Scott has so graciously granted me a platform to blast out this delirium-inducing experiment that I’ve have set off on. Throughout the month of October, I’ve soft-committed to watching 200+ horror movies. Not only that, I’ve been sectioning them off into themed double features and mini-marathons for additional fun. Up until now, I’ve been posting them on the Icheckmovies forum, so I’ll be posting every day up until now in groups of two or three until I get caught up (which should hopefully happen BEFORE the end of October…). And away we go!
The challenge technically started September 30th at dusk, and the previous month’s movie challenge was animation. So naturally I thought I’d do a theme that would bridge the two. This brings me to…
September 30th: AKIIIIIRRAAAAAAA!: Anime Horror Double Feature
1. Roots Search: Shokushin buttai X (1986)
2. Sazan aizu a.k.a. 3×3 Eyes (1991)
Root Search owes a LOT to Alien’s setup of the discovery of a seemingly abandoned ship in space that holds a darker secret but takes it in a strange philosophical direction by the end. Weird and awkward. Not recommended to be honest.
3×3 Eyes was a pretty solid fusion of horror, Japanese mysticism, adventure and comedy that follows a demon girl named Pai and a boy who can’t die who seeks to help her in her quest to become human. It’s worth a watch if you are already a fan of these kinds of anime, but the dated animation and character designs may turn off folks who have grown up on the likes of Naruto and Bleach.
September 30: Sing Me A Lullaby: A Dark Chantreuse Double Feature
3. Antebellum (2020)
4. Queen of the Damned (2004) TSZDT 1001-2000 #416
For my next double feature I watched a pair of films featuring female singers turned actresses. In Antebellum, we have art pop neo soul artist Janelle Monae as a woman thrust into a nightmarish situation as a slave at a plantation who is used and abused at the hands of the southern genteel. It’s difficult to discuss this one without spoilers though. Suffice it to say, Monae has already established herself as a fine actress in films like Harriet and Hidden Figures and continues to do so here. Overall the film is pretty effective at portraying the horrors of the situation but it has some strange pacing issues and a handful of plot holes that keep it from being really great. It also comes across incredibly preachy in a couple of places that may have some rolling their eyes.
Queen of the Damned on the other hand is pretty damned bad. Tying to the theme, we have singer Aaliyah as the titular queen who really doesn’t come into the picture much until the final third of the film with much of the runtime spent on Lestat (played by Stuart Townsend here) playing it up as a rock star and revealing the existence of vampires to the world at large. Unlike Monae, Aaliyah never really got to establish herself as an actress with her career cut tragically short by a plane crash. Also unlike Monae, this film does not showcase much in the way of acting talent either. The effect work is terrible with the whole movie feeling like a nu metal video (and a soundtrack by Jonathan Davis of Korn naturally), and the narrative is fairly shapeless for about half the runtime. Only for those who saw Interview with the Vampire and thought, “I wish everyone in the cast of this had wallet chains and chugged Faygo during the shoot”.
October 1: What It Means To Be Less Than Human: Alternative Zombie Films
5. The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)
6. Maggie (2015)
7. The Cured (2017)
All three of these films attempt to do something different with that often trod menace, the zombie. In The Girl With All the Gifts, a military institution is studying a group of hybrid children who seem to be infected with the zombie virus with occasional zombie tendencies but also with keen human faculties and thought processes. Interestingly there are a parts of this that remind me of the game Last of Us but to elaborate would be a spoiler to both. It’s a solid film with very good acting from both the titular girl as well as seasoned vet Glenn Close.
Maggie uses the slow onset of the zombie virus transformation as a coping mechanism for tragedy with Ah-nold playing a father who must come to terms with his daughter’s eventual zombification. This may be Schwarzenegger’s best actual acting role. He is able to convey a complex set of emotions often in just the expressions on his face. Breslin is fine in showing the hopelessness and acceptance of her situation, but it’s Arnold who does the heavy emotional lifting here.
The Cured has quite a unique premise for a zombie film, taking place in the aftermath of a zombie infection. A cure has been found and applied to most of the populace and now people must learn to live with the consequences of what they may have done during the zombie epidemic while attempting to readjust into society. The acting and pacing are uniformly excellent here as it follows one particular man who is released to live with his sister-in-law after he has been cured. I would safely recommend all three of these but perhaps not all at once like I did. They are all very somber and grim in tone and can put a damper on your day if consumed in large quantities.
