31 Days of Halloween

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