Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/27

Feature Presentation: Zombieland (2009)

Director: Ruben Fleischer

Rating: 8 out of 10

I didn't expect what I was about to see with this one. A zombie comedy 5 years after the the benchmark for this little sub-genre, Shaun of the Dead, doesn't have a chance of surpassing that great film. And it doesn't. This is a different monster altogether, just out to whip some ass and show the audience a great time. It succeeds on both fronts.

Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), the awkward college student with a list of rules for surviving in the current state of the planet, Zombieland, teams up with the Twinkee obsessed Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) to try to survive. Along the way they meet a couple of con-sisters, Witchita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who repeatedly outsmart the guys before eventually joining forces with them. The girls are on their way to an amusement park in California, and the guys, by survival instinct or hormonal urge, stick with them.

Less a zombie horror movie and more of an action/comedy with zombies, the film is beyond funny. It's friggin' hysterical. The scenes with the uptight Columbus and the ass-whipping Tallahassee are highly exceptional. Harrelson's portrayel of the ultimate zombie killer is something right out of a comic book, complete with one-liners and hero shots galore. He spends most of the film uttering machismo-laced cracks at Columbus, swinging baseball bats and hedge-clippers at zombies, spraying bullets from an uzi, or destroying cars and stores just to blow off some steam. The only time the movie slows down is when they try to connect Columbus and Witchita romantically, and even that isn't too bad. Thry still manage to throw some funny lines in, but it's definitely a drop-off from the tone of the rest of the film.

Jesse Eisenberg does a great Michael Cera acting job here, but I would say he even outdoes Cera. He's more believable during the romantic scenes, using the awkwardness to actually be quite charming instead of just pathetic. He has the majority of the heavy lifting in terms of acting and narrating the film, which he does very well. The girls garner a few cracks too, but they spend most of the time being smarter than the guys or picking on them. They're strong chicks, for sure.

I think this would be a great party film, like Evil Dead II. A bunch of less-than-sober people looking for a good time would eat this movie up. The enjoyment factor is through the roof.

Next: The Halloween Tree

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/26

The Movie: Evil Dead II (1987)

Director: Sam Raimi

Rating: 10 out of 10

I will guarantee one thing: gather up some friends, mix up a few cocktails, suspend your disbelief, and this will be the most fun you will EVER have watching a horror movie. This film is so amazingly insane you have no choice but to enjoy the hell out of it. It has gore, humor, more gore, and more humor. The pacing is so frantic and kinetic you won't have a moment to pause, it doesn't allow you to breathe.

For anyone who's seen the first Evil Dead you know the idea of the flick, as essentially this is a loose remake of that one. The first one was a low-budget, fairly ingenious horror-gore-fest shot by newcomer Sam Raimi. Well, the cult success of that begat a bigger budget for this. It uses many of the same concepts and techniques from the first one, but it adds a heavy dose of dark humor to lighten it up this time. Plus, the charismatic version of "Ash" we've come to expect from Bruce Campbell was born here. In the first one he's a scared, timid college kid who has no clue how to handle the crisis before him. When his girlfriend becomes a deadite in the original, he can't bring himself to chop her up to make sure she's dead, which he pays for later. Not so in this version. A chainsaw to her severed head pretty much seals the deal, without a shred of remorse.

Here's the deal: Ash and his girlfriend are heading to an old abandoned cabin in the mountains for the weekend. Once they get there, they are introduced to the evil living in the woods around the cabin pretty quickly. Within the first 10 minutes his girlfriend is dead and he's become a deadite. It's that fast, people. There's no story really other than that. We get to spend the remaining 1 hour 20 minutes enjoying the insanity that Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell cooked up, and they do not disappoint. I got a special kick out of the mounted deer head coming to life and cackling hysterically at Ash. That's the kind of insanity I'm talking about. It's like the evil is just fucking with him and tormenting him, and he just rolls with the punches.

There's nothing to describe really. I can't tell you how awesome it is, it really is an experience you just have to have for yourself. If you're open-minded, you're going to have an absolute blast with this.

Next: Zombieland

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/25

Feature: The Shining (1980)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Rating: 9 out of 10

This is what I mean about the golden days of horror. We had Stanley Kubrick directing a horror movie. This is something we're just never going to see again, a top-tier director, one of the finest filmmakers in cinematic history, directing a genre film. What do we get now? Marcus Nispel, Samuel Bayer, Eli Roth, James Wan. Any of those names ring a bell? They don't and they never will because they're just cheap labor hired by the studios to make a film that brings in a few dollars and nothing else.

The plot: Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is hired to take care of the Overlook Hotel during the torrid winter months while the hotel is closed down. His wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and his son Danny accompany him, along with Jack's ambition to write a book during the long, cold months. The hotel manager tells Jack of an incident that occurred years before where a caretaker, such as himself, went crazy and murdered his wife and two daughters with an ax. Jack assures the manager no such incident will occur during his tenure.

As the long months draw out, we watch the family slowly start to fall apart. They refer to it as cabin fever, but really there is just something wrong with that hotel. There's an evil about it that just envelopes Jack and his son, to different degrees. The place just freaks Danny out, for the most part. We've all seen the sequences of Danny bombing around the halls on his Big Wheels only to find the ghostly apparitions of the twin girls urging him to play with them. I know grown men who got freaked out by those creepy girls, so imagine being a young child and seeing them.

The movie is a slow-boil, epic kind of horror film that gets better and better as it goes on, evetually leading to the complete melt-down of the family and Jack going psychotic. I would give the movie a 10 but I do have one small gripe that knocks it down 1 point. Oddly enough, it's Jack Nicholson. He does aa great job with the role, he's perfectly cast as the psychotic dad who loses his shit late in the movie. However, Jack looks a little too insane early on in the flick too. When they're driving in the car on their way to the hotel, there's a moment where Jack grins that creepy grin and raises his eyebrow and looks totally out of his mind. And this is early in the film! I just think he should have played a more friendly father and husband at the beginning, then when he turns on his wife and child it would be far more disturbing and the influence of the evil hotel would be even more evident. But, maybe I'm nitpicking.

It's an amzing film with a great score and an utterly fantastic ending. Jack's great, Shelley Duvall play scared well, and that poor kid is pretty awesome at being traumatized. Great story, great director. See it!

Next: Evil Dead II

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/24

Film: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Director: Tobe Hooper

Rating: 8 out of 10

Here's a true exploitation flick that somehow managed to work it's way into horror classic status. Again, you'll notice I side-stepped the abhorrent remake and went back to the roots. That's my tip, folks: when in doubt, watch the original. How many remakes can you actually say are as good as the original? And even fewer actually manage to exceed the quality of the original. I'm lookin' at you Platinum Dunes! Stop ruining classic properties, come up with an original idea of your own and we'll see just how creative you guys can be. Show us your gusto!

Ok, all done with that, on to the flick. The opening narration, by none other than John Larroquette, tells us that the following events really transpired in a sweaty little town in Texas. If you've seen this or the remake you know the simple plot: 5 kids are on a road trip in the middle of the Summer: Sally, her invalid brother, Franklin, 2 guys, and another girl. Believe me, that's all you need to know about the characters. They pick up a hitchhiker which, as expected, doesn't end well. This is where the weirdness starts, and it really doesn't let up after that. The hitchhiker is clearly insane, he has a big spot of blood on his face and has pictures of slaughtered cows with him, which is a pretty good indicator that something could be amiss. After he cuts his own hand open, followed by cutting Franklin's arm, the kids toss the kitchhiker out and make their way to their (final) destination: an old, abandoned house that belonged to Sally and Franklin's grandfather. That house is pretty creepy, but it's the house next door they should have avoided.

A guy and girl go to check the house out after seeing gas pumps out back. I guess borrowing gas from your neighbor in Texas is like borrowing sugar anywhere else. Of course, the curious guy walks in the house looking for a tenant, and eventually he finds one: a large man in a skin mask and an apron belts him on the head with a sledgehammer and he's down for the count. This strapping gentleman is the fella we'll come to know as Leatherface. If you've watched enough horror movies you know what's coming next. When one friend disappears in the house all the other friends have to check it out too, one-by-one to disastrous results. One girl gets hung on a meat hook while Leatherface cuts up her boyfriend with the chainsaw, then another guy gets the old sledgehammer to the noggin.