October 1: He Did The Mash…He Did the MONSTER MASH: A Paul Naschy Fest
8. El retorno del Hombre Lobo a.k.a. Night of the Werewolf (1981) TSZDT 1001-2000 #483
9. Inquisición a.k.a. Inquisition (1977)
10. Los monstruos del terror a.k.a. Assignment: Terror (1970)
Nobody does a good ol’ fashioned monster mash like Paul Naschy. Night of the Werewolf is a fine example of his Waldemar Daninsky character’s eternally haunted werewolf, this time portrayed as a henchman to the vampiric Elizabeth Bathory who was executed for witchcraft at the beginning of the film and brought back (‘natch) by a faithful subject craving power. Will Daninsky defeat Bathory, find true love and receive freedom from his curse? If you’ve seen a Naschy film, you probably know the answers to those questions.
Inquisition is a bit different from the usual Naschy flicks, hemming much closer to the likes of Witchfinder General than his Daninsky Universal monster homages. Naschy here (also in the director’s chair for the first time) is a witchfinder-general who ruthlessly executes any who are accused of dealing with the devil in typical torturous fashion. What makes this one unique is that the female lead actually does indeed make a pact with Satan to get revenge on the sadistic tormentors who have executed so many (which creates a kind of confusing moral quandary). This one is objectively possibly one of Naschy’s better made films and the turn to the actual supernatural in the back half gives it a bit of an injection of much-needed fun, but the depressing subject matter makes it a hard one to recommend for those who may not be as familiar with Naschy’s films.
I didn’t really plan it this way but somehow I ended up picking three Naschy films that are all quite different in tone. Assignment: Terror heavily plays up the sci-fi aspects of the classic Universal horror with aliens coming to Earth and resurrecting various monsters including a mummy, our intrepid werewolf Waldemar Daninsky and Frankenstein’s monster. What follows is a borderline nonsensical series of monster fights and late ’60s pastiches that make the whole affair a heady brew for party time.
October 1: In a Festive Spirit: Holiday Horror
11. New Year’s Evil (1980) TSZDT 1001-2000 #671
12. Memorial Valley Massacre (1989)
13. Valentine (2001) TSZDT #970
The pretty obvious theme here is that each of these slashers take place on a holiday. First up we have New Year’s Evil with a fairly unique but pretty silly premise of a killer calling a woman on New Year’s Eve and telling her that he will be killing someone at the stroke of midnight in each time zone, making his way east until he finishes his spree with her. This movie is a little weird for a number of reasons. Primarily it seems to go out of its way to show just how lame the killer is. He’s somewhat bumbling at times and his motivation for killing just comes across really whiny. It’s pretty dull for a lot of its runtime. Avoid unless you just love slashers.
Memorial Valley Massacre takes place on Memorial Day (although the holiday and the title of the campground location of the killings seem unrelated) and features a killer who is a primitive wild child who grew up in the woods in isolation and thus apparently has no concept of right from wrong. Which I guess means he randomly murders pretty much everyone he comes across, sometimes with a big ol’ ax and sometimes with a series of elaborate traps. This one I would say is a step up from New Year’s Evil. It’s not amazing, but it is also good about punctuating the proceedings with a regular cadence of kills so it rarely feels boring. It doesn’t seem to add up to much by the end and there’s not much made of the origins of the wild child other than a half-hearted exposition dump at the end, but it works fine as a pretty straightforward context-free backwoods slasher.
Anyone wanna guess what holiday Valentine takes place on? A group of friends are being killed off by a mysterious stranger after being given twisted valentines. Could it be the weird kid that they all made fun of back in the 6th grade? This isn’t a groundbreaking film by any stretch of the imagination but as far as standard slashers go, it does the trick decently. The kills have enough variety and I liked that the cast didn’t have a super obvious virginal final girl. All of the women being stalked have flaws and were part of the tormenting of the kid back in the day. Still, it is a pretty standard post-Scream slasher, so either you know this is for you or it isn’t.
October 2: Vincent Price: Master Thespian
14. Once Upon a Midnight Scary (1979)
15. The Bat (1959)
16. Escapes (1986)
17. An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe (1970)
When one thinks of actors tied to the horror genre, it isn’t long before you arrive at the great Vincent Price who with Roger Corman gave us a string of great Edgar Allan Poe Adaptations throughout the ’60s which is capped off with the one-man stage performance broadcast as a TV movie An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe. Here Price gives us four Poe tales: “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Sphynx”, “The Pit & The Pendulum” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, and really what you get here is pure unadorned Price at his teeth-gnashing, scenery-chewing finest. Not many actors can hold my attention by themselves without much else besides a few stagey props, but Price shines.
