A scary thing happened on the way to the Movie Forums - Horrorcrammers

The Collector really concentrates on getting it's gory maiming and killing just right, but don't spend too long trying to figure why the masked monster in this movie "collects" people, or how his whole "bait" thing (a person in a box) works. Ahh, doesn't matter. The Collector likes to invade people's homes, and torture family members - but his real gimmick is all the traps he sets throughout the house. A kind of unreasonable number of traps that consist of razor-wire, razor blades, knives, spikes, acid, bear traps etc - devilish traps that'll cause grievous injury. Lucky for one family, they're being robbed. Arkin O’Brien (Josh Stewart) needs money bad. When he discovers what's going on, he tries to rescue various members of this family - something he's terrible at. Usually, when he unties someone and they follow his plan they end up dead - and I think "hey, they'd have been better off without this guy." Oh boy - in this there's disemboweling, disfigurement, finger amputation, mouths sewn shut, stabbing, burning, shooting, beating, cutting. Lots of blood. This is the kind of movie that gives it's audience what they want - buckets of blood. There's no skimping - but I would have liked the whole conceit to make some kind of sense. Every time we find out about what the monster does - locking people in boxes, "collecting" them, using them as "bait" - it's not explored at all and doesn't really add up to a fully thought-out concept.

Animal cruelty warning - When Arkin stumbles upon a cat stuck in sticky acid, painfully dying, it kind of bothered me. Funnily enough though, Arkin tries to save the cat, and ends up killing it - just like with every other member of this family. He throws it out the window, where a trap chops it in two. Not my favourite part of the movie.

__________________

In my opinion it's better than all the Michael Myers-based sequels, and I'm a big fan of it.

Housebound -

This movie proves that New Zealand horror is alive and well despite Peter Jackson going to Hollywood. As the title implies, it's set entirely within a house - a rickety and labyrinthine one, I might add - that is home to Kylie (O'Reilly), but not by choice. A career criminal, she is under house arrest, which she has to spend with her mother and stepfather (Te Wiata and Harper), neither of whom she gets along with. When unexplained things start happening, Kylie suspects the house may haunted, so she tries to unravel its unfortunate history to explain why.

Like Jackson's first few movies, the feature debut of Gerald Johnstone - who also directed M3GAN - is just as funny as it is frightening. Half the comedy comes from the reactions of Kylie, who I would describe as a grownup Wednesday Addams. When it's not her mother grating on her nerves, her deliciously smug and condescending counselor Dennis (Rhodes) picks up the slack. She at least has an ally in Amos, her parole officer whose passion for all things supernatural also brings the laughs. As for the scares, they come from the duo's attempt to unravel the house's mysteries, which besides its red herrings is set back by Dennis and Kylie's mother gaslighting her about it. It's a good mystery, too: as soon as I thought I had it all figured out, it threw me for a loop.

Instead of a rebuttal, I'm providing a rebuttal to rebuttals; in other words, counterarguments to common criticisms I’ve read about this movie. At a running time over 90 minutes, it is long for its genre, but since I was never bored, I didn't notice. Also, while some of the big reveals could be considered over the top or cartoonish, they are tonally consistent, and most importantly, they made me laugh. It ends up being a welcome reminder of how good New Zealand is at horror and comedy and a reassurance that the latter genre is still very much alive in the medium in general. Oh, and speaking of New Zealand cinema, you may remember seeing the actor who plays Dennis in another relatively famous movie filmed in the small country (he played Farmer Maggot).

Yup, I did it.
And I don't really regret it.
My memory was that this was actually pretty good and somehow it just hit people the wrong way but not me. I was wrong. This is a pretty bad movie a lot of the time. But some of the time, I actually like it a good bit.
Other than Kim Director, who seems like she was written and made-up to be the worst cliche in a movie full of them but is actually the best thing in the movie, this movie has very little positive to offer for about the first half of the film. The script is bad, the characters are stupid, I mean, the Wiccan character is just terrible all the way out just bad, bad writing, the acting leans, very negatively, into how cliche and bad the characters are, very little makes any sense, it looks shitty, like it's a bad-looking movie, maybe because they were trying to mix found-footage and film and neither came off looking convincing or even less than ugly...
Honestly, I’m not super-sure what I liked about this movie. Except that there’s something kind of interesting about the way things play out. I must have forgiven the movie it’s shittiness for how much I ultimately liked the story.
I guess I just really like the idea that these people went into the woods to camp at the ruins of the witch-house and
So, this is a pretty shitty movie but also one with some ideas that worked enough that I wasn't mad I spent the time to get through it.

