31 Days of Halloween

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN

MERIDIAN: KISS OF THE BEAST (1990)



An American girl living in Italy (played by Sherilyn Fenn, Johnny Depp's pre-Winona Ryder girlfriend and of Twin Peaks fame) gets raped by a beast. But wait, there's more. The beast turns out to be part of a family curse AND she ends up falling in love with it. I don't know what these people were smoking. The good news is, there's a really good score by Pino Donaggio that makes everything tolerable. If this movie had no dialogue, a reduced story and was just the visuals with the music, it might actually be great.


SUBSPECIES (1991)



A girl meets a guy. The girl falls in love. The girl finds out the guy is a vampire whose feuding with his brother. You know, that same old story. What makes Subspecies standout is the location. They actually went to Romania and made a vampire movie. I'm sure the locals were thrilled. There's also some pretty decent stop-motion animation and some nice references to Nosferatu. It's a shitty movie, but has cool stuff in it.

Film Six: Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

For Halloween I decided I wanted to do a special horror movie crash course, but rather than seek out movies that are like, good, this seemed like a decent opportunity to indulge in some crap that I’m perversely curious about. Even more than most genres horror movies seem to be astonishingly sequel prone. Hell, outside of the occasional Stephen King adaptation I can hardly think of a moderately successful horror movie in the last forty or fifty years that hasn’t been wrung dry by multiple sequels and/or remakes. Even horror movies that didn’t seem to do that great in the first place somehow end up with numerous direct to video sequels. What I intend to look at here are the sequels that seem particularly egregious either because they were sequels to movies that seem like should be above such treatment or they seem like movies that really left very little room for the story to continue.

If ever there was a horror movie that probably never should have been revisited it was probably The Exorcist both because it was an Oscar nominated classic and also because its ending was very specifically supposed to have this aura of ambiguity. However, the fact remains that the movie was a huge box office hit and the franchise was a potential source of revenue that was not going to go untapped even if William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty wanted nothing to do with it. To their credit, they didn’t just rush out a cheap sequel; they brought in John Boorman, a director who was pretty close to being on William Friedkin’s level and also managed to hire Richard Burton to star and Ennio Morricone to compose the score and also brought back Linda Blair and Max Von Sydow to reprise their roles (the later in a couple of flashbacks). Someone really wanted this to be a worthy follow-up, unfortunately they really had no idea where to steer the story and the resulting movie is both kind of insane and also rather boring.

The movie starts off somewhat promisingly with a moderately interesting scene where Burton uses a hypnosis device to get into Regan’s head and watch a sort of flashback to the first movie that’s shot in an interesting way. From there though the whole thing just gets really weird and the rules of demonic possession get increasingly confused. The mere fact that the demon Pazuzu (whose name is said out loud a lot in the movie) is still buried somewhere deep down in Regan kind of contradicts the ending of the original movie and seems to suggest that Father Karras’ death was in vain. Then there’s the finale which involves doppelgangers coming out of nowhere, magical car accidents, and a whole lot of locusts for some reason. I guess the movie’s biggest sin though is that it seems bizarrely unconcerned with being scary at all and spends more time trying to tell Father Merrin’s backstory than build actual suspense. I’ve heard that The Exorcist 3, which was made by William Peter Blatty and ignores this movie, is actually pretty decent so maybe the very concept of making a sequel to The Exorcist wasn’t completely DOA from the get go, but this movie certainly does it wrong.

*1/2 out of Five

That song is one of the better things to come from that project... and it's barely in the actual movie at all.

I'm gonna try to watch The Omen this year.

Psycho



Its too bad any modern viewer of Psycho is ruined from watching it as was truly intended.  The shower scene, motel, and Norman Bates are so ingrained in our cultural film history that we can't view it blindly as Hitch would have probably wanted.  Imagine knowing nothing about the movie and thinking it was simply a suspense thriller following the temptation of a woman to steal $40,000 when it falls into her hands.  And then being completely taken by surprise 45 minutes in.

Psycho is a famously successful thriller which teeters on that line of old school suspense and more modern tendencies.  It does lose a little steam in the second half, mostly because they are forced to introduce a whole new set of characters.  But that's a small price to pay for getting the mid-movie surprise kill pay-off.

