Iro's October '18 Horror Thread

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Because screw it, what am I to do if not to take every Suspect thread and improve on it.

#1 - A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1/10)
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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0



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#1 - A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Renny Harlin, 1988


A serial killer who murders teenagers in their dreams continues to stalk the survivors of his previous killing sprees and their new group of friends.

While I don't think I've ever really liked a Nightmare movie, I do find them oddly fascinating in spite of that. I saw the first three last year and did like how the third one, Dream Warriors, switched up the established slasher-but-in-dreams formula by having its group of teens learn how to harness dream-manipulating powers in order to defend themselves against franchise villain Freddy Krueger. Immediate follow-up The Dream Master folds that concept into the story of Alice, a shy everygirl whose friendship with Dream Warriors protagonist Kristen (and resulting encounter with Freddy) invokes a new addition to the Nightmare series' supernatural dream logic. As such, Alice's dreams are used as a conduit through which Freddy can attack all her other friends, but this also has unintended side-effects on Alice herself...

The Dream Master at once makes a noble attempt to expand on the Nightmare mythology and yet plays like a backwards step more than anything else, especially by effectively rehashing the original film but with the relatively slight addition of Dream Warriors-style powers. It's not completely terrible in this regard - Alice makes for a likeable enough protagonist whose journey from timid daydreamer to confident final girl makes for a decent arc with which to ground the movie (even if her friends are a fairly standard collection of slasher-fodder stereotypes). Likewise, Harlin's fanciful direction understandably hints at why he veered into action not too long after making this - the garish dreamscape aesthetics and over-the-top Freddy one-liners may mean it's not exactly scary but it's still not completely devoid of entertainment value either. Ultimately, neither of these factors are enough to make it an altogether good movie, though it still hasn't deterred me from seeking out the remaining installments (and who knows, maybe I'll give the original another chance soon enough).




28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
Because screw it, what am I to do if not to take every Suspect thread and improve on it.
It's not that hard to do.

As for this entry to the NOES series.....never seen it.
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Suspect's Reviews



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#2 - Hellbound: Hellraiser II
Tony Randel, 1988


A young woman must once again do battle with the sadistic demons whose tore her family apart.

Hellraiser always had a sufficiently intriguing and unsettling premise for a horror movie - hedonistic humans seeking greater and greater pleasures only to suffer the ultimate in pain at the hands of the sadomasochistic "Cenobites" who treat pleasure as pain and vice versa, which ultimately ends up bleeding out into the real world and affecting innocent people. The cosmic horror elements of a hell-like dimension ruled by creatures who consider themselves far beyond human concepts of morality certainly made the original's tale of a family being torn apart by the uncle's meddling in such affairs a compelling one and a low-key favourite of mine so I was definitely interested in seeing the rest. Hellbound sees protagonist Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) being treated in a mental institution after the events of the first film - unfortunately, it turns out that the head psychiatrist (Kenneth Cranham) harbours his own obsession with the world of the Cenobites, which only escalates with the introduction of a cursed mattress and a puzzle-solving mental patient.

Hellbound makes for a decent follow-up that earns its expansion upon the original's cosmically-unknowable mythology without undermining it by giving too much away in the process. It maintains the original's uncomfortable intermingling of skin-ripping brutality with all-consuming lust while adding new elements such as a further excursion into the Cenobites' homeworld complete with an increase in scale and celluloid insanity. One can obviously question the overly familiar and problematic asylum setting (already being depicted as a hellhole full of shrieking patients and padded cells long before any supernatural shenanigans set in), but it's arguably justified by how thin the line separating the patients' mistreatment and the Cenobites' cruelty only speaks to them being less eldritch abominations than them really being far too similar to the worst of humankind (which executive producer Clive Barker arguably refined - or maybe just simplified - in Nightbreed). In the end, it's pretty solid as far as horror sequels go, though that's not exactly the highest bar to clear.




