2022 Halloween Challenge

3 from Hell, 2019

Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), Otis (Bill Moseley), and Baby (Shari Moon Zombie) have been incarcerated for 10 years. Spaulding is executed, but Winslow (Richard Brake) helps to spring Otis and Baby from the clutches of Warden Harper (Jeff Daniel Phillips). Together, the wicked crew makes their way south to Mexico.

Thanks, I hate it.

It's not exactly surprising that I didn't enjoy this movie. I knew that the characters and narrative wouldn't do it for me, but I was hoping that there might be some visual flair or humor that might at least keep it afloat. Alas.

There was really nothing here for me to grab onto. I always struggle with unlikable protagonists, and what adds insult to injury here is that there are no character arcs. Like, at all. Okay, so without character arcs, you can still have characters get put through their paces. Only not really. The movie just sort of cycles in a way that feels really samey. The characters say f*ck a bunch then do something cruel. Then they go somewhere else. They say f*ck a bunch then do something cruel. There's something kind of rote and passionless about it. It's like it wants to be edgy and gritty and dark, but without any real heart behind it all.

For me this landed in an awkward place between boredom and discomfort. The movie is too committed to its bleak schtick for there to be any stakes. There's just no way to care about anything. Sure, in the abstract you care about some of their innocent victims, but because the movie is entirely unwilling to entertain that anyone might escape the killers, it merely becomes a question of how much they will endure before being killed off.

Nothing about the direction or style of the movie really popped for me. It looks gross and gritty, I guess.

I didn't expect to love this or anything, but usually I can find something to appreciate. Honestly I'm feeling really hard pressed to say anything positive here. I suppose the effects are passable and the performances aren't terrible.

I kept trying to figure out who Otis was making me think of, and I just realized it's Will Forte's guest turn on I Think You Should Leave.

Oh, I know. I just don't ever see myself watching the first two, so I'm not overly worried about the order.

Just out of curiosity, did it ignite any desire to watch The Devil's Rejects or did it do the opposite?

I will say that The Devil’s Rejects has a much surer sense of texture than 3 From Hell. I imagine he was working with a larger budget at the time, and it definitely shows. If you didn’t gel to this one’s meanness, you definitely won’t like the previous movie, but I do think that one is very good in its own specific, ugly way.

October 1st
Barbarian (2022)
15. A Film With a Final Girl

Ian took out the power for my block so I decided to go to the movies and to my surprise Barbarian fits one of the categories. You can say that's a mild spoiler but Barbarian tells the story of a couple that end up sharing an Air-BnB in Detroit.

In a lot of ways Barbarian feels like a horror anthology with each act of the story acting like it's own mini-horror film. It jumps around time and characters and keeps you guessing until you reach the very unsettling finale act.Part one of the story is a great hitchcockian type story and we move on from there. The social commentary horror is handled with a degree of restraint. Justin Long plays his character very well he's one of the strongest features of the film.

The final act of the film is like the inverse of The Black Phone..where you have so much dark humor from certain parts of the film. The director/writer do a great job giving it's final act a distinct flavor that you don't see in horror films enough.

*adds to my October list*

To me it was the:

The VVitch: A New-England Folktale (Eggers, 2015) which I guess would fit as an entry for historical horror.



A family in 17th century is banished from the town because of disagreements with the church. Now they have to survive by themselves as farmers. Times are tough! During these tough circumstances, we witness the family relations and psychology and we get bombarded with the parents despairing, it's all quite traumatizing. A good and slow-moving and dramatic horror film with strong performances. At times the movie gets a bit monotone, fortunately it has a good pace to it so it's not much of an issue. Strong cinematography combined with the musical instruments manage to create a good ambience, but I think the music is a bit lacklustre as a whole. I think the witch/evil mythology was intentionally not expanded upon in detail, and the film ends with a cool ending sequence. My interpretation of the whole film:


Overall a well told and effective grim and dark fairy tale horror, certainly recommended if you like the premise. Oh, and the two young kids are hilarious.

Barbara Crampton/Stuart Gordon/Jeffrey Combs is a solid pick


Hammer Studios has a lot of B-Actresses that you could use

Kind of neither. It just sort of affirmed something I already know: when a movie is a misery slog and I know everyone is going to die, I basically immediately disconnect and it turns into just noticing some good technical merits here or there.

Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)



Tells the story of how a professor of paranormal psychology gets caught up in investigating a weird case regarding a claimed supernatural killing. I watched the "original full-length pre-release 96 min cut" and I loved the mix of noirish detective story with the horror element and it's able to keep a good atmosphere the whole way through by the use of good cinematography work and excellent use of light and shadows. About half way into the movie I thought it was gonna end up as one of my favorite horror films pre 1960. In particular, I enjoyed the dialogue, as well as all the interactions between the professor and the cult leader. However, the resolution is not as satisfying as I would have hoped and the quality drops compared to the film's buildup and the middle part. The ending left me feeling a bit cold because of the final ending scene, I would have preferred something more unexpected. The pacing is good throughout and never drops. Suspense was done very well.

Overall very entertaining, but I can help but think this movie could have been more effective if it instead had left it more ambiguous whether or not the demon was real. Would make for a great double bill with this one followed by Horror Express.

I really love this one, and I actually am very fond of the ending as I love the image of .

And I like the comedy element of that last scene on the train where they are trying to pass the runes back and forth.

31, 2016

Charly (Shari Moon Zombie), Roscoe (Jeff Daniel Phillips), Panda (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), Levon (Kevin Jackson), and Venus (Meg Foster) are a traveling group of carnival workers. On their way to their latest assignment, the group is abducted and forced to participate in a sick game wherein they have 12 hours to survive in a maze while being hunted by a series of sadistic killers.

Now this is more like it. Narrative momentum. Characters with, you know, relationships that impact the proceedings. Some visual spark.

Overall I liked the progression of the film. Yes, it has that slight video game vibe of moving through different adversaries to advance to the next level of antagonist, culminating in the appearance of the menacing Doom-head (Richard Brake). The run down warehouse/industrial setting makes for a good background for the mayhem.

There's not a lot of actual torture/action in this one so much as there's a lot of talk and intimidation. For me that's not actually a bad thing, though it does mean that some of the antagonists don't come off as that intimidating. I thought that the first adversary, Sick Head (Pancho Moler) actually made the biggest impression, as he actually feels like a real threat to the group. The other antagonists talk a big game but are actually defeated with relative ease by the group. What gets the most play is a lot of sexual assault content which is, you know, certainly a choice. Coupled with the amount of extraneous female nudity, I feel like maybe more energy could have been put into the battles with the baddies.

The best sequences are the ones where the group must make moral or interpersonal decisions. At one point, they come across a woman who seems to be a previous victim of the killers. The group is split on whether or not to untie her, as half of the crew thinks she might be in league with the killers. I always like moments in horror movies where I myself don't know what the right/correct decision would be.

Overall this was an enjoyable film. It made me think a bit of the dynamics of The Collection, another "making your way through a deadly warehouse" type film that I enjoy from time to time.

That was hilarious. Doomed by coat. Any other cut worth watching than 96 min pre-release?

It's the only version I've watched, and I believe it's meant to be the better cut.

I'm with you, I think this one's excellent. But then what don't I like by Tourneur?

This pleases me.
Also I was psyched to see Elizabeth Daly again. I always had a great fondness for her.

The Munsters, 2022

Lily (Shari Moon Zombie) is a single vampire living with her father (Daniel Roebuck) just looking for a guy who, you know, doesn't just show up to a date with dozens of pictures of his pet rats. She's in luck when a mad scientist (Richard Brake) implants a new creation, Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips) with the brain of a murdered hack comedian. Lily and Herman hit things off and embark on a romance.

My only real exposure to the Munsters world was that when I was growing up we had a VHS copy of The Munsters Revenge, a very silly movie about Herman and Grandpa being framed for burglaries because bad guys were piloting animatronic wax figures of them around to commit crimes.

With that in mind, I didn't mind the silly nature of this film, which does seem to come from a place of affection for the characters and their world.

Now, that said, I don't think that this quite works. The comedy goes for goofy, but it is very inconsistent and a lot of the gags go on for much longer than they should. It's kind of amazing to me that the film is over 100 minutes, because not a lot actually happens in it. The film repeatedly raises interesting possibilities (like Grandpa using magic to make a perfect boyfriend for Lily to scare off Herman) that just go nowhere.

