October 29: Horror Noire: Films Starring Black Americans
261. Rattlesnake (2019)
262. Bad Hair (2020)
263. The Inheritance (2011)
This section was inspired by the documentary produced by Shudder titled Horror Noire that gives a very good overview of black history in horror films. The doc is recommended whether you like horror movies or not. This bunch of films is a little more of a mixed bag though.
Rattlesnake tells the story of a mother and daughter who get a flat tire in the middle of nowhere on a road trip. While the mother changes the tire, the daughter wanders off and gets bitten by a rattlesnake. With the car tire still flat, the mother panics and runs her daughter to a lone trailer she spies in the distance where a strange old woman agrees to help her daughter while she rushes back to finish changing the tire. After getting to the hospital, the doctors find no sign of a snake bite, and soon after she is approached by a fellow telling her that a soul must be given in exchange for her daughter’s health or her condition will revert. This one has some nice cinematography and solid acting but the script has some major problems with plot holes that still bugs me thinking about it.
Bad Hair was a really good one. We’ve got another killer hair movie like Wig and Exte, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Bad Hair joins other socially conscious films like Get Out and Us to give a satire of the television industry in the late ‘80s and the struggles that black women have to deal with and just how much people perceive their identity via their hair. Yes, the movie is exaggerated in places. It’s a movie about a killer weave for God’s sake (with some very well shot horror sequences that’ll make your skin crawl to boot from director Simien who’s making his first horror film here). The plot is on the predictable side and some of the CG effects aren’t the best but overall I still had fun with this one.
The Inheritance is one I knew pretty much nothing about going in other than it had Keith David who I’ll watch in just about anything. Sadly, he’s about the only reason to watch this one. Large chunks of the film are taken up with soap opera family drama. When it does finally go off the deep end with David as the head of some bizarre ritualistic ancestral cult, it feels too little too late. The hammy acting and cliche dialogue has already done its damage even though David does chew some mad scenery like nobody’s business.
October 29: Bite-Sized Nightmarish Nuggets: A Chunk of Anthology Horror
264. ABCs of Death 2.5 (2016)
265. My Master Satan (2015)
266. Southbound (2015)
I’ve always gravitated to anthologies. Unlike a full-length film, if a segment sucks, it’s generally over pretty soon before something else comes along. If it’s good, all the better! Of course, most anthologies don’t bat .1000 and these are no exception.
The ABCs of Death series in general I have a decent amount of fun watching just because they are so compact. Almost none of the segments are really great but there are enough decent ones coming at a constant clip that I never get bored with it. The way ABCs of Death 2.5 came about is that as part of the making of ABCs of Death 2, the producers sent out an open call for submissions for the letter ‘M’ with the top submission appearing in the film and the best 26 out of the over 500 submitted being compiled into this film ver.2.5. The result is an even more varied and strange collection of shorts than in the two proper films, even including a stop motion one and a puppet show with paper cutouts. In general the productions are a little more on the amateurish side and a couple of them suffer because of that but overall I’d still put in fairly close in quality to the two proper films with an equal amount of weird, silly bizarre, gross, stupid and creepy.
My Master Satan is a REALLY low budget feature from experimental underground director Dakota Ray. It’s comprised of several segments featuring the same two characters who are serial killers that do a bunch of drugs, hallucinate seeing Satan and murder folks. Frankly it sucks. It all sucks. I have nothing good to say about this poorly acted, very poorly mic’d trash heap. I usually give some leeway to lower budget films because of their financial constraints. But this has nothing redeeming about it.
Southbound was actually quite good though and unlike many anthologies that basically throw together a bunch of unrelated short films with a framing story, all the stories here tie together in tenuous ways making it feel more of a whole like Trick or Treat or A Christmas Horror Story from earlier this month. The stories basically flow from one into the next with the first and last story overlapping one another like a purgatorial ouroboros. The segments also have a good variety without feeling completely tonally disruptive for the most part. Overall I was actually pretty impressed with this one and am surprised it doesn’t get more attention.