After that, it drags out and gets really damn weird. Sally gets chased through the woods by our chainsaw wielding antagonist for, what seems like, an hour. They're in the woods, running, chasing, running, chasing, until Sally finds a house. She gets out of the house, and we're back to the woods: running, chasing, running, chasing. Then she winds up in the hands of, what turns out to be, Leatherface's uncle, who ties her up to bring her home to the family, where we find out the hitchhiker from earlier is Leatherface's brother. Then we get the dinner scene. Just weirdness from start to finish. I can understand that they're playing up the documentary feel of the film, and I couldn't imagine being in that situation. But if you're watching it now, in our cynical society, a society that has been morally desensitized by these kinds of films, it just feels dragged out and pretty damn weird (maybe even a little annoying). The scene is wall-to-wall cackling from the insane family while Sally screams and screams endlessly.

I like this film because of the feeling it gives, and I think that's what the filmmakers were after. It's fairly unsettling, but not dread-soaked like the remake is. The grainy film stock and the lack of musical score makes it feel like a homemade film, which I'm sure is the byproduct of a low budget. But it suits this kind of dirty, grimy horror perfectly. The remake looks like a movie, which is fake. This looks like real life, which is far more terrifying than a movie.

Next: The Shining

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/23

The Picture: Candyman (1992)

Director: Bernard Rose

Rating: 6 out of 10

This was probably the pinnacle of early 90's horror, which isn't a good thing. Don't get me wrong, it's a good movie, it's just not great. It's basically a boogeyman tale with an antagonist in the same bloodline as Freddy Krueger: not alive, sharp object on one hand, can only appear in certain circumstances, was killed in a horrible way.

The movie follows an Illinois grad student who pokes around the inner city projects researching the urban legend of Candyman in order to write her thesis paper. Her premise is about urban legends and I suppose her idea is to debunk them and get to the root of why people believe in these myths. In taking such a stance, she assumes the role of cynic every time she hears someone recant a tale of Candyman. Well, we all know what happens to cynics in horror films. The Doubting Thomas' always come around, especially after a certain amount of blood and carnage. But, this film goes a little too long with her disbelief. See, the audience knows that Candyman exists within the film, it's not a mystery. So watching our lead constantly doubting each scenario gets tiresome, and frankly makes me dislike her. At what point do you actually yearn for Candyman to stick his hook in her stomach just so you get the satisfaction of watching her realize the dude's real? Maybe you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss.

There's some pretty cool imagery in the film, the most famous being both our protagonist and antagonist covered in live bees. No thanks. All in all, I didn't find the film to be very frightening. The main problem is Candyman's dialogue, uttered in a monotone voice-over kind of way that just sounds ridiculous given the words he's saying. The opening narration is probably the worst. I know this film scared me when I saw it many many years ago when i twas released, but in fairness I was 11 years-old at that time. It's a little disappointing that it didn't live up to my memory.

My other main problem is the useless sub-plot of her cheating husband. Completely unnecessary and distracting. The woman just got her best friend murdered, got locked up, watched Candyman rip open the shrink she saw in the penitentiary, escapes the place, and goes home to find her husband with another woman. The first 4 things in that sequence would have sufficed. The husband dating one of his college students: cutting room floor material!

That's all. I guess the scary thing was the Bloody Mary myth of saying his name 5 times in the mirror and you're dead. Don't say it and you're safe. Not too scary to me.

Next: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/22

Feature Presentation: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Director: Wes Craven

Rating: 10 out of 10

A pantheon film, for sure. And, dammit, this is a HORROR FILM. It ranks #1 on my list of movies that scared the ever-loving shit out of me until a much later age than I would care to admit. I've seen it about 20 times, and to be honest, it's still scary to me. The above image of the outsretched arms of our burned, sadistic antagonist always ranks as one of the scariest moments in cinema history. It continues with a series of iconic moments that helped define the genre.

Conceptually, this film is utterly brilliant. A group of teenagers are having haunting nightmares featuring the same burned, knife-fingered, sweater adorned ghoul. After one of them is murdered by the madman during her dream, in quite possibly the most iconic scene in the film, the kids start to realize the situation: die in your dream, die in real life. How fantastic is that? A human being is most vulnerable while they are unconsciously asleep. While you're asleep you're at the mercy of your subconscious, and that's just what Wes Craven invades. Fuck him, I say.

Iconic scenes? How about Freddy's face pressing through the wall above Nancy's bed, the aforementioned arm sequence, dragging Tina up the wall and across the ceiling, Tina in a body-bag in the school hallway, and the blood geyser after Glenn gets pulled into his bed, just to name a few. They're all famous sequences, all creepy as hell, and all done without the use of CGI. The face press scene in this is 1000x creepier looking than the updated CGI version. Nuff said.

Of course, this introduced the world to one of the mose famous villains ever, Mr. Fred Krueger. The AFI ranked him #40 on their list of the top villains in American cinematic history, and he's at his most terrifying in this first installment. I haven't seen part 4 or part 5 of the series, where Freddy got the most one-liners and started cracking jokes. But I have seen this, Freddy's Revenge (infamously homo-erotic), The Dream Warriors (Craven's involvement is obvious, best sequel), Freddy's Dead (simply awful), and New Nightmare (another Craven addition, another brilliant concept).

The real terror of the film comes in the form of atmosphere. Craven blends reality and the surrealness of the dream sequences so seamlessly that you're never quite sure when you've entered into a dream....until it's too late. Unfortunately, this is what the remake got wrong. They think by adding a quick shot of Freddy, accompanied by a loud sound, then followed by the character waking up out of a dream, is scary. No, fellas. Realizing you're in the dream too late, then not being able to get out of it.....that's scary.

For the most part, we have some pretty smart kids in this film. During Tina's fatal dream sequence, there's the obligatory bit where she goes out into the dark in her night gown uttering "Who's there?" But when she goes outside to investigate it's more like a "alright, you son-of-a-bitch, I'm gonna find out who you are" kind of mentality. Not just a stupid girl who doesn't know any better than to check out a strange noise in the middle of the night. The subtext of the divide between parents and their kids is also pretty unique in this. The kids are more savy, willing to believe these things are real and want to deal with it, while the parents just tell the kids to get some sleep, repeatedly. There's a deep, dark secret these parents are hiding, and it's causing their kids to die one-by-one. I like the idea that Nancy's parents are divorced and her mother is an alcoholic. It feels like the secret they're hiding caused the split in their marriage and most likely contributed to Nancy's mom's alcoholism.

Ok, I'm babbling about this film. I could seriously dissect it for hours on end, but I'm going to stop. I love it.

Next: Candyman

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/21

Film: Onibaba (1964)

Director: Kaneto Shindo

Rating: 9 out of 10

Japanese. Samurai. Horror. Criterion. You don't know what those words mean to me. I will watch almost any film with any one of those tags, but a film that encompasses all 4?? I'm in Heaven. In the same way that I was hoping to open a door to Ingmar Bergman by writing about Hour of the Wolf, I am hoping to pull back the curtain on Japanese and Criterion films. The Criterion Collection is a series of films that are bought, restored, given the complete special edition treatment, and released with a pretty high price tag through Janus Films. If the film has the Criterion Collection logo, chances are it's one or all of the following: experimental, brilliant, engrossing, or amazing. I've watched 45 of their titles and I haven't been left disappointed yet. Check them out, please.

The film is set in feudal Japan and follows two peasant women, a older woman and her daughter-in-law, scratching out a living in a barren marsh by murdering lost samurai warriors and selling their belongings for food. The terrain is covered in miles and miles of 7 or 8 foot tall reeds, the same as an endless corn field in America. The sudden reappearance of a man who went off to battle with the older woman's son/younger girl's husband throws their system out of whack. They learn that their beloved has been slain trying to make his way home after escaping battle. The mother feels resentment towards the deserting soldier for returning without her son, while the widow seeks solace and freedom in the arms of this man, much to the chagrin of the angry mother who wishes not to lose her only companion. The widow sneaks out night after night for a roll in the sack with the solitary man, desperate to escape the grasp of the tyrannical mother. When mother finds out about the secret trysts, she goes to work mentally on the girl, trying to scare her with tales of demons and the fate of those who lustfully sin. It's pretty heavy psychological warfare, but she never lets on that she knows about the lovers' nightly meetings. During one such night, mother is approached by a most peculiar samurai: he claims to be a lost samurai general and wears a hideous mask that he refuses to take off. He demands the old woman show him the way out of the reeds, which she only accepts after the threat of death. Of course, she has other plans. Before long she has killed the samurai and torn the mask off him to reveal a scarred, burnt face underneath. So she steps up her assault on the poor girl: she exits their home every night, just waiting amongst the reeds for the young girl to run by on her way to her lover. As she approaches, mother pops out of the reeds in full attire: a large robe, long black hair, and the ghastly mask on her face, pretending to be a demon out to attack the lustful sinner.