This is an easy watch in part because the cast seems to be having a good time. (It is really weird watching this so close on the heels of 31, though, because wow, some of the actors here just hours earlier for me were threatening to rape and/or disembowel each other and now they're swapping cheesy puns in technicolor). There's a sense of trying that is pretty endearing, even as it doesn't always land.

I think that fans of the original will have mixed feelings, to say the least. I enjoyed the very last shot--in black and white--more than most of the rest of the film.

I just wish her character (and a lot of the characters) had more to do. It felt like most of them were just sketched out and then not developed.

Bloody Hell, 2020

Rex (Ben O'Toole) intervenes in a bank robbery with tragic results that land him several years in prison. Once freed, Rex decides to take a vacation to Finland, but his luck apparently hasn't changed. He has hardly set foot in the country before he finds himself at the mercy of a demented family, with only the family's timid daughter, Alia (Meg Fraser) as a potential ally.

Seven movies in and this is the most I've enjoyed a film that I'm watching for this challenge.

Bloody Hell has a very in-your-face gimmick as part of its structure, something that is always a big gamble. Through the whole film Rex has intense conversations and debates with a physically manifested (albeit invisible to others) version of his own conscience. The two bicker and commiserate as Rex is put through his paces, and fortunately for the movie this mostly pays off, giving a chance to have snappy dialogue and humor in many sequences where the character is on his own. It's interesting to see the way that the conscience functions. At times it is the voice of impulse, but in other moments it is the voice of caution. In the end it becomes the voice of morality as Rex must decide whether or not to risk his freedom to help Alia.

A lot of the film rests on the shoulders of O'Toole's dual performances, and I thought he did a really good job. Aside from being styled differently, the real Rex and the conscience tend to blend into one another at times, but he acting and the editing work well together to create a fluid and funny banter.

Character-wise, I also enjoyed the journey that we go on with Rex. O'Toole's charisma proves pretty key, because Rex is maybe kind of a psychopath? We learn that he saw military action, which perhaps informed his reaction when confronted with the armed bank robbers. But even after the fact his responses to certain things--including something pretty terrible--are glib and dismissive. And to be clear: psychopaths aren't always bad people or evil, they just see situations with an absence of emotion. In some professions, such as life-or-death occupations where nerves can be deadly, this can actually be a boon. In some scenes, Rex seems perplexed by the response of other people to his actions. It makes for an interesting lead character--definitely not an anti-hero, but also not a wholesome innocent victim.

A last positive is that the movie does a good job with a lot of the physical comedy. Whether that's via the editing, the blocking, or just the use of a particular sound effect, the humor pretty consistently works, such as when a delighted Rex discovers that he's able to do a lot of pull ups while tied to the ceiling and his conscience has to redirect his attention to the task of escaping.

I did have some mixed feelings about Rex's relationship with Alia. Like, is this a Dogtooth situation and she's maybe in her 20s? Or is she meant to be a teenager? The movie obviously knows that the whole situation is messed up, but the way that it's phrased at one point by the character---and then seemingly supported by the film itself---is that it's a good thing that Rex has found a woman who is dependent on him and . . .hmm.

I also thought that the film had a little bit of trouble with its framing device. I don't want to get too spoilery, but once we learn what actually went down in the bank I was like, no way would an attractive man who is also a military veteran be criminally charged for what he did. No way. A civil suit? Maybe. But to be taken to court? Just no. And on the flip side of things, the movie suffers from Return of the King syndrome where it ends at a good point and then, no wait, there's more, and then, no wait, there's one more scene. I didn't think that these last two scenes added much and they left things on a weird tone instead of the satisfying vibe of the third-to-last scene. I read in the trivia that this was maybe meant to be the first in a series, so perhaps these last two scenes were meant to leave the door open for more. I don't think that their inclusion was worth it.

Overall this was a really fun horror-comedy and a solid October watch.

I got a little curious about a film shot in Australia with Australian actors that's supposed to happen in Finland (and apparently they do speak some Finnish, too). It doesn't really seem like my kind of movie, but maybe I'll check these Finn impostors one day

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