October 2015 Horror Movie a Day

[Compound]

House of the Long Shadows (1983)

After taking an idiotic bet, an author heads to a Welsh manor where he becomes embroiled in the mysterious events occurring at the manor surrounding the family who once owned it.

Vincent Price. Peter Cushing. Christopher Lee. John Carradine. And Desi Arnez Jr. Yeah, one of these isn't quite the horror legend the others are. Anyway, a successful author (Arnez) meets with his publisher and brags about how much money his books are making. Hearing this, the publisher wishes that Arnez would write more "worthy" books, more like Wuthering Heights. Arnez sneers at that, stating that he could write a potboiler like that in a day. So the pair bets $20k on that. Arnez insists on an isolated place to work, free from distractions, and the publisher offers the use of a remote manor in Wales for Arnez to use. Never go to Wales. Movies have taught me that nothing good ever happens there.

After stopping at a creepy train station for directions, Arnez arrives at the manor during the middle of a storm. Entering the supposedly empty manor, he encounters a pair of caretakers who weren't supposed to be there. And then a mysterious woman who seems to have followed him from London. And a motorist whose car broke down. And then Vincent Price shows up. Then Christopher Lee. Then we start getting into spoilers, so I'll be vague. Secrets are revealed. Folks begin to drop dead. A surprise! Then another!

Anyway, this is a surprisingly decent little film. It's billed as a comedy, but there aren't really any jokes. (Checking IMDB, apparently the film was recut for video release, removing most of the jokes. That's probably a good move. The comedy bits in some of the later Price films weakened the rest of the film.) Great cast and a good plot as well.

[ScottotD]

Day 10: The Sacrament (2013) 4/5

BUT SHAKY CAM! BAH! BAH! BAH!

[Edward J Grug III]

Day 10: The Sacrament (2013) 4/5

BUT SHAKY CAM! BAH! BAH! BAH!

Used perfectly here.

[Relaxing Dragon]

Taking a break from Friday the 13th with the treat: Gremlins 2: The New Batch.  This movie holds up better than I remember (and I remember liking it a lot).  There's some stuff that feels a bit stale but nothing that falls completely flat in a way that harms the film, which zips along.  I appreciate that even though Dante is more invested in the monsters than the human characters, he does spend enough time in the more grounded world so that it means more when things go comepletely off the wall.  The reality of the movie is elastic in a way that not a lot of movies can pull off.  On paper, it shouldn't work when things get more slapsticky (heck, a bat-gremlins flies through the wall and makes a perfect Bat-Symbol) and yet it completely works.  John Glover is great as the Ted Turner/Donald Trump hybrid.  But what really surprised me was how good the gremlins and mogwai look.  Those puppets look fantastic with some fantastic expressions and look much better than the first.

I'm one of those guys who says with pride that I prefer The New Batch to the first movie. The first movie is great of course, but the second one just has that great, bizarre tone and gorgeous model work that I can't ever look away (and there's Christopher Lee as a mad scientist! So good).

[Edward J Grug III]

The Wicker Man - (Original of course) What a bizarre and fantastic movie. I feel like I should hate it on paper. Christopher Lee is so amazing in it. Woodward too.

Did anyone here ever see The Wicker Tree? We watched it the year it came out - Holy shit! This movie must have been a fluke!

[Edward J Grug III]

Terror at Tenkiller - Rifftrax version of course. This is a really top notch riff.

[Johnny Unusual]

The Wicker Man - (Original of course) What a bizarre and fantastic movie. I feel like I should hate it on paper. Christopher Lee is so amazing in it. Woodward too.

Did anyone here ever see The Wicker Tree? We watched it the year it came out - Holy shit! This movie must have been a fluke!

I love The Wicker Man to death and was disappointed to hear that the Wicker Tree was surpremely bad.  The leads are amazing and I like that there is no horror film that feels like this one (though I don't agree, I completely get why Lee doesn't think of it as a horror film.  I think it can be scene as a dark, strange drama with a Henry O twist),

It's definitely very rewatchable too.  Great soundtrack.