I'm not going to go any further than that. It's a damn fine, if not simplistic, story, told with minimal characters and simply outstanding imagery. The mask itself is creepy, but the way it's lit makes it even worse. The lighting and cinematography is top-notch, often showing the beauty of the rustling reeds during an afternoon breeze and the fury of the angry marsh during a harsh storm at night. It feels like such a small story in the midst of a huge political time in Japan's history. In the same way America produces film after film about World War II with the plethora of large and small stories that took place during that time, Japan gets the most out of a tumultuous time from their history books. It feels like this could have happened. Large battles were being fought miles and miles, forcing people to live a macabre life far away from political strife in order to survive. People always talk about the horrors of battle, but this film presents the horrible reality of life as a result of war. Before the war, these people were farmers living contently off the land. War is hell, and these marshes might just be the very breeding grounds of evil.

By the way, there is a ton of nudity in this flick. In case that helps anyone or cues up some interest, there it is.

Next: A Nightmare on Elm Street

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/20

Feature Film: Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Director: George A. Romero

Rating: 8 out of 10

I stated in my review of Romero's original classic, Night of the Living Dead, that I prefer slow, Frankenstein-esque zombies over the new agile, wild-dog zombies. So this is, of course, a review of the original Dawn of the Dead. It's funny that they chose to remake this film over Romero's first flick, but I suppose that's been done already. This one had never been remade, probably because it's such a beloved movie. Night of the Living Dead is known as a classic because it changed horror films forever, it's historical. Dawn of the Dead is just a damn good time mixed with some pretty heavy social commentary.

The premise: it's the zombie apocalypse again and 4 people manage to shut themselves in at the one place where all their needs would be met: a big-ass shopping mall. Most of the movie is spent showing the team try to seal off any conceivable way for a zombie to get it, and of course the dangers of embarking on that mission are pretty serious. 2 of the crew are policemen, like SWAT team members, and the other 2, a man and a woman, work for a television news station. That's basically it. Oh, and there's about a thousand zombie's spread around the interior and exterior of the mall just looking to chew on their guts.

The social commentary is what this film is really known for. The issue of people's, or in this case zombie's, inability to live without the largest center of commerce we know: the shopping mall. Their just drawn to the mall on pure instinct, just the same as the 4 person crew. They originally stop there on their way elsewhere, but even they can't resist the riches the mall provides. So they decide to try and make a home in the mall. Watching this movie you're probably thinking the same thing "I could live in a mall. Look at all the stuff that's there." But, ultimately, what good is any of that stuff during a zombie uprising? So they have nice clothes all around, jewelery stores, and the bounty of an in-mall bank, what good does it do them? They're still trapped in a mall with flesh-hungry zombies chomping at the bit to eat them alive.

Eventually, a roving gang of motorcyle looters discover that the mall has been closed off by the greedy people inside, and they want their share of the booty. So, it's on. They smash their way in, letting the persistent zombies in with them, and begin pillaging the mall. You can guess what the zombies have in mind instead of material goods. A gun fight ensues in the middle of the invasion between the bikers and our team of heroes, all while dodging the ever-grasping fingers of the zombies. By the end of it all, most of the bikers are shot or eaten, we're only down to 2 of our main crew left, and the zombies keep on truckin'. So, in the end, it's the humans that were the undoing of the other humans. Both groups were living contently before they met. The reflection of our society is impossible to miss: the greed of the human race caused the downfall of more humans than the perceived threat.

I gave it a few points off for the comic-book look of the zombies and the blood. It all just looks fake to me, which takes away from any horror it might have tried induce. The musical score is a bit laughable too, especially during the last scene. It's closer to the triumphant march of a final battle, or the victorious gun-slinger returns home. I don't know, it's just not a horror movie score to me. Great film, just a couple little blips keep it from being fantastic.

Next: Onibaba

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/19

The Movie: Psycho (1960)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Rating: 10 out of 10



This is the bloodline film, folks. The one that started it all. In particular, the sub-genre of horror we have today, the slasher flick, is derived from Mr. Hitchcock's masterpiece about a boy and his mother. There are constant references to Psycho in horror films, most notably the naming of Donald Pleasance's character, Dr. Sam Loomis, in Halloween. And for the newer generation, Skeet Ulrich's character in Scream shares the same last name as well. Also, anyone who actually enjoys M. Night Shyamalan films can point directly to this film for it's use of the surprise twist ending. Modern horror is really defined by Psycho.

The film really has every ingredient to make a classic: iconic scene (shower scene), great dialogue ("We all go a little mad sometimes"), one of the top 3 greatest directors of all time, and a classicly frightening film score. Like Halloween and Jaws, if someone played you the theme music you'd be able to identify it immediately. Those screeching violins just resonate in your ears as we watch mother plunge a kitchen knife into poor, defenseless Janet Leigh.

That, of course, is the other deviation audiences were not used to. Janet Leigh was a huge star at the time this film was produced. Focusing on her story from the beginning of the film lulls the audience into thinking she's the heroine who goes through hell but ultimately survives the movie. Not so. As mother steps in through the bathroom door the audience had to be thinking "There's no way she's going to die". Then she does. Imagine we're watching a movie in the present time and 45 minutes in Tom Hanks gets murdered. It doesn't happen. Even knowing how effective it was in Psycho current filmmakers still don't have the balls to pull this trick on the audience. After Norman covers up mother's misdeed people had to be wondering if they were going to be forced to follow Norman around for the rest of the film. Killing off the main star was a twist of genius, just a perfect way to manipulate the audience: invest them in the story of this woman for half the movie, then kill her off so they don't know who to root for. I'm thinking most people know the twist at the end of the film, but in case you don't I'm going to leave that alone. Just promise me you'll watch it.

The best part of the film for me is any scene with Anthony Perkins. He plays such a naive, innocence about the character that you really feel sorry for him. He fumbles around with his words, embarassingly, as he tries to make conversation with the beautiful woman who just walked in his empty motel. When Janet Leigh suggests he put his mother in an institution he shows a dark, brooding side to his personality, suddenly turning on her and chastising her lack of kindness. Then, effortlessly, he snaps out of it and we're back to the boyish young man who doesn't know how to talk to a woman like Janet Leigh. Really good stuff from Mr. Perkins here.

Then there's the master, Alfred Hitchcock. There's nothing I can say that hasn't been said already. He's the master of suspense! I've seen 7 of his movies and I haven't seen one bad one yet. That's an embarassingly low total considering the catalogue of classics he's directed. Rest assured, I'm on it.


Next: Dawn of the Dead

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/18

Featured Film: Eraserhead (1976)

Director: David Lynch

Rating: 5 out of 10

I know some of the Lynch-philes or Davidians (oops, that conjures up a whole different cult) will look at that 5 out of 10 rating and say "You're stupid, you just don't understand it!" I got news for you, bub, neither do you. There is such a thing as misunderstood genius in terms of art and film, but I question Lynch's work here. Now, I saw Mullholland Dr. and I know there was a narrative that made some kind of weird sense in there. I didn't understand the film, which is something I plan to rectify through subsequent viewings. I've only seen it 1 time, and even the most hardcore Lynch fan would tell you his films require at least 2 more sessions to grasp certain concepts in his work. Blue Velvet, however, does have a semblance of a narrative and is understandable in one sitting, though it's a pretty odd flick.

Eraserhead is a different beast altogether. I can guarantee you have not seen a weirder film than this, or a more sparsely dialogued film too. As I was watching it I was thinking about how little dialogue there is in the film, something that doesn't bother me a bit. Looking up some information after watching the film, I found out the initial script was a mere 20 pages long. Now, this can certainly work if the characters are doing something interesting or displaying character through their actions. But we never really learn too much about the characters in this film, they're just kind of there.

Lynch likes to throw unique and thought-provoking images up on the screen, surely enough to captivate an audience to watch the entire thing despite there being no real plot line. Our main character, Henry, lives in an industrial wasteland, all times surrounded by steam and pipes and machinery. He goes to visit a girl he dated a while ago (who is prone to spastic fits), has an awkward dinner, then finds out he impregnanted the girl and she had the baby prematurely. Next, they're married and living in Henry's apartment along with their child: a mutant baby that looks like a slimy E.T. or the little alien that pops out of the guy's stomach in Alien. Apparently, Henry's only form of entertainment is an itty bitty theater that exists in his wall behind a floor heater. There, a fat-cheeked blond woman does a weird dance, sings a song, and squashes what looks like little worm alien things that fall from above her.

