2021 Halloween Challenge

That is correct.

Look up a couple posts and you'll see which movie she's talking about. A movie I never saw. And I'm still quite okay with that.

I hope you enjoy it. It's on my 100. First saw it after renting it from the video shop with The Hitcher. Best unseen double bill I ever saw/created.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

It was ok. Had some nice scenes, and was interesting in the way it handled the vampire legend, but I had a few issues with it.
For one, Caleb acts like he had never heard of a vampire in his life. I find it hard that anyone in 1987 wouldn’t have understood what he was becoming.
And the way he becomes human again? Nope.

I'm with you.

I also thought Saw was going to be a minimalist concept of a film. When someone told me about the trailer, I remember wanting to see it. And so ended up in the theater. Hating every ****ing second of it (except for Carey Elwes meltdown at the end, that was pretty great)


It's garbage and the rare movie I would legitimately consider giving a zero out of ten.

As Jinnistan mentioned, my five/five likely had something to do with what a surprise it was to come across a film I'd never heard of before that was this good. So keep this (somewhat) hyperbolic mindset in mind.


But, in defense of the 5/5, I mostly rate based on how engaged they make me. Which is why I have zero problem with my perfect scores of Things or Hallucinations. They might not be traditionally good, but I couldn't take my eyes off of them. Similarly, with Eyes of the Devil, every moment of it just felt stupendously right. I didn't think it missed a bit. It was creative and eerie and full of great moments and, while I suspected where it might be going at times, I was never entirely sure. It also kept me on edge, rivetted.



Yeah, definitely worth a 5/5

In reading people's responses to Saw, it feels like, "boy did I dodge that bullet." But then I remember my experience doing a blind rental of Der Todusking waaaaaay back in college and these descriptions feel very similar to my experience there (admittedly, my tastes have broaden since then, but I've had no desire to revisit it to give it a second chance in the decades since.

Totally agreed on both counts. I didn't get into just how ugly the whole thing looks (and when the editing gets super choppy, it is one of the worst things I've seen). I also didn't have the energy to talk about the whole thing about the "mission" behind the killer and how totally inconsistent it was.

It was Saw and it was awful.

My main memory of the film coming out is people mocking Elwes for having gained weight. Like, THAT was the problem you had with this film? That a guy put on a few pounds in the 17 years since we all thought he was a total hottie? And you're throwing shade at the only person who actually nailed an enjoyable level of freakout?

Saw is one of the first horror films I remember watching. I really enjoyed it back then, but I'm worried it won't hold up that well if I were to ever rewatch it. I might do it anyways though.

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IMDb
Letterboxd

Blacula was surprisingly good.

Hmph, I love Near Dark. I guess I'm pretty liberal when it comes to vampire rules. I'm okay with movies bending the traditional ones and/or making up new ones as long as they stay true to them, which I think it does.

I'm watching a movie that's the seventh film in a franchise that could be considered a reboot of a franchise, and so far, I'm digging it.

It wasn't so much the bending for me as it was the idea that That wasn't rule-bending it was just ****ing stupid.

New Nightmare?

I actually watched a film! Well, I've seen a film (to say I watched it wouldn't be true) but I did pay attention to quite a bit of it and enjoyed the film.

With the amount of mentions it's been getting the last few months I decided to go with Nightbeast. It's been sitting around for a while now I think, probably a couple of years, and I hadn't watched it yet. Enjoyed it but not blown away by it. It's poor enough to be entertaining, goofy enough to be fun and just about competent enough to not be annoyinig. It's a pretty darn good mix and one I think my gf might like at some point. Bonus points for the 'love scene', the physical F/X, the 'fight' between Drago and Jamie and Drago's gf being pointlessly naked while packing.

Think I'd have had to have seen it soon after it came out to have really liked it as a kid. Too long after that and I don't think it would've have been horror enough for me to like it. Thankfully, I'm long past that stage.

As I was trying to think through part 7's in franchises in general for comparison, it did cross my mind that ANoES did really rebound there (though I am in much need of a revisit for that one as well since it's been 30 years).

But I meant, the entire franchise could be considered a reboot of another franchise (but I don't think it is considered one, because it's different studios).