Don't have time for full movies at the moment, so tiding myself over with MST3k eps: The Amazing Colossal Man and Hobgoblins.

[JimJ]

Day 11: Nothing, will try to watch 2 today to make up.

Day 12: The Final Girls (2015) 3/5

A group of teens get sucked into the world of an 80's slasher flick.  I saw this while scrolling through Google Play and decided to give it a look, since the reviews are good and the premise sounded interesting.  I liked it but, but it wasn't nearly as funny as I expected it to be.  A solidly average film, but nothing special.

[SJP]

Reviews are up late, movies themselves are not.  Got busy this weekend and couldn't type reviews.

Day 10: Re-Animator
While I do really like this movie (and it does set the stage for the future Gordon/Yuzna collaborations), I don't have as much love for it as I do From Beyond.  That might chalk up more to me having seen From Beyond on WGN Flint 20 many years a kid like me should've seen it, but the weirdness of of that one always stuck with me.  Re-Animator is certainly offbeat and ramps up the weird from 0 to 60 really quickly, but I still think From Beyond did the same stuff as this, only WAY more over the top and outlandish.  Still and all, Jeffrey Combs is great fun no matter what he's in, and without this, I doubt he'd be as well-regarded in the genre as he is today.

Herbert West is a brilliant scientist who has developed a serum which can bring the recently dead back to life; unfortunately, the serum has a few bugs in it, not the least of which is that it makes those reanimated more savage and violent.  Enter Dr. Hill (the late David Gale), an unscrupulous scientist who has stolen most of his scholarly work from others, who plans to make a fortune on West's work.  What follows is a lot of gore, fluids, severed limbs, weird sexual tension, and a thrown cat...and a sequel which, as far as I can tell, isn't available on Netflix.

Not for everyone, but for fans of this kind of offbeat, dark, and twisted humor, and a fairly strong stomach, you'll enjoy.

Day 11: Grabbers
A small Irish village becomes the site of an alien invasion as a bevy of squid-like, blood-drinking monsters begin a killing spree.  However, while water can revive the creatures back from near death, the local constabulary and a few townsfolk discover the creatures find alcohol toxic.  Rounding up the entire town to the local pub, they all vow to get drunk enough to survive the night and deal with the menace...which, unfortunately, are attacking on the night of the biggest thunderstorm in awhile.

While darkly funny and an enjoyable watch (Russell Tovey of Being Human fame as a fairly amusing scene involving him drunkenly arguing with the Big Daddy Squid Monster), the only real problem is the film does very little with its own central premise.  There isn't a whole lot done where the characters have to fight the monsters, but aren't really capable of doing it based on how plowed they are (there are really only two scenes like that in the film, and they are among the goofiest scenes).  It does have some good dialogue in it, though.  "Oh, great, you just killed the find of the century.  There's so much we could've learned from tha...oh, it's still moving, isn't it?" *Proceed to start stompkicking the monster into squidgy little bits once again*

A lot better than I thought it would be, but probably not a repeat viewing.  Not one for the Blu-ray shelf, I think.

[Compound]

Stage Fright (1980)

A young girl sees her mom have an affair and then grows up to kill people.

Oy. This sucked. Here's the plot. After intruding on her mom copulating with a man, Cathy is later taken by her mom on a car trip. Along the way, mom picks up her mister and they begin to fool around. Cathy wakes up, sees this and hits her mom on the head, causing the car to crash. Cathy's about 6, so she's got a heck of a punch. Mom dies. Dad, who was not in the car, accuses Cathy of killing Mommy. She breaks a lamp and slashes him with the fragments. Years later, Cathy, who has changed her name to Helen and inexplicably gotten an American accent is an actress cast in a horrible, horrible play. But every time she encounters someone being romantic, she breaks some glass and then uses the glass shards to kill people. She does this a lot. Also, glass is apparently very sturdy because the glass shard seems to be able to stab a person many, many times. Anyway, Helen kills the rest of the cast, meets her boyfriend/lead actor and then flips out and kills him. She then tells the cops that it was him all along. The end.