Do I need to go any further? It's not even like a Peter Gabriel video or something, because the film is in black and white. No vibrant colors to dazzle the eye, just weird images shot in contrasting black and white. There just doesn't seem to be a purpose to the flick. They call it a horror movie, but I don't agree, as I'm sure most people wouldn't. There are a few horrific things that happen, like Henry slicing open a mini chicken only to watch it bleed and ooze as the thing starts moving on the plate, but it certainly isn't a scary movie by any stretch. I don't think the film is meant to be understandable, it's just David Lynch's weird brain ejaculating onto film, splicing it together, and somehow making movie out of it. People call it brilliant, and I'm open to a serious discussion of that, but it feels like those people believe if we can't understand it then it must be too brilliant for us to comprehend. I don't buy it.

You're probably wondering why I even gave it a 5. The short answer is: the images Lynch puts in front of us are pretty mind-bogglingly weird. Weird enough to make you wonder "What the hell else is going to happen here?" It kept my attention, and I can appreciate that.

Next: ???

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/17

La Pelicula: Hour of the Wolf (1968)

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Rating: 8 out of 10

Surely the most thought provoking film on my slate so far, Hour of the Wolf probably isn't everyone's cup of tea. But this is my opportunity to show a few people who Ingmar Bergman is, despite this not being one of his greatest films. Mr. Bergman is Swedish, and as such, he makes Swedish films, usually with his long-time leading man, Max Von Sydow (Fr. Merrin from The Exorcist). Also present is his frequent leading lady, Liv Ullman, and this is their story.

Von Sydow plays a struggling artist, Johan, who lives with his wife of 7 years, Alma, on an ocean-side piece of farm-land on a secluded island. We learn pretty early that this artist is a bit of a tortured soul (as so many artists are); he has a sketch book filled with drawings of creepy visions he's been having in his sleep lately. He's so terrified of these visions that he makes his wife stay up all night with him until dawn, just after the hour of the wolf, then they go to sleep. Eventually he's approached by the owner of the island and is invited to a dinner at his castle. Now, here's where we meet a cast of surreal characters that fit the description of some of his terrifying delusions. The inclusion of Alma in the proceedings, and her social interaction with these people, leads to the question of whether or not Johan's delusions are manifesting themselves in Alma's mind as well. There's definitely some weirdness in these scenes with the overlapping dialogue and frantic pointlessness to the conversations. But it's obvious the ocassion is driving our two main characters a little insane, if they're not there already. At the end of the party we learn of a woman from Johan's history, a woman we find out later had an illicit affair with Jonah, causing great pain and embarassment for him. His obsession with her seems to be the fuel for the delusions he's having, as eventually we are treated to a very surreal meeting of the two former lovers in the castle.

There's no real horror in this flick, save for a pretty violent incident during an encounter with a young boy while Johan is fishing. I'm more including it in the hope that this will open a door into the world of Ingmar Bergman. It's a tough watch if you're not familiar with his work. It certainly lacks the narrative structure we're used to in cinema these days, but there's no denying the power of the images and ideas thrown up on the screen. The question in this film, as posed by Alma, is if you spend a long enough time with someone, do you begin to look, feel, think, and have similar traits as that person? We learn early on that Johan is having haunting visions and is possibly off his rocker, but the inclusion of Alma during interactions with these people certainly sparks interest in her continued mental well-being. It's rare that Bergman answers his own questions, and this is no exception, but it comes the closest that I've seen so far.

Next: Eraserhead

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/16

Feature: Nosferatu (1922)

Director: F.W. Murnau

Rating: 9 out of 10

Sometimes you have to go back to the source. For everyone who loves Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, or those damn kids from Twilight, this is where it all started. It's a loose adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula", an unathorized adaptation I might add, with Max Schreck in the title role of the blood sucking vampire.

If you've seen some of the other versions of the Dracula story then you have a pretty good idea of what the story is: a telegram is received by a real estate agency that a property is being sought in town by a mysterious Count Orlock, who now dwells in Transylvania. So the young real estate agent, Hutter, bids farewell to his beloved wife, Ellin, and heads off on a journey to Count Orlock's castle. Once he gets close to the castle, he starts hearing rumors of evil around, werewolves roaming the land at night, and thumbs through the pages of a book on vampires. Of course Hutter brushes off these warnings and heads to the castle, which he soon finds out is the resting place of quite a freakish looking man who thirsts for blood.

You get how it goes from there. It's a silent movie, which I'm sure would turn lots of people off, but I think makes the film more enjoyable for me. The actors had to convey emotion and feeling in their faces and body language, not just with words, which is no easy task. There's a few things I love about this story. First off, Nosferatu, himself, isn't what we've come to expect as the romanticized, charming vampire that women can't resist, making him as much a sexual predator as anything. In this one, the vampire's power is much stronger than that. He's hideous: long pointy ears, black gothic eyes, two pointy front teeth, crooked gangly fingers, and a tall slender frame that doesn't appear to have a neck. His power is more psychological. As soon as Nosferatu sets his sights on Hutter's wife, Ellin, she falls into a state of delirium, which the doctor's dub insanity. The power he has over the mind is a much more frightening thing than simply physical power and beauty. Once he chooses his pray, you basically lose your mind.

Another thing I love, at least for this story, is the low shutter speed of the cameras. These days camera speeds are so fast they can catch everything, but if you watch an old movie, say a Western, and they show a horse galloping you may notice the legs look like they're galloping much faster than they really are. This is because the cameras were too slow to catch all the movements of the horses legs, so you get a not-so-fluid image of the horse running. Here, we get the same effect, but I think it lends a surreal element to the film. Nosferatu doesn't move like a normal human would on camera. Especially a scene of him popping out of a coffin, it's just so surreal the way it was filmed. Couple his eery movements with his freakish appearance and you have a pretty effective monster.

The third thing I love has actually to do with a simple camera trick they pull twice in the flick. During Nosferatu's long voyage aboard a cargo ship, the crew starts getting sick and dying. The crew finds rats below deck, so they assume it's an outbreak of plague. Eventually they start feeling the presence of the vampire, who sleeps in his coffin by day. There's a scene where one of the crew goes below deck to look around, and he sees a superimposed image of Nosferatu sitting on some boxes that disappears after a few seconds. Just a cool shot, especially considering the era this film was shot in.

The last thing I love: this film was banned in Sweden for it's horrific images until 1972. 50 years! Anyone that watches this movie would agree that there are some pretty creepy images in the flick, but not nearly enough to ban the movie from public viewing. And for 50 years?? It almost feels like they banned it in 1922 and forgot about it. It's simply inexplicable, but adds to the lore of the film.


Next: Hour of the Wolf

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/15

The Movie: Hellraiser (1987)

Director: Clive Barker

Rating: 8 out of 10

From the absurd excesses of the 1980's in Fright Night, I took a major left turn and went down one of the darkest, bloodiest, goriest, creepiest roads of the 1980's with Hellraiser. If you're looking for some majorly screwed up imagery, look no further. Of course, judging by the poster, this is the film that spawned one of horror's most indelible creation's: Pinhead. Slight piece of trivia: he's credited as Lead Cenobite in this flick, not Pinhead. That came later, as I'm sure fan focus was squarely on the bad guy with the booming voice and needles stuck all over his ghostly head.

The real bad guy in this is Frank Cotton, who we meet in the opening sequence as he's buying a mysterious puzzle box in, what looks like, an Asian marketplace. Having performed a candle-lit ritual and activated the box, we next see Frank literally in pieces all over an otherwise empty room. The culprits for the grisly scene, where we literally see Frank's face get pieced together after being torn apart, are the Cenobites, "demons to some....angels to others." The sadomasochist undertones of the movie are certainly hard to miss, with the theme of "pleasure and pain, indivisible" being constantly displayed on-screen mixed with the sexual tension, chains, and the black latex outfits of the Cenobites. Next enter Frank's brother, Larry, and his unhappy wife, Julia, a former lover of Frank's, and eventually Larry's daughter, Kirsty. They unknowingly move-in to the house where the gruesome murder took place, though the room is spotlessly clean after the deed is done.

After a drop of blood hits the floor in that room from Larry's gushing hand, there comes a scene that's both awe-inspiring and just plain grotesque: Frank begins to literally take form again before our very eyes. Bones pop out, flesh grows, and some kind of goo covers his weakened form. Before long Julia discovers this hideous thing upstairs and yearns to be with him, but with a catch. You see Frank gave her more pleasure and thrill than Larry ever could, which is a feeling she wants desperately again. What does she have to do? Oh, just bring home random guys from bars, get them in the room with Frank, smack them on the head with a hammer, and let Frank feast on their flesh and blood so he can regain his full physical form.

