Wooley's Halfway To Halloween III

Can I hire this guy to write for my imaginary film revue?

I see The Strangeness as being similarly dull in stretches, but also full of mood.


FTR I don't think either are good. But they have pockets of goodness that make them worthwhile.


Things is front to back a piece of unimaginable greatness. But you sort of want to kill yourself while watching it.

Things is not a good Sunday afternoon watch. Things is a good late night watch to destroy your brain. But not so late night, there's nothing left of your brain to be destroyed.


Ogroff: The Mad Mutilator works when there's nothing left of your brain.


Things is a lot like that one movie you like a lot. The one where there's a guy, in a place, and lots of strange things happen to him. That movie.


Ogroff is the movie for when people have props, but had to improv their fight scenes.

There is something about movies that are an experience to watch. Things is by any definition one of the most perplexingly awful things ever put to tape. At least at first look. And my first look was probably when I was 16, and it was in the new release section of the video store, and my friend (against my advisement) demanded we get it. As usual, I think he was hoping there would be cocks in it. There weren't, and so he left half way through.


Which baffled me. His leaving. Now it's not like I also didn't have a headache and was desperate for it to end. It's not like I was necessarily enjoying it. Yes, I was laughing, but not that enjoyin' kind of laughing. It was the kind of laughing that just made the headache worse. But I just kept having to stop and wonder to myself "What the **** is this"? I'd never had that profound level of confusion watching a movie before, or probably since. And I didn't understand why he wasn't also at least curious enough to finish the god awful thing.


And then I just kept watching it. Over and over again. I brought it to university, but everyone walked out almost immediatley if I put it on. But I just kept watching. Slowly drawing myself into a world where this idiot who made this movie couldn't help but be the most earnest person, almost because of his unbelievable lack of talent. I grew to love the guy who made it even. Maybe. He's probably an asshat. But whatever. It was just about as close to a filmmaker I've ever felt when watching something. It was just there, like a photographer who puts there thumb in the picture.



After that, every thing changed. I became the person who now stands before you. Lost. Lost. Lost. But, because of the cinema journey it sent me on, happy being lost.


Maybe.

As for Ogroff, Lux led me to that one. So at least he did that for my life.



He's probably dead, right?

He was on Corrie shortly after RT closed down, but after Jinnistan put him on ignore, he stopped posting there after a bit and I haven't heard anything from him since.

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He would do an incredible, potentially cancel-worthy, provocative job.

Disagreements aside, (and raising a confused eyebrow of the omission possibly implying 90s movies are comparatively acceptable), I mentally can't guess which movies or what type of movies you have in mind when you say 70s horror is dull. Like, if someone said they find The Invasion of the Body snatchers (or going into the 80s, The Shining), dull, I can start piecing together some type of picture in my mind of things they dislike (though I might disagree with them). But "the 70s" could be anything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Suspiria (or, the afore-mentioned Bodysnatchers, but also The Exorcist, Alien, Halloween, Hausu, Shivers, The Brood, Dawn of the Dead, Black Christmas). And that's a wide range (some of them easier for me to grock someone thinking they're dull more than others.) Or maybe one might mean, "once you get past the well known stuff into the lesser known stuff a lot of it moves at a certain tone and pace."
e.g. I can see someone lumping something like Bob Clark's Deathdream (which I do quite like) in with 60s horror in terms of pacing they find too slow (I also like a lot of 60s horror. Though given your liking of Crimson Peak, I would have otherwise thought you might be more open to 60s horror because of I feel like it had more gothic horror like The Innocents, but :shrugs.

