31 Days of Halloween

I got a fun idea for one if you guys don't mind me tainting your thread.

I have a few reviews in the can I plan to draw from and my girlfriend and I also have some Halloween viewing plans. I'll try my best to post something every day.

I want 31 video essays.

Video Essays I want from PG Cooper

1. The Monsters: The Original Shared Universal
2. Hammer Time
3. How Roger Corman Raped Edgar Allen Poe
4. The Italians
5. Horror Mainstream in the 70's
6. A Slashing Good Time
7. The 90's
8. Jump Scares
9. Blumhouse
10. Art House Horror

We can save that for Thanksgiving

Ouch.



These could actually be pretty good.

Welcome to my 31 Days of Halloween! But why do 31 Days of Halloween when you can do…

31 Days of Halloween
SCHLOCKTOBER
With Rifftrax!

This October I have selected thirty-one films; some good, some bad, but they all have one thing in common...they were all riffed by Rifftrax!

Why Rifftrax, you may ask?

Because I want to. So lick me.

I think I’m less interested in artistic value than most here. I just like movies. I like to watch good ones, I like to watch bad ones, I like to watch smart ones, I like to watch dumb ones. I really take filmmaking less seriously in general, and as a longtime fan of Mystery Science Theater, I find that I feel no shame in laughing at them.

Initially I had considered doing thirty-one horror episodes of Mystery Science Theater, but ultimately I came to realize that the traditional month for MST was November, because of it’s association with “turkeys.” I decided to variety it up a bit by infusing it with Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic. But the more I tried to come up with a list, the more Rifftrax dominated it. They have such juicy, big name titles under their belts and I kept thinking to myself “if I include this one, then I HAVE to include this one.”

I’m surprised that I became so enthused by this. Rifftrax is in many ways probably one of the lesser high profile riffing projects out there. I have a love/hate relationship with it. I loved the concept at first because they were getting a hold of trashy movies that they never would have touched before due to licensing issues, like Road House and xXx, while occasionally riffing a popular movie just for fun, like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Around 2008 I noticed that my interest was fading in the project because they seemingly stopped riffing the trashy stuff and started riffing popular material continuously, and we started just getting riffs for movies like Iron Man and Pirates of the Caribbean (to be fair, I actually dislike the latter, but I felt it’s snarky nature didn't lend itself to the riffing format, similar to the former). I actually got into a back and forth with one of their writers, Conor Lastowka, after I voiced a disappointment in this direction. It pretty much confirmed that these things were likely to sell better for movies people owned, which I understood, but I think he misunderstood my point as an accusation of them being greedy whereas I was more or less just concerned about the “art form.” (You CHANGED, man! It used to be about the music!)

To put it simply, Rifftrax is a place where both Alien and Predator were both riffed, yet Alien vs. Predator was ignored. Where’s the justice in that?!

Later on Rifftrax started doing crappy movies they could afford and put them up as VODs. This was a step in a more interesting direction, yet that’s a double edged sword. Rifftrax distanced itself from what it was initially: a place where they could riff on the bad movies they previously couldn’t touch. Their final solution finally became to just turn it back into MST, only without the robots and the premise giving it personality. I like the option of these cheesy movies over the flavor of the month blockbuster that may or may not be bad, but Rifftrax kind of lost it’s identity in switching to these.

But that doesn’t mean Rifftrax hasn’t put out some good material. Maybe I’ll even watch some this month! I’ve picked thirty-one movies that they have riffed, and I tried to keep them as “iconic” or “related to iconic” or “not iconic but I might have heard of it at some point in my life” as I could (with the exception of one, but we’ll get to that when we get there). And some of these will be my first time watching them, so I’m looking forward to those.

And for fun, I’m throwing in shorts for appetizers. And if a certain riff is presented as a live show (and said live show is available) then that version will be used.

But enough talk. Let’s...talk...through the movies instead! Folks...it’s time for Rifftrax!



Day One



Film Year: 1968
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman
Riff Year: 2013 (previously riffed in 2004 and 2009)
Riffers: Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett
Featured Short: Norman Gives a Speech

Fresh out of the grave and ready to download or stream! This is the complete show, including the final short in the beloved Norman Krasner series, Norman Gives a Speech, because Norman is EVERYONE’S favorite zombie!

This classic 1968 horror film is where it all began. No, not the cronut trend, we’re talking about the omnipresent zombie craze! 28 Weeks Later, Resident Evil: Retribution, that Zack Snyder remake of Dawn of the Dead...We wouldn’t have any of them without Night of the Living Dead! (Pause to think about whether this is a good thing.)