Now, I hate giving detailed plot synopsis', but I feel like this film needs to be set-up like that in order to comment on it. It's such a work of originality from Clive Barker and it doesn't have a single predecessor, as far as I can tell. The film isn't nearly as simple as "guy walks around killing people", which was the direction horror was definitely in at that time. It just leads me to believe that Clive Barker has a pretty sick mind to come up with some of these images. He wrote the novel it was based on, adapted it for the screen, and directed it himself on a shoe-string budget. Unfortunately, the budget does show in a few of the ending effects shots, but all-in-all he did more with very little than most filmmakers could do with a lot. I think the constraints of a small budget only serve to unlock the most creative minds and push them to another level.

I'm not going to go any further than that with the plot and all, it's definitely worth checking out to see where that set-up goes. Just make sure you have a pretty strong stomach, that last scene in the house is a doozy.

Next: Nosferatu

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/14

Feature: Fright Night (1985)

Director: Tom Holland

Rating: 3 out of 10



Look at the production date on this one, folks. We all know what the 80's were about: big hair, big shoulders, loud colors, and a lot of shallow films and songs. Well, this flick is no different. Just imagine what an 80's vampire movie would be like and you'd probably come up with this same concept: neighbor moves in next door to a horror-obsessed teenage kid, the neighbor turns out to be a vampire, the kid tells everyone but they don't believe him (can we give up this tedious plot entry for good? Just once I want the main character to tell someone something crazy and have them say "I fuckin' knew it!!"), and the kid, with the help of a tv vampire slayer, has to take down the vampire himself. Yawn.

I'd put this film in the same boat as another vampire comedy of the 80's, Once Bitten. At least that film had Jim Carrey in an early starring role, the protagonist in this film, Charlie, played by William Ragsdale, is someone I want to punch in the face repeatedly. Same thing with his friend "Evil", one of the most annoying characters ever portrayed on the big screen. Charlie spends most of the film in a constant panic that seems to cause him to do stupid things at an alarming rate. I don't know if the character was written this way or if the actor played him that way but it's just irritating to watch. Somehow this movie garnered a 6.8 rating at IMDB, I just don't see it. If you view it as a light comedy with vampires and some gore I could give it a 5, maybe. But it's tagged "horror", and this damn thing just isn't a horror movie.

The one redeeming factor is Chris Sarandon, who plays the vampire in question. This is actually the second film on my list featuring Chris Sarandon in a lead role, any idea what the other is? I'm not giving the answer. He plays a pompous socialite so well that he makes you hate him, as you should. He just chews every scene into gumbo and the other actors don't stand a chance. He's play a similar role a few years later as Prince Humperdink in The Princess Bride, amd he's great at it.

Maybe this movie would be more fun the second time through now that I know what I'm getting. But don't expect a horror movie.


Next: Hellraiser

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/13

The Flick: Session 9 (2001)

Director: Brad Anderson

Rating: 7 out of 10

Alright, we left the fun behind with evil trick-or-treaters and werewolves and here we get some good old fashion psychological horror. I guess this flick kind of flew under the radar and found it's life on DVD, because I really don't remember it coming out. The main star is David Caruso, which could have something to do with why I didn't hear about it's release, but the lead character is actually Peter Mullan, who plays "Gordon", the owner of an asbestos removal company who spends the entire movie with a look of desperation on his face. I think this is one of those movies that might get better with subsequent viewings. It's a little confusing and odd at first, with strange things happening that aren't fully revealed until the very end.

I have a little problem with movies like this, ones that play up a mystery and don't really explain things until they pull away the curtain at the very end to show what's really been going on. I mean, if you're going to do that, you better have a damn good secret behind that curtain that people don't see coming. This one is more like "oh, that's what was happening the entire movie". I don't like being confused for 1 hour and 35 minutes and then have light shed on me for the last 3 minutes. That's why I think another viewing would increase my likability of the flick.

A quick plot synopsis: an asbestos removal team is hired to clear out a massive, abandoned old mental hospital. Given the locale, you can guess that there's a pretty bad vibe about the place. When one of the team members discovers some old audio tapes of physchiatric sessions of a multiple-personality disorder patient that took place in the institution, things really get weird. It's not a ghost story, as one might assume with that kind of location, but more of a mind-bender kind of horror flick. After piecing things together you begin to realize the mirror images between the taped sessions and the actual events taking place. It's a pretty well-crafted script, but it's just dripping with dread and bad vibes, which is a feeling that never gets fully paid-off in the climax. I just had a sense that something horrific was coming, and while the things that happen aren't all sunshine and rainbows, I just thought it could have been more.

Which brings me to my only other gripe: it's not very scary, for me. The ending reveal was pretty good, but nothing that made my eyes pop out of my head. I have to assume the mental hospital, itself, was enough to make the movie creepy for most people, but it didn't really bring it for me. The audio tapes were the creepiest things. The voices that girl makes are pretty damn freaky, considering they're so dissimilar from her real voice; they could only be made by someone else dwelling inside her mind. And the voice we get to meet during the 9th session is pretty unsettling. Friggin' Simon.

While it sounds like I don't like the flick, and you may be wondering how I gave it a 7 out of 10, I'm actually pointing out the reasons why the film is good instead of great. It's a pretty clever flick with some good ideas, but there's just something missing for me.

Next: Fright Night

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/12

Feature: An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Director: John Landis

Rating: 9 out of 10

Here's another fun picture. Officially dubbed a horror/comedy, it's actually equal parts both. I might even go out on a limb to say it's more comedy than horror, which I think makes the horrific elements so effective. It feels like it comes out of nowhere, although given the title you know damn well there's going to be an occassional werewolf attack in this thing. I have to say it's the two leads, David Naughton and Griffin Dunne, that make this engine run, along with a briskly paced script with some witty dialogue.

Let's face it, there really isn't much to the plot: two American tourists are attacked by a werewolf in the moors outside of London, killing one and leaving the other severely wounded. Then the rest of the time we wait for him to turn into a werewolf, since he was bitten by one, as the lore goes. But it's the little things that happen during the meat of the film that make it chug along without batting an eye. Aside from a romance with a pretty nurse, the best scenes are when David (Naughton) is visited by his undead friend, Jack (Dunne), as Jack appears in various states of decay throughout the film. Even knowing one of them is dead and clearly rotting, they still have some pretty casual and loose banter about the state of David's well-being and his impending transformation. I give all that credit to writer/director John Landis, who's screenplay never takes on the ominous and dread-soaked tone that most films would in trying to unease the audience. I think the looseness of the dialogue and character interaction makes the actual werewolf scenes more frightening because the audience is being kicked in the face and told to switch gears. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Of course, you can't talk about this film without mentioning Rick Baker and the make-up effects. The tranformation sequence is outstanding and totally insane, just so well done. I'll be buying a special edition of this disk very very soon just to see some making-of stuff about that scene. I mean, watching the scene and knowing what year this film was made, how did they manage to make his skin stretch, his bones change, appendages stretch and reshape and hair grow right in front of our eyes? It's insane. So insane, in fact, that the Academy Awards added the Best Make-Up award just for this film. I think they should just call it the Rick Baker award, but I'm sure some horror heads would prefer to see it called the Tom Savini Award or the Greg Nicotero Award. Despite all that, Baker is truly amazing. I especially enjoyed to gradual decay of Jack, and some other undead ghouls we meet a little later on. Great stuff.

Two more quick notes. The music is great, as there isn't really a musical score or theme music, more of a theme song. The classic tune, "Blue Moon", plays a minimum of 3 times during the film by different artists each time. I love the song, but I didn't know so many artists had covered it. I only knew The Marcels version, but I particularly enjoyed Sam Cooke's version, over the transformation sequence no less. But, the other point: David Naughton spends an inordinate amount of the film completely naked. I'm talking full-frontal, dick-dangling, bare-assed naked. It was a bit much for me. It's still a solid film, but you've been warned.

Next: Session 9

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/11

The Flick: Trick 'r' Treat

Director: Michael Dougherty

Rating: 8 out of 10

Now, here's some fun. For everything The Brood was (sad, heavy, slow, ominous) we have the antithesis to that in Trick 'r' Treat. This flick is fun, briskly paced, humorous, and just a damn good time. It's not really scary or creepy, it's just plain fun. It's told like it's right out of the pages of a comic book, which it almost is since many of the scenes appear in comic form during the opening credits, as well as the very last scene of the film.

I guess this film has a nasty little history with Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures never giving it a wide release in theaters. This just goes to show you how unintelligent studio executives are about movies. They have a great horror flick that would have KILLED at the box office if given an October release, just through repeat business and a damn good hook for the holiday month. The distribution company was Warner Bros., so it's not like we're dealing with a small indie company that can't afford to release the film wide. I guess they just wanted to recoup expenses with DVD sales, though they made it wait on the shelf for 2 years before that would happen. I hate the suits in Hollywood, they know nothing about the medium they're in charge of and we suffer for it. Just let the talent run the business, please.