Ugh. Where to begin? Helen's a horrible character. She's supposed to be a great actress but there's no evidence of that in the bits of the play we see. On the killing side, there's no suspense. We know it's her doing the killings. (Yes, yes. Multiple personalities.Still physically her.) For someone who's allegedly remorseful about what "Cathy" is doing, she never takes any steps to actually stop the deaths. Plus "Cathy" kills a couple of people for non-sexual reasons, so even the mental illness seems tacked on. And the police show up briefly to discuss the person slashed to death with a glass shard, but nothing happens after that. They don't connect this to the several people killed by a glass wielding maniac earlier in the film. They don't shut the show down for investigations. Nothing. Just walk in and leave. No looking around for, say, blood or broken glass. And the play. Oh, dear lord. It's described as "a humorous play about death" and the director calls the writing drivel and he's right. The bits we see of it are pretentious nonsense that the crowd is laughing uproariously in reaction to. Plus apparently the lead actress can wander off for a good chunk of the 2nd act and no one notices.

Pass. Don't even bother with this junk.

[SJP]

That's actually interesting about Stage Fright.  Even though it's not mentioned anywhere in any of the materials, there was a 2014 Stage Fright made in Canada that has a remarkably similar plot.  In fact, I thought that maybe I just thought I had inflated the year on the other one, until I looked up and saw Stage Fright is also known as Nightmares (which Scream Factory either is releasing soon or just released).  They are apparently different enough (the newer one has a Scream-type villain doing the killing and whose identity is unknown, and it is more of a musical even outside the theatrical production, and is intentionally more silly and ridiculous), but it does seem more than mere coincidence to me.

[The Lurker]

The musical one is also kinda terrible.

[JimJ]

I've heard decent things about the musical one, was thinking of checking it out soon.  Anyway, I still need to make up for missing the 11th, will try to do that today.  After the movie I just watched, getting in the mood to watch another will be hard.

Day 13: Knock Knock (2015)  /5

WOW.  Easily the worst movie I've seen this month.  No, wait, I mean year.  Holy shit!  I knew this got pretty bad reviews, but I tend to like Eli Roth's stuff more than the average person, and I usually like Keanu, so I was looking forward to checking it out.  It's so goddamn bad, guys.  The only tiny sliver of enjoyment I got out of it was the hilariously bad performance of Keanu Reeves.  Look, I know he's not the greatest actor but I usually enjoy his work.  This performance is unreal, I don't even know how it could've happened.  He makes Marky Mark in The Happening seem Oscar worthy.  Granted, the material he's working with here is hot fucking garbage, but still, this is one of the worst performances I've ever seen from an established actor.  I'm not going to get into the plot too much.  Basically, some girls show up on Keanu's doorstep on a rainy night and he helps them, but everything is not as it seems etc. etc. yada yada...

Fuck this movie, it's bad, don't watch it.

[Compound]

SJP,

You could make a good film out of the bits. Someone's killing the participants in a bad play. Is it the acerbic director making more permanent cuts to the cast? The snarky theater critic who's decided to take a more active role in weeding out bad actors? The high strung lead actress who's desperately craving a hit? The slumming lead actor whose fame hides a deeper secret? The mysterious ingenue? The stage manager who's getting revenge on the actors in revenge for the fame that passed her by? With a bit of actual mystery involved, it'd be a decent setup.

Instead what we get is a murder mystery where the audience is told "It's Steve. Steve is doing the killings" at the beginning of the film and then the rest of the film tries to pretend it's not Steve doing it.

And to clarify, there's three Stage Frights. The Aussie one with the glass shard killer, the 1987 one where a maniac infiltrates an opera and the 2014 one, which has Meatloaf in it. The modern one should have at least done a google search on the name.

[The Lurker]

I found Meatloaf's mustache kind of amusing.