Welcome To Our Nightmare: A Terror and Wooley Horror Show

This is probably just okay, but lots of scenes of characters walking down corridors and the slight Italian horror vibes in the climax meant I had a good time. I gave it a but it's an enthusiastic , if that makes sense.

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I feel like both of these have piqued my interest.
I think my dance-card might be full for the rest of the month with "classics" but I might see if I can find a slot to squeeze some of these in.

A favorite from my school library




Where is Death Proof when we need him?

Jeez, I almost let us get too late in the month without checking out The Greatest Halloween Song Of All Time!!!

"The Ghouls all came from their humble abodes... to get a jolt... from my electrodes!"

I have to admit I was impressed with this right off the bat. I didn’t realize it but it’s actually been at least 13, 14 years, maybe more since I’ve actually watched the original. I always felt let down by it, though I conceded that it was the second-best in the series, behind Part 2, because it had actual suspense. Which most of them, starting with the third and getting worse from there, don’t.
But right away I’m impressed by this movie. It takes it’s time to develop the suspense of the kills, like Part 2 and I think Part 3 but completely lost by the egregious Part 4 (yeah, I don’t care what anybody says, it may be a "better" F13 but it is not a good horror movie).
I got hooked right from the opening scene… a nice, long buildup and then a shockingly fast and abrupt stabbing that really catches you off-guard and then gets satisfactorily extended by a second person trying to get away to no avail. Unlike the kills from Part 4 on, it’s actually impactful.
Really, this movie, to me, is a prime example of why Horror was good back then and then for so long was generally pretty terrible. This movie allows itself to breathe. It's not so afraid it's going to lose your interest if it takes time to have a lonely shot of a character walking alone though town...


... a nice long, wide shot with a character just walking through it, uninterrupted, the camera unmoved for at least 10 seconds. It establishes scope and scale, it isolates the character, and it gives a lonely quality to the proceedings. You just never see it in movies these days anymore or if you do it feels so intentional and almost "artsy"/trying too hard.
Or to let conversations go on long enough that they don't just deliver exposition and/or backstory, nor do they say things to establish characters in short-hand, they actually let you feel what the moment is like for the character, as in an early conversation between a camp-counselor and the truck-driver she's hitched a ride with. By the end of that ride, I actually liked both characters. So I was emotionally invested in what happened to the counselor. I actually felt sad. That's how you make a good Horror movie.
And this is particularly evident in the Final Girl. Alice is quite plucky. I’ve always said Ginny was the best Final Girl of the series and one of the most underrated Final Girls of all time, but I’m really liking Alice, here. She's tough but in a real, internal way, not in the way a "tough girl" would be portrayed in later episodes of this series, again with stupid short-hand costuming and language to telegraph to the audience as quickly as possible. Alice is a girl who gets on a ladder with a hammer and nails because that's the work in front of her.


Salt of the Earth, she is. And I love this part of her just kinda panicking and piling whatever she can up against the door, totally irrationally, like a real person really would be in this situation instead of a character in a horror movie who has to pass contemporary audience muster. If Part 2 commits any particular sin, it is killing off Alice. (I'll have more to say about that later.)
I’ll say this, though, if Halloween really introduced the POV-cam into the mainstream Horror lexicon, this movie absolutely hammered it in. It has to be some significant percentage of all the shots in the film.
There's a lot more I could say but I'll just drone on forever. Obviously the kills are great. One of the deaths happening off-screen feels maybe like a letdown until later when it pays off. Reveals are handled just right and there’s a real touch to this movie. I’m so impressed.Also, you get free Bacon.
So, I guess this movie ultimately comes down to whether or not you’re satisfied with Historically, I have not been. But I think, given the generosity that this movie has engendered in me with its performance up to that point, I’m inclined to be charitable and so I’m sort of ok with it. It helps that
And the final scare is so effective. Really well done.

I was so wrong. I mean, this is REALLY good. I can totally understand how my mother, probably 34 or 35 when this came out, was really taken with this movie, and she was. Actually, and I’m not making this up, my GRANDMOTHER, who not only went with her to this one but went with her to the SEQUEL as well, really liked it.
I completely misjudged it. I’m shocked, I may have to re-evaluate my rankings of the series after this.