Here we have the story of a group of people who are thrust together for a night in a creepy old mansion that is probably haunted by the ghost of a witch and her henchman. Or something like that. Pretty much everybody dies.
That’s really all you need to know about this film plot-wise.
As I’ve said, there are a lot of types of films that don’t really scare me at all. Religious horror does almost nothing for me (I continue to be baffled by the over-the-top love for The Exorcist, not that it’s not good, but, come on people, it’s not that scary) and home-invasion horror can be fun but also doesn’t scare me. But, for some reason, even thought I don’t believe in them, witches scare me. Ghosts kinda do too. So, as I’ve also said, there is nothing better in a Horror movie, as far as I’m concerned, than The Ghost Of A Witch.
So, despite it’s shortcomings, this movie had my attention.
So what are the shortcomings? Well, it’s pretty freakin’ slow for about the first 45 minutes. Just a lot of talking between a lot of characters and since it's all dubbed it's not always even clear what the hell everybody's talking about and who knows who and whatever. As if it matters in a movie like this. There is a spooky scene in a graveyard about 15-20 minutes in and then not much really happens for a while beyond this hilarious guy who molests every woman in the house in an on-going attempt to get laid only to be shot down by every single one of them. I mean, he’s super-aggressive, if his character was even allowed in a film today the media and twitterverse would be having a field-day with it, but don’t worry, his uppance will come! Anyway, it’s dull for a while.
But then it perks up. A good bit really, with some surprisingly intense moments. I was as shocked as this lady to find people hanging from hooks in the basement.


And a reasonably interesting and macabre little mystery unfolded that ended, while not exactly how I would have loved, in a way that works to my satisfaction.
There’s a spooky old mansion (obviously), a cemetery, probably the ghost of a witch… Plus, this movie has lots of fog.


Fog is good. Ask Captain Terror.
Ultimately, this is another perfectly acceptable lazy-Sunday Horror movie (for fans), keeping with the theme I appear to have established for this Halfway To Halloween run.



Murder Mansion

After decades of admiring the poster I can finally watch this! The print on Tubi is surprisingly clean too. I gotta say, I had no idea this was from 72. That poster had me thinking it was more like '62 for some reason. Looking forward to it.

Also, LOL at Tubi's plot synopsis:
A couple get lost in thick fog and take refuge in an old mansion near a cemetery.
I mean, should I just give it 5 stars now? This is already my favorite movie and I haven't pressed play yet.

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We could see it happening, in real time.

I fear I may have oversold this.
To be clear, this is no great film, it's a trifle, really. But it's certainly not bad.

This is a great post. I'm glad it happened in my thread.

Since we seem to see eye to eye about Spielberg, and when I watched The Exorcist as a teenager, I was underwhelmed, I am curious, when was the last time you watched it? Because rewatching it again decades later about ~5 years ago, I was surprised at how good it was. But for me, that's mainly talking about the first half, when to a logical person, it wouldn't be given that Regan is actually possessed (you just have to ignore the fact this is The Exorcist and so you know she's possessed).

No, it is. It was powerful enough to make a atheistic child believe in the devil. It was responsible for a terror so profound, it wasn't that I became frightened of one specific image from the film, but instead made me feel suffocated and trapped by life itself.


The Exorcist is a reality subverting thing if you catch it at the right time. It isn't frightening because of head spinning or vomit or crucifix masturbation. It's frightening because it makes you understand how a mundane world is filled with menace. One where the nightmare of watching your elderly mother waste away alone in her apartment, and your child be abused by medical machinery, shares space with all the other ludicrous and evil and unmentionable things that happen over the course of the film. They are given equal weight. They are indistinguishable from eachother. It never feels as if this movie is lying to you, and as a child, it makes it feel like the world is something you don't want to have to grow into. That it almost certainly contains all of these awful things, both fantastic and completely relatable.



The fear it created in me has been unmatched by any fear I have ever felt towards anything, either in fiction or in real life. I almost don't even know what emotion it was, it was so stark and unbearable and profound.



I feel bad for everyone whose life wasn't ruined by it. I can't think of any other film that could possibly promise such a thing.

No, I'm just having some fun. I've got a realistic idea of what I'm in for.

See, this is the kind of reaction I hear about all the time and can never comprehend. People at work hear I'm a Horror fanatic and they're like, "Oooohhh, The Exorcist!" or "Well, I don't watch Horror movies anymore because I saw The Exorcist when I was younger and I don't ever need to be that scared again", and I'm like, "What the f*ck are you talking about?! The Exorcist?! Seriously?! I mean, good movie, but there are scarier episodes of Scooby-Doo!"


