2022 Halloween Challenge

6. Lady in White (1988/Shudder)



Lady in White is the story of a boy who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. He gets locked in a school closet by bullies, where he sees the ghost of a little girl that was strangled in that closet years ago. Unfortunately, that's not the worst of his troubles, as the killer returns and almost kills him as well. With the help of the girl's ghost, he tries to find the child strangler before he strikes again.

For a movie starring a 9 year old boy, this gets pretty dark. I imagine a lot of kids watched this thinking it would be geared towards them and then it gave them nightmares. I liked how it didn't pull any punches, but I wish the story was tightened up a bit.

Its pretty silly that the child murderer would return to the scene of the crime 10 years later to retrieve evidence nobody knew existed. The filmmakers could have made it a recent crime to be more plausible. I also wish the main character, Frankie, was more proactive. He finds clues to his attacker's identity and knows the dead girl wants to be reunited with her mother, but keeps this information to himself for months. There's also a subplot about the black janitor wrongfully arrested for the kid's attack that doesn't really connect with the rest of the movie.

Despite these issues, Lady in White is still a compelling murder mystery with supernatural elements. The main character and his family are relatable and even funny at times. The killer's identity was pretty obvious to me, but I enjoyed how unhinged he got at the end. The movie has its flaws, but I think it's mostly successful.

Whether it’s the best Franco/Rollin film to start with or not is frequently irrelevant to me, as I go with what’s available and what looks interesting. There’s a few Franco films, including Venus in Furs, but I opted with Dracula for now. I seriously doubt one film could ever put me off, or on, his filmography as I’ll watch what I can when ever I can. Rollin has two films on Tubi, Shiver and Living Dead Girl but I went with Shiver because….why not? I’ll get to Living Dead Girl next.

Sorority House Massacre, 1986

Beth (Angela O'Neill) joins a sorority, but from the minute she steps into the sorority house, things are not right. She begins to have visions of a strange man, who we soon discover is a mental hospital patient named Johnny (John C. Russell). As Beth's dreams and visions become more gruesome, her sorority sisters are convinced that she is dealing with repressed emotions. But Beth and Johnny have a shared history with the sorority house, and he will go to great lengths to meet her face to face.

This movie was kind of great and also kind of terrible, and it all averages out to something that is, well, average.

On the positive side, the premise is a fun one. I particularly liked that so many of the sorority girls were psych majors, and they quickly sit Beth down to interpret the meaning of her dreams. I was also a fan of a lot of the imagery that was used--simple but disturbing effects like a knife coming through a mirror, or a deep bloody imprint of a body being left in a mattress.

I also thought that some of the moments were funny. At one point one of the sorority sisters produces useful tool after useful tool (a gun, a fire ladder), each time claiming that they were gifts from her anxious mother.

The actors are all fine. While no one stands out as being great, no one was bad. Russell (along with the way he is dressed) makes for an extremely everyman killer, but, hey, that's kind of scary in its own way.

The problem is that the film borrows heavily, like really heavily from other movies, and while I've read online that it was too close to Halloween, I thought that it cribbed from Slumber Party Massacre. Carol Frank, who wrote and directed, worked on the latter film, and there are too many things that seem to have simply been pulled over.

One of the most egregious moments of mimicry comes in seemingly trying to create an ironic male gaze moment in an absurd montage sequence where the sorority girls try on outfits for like several minutes. Something in the IMDb trivia that made me laugh is that O'Neill refused to undress for the scene, which is why her character just looks on from a bed as the other girls giggle, swap floral monstrosities, and apparently throw the dresses through the air in their mirth.

Probably worth at least one viewing.

October 2nd
Terrifier 2
23. Body Horror

I didn't care for the first Terrifier film I found it to be simply gross for the sake of grossness. The film lacked scope, distinctive characters and suspense. Well Terrifier took all the failings of the first film and created a horror epic that I would literally say is twice as good as the original.

The film is not perfect the mythology and rules of Art the Clown doesn't make any sense and the final act goes on for twenty minutes to long. But this film does so many things right leading up to the final act that you can forgive it. To start off with this is a classic slasher is a massive body count. Unlike other films of it's sort the money clearly went to going into different settings and using different characters...many of them are actually established.

We also get a little mythology with the lead girl whose father knew about the clown. Now the biggest knock is that we get these dangling plot threads but the film makers actually try and do something. Art's humor works better here as his miming is top notch it's creepy and I laughed which is important.

Heh. This is pretty much exactly how I felt about it... and yet I've seen it twice.

Yeah, I could see watching it again.

Well, this is interesting.
I hated Terrifier. I loathed it.
But the online buzz on this movie is just overwhelming. I don't remember seeing anything quite like it before, and I assumed that Bloody Disgusting was an investor in the picture because they have bombed my social media every day with extravagant praise and hype for it and are basically declaring it the best Horror movie ever made. Lots of blurbs showing up everywhere, it's like a media assault.
So, my curiosity has been piqued. Could the most most openly misogynistic but also nonsensical Horror movie I could possibly have imagined, somehow have yielded a sequel that's... good?

It's not the best horror film every made but it's like Annabelle or Ouija movies in that the first one was low budget and cheap but the second one has a much stronger premise.

I would say it's a good Nightmare on Elm Street film but not a great one. I would say they fixed 80% of the issues I had with the original. The set pieces and practical effects are fantastic and most of the pacing is really good.

Ok, well, I can't watch it this month but I'll consider giving it a shot. As long Art doesn't cut anyone in half through their vagina or cut their breasts off and wear them.