PS - There is one other thing I want to comment on.
People sometimes criticize Part 2 for these two things: suddenly advancing Jason’s age by a decade maybe and in the opening scene. But, per this film, Jason drowned in 1957, making him like 30 at the time that Part 2 was set. And it is actually not really established that the part with him coming out of the lake really happened and wasn’t in her head. As for To me, it's a nice cap to the first film and bridge to the second.
That is all.

That's right.

Here is the video-game they had at Shakey's Pizza on Veterans Highway in the suburb of New Orleans I grew up in in the 1970s, which Young Wooley played all the time, establishing that he was a Horror fanatic from a very tender age:


You drove around chasing ghouls and running them over, at which point they turned into gravestones which made it harder to drive around, thereby increasing the difficulty of the game. And two people could play at once on the same screen with the two steering wheels and shifters.
Apparently the game caused a big controversy when some misguided do-gooder saw the game in an arcade and wrote an article about a game where the player ran down pedestrians and killed them, which spread all the way to The New York Times. Which of course only made the game much more popular. My parents were unimpressed.

All of it?

Enough to earn the official Rock endorsement.

Well, I'll treasure that.

I don't care what anybody says, I dig this song and it certainly belongs in this space:

Decided it had been too long since I gave this one a spin.
While I loved it when I was young, I had come to think of it as crap when I was in my early 30s, I think I was a little kinder to it the last time I saw it, but that was probably a decade ago. And all the Halloween talk made me think it was due another shot.
I have to admit, the first 30 minutes of this movie just flew by. It really gets on its horse right away.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, this is the most direct sequel to a movie you can imagine because, while it actually comes out 3 years later and really only in response to the success of Friday the 13th, this movie takes place the same night as the original film. Funny, I didn’t remember this movie actually opening with the climactic section of the original Halloween and then it sort of seamlessly shifting into the second film. But it does. They’re very different movies but the transition is surprisingly smooth.


(Really like the three level, foreground/mid-ground/background composition there.)
So, Laurie Strode has just finished dealing with Michael Myers and is taken to the hospital. But Michael goes there to find her. So the movie is mostly Michael Myers in a hospital. Which is kinda all you need.


Oh man, it’d been so long since I’ve seen this, I forgot that this movie makes it clear that Laurie doesn’t/wouldn’t/couldn’t know WHO it was that was stalking her, making the "Boogeyman" line even more interesting but really grounding the movie in my opinion. As if this were really happening to someone.
There are a lot of little things that I like actually. I dig the opening credits with the pumpkin opening up to reveal the skull inside. It's a nice mood-setter. I love that Night Of The Living Dead is on the TV. I can’t remember if Halloween was the movie that established that trope, but it’s a great one.
On the other hand, the murder in the opening seems somehow incongruous to the ethos set in the first film. It just seems random. The killings in the first one didn’t seem as random, he seemed specific and intentional, he'd been stalking these girls all day and he had seemingly chosen them, which was particularly scary, not just, oh, I walked past this girl’s house so I’ll kill her. Which is what happens here. And something I complained about in the 2018 film as well. Also, while some setup was there, it was pretty abrupt and not in character with the way the kills are drawn out in Carpenter’s film.
Also, I know it’s coincidence but it’s funny that the first person killed in this film is named “Alice”, the name of the final girl in Friday the 13th. Given the way F13 2 opens, I almost wondered if it wasn't intentional.
When Laurie goes to the hospital, of course, they have to call a doctor. In a small town like that, the doctor would not actually be in the hospital overnight, certainly not in 1981. Well, I’m a doctor. And this doctor cracks me up. He’s like the doctor in that meme, “You’ve got ghosts in your blood. You should do cocaine about it.” Just gave me a good chuckle.
Jesus, the death of the kid they think might be Michael is ****ed up. And they leave that part kinda dangling.
And just an amusing viewing note I see that I took down: "I have a brutal case of the hots for this head-nurse that keeps bustin’ everybody’s balls."
There's really a lot to like in this movie. It's much better than I'd remembered. Michael is still quite scary in this one. And, while this director is no John Carpenter, I would still say this is probably as good as if not better than the best of the post-F13 slashers.

