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

Yes, it's....alright

Most older horror is cheesy... at least during the 60s 70s 80s and 90s.

I like most horror from the early 1900s to 1940s.. then I feel it's not so good until you get to the late 60s to early 70s... such as The Omen and Rosemary's Baby. I think horror in the 80s was horrible and the 90s didn't have much.. 2000 up I'm ok with.. but still prefer my foreign horror.

Working my way through one of those portmanteaus called The House That Dripped Blood. Not half bad so far and it's got Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and the Third Doctor in different segments.

Ultimately, The House That Dripped Blood was a bit too sedate for my taste, although I could see it working for someone just starting out in the genre who might be a bit squeamish.

The best one might have been the last full segment with Jon Pertwee chewing it up as an aging, proud actor dismayed by the lack of credible scenery and costuming for his latest vampire picture. He's an authority on all things supernatural, don't you know, including Dracula with Bela Lugosi and not that ham playing him now which may quite possibly be Christopher Lee. Haha.

The weakest is probably the second one which involves Peter Cushing who finds himself drawn to a wax figurine which looks almost lifelike, one in a museum with a very curious owner. But things take a turn when an old friend shows up.

You can kind of see the twists coming, but still it worked well enough.

From Hell It Came - Decided to re-watch this even though I mostly remembered how ludicrous it was. Intrigue and jealousy among some South Pacific islanders lead to the chief and witch doctor killing off one of their own. This somehow leads to the guy coming back for revenge as an angry tree stump looking thing. It's B&W and about 70 minutes long and full of unintentionally hilarious moments. This being the 50's and all there had to be white people in the lead roles to save the "superstitious" and "ignorant" natives. I didn't recognize any of them but there was the requisite romance shoehorned in and one of the slooowest monsters on record. Half the fun is watching his victims commit the most egregious of blunders and bad decisions just to give the creature a chance to catch and kill them. I think this qualifies as a so bad it's good. 65/100

It's not an angry tree stump looking thing, it's the dreaded Tabonga!! (This was a favorite of my teen years.)
The best parts are when the creature is asked to carry his victims in his barely-functioning arms.

Just finished this, and not a fan, although I can't say I was bored. The style felt artificial in a way that reminded me of The Boogeyman, but I think that movie juggles that tone (and the contrast of said tone with extreme violence) a lot more effectively. This one just seemed to drag a lot of the time.

Probably the one scene in the movie that really clicked for me is the death of Pappas, in that the meanness of the scene felt so disproportionate given the campy tone and benignness of the character.

Farkas has such an odd presence that I do appreciate the casting here, but my problem is that the character isn't a constant enough presence in the film. There's a really unpleasant murder of the prostitute right at the beginning and the diner scene, and then it felt like at least half the movie passed by before they were reintroduced as a threat.

I watched Dark Skies. It’s like Poltergeist but with aliens instead of ghosts and an utterly boring family instead of one of those charming Spielberg families. I was expecting this to be more intense and foreboding but it was mostly just dull.

I also watched Countdown, about an app that tells you when you’re going to die. This was pretty terrible,full of lazy attempts at jump scares, generic characters and nonsensical storytelling.

I liked the one guy chucking a spear at Tabonga and missing. From like four feet away.

Even Findlay herself thought it was a piece of ****. I would actually like to check out her interview regarding it because it sounds like she goes after not only this film, but also the horror genre in general and even her own fans.


I admittedly have a high tolerance for films that drag, and am particularly fond of movies that feel artificial (which this generally does), so this one was right in my wheelhouse. After the amount of junk I've trudged through on YouTube this month (PeopleToys.....uggghh....**** you Tarantino and your recommendations) this one was a pleasant breeze for me.


There definitely needs more Farkas. Prequels, merchandise, fanfic, Pez dispensers, undercover Farkas housekeeper costumes for Halloween. So at least we can agree that an entire industry needs to be slavishly devoted to her.

This post was an emotional roller coaster for me.

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Captain's Log
My Collection

The Raven is another example of Lugosi "winning". Not that it's a competition but like you say, Lugosi's legacy has not gotten the same respect as Karloff's so it's always nice to find examples of Bela holding his own.

The Raven is definitely a lesser film than The Black Cat but it's a fun showcase for Lugosi going full-psycho. It's a similar plot to Mad Love, Murders in the Rue Morgue, et al (brilliant incel surgeon fixates on pretty lady), but in this case the surgeon is also a Poe enthusiast. (This means that the viewer is treated to Lugosi reciting excerpts from the poem.) But my favorite moments are after he's snapped and is delighting in tormenting Karloff, often by poking his head into a skylight and cackling at Boris. Good stuff, and this trailer gives you a taste of some of it.