28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
I remember not liking the original, I thought it was fairly boring to be honest. Then again, I watched it when I was younger, maybe I'd appreciate it more now? I don't think I'll give it a revisit anytime soon though, so I probably won't check out any of the many sequels.



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I'd obviously recommend giving the original another chance - maybe it's a matter of having the wrong expectations at the time? Either way, I've only seen the first three (disappointingly limited box set, but it sounds like those are the "good" ones anyway) and based on that I wouldn't bother with the sequels if you still didn't like the original (review of the third is coming).



Hellraiser and Hellbound are weird for me. I think I've seen them three or four times each and pretty much every rewatch changes which I like more. I think it's safe to say that in my opinion Hellbound has quite a bit more potential but starts to fall apart in the latter parts of the film. Last time I liked the sequel more though.



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#3 - Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
Anthony Hickox, 1992


An aspiring journalist investigates a strange series of events that are connected to a sculpture of demonic origin.

Watching this back-to-back with Hellbound: Hellraiser II really underlines the paradoxical way in which the concept of Hellraiser is at once primed to support sequel after sequel and yet probably shouldn't have been allowed to progress past the second one (and maybe not even reach that far in the first place). It definitely gets more than a little silly as it transports the action from the suitably Gothic gloom of '80s London to the scuzzy mean streets of '90s New York and cranks up the absurdity to a notable level even for a franchise that had established a fondness for distorted leather-bound monsters and flesh-ripping instruments of torture. Regular antagonist Pinhead (Doug Bradley) returns in the form of a cursed statue that feeds on blood at the same time that intrepid reporter Joey (Terry Farrell) is looking to find out the truth behind a classically Hellraiser-looking death she witnesses. These threads intertwine with others - most notably involving an arrogant nightclub owner who buys the Pinhead statue, but also B-plots involving Joey dreaming of the Vietnam War and Pinhead's true soul being trapped in purgatory - and it all adds up to...something?

Hellraiser III functions best as a sort of feverish shark-jump for the franchise that fills out the gaps it tears in its own concept by borrowing from other prominent horror movies (there's an obvious Nightmare on Elm Street vibe where Pinhead rattles off overwrought one-liners and dream worlds figure into the plot). The shift in tone is reflected in everything from cinematography that alternates between garish and crusty to a soundtrack that supplants the typically ominous orchestra with a considerable number of metal and industrial songs. Of course, this signals that the movie is less about trying to create an overwhelmingly scary experience like its predecessors and more about drawing as much crazy weirdness out of the concept as possible while still creating a semi-coherent serialised narrative. As such, I think it's appreciable to a degree because there is at least some level of crazy fun to be had with the proceedings - while that only does so much to elevate this rather messy threequel from badness to campy mediocrity, something just managing that is enough.




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#4 - Hereditary
Ari Aster, 2018


A family is beset by unexplained supernatural phenomena following the death of its grandmother.

This review contains unmarked spoilers.

There's a scene early on in Hereditary set in an English class where the teacher asks if a tragedy is more or less tragic if nothing can be done to avoid it. One student bluntly says "less". Another one not only answers "more" but elaborates on how the sadness of a tragedy is only compounded if people keep trying and failing to avoid it. The scene (and the film's most overt addressing of the idea) concludes, but not without showing how all this is lost on Peter (Alex Wolff), the unlucky chump who is about to start his own inexorable journey through hell - and he's more focused on organising a lunchtime weed session. While most of the stuff I noticed on a second viewing of Hereditary amounted to little more than picking up on bits of foreshadowing here and there, this particular moment was what stood out the most, if only because I questioned whether the film ultimately ended up taking a firm stance on this either/or question or if it left viewers to draw their own conclusions. The plot certainly weaves a sense of inevitability into its tale of Annie (Toni Collette) coming to terms with her mother's recent death and gradually realising how the lingering traumas said mother left behind can only now be read as portents of something even more nefarious than ordinary parental abuse, but whether or not that translates into a film that rewards on either a first or a second viewing is still debatable.