That's still in it...you have a brutal scalping and someone gets their penis cut off but it's just a glob of meat. It's a slasher but it feels more Argento than the original which was like an experimental SAW film. It was like they added an actual movie in it.

I don't mind so much if it's brutal it's just in the last one pretty much all the violence was extreme sexual violence against women and that made me angry. Like the director just hated women with a passion and wanted to act out his violent fantasies against women on screen. If it's not just gonna be that again, I could be kind and give it a shot.

I'd heard for years that this was supposed to be really boring or something, but was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I think the dreamlike atmosphere of the first few minutes goes a long way in giving the movie a distinct mood.


As for the cribbing from The Slumber Party Massacre... the sequel has a lot of flashbacks... not to this movie but the first Slumber Party Massacre! Very confusing.


The sequel is very much a Jim Wynorski movie, in that it's really dumb, a little tongue-in-cheek and has lots and lots of nudity. It might not be your bag, but there's one gag I still chuckle about.

__________________

Yeah, like I said, there's a lot of borrowing, but it's mostly deployed well. Aside from the clothing montage, which was terrible. (But then great again when you watch Angela O'Neill dispassionately watching her fellow actresses obligingly fulfill their contractual nudity obligations).

Good to know.

I started Violation last night but ended up bailing because I was like "Wow, that looks real." And it was. And I was not quite in the mood.

Going to try and finish it tonight. I will be more emotionally prepared this time.

Searching for any decent looking 2002 horror I haven't seen yet and

I just did a quick search and yeah, it's pretty thin. I saw nothing that you wouldn't already be aware of

Reviewing a list of all Horror films released that year... brutal.

Allegoria, 2022

In a series of interconnected vignettes, different artists are haunted and attacked by their own creations.

Is it possible for a movie to disappear from your mind even as you're watching it? Yes. Yes it is.

The ideas in this film aren't bad, per se. The first sequence takes place in a theater class and builds some decent tension. But once the reveal happens, it's sort of like "Oh, okay."

And the whole things ends up being various degrees of okay. The image at the top of this review is from the first proper sequence, in which a man is haunted by an image out of one of his paintings. (A phone conversation where he belittles his girlfriend ruthlessly about her enthusiasm about getting into an acting class makes it really easy to watch him get tormented by the strange creature).

The problem is that while the ideas about what happens to each artist are (say it with me) okay, it gets a little repetitious. A writer is haunted by the characters he created. A musician plays a haunted song that results in a possession.

A danger of an anthology-style film is that you have very little time to get to know the characters. None of them were particularly memorable to me, aside from the first painter guy, and that's just because he was such a creep.

Some of the visuals here are fun (I liked the look of the creature in the image above), but I just never had a "wow" moment with this film. A neat image here, a funny line there, but it doesn't cohere. It's already fading from my mind, and I couldn't tell you the name of any of the characters without the help of the IMDb.

Not bad, per se, just really underdeveloped.

Pooka Lives!, 2020

Derrick (Malcolm Barrett) is a writer on the losing side of a nasty battle with a popular online teenage personality. Seeking to escape the hate, he returns to his hometown to stay with friends Molly (Felicia Day) and Matt (Jonah Ray). Once there, he also strikes up old friendships with Bennie (Gavin Stenhouse) and former flame Becky (Laurel Toupal). One night as a whim, Derrick and the group create an internet challenge around the children's toy Pooka. The problem is, their creepy little story seems to be coming into the real world.

I was pleasantly surprised by the film Pooka, an early entry in Hulu's Into the Dark film series. The original was a pretty funny story about a man who is hired as a mascot and slowly finds himself being possessed by the evil toy.

This film also seems to be aiming for the kind of dark but silly fun of the original, but it lands short in most regards.

On the positive side, the cast is pretty good. I think that Malcolm Barrett is very funny, having been a fan of his performance in the show Better Off Ted and also his role in the Key and Peele skit about the two guys on the airplane. I have positive associations with Day and Ray (the host of the MST3K reboot). There's even a fun-enough prologue with Rachel Bloom () and Wil Wheaton, with the former playing a Pooka corporation worker who has been laid off and goes a little off the deep end.

The problem is that the characters are all incredibly thinly drawn. Derrick probably gets the most development, what with his career having been scuttled by an internet hate campaign. But his nemesis---an early 20s Logan Paul type called Jax (Motoki Maxted)---is a complete caricature. Bennie is an openly gay police officer in a small town . . . which is something that is told to us about him and then plays zero role in his character or the story. (Okay, it's used as a running joke to explain why he looks so good, but it's thin material). The dialogue sometimes gestures at character growth, but then just abandons them. Derrick and Becky have a bit of a blow up about the way that Derrick ran off to New York and forgot about them when he got famous, but the argument is quickly quashed.

The scares are also kind of random. The idea is that as the internet gloms on to the #PookaChallenge, their collective interest and creativity begins to manifest and then their new creations start to appear. This does lead to some fun visual gags (like a Pooka wearing lederhosen or what is clearly a "sexy Pooka"), but it also means that it's a pretty abstract and inconsistent bad guy(s).

I tried to roll with this one. As I've felt about quite a few films I've watched this month it wasn't bad, but neither was it good or memorable. And with such a game cast, it's odd that they couldn't produce something with a little more moxie.

Conveniently for me for 2002, for some reason I've never seen Guy Maddin's Dracula ballet movie.


But yeah, that year gets "looks unpromising" fast.