I haven't seen Vinny either (my shame knows no bounds), so I'm just now figuring out what this meant.

No thunder stolen, looking forward to your thoughts.

I have watched this many times and I think it might actually be my favorite movie.

Marylee: "Bubba told me what you did."
Hazelrigg: "Bubba didn't tell you nothin'. Bubba's dead."
Marylee: "I know."

Me: 🤘 😭 🤘

__________________
Captain's Log
My Collection

Dude, that's funny, that moment jumped out at me too.

So, this is actually pretty good.
Charlie Brewster has gone to college, accepted that there is no such thing as vampires and that he and Peter Vincent were suffering a shared delusion brought on by the presence of a serial-killer in the house next door, gotten a new girlfriend who is also excessively chaste, and severed contact with Peter. He's happy and ready to get on with his life - until another vampire, Regine, moves into the neighborhood, specifically into the penthouse of Peter Vincent's apartment building. Is it just a coincidence that Charlie is always around when a vampire moves into town? We shall see.
This is a perfectly acceptable sequel. It's a shame this got buried, apparently because of the Menendez Brothers.
And while, sure, Regine isn’t quite Jerry Dandridge, she’s not bad at all, she does a lovely performance-art vampire show, and she gives pretty credible Chris Sarandon pout. And yes, she is hot. Nice to see her again having appreciated her in In The Mouth Of Madness. And honestly, the scene where she hosts Fright Night is a borderline inspired Horror moment.
Plus, I really liked her crew, which consisted of a sort of strongman, in a suit, who eats bugs all the time, a horny werewolf, and the first openly trans vampire ever committed to the silver screen, played by Michael Jackson choreographer, Russell Clark


When Fright Night 2 asked me, "Wooley, do you want to watch a black, trans vampire on roller-skates go bowling?", my answer was, of course, "... I mean, yeah."
Having both Charlie and Peter back from the original film gives this movie real continuity, as does the script actually, and it's actually filmed, very competently, by Tommy Lee Wallace, director of Halloween III: Season Of The Witch. (I kinda feel bad for that guy, with both those films getting slaughtered, one for not being a Michael Myers film and one for being produced by a victim of a shocking very public murder.) While the third act pales a decent bit in comparison to the first film's wonderful finale, I think this is a high-quality sequel that deserves to be seen by any fans of the original.
Yeah, as big a fan of the original as I am I had no real qualms with this one.

Blair Witch two is the bomb. It's so much of its time and unique. Just for how unusual it is it's worth seeing.

Mary Lou is an unabashedly self-centered, mean-spirited, promiscuous 1950s high-school senior who, immediately after winning Prom Queen, burns alive on-stage in front of the school when a revenge prank, perpetrated by the boyfriend she cheats on (literally bones another dude) at the prom and then rubs his face in it, goes wrong. 30 years later, her (mean) spirit is set free on the unsuspecting seniors of 1987, starting with the murder of a pregnant teen, before she possesses the straightest and shyest of the candidates for Prom Queen and basically turns her into a murderous tramp.
Well. This is arguably the best A Nightmare On Elm Street rip-off I've ever seen, though the movie actually has bits from several famous Horror movies, such as Carrie, The Exorcist, and Evil Dead. In some ways this is the straight up, alternate-universe sequel to ANoES but also kind of an overall Horror-homage pastiche. I don't think I noticed that the first time I saw this but it's super-obvious now. Some scenes and shots are almost straight out of Nightmare or the other films. The killer even drags her fingernails along the lockers while stalking someone.
That said, this ends up all going surprisingly well, partly because the movie is not afraid to be gritty and mean, partly because of an outstanding performance by the lead, and at least a very good one in Mary Lou herself, and because it just works for what it is. Really, this lead actress, Wendy Lyon, she makes this movie work. She’s fearless. She does everything she has to do to sell this character and she has the goods. I never would have thought from how sold I was on her as the goody two-shoes that she could be the version she is in the second half of the movie. That said, the actress that plays Mary Lou, Lisa Schrage, also does an aces job.
So, this is a fun little movie that is totally worth seeing and even re-watching... but it's almost like a drinking-game waiting to happen for every time something shows up that was lifted directly from a more famous earlier Horror movie.

