driven him to suicide.

An astonishing leap in quality from the first Terrifier. The expanded budget and Damien Leone's growing skills as a filmmaker immediately inject this sequel with a far greater sense of production value and general craftsmanship. This movie just looks a whole lot sharper than its predecessors, with more dramatic lighting and arresting compositions. The editing is also a bit more ambitious, with the opening scene with Art the Clown's resurrection put together in especially exciting fashion. The synth heavy score and soundtrack also help a lot. Perhaps more importantly, the film also puts the work in to develop a legitimate protagonist in Sienna, not only giving us a character to identify with and fear for, but also someone to root for. At times the film feels less like Halloween and more like H20 as it builds to an epic confrontation between slasher and final girl.

Where the prior Art the Clown films felt more like glorified kill fests, Terrifier 2 feels like a legitimate movie, and a pretty darn good one at that. Even the characters who do transparently exist mostly to get axed are given a lot more personality. And as for the kills, oh boy do they still deliver. No one single kill quite lives up to the sheer disgust of Terrifier 1's best slashing, but taken as a whole they average out to a much higher quality, overwhelmingly disgusting and creative in how the blood spills. The film also leans a bit more into the dark comedy of David Howard Thornton's performance. About the only big complaint I can levy at Terrifier 2 is that it's a tad indulgent in a way which can stretch the movie too thin. At the same time, you can really feel Leone realizing he's got something legitimately cool on his hands and I can't fault him for wanting to show that off. Genuinely excited to catch Terrifier 3 in theaters.

B

I knew going in that the title of F.W. Murnau’s earliest intact film, The Haunted Castle, was misleading. The movie’s original German title was “Schloß Vogelöd” which just translates to “Castle Vogelöd” and if the castle in question is haunted it’s only metaphorically and I can only assume that the “haunted” part got added sometime after the fact to fool people into thinking this was a companion of sorts for Nosferatu (which Murnau made a year after this). The film is actually something more akin to a drawing room mystery and it’s not even much of a German Expressionist one, though there is one notable nightmare sequence which I think is enough that it still sort of counts for my various October viewing rituals. The mystery at the center of this isn’t exactly your traditional whodunit as it’s more about getting to the bottom of a murder that happened years ago rather than someone who’d murdered during the events of the film and it’s not laying out clues that the audience could potentially put together. There is a predictable but neatly executed little twist towards the end and for the most part it’s a decently crafted if not terribly inspired little silent movie. Probably not something that would be very widely seen at all today if not for the Murnau name, but worth a look for auteurists interested in that important filmmaker.

Replace it with this poster.

Doomsday did you get the directors cut of little shop or the original cut?

Day Twenty: Dreamcatcher



Utterly perplexing, a film born from a drugged up Stephen King attempting to fuse an It-esque coming-of-age tale meets supernatural horror adventure with sci-fi pulp about alien creatures who come from beyond and are birthed out when a human host is infected and then literally shits out a razor-toothed alien worm. This doesn't even account for the autistic child who gives the main collection of men psychic powers and ends up having a connection to the evil aliens, or the one character whose body becomes possessed by the alien villain and is forced to hide within a construct of his mind, or the evil military who escalate the situation. It's an incredibly bizarre mishmash that does not work tonally and barely holds together as a narrative. The frustrating thing is there is some talent here. The cast director Lawrence Kasdan has assembled have real camaraderie and King's comments about treating the bathroom door as the door nice fiction doesn't enter is kind of compelling, but the results are a mess. It's staggering not only that Kasdan directed this, but that William Goldman of all people penned the screenplay. You'd think they'd recognize that King's bizarre novel was way too unwieldy to function as a coherent film and would streamline the material but instead they've tried to include everything in a bewildering whirlwind that boils down to poop monsters.

And perhaps the most perplexing thing of all, why the hell is this thing called Dreamcatcher? Like, yeah, there's a dreamcatcher in the movie and the characters talk about it but it isn't especially important thematically or narratively. They should have called it "Space Worms from the Hole."

D

I read and rather enjoyed the book when I was a teenager.  Never saw the movie.