October 29: I Am The Best Version Of You: Malevolent Mirrors
267. Amityville: A New Generation (1993)
268. Geoul sokeuro a.k.a. Into The Mirror (2003)
269. Mirrors (2008)
With mirrors you have a lot of potential for horror. Evil doppelgangers, alternate mirror dimensions, ghosts you can see in the mirror that you can’t see behind you… Us recently exploited the mirror to interesting effect, but I thought I’d take a look back at some other movies that have used mirrors as a driver for terror.
Amityville: A New Generation taught me a valuable lesson. Never accept haunted mirrors as payment for a photograph. It will then start showing you terrible future tragedies and lead you into derangement. Honestly I thought this was one of the weaker “possessed things” Amityville sequels although it still had its fun kooky moments. Oddly this one seems to want to tie into the original movie a little more than some of the other sequels. Toward the end it definitely intentionally draws parallels with the first one. Anyway, I think this one might be best served as part of a Nutty Amityville marathon nestled in between more crazy iterations of the series.
Into the Mirror is a Korean film that blends horror and crime procedural in a generally fairly effective way. It tells the story of an ex-cop who gets a job as security at a new mall and gets pulled into a series of mysterious deaths involving mirrors. The actual death sequences are pretty effective and well filmed, but I do feel like the movie gets bogged down in exposition and procedural elements that detract from the actual suspense. Still, it’s pretty good overall.
I didn’t realize it when I started it but apparently Mirrors is a kind of pseudo-reimagining of Into The Mirror. It is also about an ex-cop security guard (played by Kiefer Sutherland) at a mall who gets involved in creepy mirror-related murders. Some of the death scenes are also pretty similar. But the overarching plot is much different. Rather than emphasizing the investigative procedural elements, director Alexandre Aja puts the focus on the lead’s family and restructures the plot into something more personal to the main character. Overall, I’d place it of a similar quality. While the changes overall do alleviate some of the more exposition-heavy elements I took issue with in Into the Mirror, it still feels too long and drawn out at times and with the shift in plot, I felt like it made the movie a little more predictable too. Decent but not amazing.
October 29: KIDDIE KORNER!
270. Scooby-Doo! Adventures: The Mystery Map (2013)
Another day, another Doo. This one is done entirely with puppets for reasons unknown and involves the gang getting mixed up with an evil demon parrot trying to steal a treasure map. It is definitely skewed a little younger than the typical Scooby doo series or movie but still manages some mildly amusing jokes and keeps a brisk pace. My kids actually liked this one, so I guess the creators knew what they were doing.
October 30: Don’t Go Near The Water!
280. The Beach House (2019)
281. Chorakhe a.k.a. Crocodile (1979)
282. Harpoon (2019)
Sharks aren’t the only danger the ocean brings. You can be infected with some kind of disgusting waterborne virus, eaten by vicious crocodiles or stranded out in the middle of the ocean with no food and skeletons in your closet. No matter how you look at it, a stay-cation is starting to sound pretty good.
The Beach House will sneak up on you. Something isn’t right with the ocean water. But a young couple who goes to a beach house for the weekend isn’t aware of it. Neither is the older couple, friends of the family, who show up to the beach house unaware the others were going to be there. Just FYI for those who are squeamish about grotesque flesh mush, there are a couple of scenes here that will get you cringing. One in particular involving a knife and tongs is going to stick with you. While the basic plot here is similar to Cabin Fever, the execution is vastly different. The Beach House plays up the raw terror and otherworldliness of what’s happening, leaving the audience as dazed and unsettled as the characters in the film. Not recommended for people who need every little detail spelled out but otherwise, it was a really good one.
Crocodile is a bunch of gory nonsense for the most part. You know how these movies work. It’s basically a Jaws ripoff about a giant crocodile that swam out of the ocean upriver, preying on unsuspecting villagers. I will say it’s probably bloodier than Jaws although the effects are generally pretty bad. Also PETA fans be warned. A real crocodile was killed on film here. Still, it wasn’t boring, so it has that going for it.