Film Seven: Krampus (2015)
Usually I’m way too busy watching awards season movies in December to watch the Christmas movies that are being released in that month, which usually isn’t too much of a problem given that Christmas movies usually look like crap anyway but I was a little disappointed to have missed this bit of yuletide horror when it came out late last year, in part because the whole thing just looked kind of insane. The movie is about a family that has gathered together for Christmas even though everyone in this extended family seems to hate one another. This gathering quickly gets a jolt though when they suddenly find themselves under siege by Krampus (the anti-Santa of German folklore) and various other Christmas themed ghouls and ghosts. Ultimately this is a movie that falls into the same trap that most horror comedies fall into, being too silly to be scary and too dark to be funny, but it does come up with some fairly amusing Gremlins-esque ideas along the way. I definitely appreciated the movie’s use of practical effects and some of the creativity in designing the various Christmas themed monsters that the family has to contend with. Ultimately it’s the humans that probably let this down as they’re really broadly drawn and kind of clichéd characters. I don’t really regret having skipped this in theaters but I can see it becoming something of a cult movie for people looking for something a little less cheery during the holiday season.

***1/2 out of five

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN

HOUSE (1977)

What happens when a bunch of Japanese filmmakers take a bunch of drugs and make a movie? This happens:








Seriously. What the fuck is this movie? And most importantly, why is it a Criterion release? Doomsday , care to explain? I thought Criterion only stood for high class. This is like walking into a 5-star restaurant and seeing chicken nuggets on the menu. If I've peaked your interest and your curious about this malarkey, it's about a schoolgirl and her friends spending the summer at her aunt's house. Turns out, the aunts house is straight out of a Saturday morning show. This is supposed to be a horror movie, but really, it's a comedy for children. Again, why is this under Criterion? Did someone order the chicken nuggets?

Film Eight: Hush (2016)
Going into Hush I wasn’t really sure what to expect. On one hand it was directed by Mike Flanagan, who made the fairly solid horror flick Oculus, on the other hand the movie went “straight to Netflix” and that’s definitely a bad sign. Netflix may have some great original programing when it comes to TV shows and documentaries, but outside of Beasts of No Nations it’s been little more than standard VOD platform when it comes to regular movies. Between this, Green Room, and Don’t Breathe it’s kind of becoming clear that the whole siege/home invasion sub-genre just doesn’t really do it for me, but I think I might have actually preferred this one out of the three in its simplicity. There are no convoluted plans to make wholesale massacres look like self-defense cases here, and the film doesn’t try to make the disabled person defending her home into the villain either. Instead it’s this bare bones thriller about a deaf woman trying to survive the night when, for reasons that are unexplained, a crazy person with a crossbow and a big knife tries to break into her home with murderous intent. There’s not a whole lot more to it than that and little to distinguish it from other similar movies, so it’s not likely to go down as one for the ages, but lead actress Kate Siegel does an admirable job of getting the audience involved and the few unexpected tricks the movie does try generally work.

*** out of Five

thebtskink

The Stepford Wives: a great Saturday afternoon movie.

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN

PHANTASM (1979)



One day Don Coscarelli watched Dario Argento's Suspiria and thought to himself, "yeah - I can do that too." Can you, Don? Can you? Phantasm is about a boy, who's grieving the death of his parents, encountering a bunch of weird stuff and no one believing him. Turns out, a strange old man is turning corpses into dwarfs and ordering them to kill everyone. Seriously. That's the plot. It's presented in a nightmarish and Argento-esque style, but it mostly comes across as nonsense. That being said, for a low-budget and independently made film, Phantasm is REALLY well done. If someone told you it was made by a major studio, you'd believe it. The cinematography, the locations, the special effects, the editing and music are fantastic. And now, it has been remastered by J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot and it looks spectacular. I highly, highly, highly recommend it. Although keep in mind, it is a stupid movie. Argento's work is also really stupid. I'm not pitting American vs Italian. This is just a reminder that this is a film you watch for the visuals and music. Don't expect a good script and good characters. Just sit back or lay back and immerse yourself.

Deexan PhantomKnight SnoBorderZero Justin PG Cooper




THE GOOD SON (1993)



Growing up this was one of my favorite movies, and it has mostly held up. A boy (Elijah Wood a/k/a Frodo), moves in with his aunt and uncle after the death of his mom and discovers that his cousin (Macaulay Culkin) is a fucking sociopath. Or is it psychopath? I don't know. Point is, he tries to tell everyone and no one believes him until it's too late. Even as a kid I felt the casting of Macaulay Culkin as the evil child was genius. His character in Home Alone is pretty psychotic if you think about it. He's the youngest member of a huge family and is always struggling for attention. They ate his cheese pizza for crying out loud. He acts way too adult for his age and survived perfectly fine when left home alone. Then when two robbers try to break into his house, he sets elaborate traps and almost kills them. If they made a Home Alone about Kevin McCallister growing up to be a serial killer, people would buy it. As a result, Macaulay Culkin's performance here is not that much different than in Home Alone. He's just more of a dick here. It makes the movie work really well but it's also what hurts it. Watching Macaulay Culkin do evil stuff is awesome, but he's such an asshole that it's difficult to believe that 99.9% of the characters don't know he's up to no good. I would have seen it a mile away and tested HIS flying skills.