While it's easy enough to acknowledge the more tangibly strong elements of Hereditary - Collette's remarkably committed performance, the sparing use of conventional horror tactics in favour of delivering a slow-burn story that plays more like a standard drama about living with grief than anything else, reasonably effective deployment of said tactics - at the end I still have trouble determining whether or not these elements all build up to a satisfactory whole. This much is reflected in its nominally intense and revelatory conclusion, which ends in a manner that again brings up the question as to whether or not all the suffering and death and futile attempts to prevent this particularly terrible finale are rendered more or less tragic because of its sheer inevitability. It's easy enough to interpret what happens to Peter as an especially dark and twisted "happy" ending as the trauma and grief that has plagued the family for generations (and especially throughout the course of this film) is finally washed away, yet this does not come across as an altogether satisfying or resonant ending - the lasting impression it leaves barely goes beyond "oh, okay then". While there's something to be said for how Hereditary's fixation on various facets of death makes for fairly discomforting viewing, that's only effective up to a point and the moments where it leans into the horror side of things are just as liable to work against such discomforting thematic material as for it.




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You may still enjoy it, but I had my issues with it and how derivative it could be at times. It's very much in the same vein as other A24 horror movies like The VVitch and It Comes At Night where its unconventional approach to horror (read: not indulging popular clichés like jump scares and excessively gory murders) is at once its greatest strength and weakness - those films maintained a more consistently unnerving vibe and I think it helped that they were both considerably shorter and more concentrated than Hereditary.



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#5 - Session 9
Brad Anderson, 2001


A cleanup crew is given a job working on an abandoned mental institution but things do not go as planned.

I mainly know Session 9 for its place within the AV Club's New Cult Canon and also one especially unforgettable line delivery courtesy of David Caruso, which I figured was reason enough to watch the whole thing. In my review for Hellbound: Hellraiser II, I noted how the prospect of setting horror movies in mental institutions (abandoned or otherwise) is always a bit of a dicey prospect as mining their more barbaric practices and conditions for entertainment purposes can always come across as more than a little exploitative if not handled properly. Session 9 skews that way more often than not with its tale of an asbestos removal crew who are tasked with cleaning out such an institution - the job (which is already proving a hassle as desperate foreman Peter Mullan promises to do in one week what should take at least three) is subsequently complicated by the crew members bringing their own internal and external demons into the matter long before even the implication that there may be paranormal activity sets in.

There are little things to appreciate about Session 9 - the fact that it's shot on visibly digital video is an interesting touch that does add a found-footage verisimilitude to the proceedings while still allowing for distinct filmmaking flourishes (even that video I linked serves as such an example with its dramatically swooping close-up), and it's not like its patient approach completely lacks for pay-offs (the most blatantly conventional scare in the whole movie actually works remarkably well). There's even some decent interplay between the small cast, especially Mullan and Caruso. Unfortunately, these various pieces never quite come together in a satisfactory manner and Session 9 only continues to serve as a reminder of the paradoxical nature of mental institution as horror trope. The constant guessing as to how much is real or imagined or who's crazier than who is effective (even to the point where even an obvious bit of foreshadowing doesn't quite render the whole thing predictable), but it ultimately collapses inwards into a familiar run-through of old tape recordings and crumbling corridors that whimpers to a close. Given its reputation as a minor cult classic, I almost feel as if I should give it another chance at some point but as it stands I consider it a movie where the successes are mild and the failures are considerable. In other words...f*ck youuuu.




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#6 - Dagon
Stuart Gordon, 2001


A rich American couple holidaying in Spain find themselves trapped in a coastal village that is home to a cult of half-human mutants.