Price is also not shy about providing his ghoulish presence as a master of ceremonies voiceover or narrator to many a horror anthology (and even Michael Jackson’s Thriller) like two of the films in this marathon: Once Upon a Midnight Scary and Escapes. Midnight Scary was a TV movie aimed more at children with adaptations of the kid-lit classics “The Ghost That Belonged to Me” and “House with a Clock in its Walls” (which of course just got a big budget adaptation courtesy of horror bro Eli Roth) and the Washington Irving classing story “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. The Ghost and House with a Clock both play out like episodes of Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark with some pretty cheesy effects (although I mean… it’s a 1979 TV movie so that’s expected), but they are still fine for what they are. Sleepy Hollow is distractingly hilarious though in large part to the incredibly ridiculous, effeminate Ichabod Crane who the director apparently wanted to be as lame and foppish as possible. The actual horror element isn’t really executed all that well, but it’s still worth a watch for folks who like bad movies.
Escapes is an oddly subdued anthology that creates one of those weird paradoxes where the wraparound in the movie has the movie as a VHS itself being sent to a character, creating some kind of weird echo chamber of Vincent Price introducing lazy shorts that don’t even seem to want to be scary (when the scariest thing in your story is a friendly old guy who just REALLY wants you to stop and have a cup of coffee, you’re probably in some pretty lame territory).
The Bat is mostly a pretty standard old dark house mystery but with an unusually high body count for this kind of movie. In fact, the masked killer murders with such alarming regularity that it almost feels like a proto-proto-slasher. Unfortunately like many slashers, it’s also fairly easy to predict who the killer is. Still, it’s not a bad movie.
October 2: Pissed Off Primates
18. King Kong (1976)
19. Shakma (1990)
20. Link (1986)
21. Gorilla at Large (1954)
Rampaging apes and monkeys seem to be a well that the horror gods return to on a fairly regular cadence mostly likely kicked off by the mighty Kong himself (and even earlier in narrative form by Poe’s Rue Morgue murderer). The results seem to usually be uneven at best but occasionally a gem shines through.
First up is the high profile 1976 King Kong remake with Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange, and it can’t help but feel inferior to both the Kong that came before and the Kong that will come after. From it’s kaiju-influenced gorilla suit effects to the bloated running time to Lange’s miscast star-crossed damsel (and don’t get me wrong… in the right role Lange is excellent. Just not here) to it’s less than impressive World Trade Center finale, there’s a lot about this one that just doesn’t work.
Shakma and Link I feel like are good ones to talk about together since they both involve people being pursued and killed by a rampaging primate largely in a single location. In the case of Shakma it’s in a medical school and with Link it’s at a seaside estate of a zoology professor. In terms of effectiveness as a horror movie Shakma‘s psychotic baboon edges out Link‘s agitated orangutan just by sheer fury of his attacks. Link on the other hand offers a more well-rounded actual movie with better characterization, a killer soundtrack and better talent behind the camera. Shakma may be entertaining as a bad movie watch though with it’s stupid “game” setup (what the hell is this game they’re playing anyway?) and Roddy McDowell’s overly theatrical performance. Although be warned, about 80% of this movie is people opening doors and walking down halls, and it can get dull in places. Link though is actually kind of a fun movie. With Richard Franklin of Roadgames directing, it’s no surprise that the pacing is better. Plus the various primates in Link are all very good actors even if they aren’t as menacing as the red-assed horror in Shakma.
Gorilla at Large is a pretty tired flick that feels a little like Rue Morgue at a circus. The tone just feels off. It doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a rampaging gorilla movie, a film noir or a romantic melodrama, so the elements feel randomly thrown in at will. The one place it really excels is in the casting though with a veritable powerhouse of talent. We’ve got Raymond Burr, Anne Bancroft, Lee J. Cobb, Lee Marvin, great character actor Peter Whitney…. It’s too bad they’re sort of wasted in this muddled plot.
October 2: KIDDIE KORNER!
22. Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf (1988)
Took a quick stopover into kiddy kountry with an earlier Scooby Doo movie, and a pretty low-tier one at that. With an incredibly goofy premise about Dracula needing to turn Shaggy into a werewolf so he can win a race (…yea…I dunno…), most of the Scooby gang is left out the proceedings except Scooby & Scrappy Doo (and Shaggy’s girlfriend (!)). One of the big issues I have with these movies that have Shaggy carrying the weight of the narrative is that it forces Shaggy into mischaracterizations as a fearless leader since there’s no Fred, and it just rings false. Also why do several of these just turn into Munsters-meet-Wacky Races? Is this something kids clamored for in the ’70s and ’80s? As a kid of the ’80s myself, I definitely didn’t…