Also, this movie does contain my favorite kill in all of horror, slightly edging out the hammer-kill in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Bob in Halloween. It's the nurse in the hallway, for anyone who's seen the film. That one always scared the living hell out of me when I was a kid/teenager. Yikes. Really effective.

And this leads me to wanting to talk about kills a moment.

So, it’s pretty clear to me that F13 kinda established the anti-Halloween kill. Which is to say that while they both have the buildup, the kills in Halloween were long and visceral with a sort of brief aftermath to them, which is largely why you could get away with only, what, three on-screen kills. Because the kills actually taking time and then there being a bit of a lingering over them was actually more frightening than squeezing in another kill. But the kills in F13 were really fast and don’t have the same gravitas, which only got worse as the series went along, particularly in the opening of F13 Part IV when the time elapsed between the beginning of a stalk and the victim being dead was just 14 seconds. Halloween II unfortunately follows the latter model more often than not. And while the suspense is still effective, the kills, save one, are just sudden and then they’re done.

So, to revisit the two early films from the most famous slasher franchises ever, I definitely got more of a sense of fear out of Halloween II than F13. I felt that it was fairly scary. Hospitals are inherently scary. But the pacing of this film and the very intentional building of suspense and continued lingering over a kill (less in this one than the first but it's still there) is really just more effective from a fear-generating perspective. Which is not to say that F13 wasn't effective in its own way.
Ultimately, here, I have to say that I liked Halloween II a lot and would not mind ever watching it as a double-feature with the original.

I admit I dozed off around the hour mark. Woke up to find the screen littered with corpses and thought, "I should probably rewind. It seems I've missed some important plot points."

Some thoughts regarding superficial matters:

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Captain's Log
My Collection

So I'm doing laundry Friday night and for some reason this game came to mind and I thought "I gotta remember to ask Wooley what the name of that thing was." Then you posted this mere hours later.

Psychic bond!

Another Georges Melies "horror" movie for ya, The Witch, aka., The Old Hag, aka. The Fairy Carabosse or The Fatal Dagger...


As has apparently been discussed for like a century, this is kinda bull**** because the Witch, Carabosse, actually totally upholds her end of the bargain, it's the troubadour who is the criminal here, double-crossing her and trying to kill her, yet he gets the fair maiden and the Witch is drowned in the lake.
Total bull****.

I think most people here know this one.
Herk Harvey's guerrilla "Horror" film is more like a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone, yet its haunting (forgive) second half transcends the low expectations such a statement might engender in the minds of the audience. What starts out as a fairly by the numbers procedure becomes something far more artistic as the steadfastness of our protagonist begins to unravel and, in the end, we are left with the feeling that we have seen something far better than we paid for.
Mary is a passenger in a car driven by her friend who engages in a dangerous flirtation with another car of male motorists. The car ends up in the river and only Mary survives. After the ordeal, she moves to Utah where she has taken a job as a church organist, an occupation she takes seriously but has no spiritual connection to. Along the road, Mary is haunted by the vision of a ghoulish man peering in her car window... even though she's driving on the highway.


As the specter menaces Mary more and more frequently, she experiences strange dissociative episodes and becomes obsessed with an abandoned Dance Hall/Carnival pavilion she's seen out in the desert. Who is this ghostly man that no one else sees and what does he want with Mary?
I think "haunting" really is the right word for this film. 50 years after its release, this sort of story seems commonplace or almost rote but it has been described as an influence by David Lynch (very obvious in Lost Highway) and George Romero (feels an awful lot like Night Of The Living Dead), among others. And a quick Google search will reveal just how much has been written about this $30,000 independent film.
I can see some getting a little bored in the first half (my friend, Trout, fell asleep for a few minutes near the middle of the film), but sticking it out will reward the savvy viewer with a haunting treat that will likely stick with them.

Another of Melies' fun little "Horror" films, The Merry Frolics Of Satan: