2022 Halloween Challenge

Bloody New Year, 1987

A group of young folks--Lesley (Suzy Aitchison), Tom (Julian Ronnie), Janet (Nikki Brooks), Rick (Mark Powley), and Spud (Colin Heywood)--are at a carnival when two of the guys spot a young woman, Carol (Catherine Roman), being harassed by a man and his two grown sons. Rescuing Carol, the group then flees the creeps in their boat. Unfortunately, they run aground on a strange island where everything seems to be somehow inhabited with a menacing presence.

There's a subgenre of gentle horror, stuff on the more PG side of things, that is the kind of movie that is perfect if you are, I don't know, a slightly timid 10 or 12 year old who is into the idea of horror but not actually emotionally prepared to watch people getting sliced, mutilated, raped, impaled, terrorized, or things of that nature.

Bloody New Year is almost a perfect movie for that kind of niche. And if that sounds like an insult, it really isn't. For the most part, the horror leans on the non-gory side of things, showing imagination without being overly graphic. In one sequence, the group finds an old projector and starts watching the film that's in it on a large screen. Suddenly, inexplicably, one of the people from the film leaps out from the screen and mauls one of the viewers. Later, a woman is suddenly wrapped in a net that slowly tightens around her as an animated rope winds around her leg. It's spooky without being too much.

Now, that said, underneath that family-friendly vibe actually lurks some dark stuff. The thing is: I really liked the characters and didn't want to see anything bad happen to them. They just seem like nice people who enjoy each others' company, have adorable giggly sex, and show a lot of empathy toward others. As the film goes on, the movie is pretty nasty to them. Not in a graphic way, but just in a bleak way. As each character dies or is consumed by the presence on the island, they turn into a sort of evil zombie version of themselves. It's surprisingly upsetting!

The movie benefits from some really nice imagery. Is 95% of it stolen quite blatantly from other movies? Absolutely. But despite stealing the "pushing through a wall like it's fabric" effect from Nightmare on Elm Street or cribbing the stop-motion horror of The Evil Dead, these moments and images are still deployed pretty effectively. One of the seemingly silliest effects---the trees and bushes on the island shaking and laughing--comes with the implication that there are no safe places on this island. There's even a nice callback in the way that the final sequence is shot to how the whole movie began.

This probably isn't gruesome enough for most in this thread, but I was pleasantly surprised by it.

Fender Bender, 2016

Hilary (Makenzie Vega) is having a bad day. Her boyfriend, Andy (Harrison Sim) is cheating on her. On her way home she is rear-ended while stopped at a stop sign, exchanging information with the driver (Bill Sage) of the other vehicle. Because of the accident, her parents decide she will not accompany them on a weekend trip. Unfortunately for Hilary, the driver who hit her is a serial killer who preys on those whose information he acquires.

Yelling at the screen as characters make stupid, life-ending decisions is a tradition for many a horror fan. But there's a big difference between the energy of Oh no! Don't go in there! and Wow! Why?! Why are you all too stupid to live?!?!?!?.

Taken on their own, each individual choice in this film could probably be explained away. Like parents deciding that because a child was irresponsible . . . that child will now spend the weekend alone? Or someone seeing that someone was in their house and took pictures of them in the shower and NOT calling 911? Or having the opportunity to run from or even maybe finish off an assailant but instead just . . . standing around and waiting?

Horror movies are no fun when they have to work so hard to get the killing to happen, and this movie throws one idiocy after another at the viewer. By the halfway point I was completely fed up. At one point, Hilary turns to Erik and Rachel and is like "So someone broke into the house just now, took pictures of me in the shower on my own phone, and deleted all of my pictures of the accident I was in. Was that you guys? Are you pranking me?" I mean, can you even with this?!

And the problem is that not only are the victims total write-offs---Hilary is joined by friends Erik (Kelsey Leos Montoya) and Rachel (Dre Davis) to up the body count--but the killer is also woefully underdeveloped.

Look, have ya'll seen Mysterious Skin? Bill Sage is a good actor! He can convey menace very well (and does so in the one short scene he shares with Hilary). So naturally he's kept off camera in the form of text messages on the world's fakest looking texting app OR he's silently stalking the teens while wearing a mask. It's such a waste of a resource. I'm sure the silent killer was scripted before Sage was cast, but come on!

The premise, while naturally very flawed if you think about it, is at least decently scary. But it can't matter with idiots like this as our protagonists. And the film has the gall to end on not only a really sour note, but also to put this long monologue at the end to really drive home the point. Are the kills good? Nope. Just very standard stabbed-by-killer deaths.

What a waste of time.