So, the film. It's told as 4 separate vignettes that take place non-linearly on Halloween night in a small town in Ohio. The 4 include: The Principle, School Bus Massacre Revisited, Surprise Party, and Meet Sam. There's also an excellent opening sequence where we meet a few characters that pop up as the movie gooes on. It's one of those movies where you need to pay attention to everything going on because the filmmakers place familiar characters or precursors to something we've already seen in many of the scenes. If I had to pick a weak link in the story I'd have to say it would be Surprise Party, though it does feature the only star anyone would know, Anna Paquin. That story is mainly a play on words and rife with double-entendres that are a little silly upon repeat viewings. But it's still a good time.

The thing about this movie is it's really only good to watch around Halloween. I mean, it's a great flick in general, but it's so festive and in-love with the holiday that it's amazingly essential viewing during the month of October. Any other time of the year you'd watch it and wish it was Halloween time again. I want to live in this town, minus all the killings, because it's basically a real-life version of Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas. The set design is absolutely outstanding, there's pumpkins and corn shalks and Halloween decorations in almost every shot. I love it. Please watch this and you will too.

Next: An American Werewolf in London

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/10

Feature Film: The Brood (1979)

Director: David Cronenberg

Rating: 6 out of 10



Here's a weird under-the-radar flick that, I'm assuming, most people don't really know. If you google the words "Cronenberg" and "horror" you'll probably get the majority of the results including The Fly and/or Videodrome, two movies I plan on viewing before the big holiday on Oct. 31st. But I've read a little bit about The Brood and was intrigued because, hey, it's David friggin' Cronenberg. And I think intrigueing is the right word for the film, as I'm having a hard time pinning down whether I truly enjoyed it or not. It's definitely different, as his films usually are, and weird, in a very melancholy kind of way.

The basic premise of the film involves the lives of a separated husband and wife as the wife undergoes highly experimental and unusual therapy called "Psychoplasmics" at the hands of one of the least happy psychiatrists of all time. But, that's a Cronenberg film: rarely happy and usually loaded with heavy ideas and thoughts. When the couple's daughter shows up with awful bruises and scratches on her back, the husband suspects his mentally ill wife physically abused the child during a routine visit. Of course, this is just the first in a long line of suspicious and weird things that start happening. When the wife's mother is brutally murdered in her home by a little disfigured dwarf creature the movie vaguely begins to take shape.

See, Cronenberg doesn't lay things out on the table under a bright light with a diagram explaining the details of the story. If you're paying attention and thinking, you'll pick up on it as the film goes on. I don't think today's audiences would really appreciate that form of storytelling, and I would be totally disgusted if they decided to remake this one. Not because it's in a unflinching classic, but because I know what the studio system would do to a story like this: leave out the ambiguousness and have the killer dwarves popping out of everywhere with a loud musical chord highlighting each moment. They don't understand a slow-build kind of horror film.

Now, there is a line between slow-building and just plain slow and boring, and this film teeters on that line until the last 10 or 15 minutes. That's when Cronenberg pulls the curtain back and shows you what the hell has been going on, and it's pretty strange, to say the least. The moment where the wife reveals what's beneath her gown to her mortified husband is vile and freaky, which shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with Cronenberg's remake of The Fly.

The film starts unhappy, continues it's unhappiness, and ends unhappily. It's a pretty good horror flick, it just isn't a shred of fun for the viewer.


Next: Trick 'r' Treat

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/9

The Movie: Halloween II (2009)

Director: Rob Zombie

Rating: 0 out of 10





Well, Rob Zombie, you did it. You took a franchise that started with a horror classic in 1978, spawned seven sequels ranging from pretty darn good to ambitiously mediocre, and rebooted itself with you at the helm with modestly servicable results....and you killed it forever. You've successfully made the worst installment in a series that had nine previous films. Let me say this: it's not just the worst Halloween movie, or one of the worst horror movies ever: it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I struggled with the rating on this one. A zero is pretty far down, and I never thought I would ever give out a zero. But after thinking about it, there just isn't anything redeeming about the movie at all. And I LOVE the Halloween series. I even enjoy Halloween 6!

Here is what's wrong with Rob Zombie: he thinks this franchise is his, which I guess was signed off by the Weinsteins and/or the Akkad family. Thinking back, the only reason his first attempt at a Halloween movie was even remotely watchable was because he had some source material to go off. Here, it's all Zombie. Let me just throw out a few of the awful ideas he came up with: the film opens with a 20-minute dream sequence (cut it!), Michael grunts every time he kills someone (all of the sudden), he eats a dog on camera (unnecessary), his main motivation for killing is the apparition of his dead mother and a white horse (WHAT??), he walks around the majority of the time without his mask on, and Dr. Loomis has been turned into a money hungry, media savvy shark.

I'm going to focus on these last 2 points. The mask: one of the most iconic images in all of horror is the plain white, expressionless mask of Michael Myers. Zombie set-up Michael's obsession with masks in his first installment. In that flick Michael made masks with his bare hands while he was locked up in Smith's Grove and was never seen without one on. The walls of his room were covered from top to bottom with homemade masks, and he was very protective of them. He wouldn't even take it off when his mother came to visit him. Cut to two years later and all of the sudden he doesn't need a mask, often times walking around freely without it, looking like a homeless person or a Hell's Angel. Zombie should have just made a whole different movie and had Tyler Mane be the maskless killer if he wanted to show his face so much. It still would be a bad movie, but at least he wouldn't have put a dagger in the heart of this franchise.

Ok, the last, and most insulting, point: the betrayel of the character of Dr. Loomis. Real quick: these aren't your characters, Rob!! You can't shape them into something they're not, and Dr. Loomis is not what you made him in this movie. According to Rob Zombie, Dr. Loomis' sole motivation is selling books, making money, and getting laid. Again, Rob, make a different movie where the killer's antagonist is an asshole, scumbag that nobody cares about, just don't put Halloween anywhere near the title. We get to watch Loomis routinely be an asshole to everyone for the majority of the 2-hour running time (wayyyyy too long, again) and then come to his senses in the last 3 minutes of the film. By that point he's been written off and all I want is for him to go away or be shot by the sheriff. The same goes for Laurie, who's turned into a goth-punk uber-bitch since the first one. I sat there thinking "When is she going to die so I can focus on someone else?" That's not a good thing. You know how you're supposed to root for the protagonist in movies? Not this movie, you're pretty much comfortable with everyone dying here.

I wish I didn't own this film. I hate every shred of it. Rob, I hope you never make another movie again.


Next: Unsure.....

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/8

Feature Presentation: Saw (2004)

Director: James Wan

Rating: 5 out of 10

Filmmakers are constantly asking the audience to suspend disbelief in order to enjoy their stories. It's part of the process. It's also the funniest thing to hear a supporter of a film throw in your face if you try to point out a few inaccuracies and shoot holes in a less than cogent story. Now, I'm a cynic; it's just how I am. I thirst for an intelligent story that makes sense without my having to discard my natural cynicism, because that is an impossibility. So the movies that aggravate me the most are the ones that rely solely on the suspension of disbelief in order to be palatable. Let me just tell you this: I won't do it. Now I'm not referring to certain supernatural aspects of films, especially horror films, because the audience knows that there's no such thing as an unkillable man, or a man that kills you in your dreams, or shape-shifting aliens. But, when the filmmakers try to ground their film in reality and take short-cuts with the logic of the plot in order to force the issue, I take issue.

I'm beginning this review in such a manner because Saw is such a frustrating film for me. They came up with a pretty damn good hook for a horror film: a "killer" puts people in escapable death-traps with the intent of changing their life through the harrowing ways they would have to partake in to escape with their lives intact. There's a far far far superior film that used a similar premise to a much better effect: Se7en. Just a recommendation: if you think Saw is good and you haven't seen Se7en, go see it immediately. The problem I have with this film is in the execution of the story. It just tries too damn hard to unsettle or make you feel trapped. There's an exchange at the beginning of the film shortly after the two main characters wake up incarcerated in a needlessly dingy bathroom that just irks me so much. The doctor, played by Cary Elwes, points out that the clock on the wall looks brand new, to which the other character replies, "So?" The doc's retort being something along the lines of "Since the clock is brand new, someone obviously put it there because they wanted us to know what time it is." Obviously, doc. No, I'm sorry, that stupid, contrived exchange simply doesn't work for me. No human being would ever say that, but they say it here because the filmmakers are trying to spoon-feed you this vibe that EVERYTHING in the film is there for a reason. Do you expect me to believe that you would wake up chained to a rusty pipe in an unfamiliar room and be like "Hey, that clock on the wall looks new"? Sorry, try again.