It's a bit weird to think about how H.P. Lovecraft, who is widely considered one of the most influential horror authors ever, hasn't seen much in the way of direct cinematic adaptations of his work - maybe it's because his words are so reliant on the notion that certain things can be so indescribably terrifying that they send people insane at the sight of them is extremely hard to effectively translate into a visual medium. It's not like there haven't been some noble efforts to do so - John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness works as a loose pastiche that does a good job of capturing the essence of the author's signature brand of unknowable cosmic horror while Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator is arguably the best direct adaptation of a story (though the fact that it's a fundamentally simple tale of mad scientists and zombies means that it's easy enough to turn into a splatter-happy B-movie instead of something that evokes the existential dread of Lovecraft's most noteworthy work). Gordon once again tries adapting Lovecraft with Dagon, which leans further into Lovecraft's established "Cthulhu Mythos" with its emphasis on the horrors of unfathomably cruel gods and the freaks who worship them. As with Re-Animator, the set-up is a familiar horror one - naive travellers end up falling prey to a town with a dark secret - and the question of whether or not Lovecraft's sense of terror translates through scene after scene of lumbering fish-people chasing the hapless protagonist (Ezra Godden) is answered quite definitively.

Fortunately, I would consider Dagon moderately successful in not only capturing what makes Lovecraft scary but also being a solid horror movie in its own right. Gordon crafts the second act as a nigh-relentless game of cat-and-mouse with nothing but the rain beating down and mutant shrieks to soundtrack Godden barely managing to stay ahead of his pursuers to the point where a protracted expositional flashback plays less like a momentum-wrecking interjection than a much-needed breather. The progression into overtly Lovecraftian territory is suitably curious - troubling dreams give way to nightmarish reality, the author's well-documented racism manifests through its twisted tale of demented half-breeds, and the third act ramps up into some truly nasty insanity for its surviving characters. Parts of it have aged more than a little poorly (just look at that CGI - or don't), but outside of that the film builds a solid atmosphere that compensates alright for the film's other weaknesses. In this regard, I would recommend Dagon - I don't necessarily think it's an underappreciated classic but there is quite a bit to appreciate about its distinct approach to adapting one of horror's great writers that is at least worth considering if you have a vested interest in horror obscurities.




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#7 - Mimic
Guillermo del Toro, 1997


An entomologist discovers that the disease-curing breed of insect she created is now endangering the citizens of New York City.

One of the things I find interesting about del Toro as a filmmaker is his capacity for taking basic (or maybe even bad) concepts and managing to give them solid executions. Blade II expanded upon the vampire-hunter's original adventure to make for something that I considered a superior thrill ride, Pacific Rim took a story of giant robots fighting giant aliens and infused it with a surprising degree of pathos, and (most famously) he took the absurd-sounding high concept of a woman falling in love with the Creature From The Black Lagoon and turned it into Best Picture material with The Shape of Water. Needless to say, I was ready to see what he could do with that most B-movie of premises: the giant insect movie. Mira Sorvino plays an entomologist who, in response to the outbreak of a deadly disease in the middle of Manhattan Island, breeds a whole new type of insect in order to wipe out the cockroaches that carry the disease and thus eradicate it. Years later, she finds out that the insects she created are starting to become a problem in their own right and are threatening the citizens of New York. Naturally, it falls to her and a motley crew of individuals to get to the bottom of what's going on.

Unfortunately, Mimic marks the first instance where I truly realised that del Toro isn't always capable of making something worthwhile out of seemingly unworkable or trite premises. As is the case with all his films, one can certainly respect the effort that goes into crafting the various onscreen elements like the designs for various sets or creatures (even if the mid-'90s CGI may be showing its age a little bit), but what really disappoints me is how dull the underlying story ends up being. Sorvino's a sympathetic enough protagonist who's granted enough of a background to keep her from being a flat character, but it barely extends beyond a basic sense of tragic irony - and even that is still much more than can be said for the likes of Charles S. Dutton's transit cop or Giancarlo Giannini's shoeshine man. Even overt attempts to grant the proceedings a semblance of soul (like having Giannini be the doting guardian of an autistic child who also ends up being caught up in the action) come across as misguided (if well-intentioned). The leaden pacing that divides the film into two equally boring halves - one spent figuring things out, the other spent escaping from things - doesn't do it any favours either as stand-out moments of terror are few and far between. As such, while I can appreciate del Toro and company trying to pull a fresh 1990s spin on the old-school creature feature, now it exists as a dull reminder that the man has definitely gone on to better things.