The Strings, 2020

Catherine (Teagan Johnston) is a musician who has split from her band for reasons that are undefined. Wanting a chance to be creatively productive and reset, Catherine rents a remote cottage and sets about composing, drinking too much, and wooing a local photographer, Grace (Jenna Schaefer). But soon Catherine is troubled by the sense that there is something in the house.

Look: I would imagine for a lot of people (in this thread, and generally), this story of a curvy bisexual woman slowly losing her mind while composing electronic/synth music in a dimly lit living room won't exactly push their horror buttons.

But shucks if I didn't enjoy the protagonist, enjoy the music, and enjoy the general vibe of unease that permeated the whole thing.

Johnston is actually a musician, and further she composes and performs music like what we see in the film. Her comfort with that process, and the fact that she has a really nice voice, lends an authenticity to the various sequences of her trying to compose music. So often in movies, "great musicians" are . . . not so great. It was fun to see a real talent playing a musical performer.

I also really enjoyed the atmosphere. This is the kind of movie where the character hears a thump and then looks around, while the camera slowly zooms in on the wall. And . . . that's it. For most of the movie, the instances of haunting/horror are incredibly low-key. But in a very slow but steady way, it all begins to escalate. Catherine has disturbing dreams, waking from them and thinking that she sees a figure watching her. It's just slow enough that you believe a person wouldn't run out of the house screaming, and would just chalk it up to an overactive imagination and stress.

The upside and downside to this film is that for the most part it exists at the same level of intensity, pace, and tone. It's good because it adds to the dream sense of it, but the problem is that the lack of variation can make it all blend together.

I feel like I can confidently recommend this one to @Captain Terror, but I'm not sure if it's "horror enough" for most others in this thread. I definitely enjoyed it. It was a real change of pace with oodles of atmosphere.

An excerpt from a Letterboxd review: "...slow paced, slow burn, snail of a film that very little happens in..."

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Captain's Log
My Collection

31. Supernatural horror: I went with the ring I still think that this is a really great film naomi watts was great in this film and the movie works at so many levels it doesn't rely on jump scares to get you scared. It's scary because if you watch the evil tape 7 days later you die and you find out why the tape was made but as for who made it is never explained i thought the kid who plays her son did a really great job and the girl who plays samara is great too but the end of the film sucks it just ends abruptly in the middle of a scene. I am not a big fan of those type endings to films even though some of the film is a little predictable but it still hits on its beats and delivers a creepy skin crawling experience that will stay with you even 7 days later so i would recomend it i would say it is at least a 7/10 film for me which is great because i don't think there is another movie that could be as horrific on a supernatural level.

[IMG]http://www.moviepostershop.com>the ring movie poster 31. Supernatural horror: I went with the ring I still think that this is a really great film naomi watts was great in this film and the movie works at so many levels it doesn't rely on jump scares to get you scared. It's scary because if you watch the evil tape 7 days later you die and you find out why the tape was made but as for who made it is never explained i thought the kid who plays her son did a really great job and the girl who plays samara is great too but the end of the film sucks it just ends abruptly in the middle of a scene. I am not a big fan of those type endings to films even though some of the film is a little predictable but it still hits on its beats and delivers a creepy skin crawling experience that will stay with you even 7 days later so i would recomend it i would say it is at least a 7/10 film for me which is great because i don't think there is another movie that could be as horrific on a supernatural level.

3. Sator (2019/Shudder)



Sator is about…uhh…well, there’s an old woman with dementia who hears voices and writes down everything they say. They come from an evil spirit named Sator, who might be responsible for the disappearance and odd behavior of her family members. The main character Adam is hunting Sator and his toadies, who wear animal skull masks. He has visions of a white fire. His brother looks like Jeffrey Dahmer and speaks in an incomprehensible mumble. People float like they were picked up by a claw machine. Characters turn bald and evil.

According to Wikipedia, the old woman is the director’s grandmother and the film is loosely based on her actual writings and beliefs. It's some avant garde shit. I didn’t understand what was happening and even the plot synopsis only fills in a few gaps. It’s an interesting movie in that I never knew what was going to happen next, but I have no clue what the point was.

4. The Head Hunter (2018/Shudder)



I watched this due to the positive reactions in Wooley and Torgo’s thread, but I didn’t care for it. It's a monster hunting movie with very little in the way of monsters or hunting. The special effects are impressive for an apparently tiny budget, so I was disappointed that they didn’t even try to show any battles. The big climactic fight is the hero pinning a puppet to a wall and stabbing it. Besides that, all that’s left is long slow scenes of him walking around and rubbing his wounds with magic diarrhea. At least the ending is amusingly silly.

5. Cronos (1993/Criterion Channel)



Cronos is a thriller about an old man who finds a scarab-shaped device that restores youth. Unfortunately for him, Ron Perlman and his rich father soon discover this fact and will use any means necessary to acquire it.