I had only watched the movie one time before this and I wasn't a huge fan since it lacked any logical threading. So this time I was hoping to enjoy it more, seeing as how everyone is a fan of the series. After about 30 minutes I took out a piece of paper and started listing the things that aggravated me about the film. Before I knew it I had a list of 9 things, lovingly titled "Reasons Why Saw Sucks". After a while they start putting things in the film just to make it work, not because it makes sense. There's one scene in particular with a few issues. When the two detectives discover the hideout of Jigsaw, they find a creepy lab with all kinds of weird stuff laying around. One of the things in the room is a man strapped to a seat with a drill mounted a few inches away on either side of his head. Presumably, this is another one of his death traps, although curiously it's the only one that's in his own lair (hmmm....) The detectives sneak around for a few minutes before the man of the house comes home, strangely cloaked in a boxers robe. And why is he wearing this? Well, so the filmmakers won't have to show Jigsaw's face, of course. They couldn't find a more conspicuous way to hide his face?? Who the hell wears a hooded robe around their own home?? After the detectives pull their guns on our killer, he manages to set the drill-trap in motion to distract one of the detectives. After a minute or so, the cop shoots off the drill bits, thus rendering the trap useless. But, just perfect for Jigsaw to try to escape. Now, the question must be asked: why was the drill-trap there in the first place? The guy has no feasible means of escaping it. He's also the only one who doesn't get his orders stricly from that creepy doll with the bulls-eye cheeks. So, it's perfectly safe to make the assumption that the drill-trap was there solely as a plot device to make it so there could be some kind of stand-off between our detectives and the killer. Of course, the inclusion of the trap allows him to escape as well. How convenient.

I can't do it, folks. I need cohesion in my films. The picture feels genuinely dirty and grimy, and really gives off a more disturbing vibe than a scary one. It's gory and morally depraved, which is proably all they wanted to accomplish anyway. They just took on too much of an ambitious project and were not equipped to deliver on the clever premise. And I've seen two of the sequels, they only get worse as they go on.

Next: Halloween II (2009)

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/7

The Pic: The Evil Dead (1981)

Director: Sam Raimi

Rating: 8 out of 10

Ladies and gentlemen, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell! With The Evil Dead the world was introduced to the directorial talents of Mr. Raimi and the comic book chin of Mr. Campbell. It's old school, it's low budget, and it's got buckets upon buckets of gore and guts.

The plot, what little there is, revolves around five friends who go into the moutains to vacation in a little, rundown, isolated cabin. As usual, things begin to go awry pretty quick. After some investigation in the cellar two of them find a strange book and a tape-recording from a previous tennant. Basically, they play the tape and, before you know it, demons are rising and inhabiting the friends one-by-one. Just a word to the wise, if you watch the film the demons appear to be zombies of some sort. But, if you reside in certain circles that are familiar with the mythology of The Evil Dead films you'd be best to refer to them as "deadites".

The film isn't perfect by any stretch. It has some pretty dumb dialogue, and the first person to be assaulted (sexually by a tree, no less) does the old "Is someone out there?" routine as she walks out of the house alone into the dark forest to investigate. But, after that, hold on to your hat. The make-up on these things is absolutely ghastly: white faces, dead eyes, and cracked skin. In fact, there's an animated sequence where we see one of them become a deadite that's so fantastic to witness. Raimi zeroes in on a close-up of the victim's foot, and right in front of your eyes the veins begin to spread in a sped-up stop-motion animated series of shots that's just plain unsettling to watch. But, when you're working on a budget and all you have is your talent to work with, these are the brilliant little things you come up with.

The last film I wrote about was The Thing, which I gave props for offering up some truly terrifying visuals without the use of computer technology. Well, this film is right up there too. The demons and gore are all practical effects that would only look unnatural if they were computer generated. The first-person POV steadi-cam work is also first class, giving us the vantage point of some evil being stalking outside the house. Raimi mixes in some stunning camera angles so as not to bore the audience, considering 99% of the film takes place in a small cabin and there's only so many ways to shoot the same room before it looks stale. Look out for several tilted shots and a pretty amazing upside-down shot that circles over the top of Bruce Campbell's head and settles on his terrified face in a nice close-up.

Speaking of Bruce Campbell, this guy carries the 2nd half of the film with only his physicality and acting chops to accompany him. After all his friends are turned into demons, he is all alone in fighting off the army of deadites trying to make him of their own. He has to play incessant fear and terror, mixed in with sadness over losing all his friends, not to mention the gallons of blood and guts constantly being sprayed across his face. He became the more wise-cracking "Ash" in the sequels, which is what he's know for, but here he plays it pretty straight as a wide-eyed kid who doesn't know what the hell to do. And he does a damn fine job.

It's a classic flick that, while looking a little dated, still holds up on a visceral level. I'll be watching the sequel in the coming weeks.

Next: Saw

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/6

Feature: The Thing (1982)

Director: John Carpenter

Rating: 10 out of 10

I know, I'm getting behind on this thing. I can assure all of our thousands of readers that I'll be getting caught up very soon.

My last couple reviews were The Mist, a film I knocked for being just a creature feature and little else, and A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot, which I knocked for being awful. I was festering in a sea of mediocrity or worse, just hoping to see a film that was scary and intelligent. Rest assured folks, John Carpenter came to my rescue. This is a damn horror movie! Your standard films of the genre seem to usually be in warm climate locales, like places where it's perfectly feasible to go skinny-dipping or take your clothes off at a moment's notice so the killer can murder you in a state of undress. Well, this film couldn't be farther from that: it's set at an American outpost in beyong-frigid Antarctica. It almost chills your bones just to watch these poor guys trying to survive in that harsh climate. It's the perfect secluded setting, especially for this kind of paranoid horror.

Basically, these men working at the outpost take in a stray dog that they rescue from annihilation at the hands of a crazy team of Norwegians at the very beginning of the film. Before long, they, and we the audience, become very aware that there is something seriously wrong with their new friend. I'm not going further than that, but you are not expecting what becomes of this scenario. Let me just say this: the creatures, mutations, and just plain freaky things they came up with for this film are the stuff of nightmares. You know why they're so great? Because they're all practical effects. No CGI, no man in a rubber suit. I'm talking animatronics, pupppets, and stop-motion work. These guys took the time to actually MAKE something, instead of pointing a mouse and typing on a keyboard, and their result is something freaky, disgusting, and just plain amazing.

The brilliance of the film, for me, is in the paranoia of the team members and their sudden distrust of each other, especially considering the seclusion they've been subjected to for quite some time and the strength of the bond they must have formed during that time. All it takes is one little crises with an alien life-form (ALF, hehe) to break that bond and get everyone doubting one another. The reason it works so well is because even we, the audience members, are as unsure as the characters are. Carpenter never once tips the hat or shows us anything that the actors on screen don't know. In this way it's very anti-Hitchcockian. We're along for the same ride as all the principle actors and feel the same sense of danger and terror. Kurt Russel plays "Mac", the loner helicopter pilot who drinks too much and doesn't really seem to care too much for being where he is. That is, until their survival comes into play. I know he isn't winning any awards for his performances, but give me one person that doesn't like Kurt Russell and I'll show you a person without a soul. He's just so damn charismatic and likeable, and he's no different here. But, this is a pretty straightforward horror flick, not the horror-comedies we've been subjected to for quite some time. There are no jokes, no cynical asides, no comic relief side-kicks, and no women either, which is another deviation from the normal horror plan. There's no helpless female heroine screaming her brains out, no sex appeal, no one that all the men are trying to protect. Kudos to John Carpenter for straying from that cliche, especially since he practically invented the scream-queen with Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Now we know Carpenter isn't a one-trick pony.

All in all, brilliant stuff. It's frightening and intelligent at the same time, which is all I want from a horror movie. So rarely do I get my wish. Thank you, John Carpenter.

Next: Evil Dead I think

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/5

The Picture: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Director: Samuel Bayer

Rating: 3 out of 10

Creative decision #1: The filmmakers decided not to include Wes Craven in their conversations about rebooting his original 1984 horror classic. And why would they include him? What has Craven ever done? Ooooooh right, he's responsible for Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, not to mention the only two decent sequels to the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. So, right out of the gate it's obvious these guys at Platinum Dunes weren't interested in making a good movie. They see $$$, acquire the rights to these classics, and push forward on production of these insanely bad remakes. Is it really impossible for someone else to make these movies if New Line was so interested in making some quick money? What about Michael Dougherty, the writer/director of Trick 'r' Treat? Offer it to him, at least he's talented! Shit, have an open contest for fans of the series to submit screenplays for a reboot. Without a doubt, they would have found something more intelligent than the script they spat up on the screen.