When she’s attacked in a cemetery by zombies, a young woman named Barbara flees to an abandoned farm house. There she’s joined by a ragtag group of survivors who band together to wait out the apocalypse, with the occasional light descent into madness. The rest of the movie plays out like The Big Chill, but instead of Glenn Close sobbing naked in the shower, they board up windows and occasionally get devoured alive. So in this respect, Night of the Living Dead is the slightly less depressing movie.

Shotguns! Molotov cocktails! Exploding cars! Headshots galore! Like one of those awesome zombie video games (except you don’t get to play it), RiffTrax Live: Night of the Living Dead is guaranteed to be scarier than Brad Pitt’s beard in World War Z and funnier than the acting on The Walking Dead! You won’t want to miss it!



No, this isn’t my freakish way of honoring the late George A. Romero. The reason I’m putting this first is simple: Every time I ask myself if I want to watch a horror movie for October, Night of the Living Dead is the first thing that pops into my head. As soon as I decided to do this, I knew that the Live show of Night had to have a place on this list.

Things get off to a great start with one of the funnier intros Mike, Kevin, and Bill ever offered for their Live shows (and some of them could get pretty lame) where they “Trick ‘r' Treat” each other for some candy. Mike handing out razor blades is deliciously dark and hilarious.

They then introduce what they describe as the scariest monster of the night: Norman. This is the live show’s short feature, Norman Gives a Speech, the fourth in a series of four Norman comedy shorts that the guys at Rifftrax seem to just adore. I don’t have as much of a fascination with them as they seem to (I think they burned through them too fast and I was tuckered out on the Norman character by the time this show came out), but this Norman series is a very odd duck indeed. These four shorts weren’t produced in rapid succession but rather over a looooooooong period of time. The first one was made in 1974 and they came out once every five years afterward, so bringing this character back was a conscious, calculated decision, so there must have been SOME demand for the character.

Norman Gives a Speech is about...Norman giving a speech, I guess. But as is true to all of these Norman shorts, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The short itself is decently funny, and like all the Norman shorts doesn’t really need riffing. I somewhat suspect Rifftrax used them not so much as a riffing tool but rather just found them strange and amusing (which they are) and just tried to push them into the spotlight a bit. The riffing is fine, mostly just emphasizing Norman’s shtick. There are a few great highs, but most of the amusement comes from the silly short itself.

Moving on to the feature, I’ve been a big fan of Night of the Living Dead since I was a teenager. However I saw the remake first on the Sci-Fi Channel way back when, mistaking it for the original, and recall thinking to myself “boy, this movie is newer than I thought...and it kinda sucks.” Later I found out that I didn’t see the original and corrected that, and was utterly captivated by it. Of course, the lackluster acting from certain characters is a weakness, but the film makes up for it with its sense of dread and impending doom.

“A JEFF DUNHAM PUPPET! Oh good, it’s just a rotting corpse.”

As far as Live riffings go, Night of the Living Dead is one of their weaker ones. Personally I’d rank Plan 9 from Outer Space and Time Chasers below it, but Night seems to be a well they tapped one too many times because it’s a public domain movie, yet they’ve never delivered anything spectacular with it. Maybe the movie is too good, but Rifftrax has riffed good films before to wonderful result. They riffed this particular movie three times and seem to stumble with it each time. Personally if they want to do their next Kickstarter for Diary of the Dead, they might find a better subject there.

It’s not a total loss. A highlight of their Night riffs is always angry Harry Cooper. Characters who are introduced pissed and stay pissed always seem to be favorites of Mike, Kevin, and Bill as they love to fuel the fire and play it up. They also take aim at whacked out Barbara, to much more mixed results, playing up the character’s broken mental state. They’re not great riffs, but when they hit they’re pretty funny. And as the movie delivers more carnage the riffers start to heat up.

This Live show is actually being re-released to theaters later this month, in what I’ve hear is a (mildly distasteful?) honoring of Romero’s passing. I would have preferred a straight screening of the movie for such an occasion, but at least it’s an opportunity to see this classic on the big screen.

Well, I thought I explained it well enough, but to put it simply I'm watching thirty-one horror/monster movies with Rifftrax this year. One of my film hobbies is movie riffing, and I thought it would be a fun change of pace from normal horror movie marathons.

I wish. Maybe if I did I could finally push for them to do Friday the 13th.

You've made this dig before.

Anyway, High Plains Drifter is alright, but you're right, the movie doesn't go all the way, and that's a shame. It's a watchable western with solid atmosphere, and I probably prefer it to Pale Rider, but it is lacking.