31 Days of Halloween

The Thing



I rewatched The thing.

Its still awesome.

9/10

You have John Milius to thank for that speech.

And Robert Shaw . And alcoholism.

The Blair Witch Project




Having never seen this movie during its insanely popular release or in the subsequent years when it received the typical backlash that a popular movie often gets, I thought the year 2015, a ripe 16 years after its release, would be a good time to take it down.  The concept is simple yet surprisingly effective even almost 2 decades after this movie helped make it popular in the horror genre to the point where it is not beaten to death and stale.  The 'interviews' with local townsfolk helped create a nice little legend about a local witch, something I can in a way relate to having been raised in a small California town with its own history and more than its fair share of urban legends and ghost-hunting documentaries.  The movie seemed restrained when packing on the scares, instead focusing on the breakdown of the documentarians which helped make it that much more effective.  By not answering every question, by leaving much to the imagination and focusing on the build-up rather than the instant visual gratification we're given a movie that in many ways lives up to the reputation that was built on its release.  


A- so says Doomsday 

That makes two of us.

Blair Witch isn't really my jam but I like that it got made. To have something that experimental get that much bank in 1999 was certainly a positive development. Also, the last five minutes of that movie are great.

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN

Poltergeist (1982)



1982 was the year that Steven Spielberg became Steven Spielberg. Not only did he shatter box office records with E.T., proving that Jaws wasn't an isolated achievement, but he had his first success as a producer with Poltergeist. These two movies were literally released a week apart and gave audiences two different cinematic experiences, but also two very similar ones. Poltergeist is about a family living in a house built on top of a cemetery and then suffering the consequences. It's a brilliant premise for a horror movie, but man, Spielberg went nuts with the special effects. And yes, I'm specifically saying Spielberg because, regardless of what the credits say, Spielberg was the director of Poltergeist. He does an awesome job, but also too awesome of a job. There are moments in this movie where there is such a spectacle of special effects that it just stops being a horror movie and becomes something you can watch as a double feature with E.T.

B+

Bullshit.

How can you be 30 and not seen Poltergeist? Have you seen Gremlins? Ghostbusters? Beetlejuice?

I try to watch a lot of horror movies around Halloween. In past years, that just meant tuning into whatever Netflix streaming had/rewatching my own favourites. This year though, I've decided I can do better. I borrowed my brother's Legacy Collections for Dracula and Frankenstein and will be posting my reviews here in three parts.

Day Twenty-Four: The Universal Dracula Movies

Dracula



There's a lot of awesomeness about Dracula. Bela Lugosi's performance is legendary and iconic, and the supporting cast is really good too. Dwight Frye's insane Renfield steals a lot of scenes with his intensity and Edward Van Sloan's Van Helsing is a great rival to Dracula. The film is also full of atmospheric imagery and the first act in particular is very strong. What the film lacks is a real narrative drive. The story of Dracula is very strong, but it's not as tightly wound here as it should be. I also think the film is harmed by some of the awkward staging that often plague the early sound films. The most major flaw though is the climax, which is tremendously underwhelming. After building up the menace of Dracula for an entire film, he's defeated without even putting up a fight. It's an ending that seems inappropriate to the character and is cinematically dull.

Dracula may not be perfect, but there's a reason the film is still highly remembered all these years later. The film features three awesome performances and the iconography Tod Browning established has gone on to define horror cinema. As a result, I'm a bit more forgiving of the film's faults than I might be otherwise.

B+

Dracula's Daughter



Given Bela Lugosi's iconic performance in Dracula, you'd think Universal would have find some way to revive him for the sequel. But in Dracula's Daughter, the Prince of Darkness stays dead. Instead, the focus is on Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), Dracula's vampiric spawn. However Marya wishes to be free of her life as a vampire, and seeks the aid of psychologist Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger) to cure her. It's a good premise and all the scenes dealing with Marya in this way are quite good. Gloria Holden is very compelling in the role and there are also some good scenes of her stalking prey in the city. The climax where Jeffrey must confront Marya in Transylvania is pretty exciting and way better than Dracula's climax.

Unfortunately, the film also devotes a good chunk of screentime to Jeffrey and his own relationship with his wife. There scenes are dominated by a lot of dumb comedy which just feels like filler. Additionally, Otto Kruger is really stiff in his role. Had the film focused entirely on Marya and her plight, it might have been something special. As is though, it's still an interesting gem.

C+

Son of Dracula



Unlike Frankenstein, which got a bunch of sequels in pretty rabid succession, Universal was a lot more laid back with Dracula. Twelve years after the original, and this is only the third film about the character. The story sees Count Alucard (Lon Chaney Jr) travelling to America to court a young southern plantation owner. The film has some positives. Despite some very pedestrian direction, there are some pretty cool special effects here involving Dracula's transformations. They don't exactly hold up, but it's still fun. The film suffers from a boring story which is poorly thought out and sloppily written. There is however, a pretty neat noirish twist towards the end which genuinely caught me by surprise, though admittedly the filmmakers don't take full advantage of this either.

The neat special effects, surprising twist, and a handful of impressive scenes would have been enough for me to give Son of Dracula a modest pass, but the terrible treatment of the titular character torpedos all of that. Alucard, who is later revealed to be the legitimate Count Dracula, is completely non-threatening in this film. He doesn't do much, his plan seems ill-conceived, and Lon Chaney Jr is awful in the lead role. He doesn't have the sense of menace or the sophistication necessary for the part. The dude is great as the Wolfman, but he flubbed both Frankenstein's Monster and now the Prince of Darkness. These movies are only as good as their monster and here, the monster sucks.

D+

Drácula



For those who don't know, when Universal created Dracula in 1931, a Spanish version was made at the same time. This film used the same sets and scripts as the classic Dracula, but filmed at night with a different cast and crew. The filmmakers were able to watch what the English crew was doing and attempt to improve on it with more ambitious camera work. There is a cult audience that believes this film to be the superior 1931 Dracula movie but I don't agree. While some scenes are more well-shot than their English language equivalent, this film lacks the amazing cast Browning had. Don't get me wrong; the actors here do a fine job, but they can't compare to Edward Van Sloan, Dwight Frye, and especially Bela Lugosi.

The film also shares a lot of the problems that Browning's version does. Namely that the middle section drags a lot and the ending is anti-climactic. You could argue that they were stuck with the same script, but if they were able to take advantage of the other film and improve on it visually I don't see why they couldn't narratively too. Perhaps I'm just Dracula'd out though. This is the fourth version of Bram Stoker's story I've seen this month and I'm starting to get burnt out. Anyway, this is a pretty good film. It has the same sense of atmosphere as the original, along with-more interesting camera work and the plot remains compelling.

B-

Film Twenty-One: Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015)
I found the first Insidious movie to be a pretty pleasant surprise but the second one to be a pretty big step down. I got sick of the haunted house/things going bump in the night brand of horror a long time ago and my interest in this series is rooted more in its clever “astral plane” concept than in its horror mechanics. As such, it’s a little disappointing that this third installment is a prequel which steps back a lot from the internal rules of the series and focuses more on horror than on the ideas. On the plus side, I do think that the simplicity here makes the horror elements work better here than they do in some of the other installments, even if its still pretty much just a long series of blatant jump scares. On the down side it also means that the movie doesn’t really progress the overall story at all and it makes the film seem more like a sort of spinoff than a true continuation. The secret weapon here is Lin Shaye, whose part has been expanded here and who really steps into the starring role in the second half of the film and seems to be really game to give this material her all. We don’t often see mainstream horror movies that have 72 year old women as their stars and that makes the film’s finale fairly interesting.

*** out of Four