Oh my god. You get to the part where you think, they can't POSSIBLY smush me any more without doing permanent physical damage! and then the machine DOES go tighter. And in that moment an eyeball pops out.

That's amazing nightmare fuel and certainly what I'll be thinking of when I get my next one.

The Collector was a bit too torture-heavy for me, but I frequently rewatch The Collection, which takes the whole premise to a better fitting level of outlandishness.

You're welcome.


"The good news is you're cancer-free. The bad news is you have a detached retina."

Watched The Haunting for the third time as my Halloween movie. I didn't care about it at first, but I love it more every time. There's so much to catch on repeat viewing. I'll keep watching every October probably. I'm sure actual answers are buried in there somewhere. I loved the lady caretaker this time, where I didn't really focus on her before. She is totally taking the piss out of visitors.

On my little October horror odyssey I made it back to 1978 (yes, I'm way behind on writing up reviews.) I think I'm going to keep going with it until I get to 1923 (thus 100 years of horror).

I know I should be watching horror like mad tonight, but after really enjoying the 1978 Czech Beauty and the Beast (really liked it), I watched the "I'm Just Ken" song from Barbie and now I'm watching Folding Ideas video about NFTs.

Might watch the first half of Death Game after I take a shower.

Bones and All is a really smart horror movie, and features some great performances (Mark Rylance in a supporting role here is really phenomenal) - the whole 'humanoids who must feast on human flesh' avenue is ripe for metaphorical exploration, especially in relation to coming of age and young love. Okay, that sounds strange - but the two kids in this, Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) are still choosing how they're going to survive in a world where they must sometimes kill - and are already dealing with a lot of trauma. When we were that age there was so much change going on, and many things felt strange and sometimes uncomfortable. There's often unresolved trauma that impacts people's growth. Sully (Rylance) is a prime example of what happens if you deal with it in an unhealthy way - he's one creepy character. Wonderfully, and oh so uncomfortably creepy. That feeling of "ew...EWW!" never leaves once Maren has a handful of finger snacks. I didn't enjoy the movie to the hilt, but it's the kind of film that's very interesting and sticks in the mind. When you see a certain character with disfigurements, your mind works it out - and then you wish it hadn't. Sometimes I hedge with my ratings, and I'm doing that here - Bones and All is pretty good.

Hmph.

I ended my Halloween night with some elevated horror.

1. I didn't realize this came out only one year after TBWP. In my memory it was a few years later. Cashing in on the buzz I suppose.

2. I honestly can't say if I've seen this or not. Like, of course I did, right? But did I? I remember nothing about it.

The movie won me over early, when the art girl gets attacked in the hallway. The slo-mo fog-shrouded roller skater was filmed with pizazz and the way the victim's blood splatters all over her sketch pad showed a sense of visual flair that I was very much into. So I was on board at that point, and when it became clear that they'd pretty much embraced the tone of the first film that was the clincher. A pleasant surprise.

Happy Halloween everyone, I've got Targets, Cure and Zodiac lined up for tonight/tomorrow, may also try to get to the 1980s version of Little Shop of Horrors.

__________________
Down The Rabbit Hole
Down A Dark Alley

Latest Movie Viewing: Wings (1927)
Latest Album Listened To: Honky Château, Elton John (1972)
Latest TV Show Viewed: Doctor Who

I was really let down by Bones and All. I think it didn't know what it actually wanted to say and just sort of muddled around. The Sully character was a big misfire for me. He raises, in the beginning, the question of how to be an "ethical monster" and then . The last 10 minutes in particular I thought were abyssmal.

Loved the scene around the campfire, though.

And now I'm watching the World Series.