I've seen it three or four times, including once in the theater, and I think it's a fine film, I really do. But I even think Rosemary's Baby is scarier.

Then you'll do just fine.

Radu returns!!!
No, this is not one of the many sequels, Subspecies opens with Angus Scrimm, wearing just an awesomely hilarious wig, sitting on a throne of sorts in what certainly appears to be a crypt, squeezing a few drops of blood onto his tongue from The Bloodstone, when Radu, his son, returns home. Radu is immediately identifiable as a villain as Scrimm looks mostly human beyond a pale face and being Angus Scrimm while Radu is very Nosferatu. But with rock-star hair. I was struck immediately that Full Moon probably spent a couple thousand bucks on the makeup effects for Radu for the whole film and he looks better than god knows what Sony spent on CGI for Morbius.


Anyway, Radu wants the Bloodstone which will apparently give him "too much power", according to Scrimm. There's going to be a festival which is somehow really important to the vampires. They have had some kind of truce with the humans in their region for some extended period of time and the Festival and the Bloodstone somehow tie in. Scrimm has sent for his half-human son Stefan to give him the Bloodstone during the Festival but Radu shows up early and just takes it. What is not clear is how it makes him any more powerful since he does the most magical thing in the movie before he actually gets it, which is to create foot-tall claymation demons out of his broken fingers (just go with it).


This is all really just the setup because then we have to have 3 attractive co-eds show up to do their history thesis on the town or some such nonsense who Radu and Stefan will fight over so they can squeeze some skin into the movie. This is where things really begin to drag.
As the movie began, the very first frame, I thought, “Wow, this is what it looks like when neither the cinematographer nor the camera-operator (if they are not the same person) have ever taken a class. Or possibly have ever done it before”. As the movie pressed on, I began to realize that the director was at fault too and there was just an embarrassment of hackery in this film. Sadly, the actors seemed not to have been informed and actually did at the very least a credible job for the level of actors the Charles Band could afford.
To be clear, I did not know this was a Charles Band/Full Moon production. Reviewing that massive catalog, I see that this is only my fourth film from the entire legacy. I actually liked 2 of them (Trancers, Castle Freak).
And, for a while, it looked like this would be the last Band/Full Moon movie I would ever watch, it was just really going that cheaply and badly. And it's tricky, when you're trying to identify what makes a movie actually bad, I think this one made it clear to me that when there's just a lack of either professionals or amateurs who are really trying hard on hand, that's when you get actual bad. I mean, the lighting is even terrible. It’s often hard to tell whether things are supposed to be happening in the day or the night, which matters in a vampire film. Sometimes it seems as though a scene shot in a sort of dimmer daylight is supposed to be at night, since all the vampires are up and about, so you accept that they just couldn't afford those night-filters... but then other scenes are actually shot fully at night. It’s super-confusing. But it's also just the way scenes and characters are terribly lit. The camera-work is pretty awful most of the time and this somehow feels more amateurish than The Strangeness even, until...
Somehow, in the middle of this film, it actually gets better. Not a lot, mind, but the story picks up, the filming actually improves (including some Nosferatu-inspired business), and you almost start to give a shit about the characters a little. Color me surprised. About halfway through the film, right at the Festival actually, which borrowed from, like, The Wicker Man (never a bad thing), I actually started to kinda enjoy it and even pay attention (which unfortunately meant I had to go back and re-listen to some exposition from earlier when the movie kept losing me) and, in the end, I was able to accept this as just the lowest form of movie-making that is still watchable. The movie is kind of at the Ghoulies level but doesn't have the Ghoulies sense of humor about itself, so it falls just there at the bottom, though not completely off the scale.
High praise indeed.

PS (for Captain Terror and others for whom it might matter) -
The poster drastically over-sells the number of foot-high claymation demons that appear in this film.
Be advised.

Takomaaa!!! Oh, Takomaaa!!!