Ok here is a little update. I have now watched the following movies this month:
The Scream Trilogy
The Descent
Dog Soldiers
The Howling
The Haunting
I Know What You Did Last Summer
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
Hatchet
Mini reviews:
The Haunting was really good. I like how it built the tension and horror through character development and atmosphere rather than cheap scares and gore.
I watched
I Know What You Did Last Summer because it was written by the same guy who wrote
Scream and I wanted to compare the two. I must say that I vastly prefer
Scream. I was bored for the run time of
IKWYDLS. I think that is for a couple of reasons. First off, I didn't connect with or care about any of the characters. None of them were sympathetic. As soon as they decided to dump the body I disconnected from them and thought "Man I can't wait for them to start dying." In a horror movie, the heroes should be innocents, not guilty of murder themselves.
I liked the sequel better actually, but it still wasn't that great.
I am going to write up an actual review of
Hatchet because with its limited release I figure not that many people have seen it.
On the docket for the rest of this week are:
House on Haunted Hill
Black Sunday
Suspiria (if I can find it in the local video store)
Friday the 13th pt 1
Psycho
Of course these plans are subject to change at any moment.
On TV the other night, I caught the final moments of a great suspense film from the 1960s that I haven't seen in years--
Fail-Safe, based on a best-selling book from that period. It's about an international screw up that puts the US and Russia on a collision course for nuclear war. But where as
Dr. Strangelove milked that premise for laughs,
Fail-Safe is as serious as a mushroom cloud. The scene where the US bomber pilot proceeds on course with his deadly cargo despite the Pentagon putting his pleading wife through to him via radio when the fail-safe recall system misfunctions is harrowing, to say the least. So is US President Henry Fonda's last ditch decision on a horrible sacrifice in hopes of adverting unlimited war between the two giant powers. Larry Hagman's movie career got a big boost from his role as Fonda's interpreter in phone calls to the Russian premier. The scene that got to me the most was played out in a conversation on that phone where the US ambassador in Moscow is directed by the president to take his phone out on the embassy balcony. If an atomic bomb is dropped on that city, the listeners will know immediately because the ambassador's phone line will suddenly emit a continuous loud whine.
Another great suspense film from that period based on another best seller on the same subject is
On the Beach with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astair (in a role that I think won him the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor), and Tony Perkins. In this film, the atomic war has already been fought and finished, with everything north of the equator now dead. Even worse, prevailing winds and currents are picking up the deadly radiation and carrying it mile by mile into the southern hemisphere where all life is slowly being extinguished. One of the last outposts of civilization is Australia, and this is where a US nuclear submarine captained by Peck makes its way. The sub's original assignment was to wait out the first 2-3 exchange of nuclear weapons and then surface some weeks later to wipe out whatever was left of Russia. Only by that time both Russia and the US had been destroyed. The story is what happens to these people as they wait out the final days of earth as we know it. Although not as good as the book, the film is well worth seeing and will grip you emotionally.
By the way, although made in the 1960s, the film was set in the distant future--1980, as I recall. In both of these films, it's people, not monsters, who scare the bejeebers out of you.