It's a bit weird to think about how H.P. Lovecraft, who is widely considered one of the most influential horror authors ever, hasn't seen much in the way of direct cinematic adaptations of his work - maybe it's because his words are so reliant on the notion that certain things can be so indescribably terrifying that they send people insane at the sight of them is extremely hard to effectively translate into a visual medium.
I don't know Lovecraft's work but I'm familiar with it because of its influence on other things. I was watching The Serpent and the Rainbow recently and it reminded me about the Doctor Who novel White Darkness (1993), which was also set in Haiti and drew from the Cthulhu Mythos.

Your last words in the quote reminded me of my favourite Doctor Who villain, Kwundaar, and I wondered whether Lovecraft had partly inspired him too. He's a one-off character in the audio drama Primeval (2001) who can read minds throughout time and space, created entirely through the actor's voice and the sound design. He's masked and his voice is like several voices sliding over each other at once. When he removes his mask at certain points in the story, characters who see his face seem to be instantly terrorized and incapacitated. I always thought it wasn't just about fear but that they couldn't comprehend what they were seeing.



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#8 - Vampires
John Carpenter, 1998


A vampire hunter working on behalf of the Catholic Church must go up against an exceptionally powerful master vampire.

John Carpenter is a fan of Westerns, and while he's never technically directed one, many of his films draw inspiration from Westerns to one extent or another. Escape From New York has an outlaw being forced to carry out a rescue for his freedom (and life), Assault on Precinct 13 has police fending off a criminal siege in an explicit homage to Rio Bravo, and even horrors like Halloween play around with tropes like the lawman chasing the remorseless killer to a sleepy small town. Vampires is one of his more obvious pseudo-Westerns with its dusty desert settings, slide-guitar score, and grizzled gunslinging leads. As you can probably guess, the key difference with this movie is the presence of vampires. Jack Crow (James Woods) is a lifelong vampire hunter who leads a squad of other hunters to clear out entire nests of vampires throughout the country - however, he faces his latest challenge when an all-new and unusually powerful vampire attacks his crew, leaving him with only his equally hardened partner (Daniel Baldwin), the naive young priest (Tim Guinee) who's been assigned by the Vatican to oversee their duties, and the recently-bitten call girl (Sheryl Lee) whose gradual transformation into a vampire is something that Crow is prepared to exploit in order to kill the master vampire once and for all.

In trying to make Vampires a consciously subversive take on vampires and the people who hunt them, Carpenter instead crafts a straight example of the kind of mean-spirited machismo that his greatest films managed to either avoid or criticise. It makes sense that veteran vampire hunters would be reluctant to establish any long-term bonds or care about social graces, but here that manifests as Woods and Baldwin spitting alpha-male bile at both each other and at anyone else who comes into contact with them (especially Lee, whose put-upon characters bears the brunt of their callousness throughout the film). Even when the movie tries drawing attention to the wounded humanity underneath the leading duo's brutish exteriors (especially Crow's tragic backstory as a boy who was adopted by the church after his parents were attacked by vampires), the actors can't sell any of it nearly enough to make further plot-critical moments of character development seem remotely convincing. The concept of the Catholic Church not only being a worldwide support system for vampire hunters but also having its top vampire hunter be a foul-mouthed disbeliever is a novel one, but this is largely rendered as Crow engaging in grating odd-couple rapport with his much more pious and strait-laced minder. Meanwhile, Lee's character being infected with vampirism is a plot all its own as she can connect to the animalistic creatures' hive-mind at the risk of her own humanity, but this ends up being little more than fuel for a stunted relationship with Baldwin that is characterised less by their non-existent chemistry than by his uncomfortably rough treatment of her.