I think my hatred for this film grew to much larger proportions as I watched the mini "making of" deal after I watched the movie. The extra includes interviews with the cast and filmmakers, and boy do they come off as stupid. One of the filmmakers said they wanted to slowly reveal Freddy Krueger as the movie went along and not show everything up front. The original did this exceptionally well, you weren't really sure what Freddy looked like for at least 20 or 30 minutes. Well, in this one we get a dream sequence, the first kill, and a nice loving close-up of him inside of the first 4 minutes of the movie. Good job not blowing your load right away, guys. Strike 1! Next, I think it was one of the writers who was talking about how they had to create a backstory for Freddy because there wasn't much in the original series to go off. Meanwhile, as the real fans will tell you, his backstory is delved into in every movie in the series, especially part 1 and 3 (not coincidentally, both are Wes Craven contributions). They really only changed one thing from his original backstory: they made Freddy a child molester instead of a child murderer, which is pretty pointless. I don't see why they would change that, except to exploit some weird sexual tension between Freddy and Nancy whenever they're on screen, which just makes the filmmakers look creepier. Strike 2!!! And the final thing: the make-up. It's just a bad job by the make-up people. Now, I know they had to change the look a bit, especially considering they weren't bringing back Robert Englund to play his iconic creation, but his mouth doesn't even have a full range of motion, so it looks like an old Godzilla movie where the words don't match the lip movements. But the filmmakers reasoning behind the change was they wanted to bring a "realistic" look to Freddy, meanwhile part of the make-up is computer generated. They had to use green screen technology to add a hole in one of his cheeks. So much for realism. Oh and, also, guys, we're talking about a man who haunts and kills people in their dreams, can disappear and reappear anywhere, and can change forms into anyone he wants.....I'm afraid "realistic" is not in the equation. SSSStrrrrrriiiiike 3!!!!!

The funny thing is, I haven't even started on the actual movie. My main issue: the movie isn't scary. It's jump scare, after jump scare, after jump scare. Everytime Freddy shows up he pops out of nowhere. There's even a couple ocassions where he pops out of nowhere, has some banter with his victim, then disappears just so he can pop out of nowhere again. I couldn't believe it when I saw it, just lazy filmmaking. They also introduce us to the possibility of "micro-naps", which comes about after extreme sleep deprivation and enables the person to dream even when they're awake. But, do you know what it really does? It enables the "screenwriter" to have a dream occur anytime he wants because he's come up with this idiotic plot device that allows him to throw in a random shot of Freddy whenever he can't think of anything to write. I feel like there's a minimum of 15 dream sequences throughout the movie. A little overkill, guys. Even if "micro-naps" were possible, they fail to stick to the logic of it. The male lead sticks himself in the leg with a shot of adrenaline, which would surely liven you up, but then he proceeds to take a "micro-nap" a few minutes later. Huh?? You may notice that both "screenwriter" and "micro-nap" are in quotations, which is because I think both of them are a joke.

Did these guys really have to be put in charge of such a valuable commodity? I mean, New Line is only in existence because of the original Nightmare. It's even known in the industry as "The House that Freddy Built". So why would you piss all over that?

I was going to do this and the original film back-to-back, to have some fun and compare the two. Then I realized this film doesn't belong anywhere near the vastly superior original. Ugh....what a disappointment.

Next........

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/4

Feature Presentation: The Mist (2007)

Director: Frank Darabont

My Rating: 6 out of 10

First off, file this one under sci-fi creature feature, not really horror, save for some gore and blood splattering. The premise is pretty damn creepy: after a storm of, apparently, biblical magnitude passes through a small town, a thick mist sweeps over the land. Before long, people are getting wiped out by tenticles, weird monster mosquitos, some crazy pterodactyl looking things, and acid spitting spider creatures. The story focuses on a bunch of people banded together in a supermarket, with Thomas Jane playing the de facto leader of the bunch, or at least the only one with a brain. The film is smattered with several other small supporting parts, most annoyingly of all is a bible thumping "prophet" woman who absolutely kills the movie for me. In all honesty, if they simply cut her part, trimmed about 20 minutes and just played up the terror outside the store I would have probably given it an 8 instead of a 6.

I think the film tries to be something like Night of the Living Dead, the similarities are hard to miss. They've got the resourceful leader, they're trapped in a building with an unknown terror outside, and, moreso than the issues with the creatures, they've got problems with their own humanity. Several of the people begin to turn on the others as the movie goes on, splitting into two factions: one lead by the religous idiot and the other by Thomas Jane. I have the biggest problem with the extremity of the religous clique. They just seem to play up the stupidity of humans more than anything. At the apex of insanity the religous fanatics go so far as to savagely kill one of the others in an attempt to "sacrafice" him to God. That's where the movie lost me. Do they really expect that, given the situation, people are so dumb that they would believe some lunatic preacher and murder someone because she told them to? Sorry, I do have more faith in people than that. And if that's where they're trying to derive their horror from, I'm not biting.

That being said, the creatures are pretty great and the ending is fairly solid. If it wasn't this could have been a disaster. There's also a stand-out sequence in a pharmacy where the CGI people get to show off some pretty cool stuff amidst an all-out creature attack, which I dug, except my Netflix disk decided to stop as the attack was about to begin. Luckily, I bought the blu-ray on sale at Best Buy the day before, so I had to throw that in. Serendipitous if you ask me.

Next: A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot

Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 10/3

The Pic: Friday the 13th (1980)

Director: Sean Cunningham

Rating: 4 out of 10

I know it's a little late in the game to be writing the rules, but I'm stating one here and now: if the movie I'm writing about is over 20 years old, I'm not putting a spoiler warning. You've had plenty of time to catch up with this stuff, so I'm not going to hold back on these old ones. The exception being if I feel the spoiler would really devalue the overall experience of the film. That's it.

So, Mrs. Voorhees is the killer in this one! If you've seen Scream you know they spoiled that already, and if you haven't seen Friday the 13th or Scream then I honestly couldn't say why the hell you're even reading this. I've seen this flick a few times before this viewing, so I know the story and such. This time I was looking to pick out the influences, seeing as quite a bit of this movie came from other movies. I counted 3, maybe even 4, rip-offs, or homages as the filmmakers would call them. The music, with screaching violins during the theme and background score, is straight out of Psycho, which is famous for it's creepy music. The first-person POV steadi-cam is a little technique inspired by Black Christmas, which I reviewed about a week ago. The opening scene of Friday the 13th is almost an exact rip-off of the opening of Black Christmas: we see a house in a medium exterior shot, then shifts to the steadi-cam work as our killer approaches the house, then cuts inside to the people in the house going about their business, then back to the killer sneaking up on the house, and so on. There's even a little moment stolen from The Shining, which is THE MOMENT in that movie. Our heroine is hiding in a food pantry when Mrs. Voorhees cracks open the door and peers through the hole at the scared victim, though not with the same gusto as Jack Nicholson of course.

But, I will give them credit for a few things. Having a woman, an older woman at that, being this gruesome murderer I'm sure was a surprise to most people. It's especially fun watching the movie a couple more times just to imagine Mrs. Voorhees doing all the terrible things, such as jamming an arrow through Kevin Bacon's hilariously off-colored prosthetic neck. Another thing, this movie doesn't really skimp on the blood. If Black Christmas and Halloween were the pioneers of the slasher film, then this is the one that took it a step further. Throats are slit left and right, arrows are jabbed into people's faces, axes are swingin'. Good stuff all around.

Here's where it is unforgivably bad: the dialogue and story. This must have been one of the first horror movies that didn't care if we liked the characters or not, they were going to kill them. And honestly, you don't care about a single character in here. The dialogue is lame and there just isn't any story to latch onto. This film introduced us to the "stupid kids who do all the wrong things" cliche. It has them all: "Is anybody there........hello??" "If this is a joke, cut it out.....This isn't funny you guys!" "Well, that's weird...the power just went out". And this one, the mother of all stupidity: two characters are looking for their friend in her room and find only a bloody ax in her bed, which leads to the exclamation "What is going on here?" followed by the two of them going back to their cabin to hang out. No idea that a bloody ax in your friend's bed could be a sign of a larger issue. You just have to laugh.

I'm not going to delve into franchise sequels in this thing, there's just too many other movies to watch. But, with the face of the franchise shifting to Mrs. Voorhees' son, Jason, the gore, bad dialogue, stupid kids, and lackluster sorytelling would become staples of the Friday the 13th series.

Next: a possible A Nightmare on Elm Street double-feature