31 Days of Halloween

The Frankenstein one is alright.  I'm not 100% sure I've seen their original Mummy movie, but the Hammer mummy movies I do remember seeing seemed pretty lame (could be off on that admittedly).  Their sequels all seem to mostly suck irregardless of series.  I'm not an expert though, so I might be talking out of my ass.

Poltergeist



Poltergeist is like the horror version of ET, and it works quite well. Its got a slow build up, but it actually doesn't take too long to get going. The haunting of the house has some interesting stuff, like the stacking of the kitchen chairs, and some good moments, like the parapsychologist bragging about seeing an object move across a room only to have a door opened to a room full of levitating furniture.

I gotta say, this is a pretty exciting movie. The scene where they actually have to enter the portal to .... wherever to get the girl is very thrilling. There's some stuff that feels thrown in, like the skeletons in the pool, but most everything else works together great.

I never really thought about how iconic much of this film is as well, from "There here" to "This house is clean", to the creepy clown, to the digging up of the burial ground idea. I think Poltergeist has gone up in my estimation.

Day Thirty-One: Freaks



Ending my horror reviewing this month is Freaks, a film I recently listed as one of the top ten horror films I had never seen but most wanted to (which you can see in my list thread).

Freaks looks at a group of circus performers, many of which with deformities who belong in the "Freak Show". What's interesting is that Tod Browning cast people with real deformities, from little people to others who are missing limbs. The film is very ahead of its time in the way it depicts people with disabilities. Despite what the title my suggest, those in the freakshow are treated with dignity and respect. They're real characters with real feelings, not just a prop for horror, and they all feel genuine. I was especially impressed by Harry and Daisy Earles who both give very emotional turns. The performances do have some early 30s stiffness, but there' a reality that comes through.

The actual story here is a pretty conventional one about a greedy woman dating a man she has no interest in for the money. It's a predictable plot-line that you can see exactly where it'll go from the first five minutes. In fact the film doesn't really become a horror film until the climax. I didn't totally by the motivation of the characters at the end, but the climax is really unforgettable and one of the best horror visuals of the decade. Freaks isn't a perfect movie. It's a bit meandering and the writing could have been stronger, but there's something about it I found really compelling. A unique work of horror and Hollywood filmmaking in general.

B+

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN

Ernest Scared Stupid (1991)



When a town is invaded by trolls, only a garbage man, a group of children and... miak... can save the day. With the word stupid in the title, it shouldn't be a surprise what you'll get when watching the movie. I'm a child at heart, but there are things you outgrow and Ernest is one of them. The character and the movie definitely have their moments, but overall, it's mehtastic.

C-

Happy Halloween, ya'll.

I love how Ernest Scared Stupid was the climax to Neverending's month of horror films.

I know it's November, but fuck it!

Inferno (1980)
Dubbed a somewhat sequel to Dario Argento's biggest hit Suspiria, I was pleasantly surprised by how Inferno begins. While Suspiria I'm sure was initially devised as a stand-alone piece, Inferno opens on the mythology of the Three Mothers, three witches from the 11th Century who have been housed around the world. In Suspiria, we deal with the first of those witches, and Inferno centers on a second witch who has taken residence in an old apartment building in Manhattan (hey, it was New York in the '80s, it's not really a stretch). I liked this opening sequence of placing actual context to the situation, which Argento is not very strong with most of the time. And a scene where a woman goes into the cellar in the beginning and plunges underwater was actually quite chilling and very well executed. The rest of the film doesn't quite live up to the first 15 minutes, and like Argento's films (I've only seen 3 now but none of them have any semblance of a credible plot) doesn't make a shred of sense when you really start digging into it. But if you look at like Suspiria-lite, you might walk away from it entertained. Apparently Argento was sick for most of this film, and actually Mario Bava directed the majority of it. Which you can believe because there's a great display of vivid colors of striking blues and reds that Argento basically adopted from Bava, and some decent death sequences as well. It all essentially boils down to a "final boss" plotline similar to Suspiria but with more exposition, which doesn't work as well but I didn't feel it detracted from anything since this film definitely delves into the mythology much more than Suspiria did. It's silly, it's nonsensical, but there's some terrific lighting and production design on display that makes it worth a look.

7/10

Re-Animator (1985)
This is a movie I've known about since childhood but only got to watching it just last night. The film centers around Dan Cain, a medical student who has everything going for him. He's among the top of his class, he's banging the dean's hot daughter, and he has a new roommate to help pay rent. Unfortunately that roommate is Herbert West, who is obsessed with the study of death and has fine-tuned a serum that can "re-animate" the dead and turn them back into the living. Naturally, none of this goes as planned and what follows is a good gory, fun time. For a low-budget effort, the film is better than I thought it would be plot-wise. I honestly thought it was just about West having a lab and re-animating a bunch of people, but there's definitely more going on than that. There's some witty dialogue and the actors do a solid job. Plus the gore and blood effects, which the movie is known for, are really strong and there's definitely some sequences that will make you laugh and cringe all at once. When you get down to the plot, it can be easy to nitpick a lot of the movie, and I wish they had spent another 5-10 minutes shoring up the plot because I could've gone with a lot more of the film if they had. For example, how is West even in the United States and in medical school when in the first sequence he's re-animated his professor? No one looked into this, he's not under criminal investigation? Even if the charges were dismissed, a mention would've sufficed. Also, they don't make it believable why Cain even gets involved in West's experiments in the first place. I mean, it's one thing to be interested in what West is doing, but he goes from being horrified to the experiment on the cat to the very next sequence getting into a full-blown, excited conversation about it with the Dean. Why even bring it up? Obviously these quips are secondary to what the film was looking to accomplish, but it just seemed out of character that a guy who's a straight arrow is now breaking West into the morgue and conducting experiments on bodies. But, the last 20 minutes are good, nasty fun and Stuart Gordon as Herbert West is a ton of fun to watch. The film plays out essentially how you think it will, but it's very effective as a horror/comedy and if you're not disgusted by it, it's hard not to walk away from the film with a guilty smile on your face.

7/10

Yeah I mean obviously plot holes don't derail the film really, it's a well executed film which some great effects especially considering the budget. I had a ton of fun with it, those were just things that stuck out to me that I wish they had cleaned up. All it would've taken was like 5 more lines of dialogue honestly. But it was definitely creative and unique, no doubt about that.

It's loosely based on his story of the same name, but it's one of the best.

Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised by the film. It's actually decent.

The Exorcist clip with Linda Blair's on-set audio:

One of these things is not like the other....

 Right, not sure if you're aware but Nightmare 2 is one of the least liked of all slasher movies and is pretty much forgotten outside of its bizarre homoerotic subtext.  If you're looking for something that's fun in the way the first Nightmare is fun you might want to skip to part 3, which Wes Craven co-wrote and which I think completely ignores 2.