I had a good time with Harpoon. A smart, funny script mixed with shitty characters that are still somehow entertaining to watch despite the increasingly bleak, desperate situations they find themselves in… It’s a hard balancing act to pull off but these three actors manage it with aplomb. I honestly don’t normally care for these kind of “slowly watching people die” kind of movies, but Harpoon manages to not only make it watchable but even fun.
271-279. The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) E1-9
My wife and I have been watching this over the last couple of weeks. I would say in general I echo the sentiments of others that this isn’t as good as the Haunting of Hill House, but it still has some great moments, particularly in the middle of the series from about episode 4 to 6. In general, once it shows its hand, then it’s just a matter of watching it play out pretty predictably. Despite the somewhat lackluster ending, Mike Flanagan once again shows how much talent he has behind the camera. It’s filmed with a certain warmth and grace that few other directors could pull off with such a narrative. From an acting standpoint, it’s across the board mostly quite good (although Henry Thomas’ British impersonation is a little weird). Overall, I was still glad to have watched it and thought it was overall very well done.
October 30: A Howling Sequel Double Feature
283. Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988)
284. Howling V: The Rebirth (1989)
For no particular reason other than they’ve been sitting unwatched in my movie stack for a long time, I decided to take in a couple of Howling sequels. The Howling was a great, very influential werewolf movie that seemed to spawn a barrage of trashy, dumb but occasionally fun sequels that rarely seemed to try to capture the spirit of the first one at all.
Howling IV is the rare outlier that actually tries to be more of a straightforward werewolf movie and plays out almost as a remake of the original with some changes. I’ve seen a couple of comments that this is actually a more faithful adaptation of the books in some ways. Honestly though if this is more faithful to the books, I’m glad Dante took the original Howling in the direction he did. This movie is incredibly dull and exposition heavy with very little actual werewolf business. The way it was shot also makes it look like a low budget TV movie, drained of all life. Part 2 was stupid but ridiculous and Part 3 was even more stupid and even more ridiculous. But neither 2 nor 3 were boring. This one is just boring.
Howling V on the other hand is a nice little “And Then There Were None”-style mystery with a werewolf shoehorned in, not unlike The Beast Must Die. It had its share of stodgy scenes too but in general was better paced with some nice atmosphere courtesy of the Hungarian castle it takes place in. This one was actually worth watching.
October 30: KIDDIE KORNER!
285. Ghost Stories a.k.a. Charles Dickens’ Ghost Stories From The Pickwick Papers (1987)
Oh shit. This was legit creepy and even funny at times. I quite liked this adaptation of several of Dickens’ ghostly horror stories. In fact, one of the stories I actually had on a VHS when I was a kid and must’ve watched it over a dozen times but had no idea what it was from until now. Specifically I’m referring to the 4th segment about a bitter, drunken grave digger who is tormented by Death and dragged into Hell on Christmas Eve. It’s a sort of dry run for A Christmas Carol, similar to the Ghost of Christmas Future but even more creepy and weird. The animation in this special is a little on the cheap side with some low frame counts in places which is a shame because the actual artwork is actually very good at times. This actually crept out my kids quite a bit to the point my son left the room while it was on (I mean, it’s not terrifying but things can get pretty damn scary when you are a seven year old).
October 30/31: Beyond Redundancy: Sequels of Remakes
286. Quarantine 2: Terminal (2011)
287. Pulse 2: Afterlife (2008)
288. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2014)
289. The Fly II (1989)
Three out of four of these I actually watched the day before but I decided to tack on The Fly II at the end to kick off Halloween with something I knew would be nice and gooey.
Quarantine 2, like [rec] 3, mostly abandons the first-person camera for the majority of its running time (as well as pretty much any continuity with the original [rec] series itself) which I was thankful for (I’ve shared my dislike of found footage before). The setup is decent with a virulent outbreak on a plane mid-flight being a solid setup for a movie (see also Flight of the Living Dead) but 20 minutes in they land the plane and the rest of the film is spent dealing with zombies mostly in empty warehouse-like areas in the staff only sections of the airport terminal. It’s mostly a pretty generic zombie movie from that point with a lame terrorist plot thrown in to rationalize it.