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)
Director: Terence Fisher



This has been on my watch queue for a while. The psychadelic trailer always had me intrigued (spoiler, the movie never becomes psychadelic, it looks like that was all a marketing ploy. But it would have been cool if it had!). Hammer Horror has always been a blind spot for me. Embarrassingly so, the reboots of the universal horror franchises (but is it a reboot when it's a different studio trying to mine the IP?). So, with this finally/allegedly leaving Hulu soon, I decided this was the year I would watch this. And as I sat down, it crossed my mind, the Hammer Frankenstein movies are a franchise, and this is the seventh (and final) one in it.

I can't say how well it compares with the rest of the Frankenstein cannon, but as a stand alone, with the general Frankenstein plot knowledge, this movie seems as solid as I would expect an early entry in the series to be. Due to my lack of knowledge of the other entries, I can't speak to whether if this one would suffer if you've seen the others (i.e. maybe it's derivative or redundant in its plot). But this just stands in contrast to the crapfest of Dracula 1972 A.D. in such contrast of, IDK, actually making a Frankenstein movie. At this point in the series, rather than focusing on the monster, it's clear this series knows it's Victor von Frankenstein is the monster and the sequels needed to focus on him and not the creature. To which, Peter Cushing and the entire cast plays it straight and there's hamming it up, be it plot or acting. The introduction of a younger protagonist for the audience to follow... even that works. Serving as a reminder of how admiring someone older who's also into the unconventional things you're into can be lead to undesirable moral ends.

I think the main bummer is, since this turned out to be the final movie in the franchise (according to wikipedia), it didn't wrap up the series in a satisfying conclusion.

Satisfies: late entry in a franchise. other things as well, but I don't know if I'm going to find another franchise that has a late entry that I want to see that I haven't seen already.

Slumber Party Massacre 2, 1987

Following on the events from the original film, Courtney (Crystal Bernard) is the younger sister of Valerie, who is now in a mental institution. Courtney and her friends go to a vacation house for a weekend away, but Courtney is haunted by gruesome visions, including a rockabilly murderer (Atanas Ilitch) who threatens and taunts her.

Now that's what I'm talking about.

If Saint Maud was my first real hit of scary, intense horror for the month, this one was the first real hit of awesomely winky, camp.

I imagine that a lot of people would have a pretty tepid response to this film, which is admittedly kind of a mess. But I thought that it was an endearing mess that continued the first film's cheeky take on slasher dynamics.

In the first film, I thought that the intended criticism of the leering horror camera was only medium successful. Here, though, I thought it was hilariously wonderful. Like the scene where a character talks to her boyfriend on the phone---she's totally covered while he's inexplicably sprawled on his bed in just underwear. Or the funny (though very PG rated) beefcake fantasies the main character has about her boyfriend. There's also the dynamic that the main girls are in a (pretty good!) band, and their boyfriends are mainly relegated to the groupie role. A scene where the girls all have a pillow-bra fight was also totally goofy and funny.

There's something scattered and a bit repetitive about the film for the first hour, which is why I imagine most people not loving it so much. It's basically just Courtney having various scares, seeing the driller killer pop up or seeing one of her friend's faces melt. Or--my personal favorite--being attacked by a raw chicken from the fridge. But these sequences are all so obviously not real that they don't produce much tension. Fortunately, I thought that they were all pretty funny.

Things shift gears as the film goes into its third act and the driller killer becomes more of a presence. I enjoyed Ilitch's smirking, absurd performance as the killer, especially because he seems very aware of Courtney's fragility.

Maybe this one got a bump because I watched it on the heels of Saw, but I was very entertained.

+

October 3rd - The Testament of Doctor Mabuse(1933)
13. A film from Germany




So this film shows up on a couple of lists as horror and I can kinda see it, it's really more of a genre breaker. The titular character dies and haunts/helps a gangster wage war. Visually Fritz Lang is a master but the pacing is just rough, The visuals are fantastic and the ghost effects with Mabuse are incredible but I was bored because half the film is talking and the dialogue is just dull. I wonder if Mabuse would get so much credit if it wasn't done by Lang.

I wish I could talk about the characters in The Testament of Doctor Mabuse but they never feel distinctive. This is a film you kinda of forget about it a week after you watch it.