The tone of this movie varies throughout its runtime. It's a story about the lengths people will go to stay young and it also features cartoonish villains. In short, it's not quite as polished as Del Toro's later work. I liked the ending a lot though; a touching moment and a change of heart.

I feel like Del Toro's problem is that he became too polished.
Though I feel like that happens to a lot of directors.
I like this one more than most of his films.

I really owe Cronos a rewatch, but I think I had/have the same opinion of Cronos as Wooley has.

Pieces, 1982

A little boy is caught by his mother putting together a puzzle of a nude woman. The mother's reaction is, um, extreme, but the boy's reaction even more so. Years later, a mysterious killer is hacking up the young women at a college. Unable to cover the deaths up as "accidental deaths", the Dean allows the police to plant a female officer, Mary (Lynda Day George) as a fake college student. A young man attending the college, Kendall (Ian Sera) also gets involved in the investigation.

This hack-em-up slasher is a lot of stupid and a whole lot of fun. It combines cheesy set-ups with some unexpected moments of gore and ends up being very watchable and moving along at a good pace.

The film is filled with delicious and absurd suspects. Maybe the most overtly funny is the hired gardener, Willard (Paul L. Smith) who lumbers around campus in a blue jumpsuit, lovingly caressing his various sharp implements, including a chainsaw like the one being used to carve up beautiful co-eds. But you've also got Professor Brown (Jack Taylor), who specializes in anatomy and is prone to saying things like "I'm just used to looking at dead bodies."

I don't need to get my kicks watching people take long loving showers before someone gets stabby, so I was grateful that most of the kills offer at least a bit more imaginative staging. Perhaps the best was the aerobic dance instructor who, after an extended sequence of practicing a routine in an empty studio, makes her hasty exit. I was genuinely shocked by the moment when she . Of course, this moment follows a man somehow successfully walking around with a chainsaw behind his back, totally unnoticed by the victim.

I also liked the relative ineptness of the police. Not only are they willing to sort of keep hush on the whole series of murders, they tend to walk around saying things like "What I need are some clues!". Well, just keep asking nicely, friend! I also love that their big capture-the-killer plan repeatedly relies on using a student to, you know, keep an eye out for anything weird.

I think that with this kind of movie, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. I thought it was stupid fun, but more emphasis on the fun part. As with any short amount of time where I watch a lot of horror, I am approaching thin naked white woman saturation. Kudos to Pieces for having one semi-nude shot of a guy, I suppose.

I find myself a bit torn on the very end of the film, but it's almost so weird and dumb that it's fine. Whatever. I can't even ask for an explanation because there obviously isn't one.

Definitely a great October watch.

Not my insight, but I remember someone somewhere bringing up that this was a reaction to loosened censorship after the end of the Franco regime, so sex and violence overload is very much the intended effect.


Anyway, my favourite part of the movie is that the dorky hero is somehow the most popular dude with the ladies on campus, and is so cool that the cops let him tag along for every step of the investigation.



Also, I remember when I (blind) bought my copy, I got the weirdest look from the video store clerk. I still don't know if it was one of admiration or disgust.

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I
Love
Pieces

Yeah, reading the trivia section it sounds like the director's repeated tactic was to go up to the female cast members and be like "So in that scene you're supposed to be in, what if you were naked instead?". And it's nice to hear that two of the women felt comfortable being like "How about no?".

I'm glad he didn't get his way, because I think that altogether the balance of the different elements (the goofy investigation, the blatant red herrings, the sex/nudity, the violence) is pretty good. Proportionally more of any of them would make the film weaker, IMO.

True, though

A two-word Horror film:


It's one of my personal favorites and I especially enjoy it on Halloween night if it's a chill Halloween. This month I watched it early.

Historical Horror:


Set in 1750, this is what happens when people fleeing puritanical Christianity run into New World witchcraft.

The Bad Batch, 2016

In a dystopian future, Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is exiled to a lawless desert in Texas, becoming part of the Bad Batch---social undesirables, criminals, and other outcasts. Immediately captured by a group of cannibals, she loses body parts but makes a daring escape. She later happens across the daughter, Honey (Jayda Fink) of one of the leaders of the cannibal group, Miami Man (Jason Momoa). Losing track of the girl in a settlement run by cult leader The Dream (Keanu Reeves), Arlen sets out to find the girl under threats from Miami Man.

While I have heard pretty much only good things about this film, I had been under the impression that there was some gruesome torture stuff in it, and so I've avoided it. While considering it for this challenge, I realized that its content was not as extreme as I'd come to believe and decided to give it a whirl.

This was another pleasant surprise, and I really enjoyed it. The film has an off-kilter energy to go with an off-kilter story line and character arc.