I already recommended this earlier in the month so this isn't me badgering you into watching it, just elaborating on my previous comments.

With all the cinematic style of an episode of Quincy M.E. and all the star power of Leif Garrett....

I'd meant to check it out this month but didn't find an easy enough to get a hold of copy (read: on Netflix/Prime/Tubi/YouTube; I might order a physical copy a few months down the line). Bride of the Monster was not how I intended to end my Lugosi-thon, although it did offer some valuable perspective.

Not really a horror film but operates on a quease factor that makes it an unwanted sleazo-melodrama cousin of the genre. Toys Are Not For Children will ultimately be a prime example of what a heroic job overt exploitation can do in allowing its audience to at least keep some kind of anthropological distance between it and whatever taboo subject matter it is peddling. And this film, in an act of Bizarro World perversity, will be very willful in giving us almost none of that.

Opening with a scene of a woman copulating with her childhood toys while fantasizing about her father, one would hope to get a sense that this film is targeting some very specific group of subterranean Weirdos. People who we can point to as the cause of such deviancy in our poor society. Definitely not us Hopeful Normals, who are simply watching out of harmless curiosity . But as the film carries on, soberly and competently telling us its tale of sexual dysfunction, marital collapse and family tragedy, it quickly becomes an affront to polite society that it doesn’t seem to have any intention to let us easily shame anyone else for its existence. It seems to have the gall to be telling Us this story. No drooling, sex maniac intermediaries required.

Without even the slightest trace of camp or amateurish weirdness to dissolve the awkward silence it creates between it and the viewer, what we end up left with is a movie that stares us straight in the eye waiting for us to blink first. And we definitely will. But when we open them back up , this film will not have stopped carrying on with its unbearably straight face. With nothing for us to gawk at, to point to as the hilariously awful reason we are here, we can’t help but wonder to ourselves exactly what we are doing here. How we are supposed to engage with something that is clearly aiming to unsettle us while keeping so much of what we were expecting to offend us hidden snugly beneath its flasher overcoat. Junk film afficionados are prepared for almost anything but the threat of contemplation.

There is definitely a perversity in how by keeping so much of its disturbed id buried inside of the psyche of its main character where we can’t get at it, that it somehow begins to feel even more gratuitous with its subject matter. Or maybe a film like this simply is exposing the sickness of general geek show filmmaking, where we only come to stare at the obscenity, claim it really wasn’t as bad as people say after all, then move on. It almost seems to be pointing at how unhealthy that is, burying the hard reality of these issues in our cynical mirth.

None of this actually makes Toys Are Not For Children a particularly good film. But it is shockingly well put together considering the type of theaters it would have played in. And the incongruency of some modicum of competence, mixed with remarkable restraint regarding its subject matter, offers us a curiosity without any catharsis. This allows it the weird feat of being boring without being easily forgotten. An accomplishment? I guess so.

Hey y’all. How ya doing?

This premieres tonight. So... Watch it? I’d appreciate that. Or don’t and lie to me that you thought it was great fun. Either way is cool.

If any of you have a bit of free time to cram something else in your Horrorcram, then check out a special episode of my podcast, Thief's Monthly Movie Loot, dedicated to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; specifically one scene from it.

Thief's Monthly Movie Loot - Special Episode II (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre)

Enjoy


EDIT: You can also listen to it on Spotify

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Hello, MKS! Glad to have you here.

Where do you watch the episode? I may not get to it tonight, but I'll certainly do so this weekend.

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IMDb
Letterboxd

The Poltergeist series has a reputation for being a cursed production all the way through the sequels. If I recall, it emerged eventually that the production crew had used real skeletons/corpses, Which they had procured from a medical lab or something along those lines, to dress some of the sets and pull off some of the horror scenes. Several people on the cast and crew became gravely ill due to the exposure to these remains.

Damn, the title escapes me at the moment, but I am pretty sure there is a documentary about the production of these films out there somewhere.

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Yeah, I heard about the movie's "cursed" reputation after watching it. Whether the curse is real or not, it's a creepy thing to learn about. I saw a video which gave a timeline of the various mishaps which occurred throughout the franchise a couple days ago. It was kind of interesting.