Pulse 2 is the sequel to the American remake of the original Japanese film and looks like it took inspiration from The Room in terms of using unnecessary green screen. It seems like about 60% to 70% of it is actors superimposed on static backgrounds for no particular reason (like random street scenes, that kind of thing). The effects also have that stop/start jittery look of a Marilyn Manson video from a decade before. It’s too bad because honestly the plot itself had some potential that could have been decent with a better budget and a better director.
The Woman In Black 2 finds our titular ghost haunting a new family in Eel Marsh House, and apparently the director forgot to hire a lighting technician. I don’t know if it was intentional but it seems like half this movie is just hearing kids screaming at something in darkness and whispering to each other. It’s unfortunate because when the lighting is bright enough to see what’s going on, it actually has some very nice cinematography and period detail. The story itself is a little slow moving in places but punctuated with random jump scares (I guess to wake you up if you inevitably fall asleep while the camera wanders around in the dark for ten minutes?).
The Fly II had some big shoes to fill coming in after Cronenberg’s well-regarded remake. It opens with a bang on a slimy, screamy birthing sequence but once it’s over it basically settles into a rehash of the first one, almost beat for beat at times. Still the elaborate practical effects are on point, so just purely on a visceral level it has some merit to it even though Eric Stoltz is definitely no replacement for Jeff Goldblum (but then again, few would be).
October 31: Love Means Never Having To Say ‘DIE!’: Romance in Horror
290. You ling ren jian a.k.a. Visible Secret (2001)
291. The Honeymoon Phase (2019)
292. Cô Haû Gaí a.k.a. The Housemaid (2016)
That old hoary cliche about women loving bad boys seems to have imbued horror from the beginning. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, both novel and the Universal adaptation from 1931 melded the menace of the other with eroticism and longing that ensured the two genres would stay in touch over the years.
Visible Secret from Ann Hui is a weirdly structured movie that meanders around various plot threads, working to tie up a story of a guy who sparks a romance with a strange girl who claims to see ghosts and a mystery they get involved in regarding a man who was beheaded in a bus incident at the start of the film. Like other Hong Kong films I’ve seen, it has this uneasy mix of romance, comedy and horror that doesn’t entirely gel. I didn’t find much of the humor landing and I thought the romance plot could’ve used fleshing out more. On the horror front, I did think there were a few rather eerie scenes and I was glad to see an Asian horror movie that didn’t rely on jump scares. Overall though, I thought this was too muddled with a predictable ending.
The Honeymoon Phase introduces us to a couple, Tom & Eve, who have agreed to take part in a social experiment (these always go well, right?) where they will be living together for 30 days not allowed to leave their swanky living quarters while being closely monitored and interviewed daily in exchange for a much needed $50k to get their lives going. Everything is wine and roses for the first half of the study but after they eat some drug-laced edibles and Eve sees another woman from the study banging on their door begging for help, she begins to get the uneasy feeling that something is wrong. When Tom seems bizarrely fixated on having children and Eve starts to believe she’s pregnant, she concludes something is definitely wrong. This one starts out pretty interesting with some good acting but I feel like it stumbles on trying the nail the landing. It adds a superfluous subplot toward the end that didn’t need to be there and serves up a really predictable ending.
The Housemaid feels like two different movies vying for supremacy throughout its runtime. One film is an evocatively shot, atmospheric supernatural gothic romance tale of a plantation owner who falls for his recently hired housemaid but is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife. The other is a loud, jump scare thrill ride with over-the-top death scenes and an unstoppable monster. At times, it will jarringly cut between these two creating a kind of tonal dissonance that makes it hard to focus on what’s happening. Still the beautiful cinematography and unique period detail makes it worth a watch even with its flaws.
October 31: KIDDIE KORNER!