I liked all of the characters in the movie and thought that they were for the most part enjoyably complex and interesting. Reeves probably gets the least original part, playing the charismatic leader of the settlement called Comfort. He has created an economy driven on drugs and, well, comfort, which has allowed him to build a harem of young women as part of his brand. It's not an original character, but he plays it well.

I thought that Arlen was an interesting and fun character. She's obviously been through a lot of trauma, certainly in what we see in the movie and probably before what we see of her life. Arlen sometimes made choices that made sense to me, and other times not, but it always felt true to her character. In such an outrageous environment and in her particular situation, it's hard to be like "Why would she do that?" It's more like "Why wouldn't she do that?". I also liked that there was something dulled about her. She doesn't know where Cuba is. She chafes against the structure of Comfort without really knowing why. She is a person navigating a world where every way of life is inherently hostile, it's just a matter of picking your poison.

Now, occasionally I will be watching a horror movie and something will happen and I'll just go, "Huh." And I'll think, "Did a dude really direct this?" Sometimes I will pause a film to confirm my hunch. Friends, how do you know that a woman maybe directed the dystopian cannibalistic horror movie on your TV? Well, in my case it was the part where one of the cannibals is a total beefcake and he protects the main character from a dust storm while just quietly smoldering in her direction.


Something I think is really interesting about The Bad Batch is how it overtly contrasts sensuality with brutality, examining the appeal of the former and the revulsion toward the latter, and how those reactions guide Arlen's choices in the film. Understandably, Arlen has a strong impulse of disgust toward Miami Man and what he represents, driven both by the taboo of cannibalism and her specific experience of terror as a victim of the cannibals. But there is a simple, animal attraction that she feels toward him, perhaps because there is a directness to his character that she doesn't experience with any other character.

Contrast this with Comfort and The Dream. The sensual pleasures of Comfort, and especially inside the inner sanctum, are clearly superior. A swimming pool. Lemon slices in fresh water. Sprawling bedrooms with silky sheets. But there is a coldness to this luxury, and you can tell that Arlen isn't swayed by it. One of the things I actually respect the most is that the film doesn't go overboard in terms of portraying The Dream as a villain. Oh, don't get me wrong. He's sexually exploiting children, ticks all the cult leader boxes, etc. But it would have been easy to take his character overboard---show that he is secretly a cannibal, or harvesting organs, or whatever--to make Arlen's affinity for Miami Man seem more like "the right choice." Instead, what he is offering remains in the realm of reasonable.

It really just comes down to what Arlen wants. Miami Man, having softened toward her a bit, even warns her that she's not really cut out for life outside of the settlement. But Arlen wants to live life on her own terms. In its own messed up way, I kind of liked this portrayal of agency. She has already been exploited for her body and fought for her life. She gets to choose how she wants to live her life from that moment on, even if it seems dangerous or stupid to an outside eye. She is inherently at a disadvantage with her size, and once you throw in two missing limbs, she will never be top dog. But if she has to live in a situation of mutual dependence, she gets to pick.

It was also really refreshing to watch a dystopian film featuring a female protagonist where sexual violence wasn't at the center of much of the plot. Obviously the violation or possession of bodies is embedded in the film with both the cannibalism and the harem, but framing sensuality and sex as being things the main character is drawn to instead of repelled from is a nice change of pace.

Overall I enjoyed the look of the film, its themes, and its weird energy.

Watching my First Franco film soon (Count Dracula) but first up is my first Rollin, who’ve I’ve avoided because I’ve heard his films are mostly just erotic horror and it never seemed all that interesting to me, but since he’s so revered, I’m opening up with Shiver of the Vampires.

Having just watched it, I'm going to say Count Dracula isn't the best Franco to start with, or at least isn't indicative of why people watch Jess Franco.
A Virgin Among the Living Dead
The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein
Eugenie (1970)
Venus in Furs
Vampyros Lesbos
Are all much better examples (the last one's kind of famous, has it's moments and soundtrack, but is suggest starting with one of the other four first).


I can't comment on Shivers of the Vampire, I've only seen Requiem from the Jean Rollin vampire collection, outside of, Shivers looks like it's the next most interesting of the four and might be a good starting point. I've also seen Fascination and The Living Dead Girl frequently stated as good starting off points (and they're both in the Criterion vampire collection).

ETA: and if you emotionally need the excuse for why you're watching something called "A Virgin Among the Living Dead," I'm pretty sure that was one of the Jess Franco films Peter Strickland cited as an influence when making The Duke of Burgundy, so you can mentally class up the joint.

I was just thinking, "Man, sounds like I should watch this movie" and then I realized, because of the gardener, that I have. Like fairly recently. That character stood out so much to me, partly because of the actor and partly because they dangle him like, "this is obviously the killer". I think I did mostly enjoy it but I don't think I engaged with it as much, kinda had it on in the background and was in and out.