Vampires ultimately leans closer to being an action movie than a horror movie as it shows Crow and his team methodically rounding up vampires and killing them, often by hooking them up to a truck winch and dragging them out into the sunlight. However, this no-nonsense approach is not terribly exciting to watch as it starts off dully repetitive and remains that way even as later sequences start throwing in obstacles that try and fail to ratchet up tension. Even the gory carnage caused by vampire and hunter alike all come across as rejected leftovers from KNB's work on From Dusk Till Dawn. To top it all off, Carpenter once again scores his own movie, but it amounts to little more than generic slide-guitar noodling. In that regard, it sums up the real tragedy of Vampires - it may well be the closest Carpenter has come to making a straight Western, yet it's also a surprisingly serious contender for the worst movie he's ever made. Sure, there are more obviously boring and underwhelming contenders like The Ward or Ghosts of Mars, but for all their faults neither of them left me with quite as bad an aftertaste as Vampires did. Perhaps the best summarisation of Vampires comes from a line Crow delivers that highlights how the filthy and largely mindless vampires of its world are nothing like the fanciful aristocrats from stories like Dracula. While this is intended to underline how much Vampires works to distinguish itself from the trappings of its genre (especially when the title card is rendered as "John Carpenter's Vampires" so as to emphasise the man's personal touch), it only serves as a stark reminder of how disappointingly it executes that approach.




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#9 - Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
Rachel Talalay, 1991


In his quest to find new victims, a supernatural serial killer uses an amnesiac teenager to lure others back to his hometown.

It's always at least a little interesting to see how franchises that really get up there in terms of installments try to keep the experience fresh, especially when it comes to horror franchises that would nominally have the most to suffer due to the diminishing returns on their original scariness. I've noted my fascination with how A Nightmare on Elm Street handled this issue, mainly by trying to take its premise to imaginative new levels regarding the dream world in which series villain Freddy Krueger stalks his victims and how they would ultimately figure out how to beat the sweater-clad sicko at his own game. Even then, there's only so many ways that that could be done and that seems clear enough in the franchise's sixth entry, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. I skipped over fifth entry The Dream Child but it doesn't matter as this film does away with using recurring protagonists in favour of a standalone story that starts off weird even for this franchise - an Escape From New York-style prologue establishes the film takes place "ten years from now" and that Freddy's hometown/stalking ground of Springwood has no children left for him to prey upon and that all the adults have gone insane. Since he's effectively bound to the town, he takes one surviving teen and sends him out into the world with no memory but enough clues to lead back to Springwood so he can escape. The lucky people who get to go to Springwood with this walking John Doe? A youth worker who takes him on as a case and a handful of delinquent stowaways from said youth worker's workplace. So the nightmare begins...

Like James Bond, Freddy Krueger exists at this paradoxical nexus of serious and silly - after all, is it really the best idea to take a serial murderer who explicitly preys on children and turn him into a candy-coated joke machine? It is especially weird to note how this latest collection of victims all come from a halfway-house for troubled teens whose various personal troubles tend to seem a little too serious to turn into material for Freddy (one was sexually abused by her own father, another is hard of hearing), plus the relatively small number of characters means that Freddy really takes his time tormenting them (look no further than his Looney Tunes-like treatment of the aforementioned deaf character). At least it's somewhat salvaged by the story just embracing the lunacy, often quite literally as seen in how Springwood has become a ghost town populated by crazed adults whose town fair looks like something out of the back half of a Herzog movie. At least the underlying story - that of the heroes once again trying to figure out how to stop Freddy once and for all - kind of works despite all that. As such, I'm not exactly inclined to think that Freddy's Dead is a good movie, but I surprisingly didn't hate it either (it's not my least favourite of the ones I've seen, anyway). It moves at a clip, maintains the series' ever-increasing craziness without suffering too much for it (occasional moment of exceptionally bad taste aside), and at least commits to providing a definitive conclusion to the franchise (which as of writing, it seems to have done just fine).