293. The Witches (2020)
For the Halloween Kiddie Korner movie I wanted to put on something that would at least be reliably decent and Robert Zemeckis’ new adaptation of the classic Roald Dahl book seemed to fit the bill well enough. I was a big fan of the original Roeg version of the story and its grotesque practical effects, so I watched this with more than a little trepidation knowing it went the CGI route. The results are a mixed bag. As I expected the CGI definitely does not evoke the same visceral response as the Roeg version. It also adds a superfluous third mouse transformed from a kid that wasn’t in the book or previous version of the movie. On the positive side, I thought the shift in setting to 1968 Alabama with Octavia Spencer as the grandmother was a good idea and adds another layer in places to the narrative that wasn’t there in the previous version of the movie. I also appreciated that this movie kept the original ending of the book rather than the sappy ending of the 1990 film (which has always been one of my biggest complaints with that version). Overall it was a pretty decent effort, although the scene when the witches turn the kids into mice in the ballroom seemed to scare my 7-year-old.
October 31: Youth Gone Wild: When Kids Stir Shit Up
94. The Barn (2016)
295. Get Duked! (2019)
Man, teens are just the worst. Sometimes you wanna just rise from the dead in your haunted barn or take to the Scottish Highlands with a hunting rifle and murder the shit out of them. Am I right?
Anyway, The Barn is obviously made on the cheap but does a pretty good job of making the most of its budget. The director knows his way around a camera even though he’s saddled with some incredibly bad actors. The whole thing is designed to look like an old horror film from the ‘80s, from the title font and soundtrack to the post-production film print damage. It’s a decent effort with some pretty good practical effects at times even though the lack of money is an obvious limitation.
Get Duked! was a fun but slight romp through the Scottish Highlands with a group of slackers and social outcasts who are hunted down by mask wearing “old posh people” as a means of population control I reckon. There were times I actually laughed pretty hard although it had about an equal amount of stupid nonsense too. In general though I think this would be a fun one to watch with a group.
October 31: Masters of Horror?: Legendary Horror Directors Tackle TV Movies
296. Invitation to Hell (1984)
297. La dolce casa degli orrori a.k.a. Sweet House of Horrors (1989)
You know, even the best of us have to pay the bills sometimes, even noted successful directors like Wes Craven and Lucio Fulci. As a result, sometimes a TV project is needed to keep oneself afloat until the next great project presents itself.
Invitation to Hell is pretty odd but in certainly of a kind with some of Craven’s ‘80s/early ‘90s output like Shocker and Chiller with it’s dumb mix of horror and high-concept sci-fi/fantasy. The setup is gives off a Stepford Wives vibe about an exclusive private club of the rich elite who tries to recruit a scientist developing a revolutionary space suit (that includes the ability to identify humans from non-humans as an incredibly convenient plot device). Guys, you will be shocked… SHOCKED to learn that this private club has otherworldly trappings (as if the title of the movie didn’t give it away). This one is pretty laughably bad in places with incredibly dated effects, especially toward the end when the movie totally goes off the rails. This was obviously a paycheck movie for Craven.
From Lucio Fulci we have the tonally strange Sweet House of Horrors which seems to seesaw wildly between Fulci ultraviolence and light-hearted children’s fantasy. When a couple of kids’ parents are (pretty gruesomely) murdered during a break-in, they are left in the care of foster parents and in the protection of the ghosts of their dead parents who also seek revenge against their killer. This came at a time when Fulci was using very soft lighting which creates a bleary, soap opera-like look to everything. It seemed to work for something like Conquest, but here it just looks bad. But that is just a small complaint behind a much bigger one, the tone and plot. I have no idea who this is targeted to. The scenes of the kids interacting with their parents are fairly lighthearted and playful with cheesy little glowing lights buzzing around and all. But then there are multiple scenes of very brutally violent murders that just left me confused as to who this was intended for. The plot is also just a muddled mess in places with choppy transitions and flat acting. Fulci was definitely not trying here. In fact, the kill scenes are the only parts that appear to have any effort put into them.
And that wraps up this madcap marathon of massacres, monsters and madness! I had a lot of fun watching this stuff and writing about it, but I think I’m going to go and sleep for a couple of weeks now.