October Horror Movie a Day 2023: 14th Year! Who Still Even Does This?!?

[Edward J Grug III]

October 7 we watched Final Destination. I have never seen any of these films before, but I heard they were pretty fun, and we wanted something mindless. It's fine, very goofy and has an abysmal soundtrack. I did spot a Cub poster in the background. A missed opportunity to have a cuddlecore soundtrack IMO

I would watch more from the series if they turned up on any of the streaming services we have, but I wouldn't go out of my way.

[Edward J Grug III]

8 October we rewatched Jennifer's Body.

It's one of those movies that people suggest needs reevaluation, but it turns out I was right the first time - this movie is not good.

The writing is just awful. We rewatched Attack the Block a couple of weeks ago, another film we hadn't seen since it came out, and it's so good - I was struck by how authentic it feels. The dialogue is perfect, and the kids are so real. Jennifer's Body is the opposite.

It's phony and it's not even nearly as funny as it thinks it is.

[Edward J Grug III]

9 October we watched The Brainiac, AKA El barón del terror.

What a bonkers movie. And more bonkers is getting to the end of that and thinking 'how weird this hasn't been riffed,' and finding out it has been riffed and we have watched it. How do you see this weird movie a second time and not realise you have seen it before? In out defense, it's been over a decade, but still...

Also, we watched a nice restored version with the original language, and I'm sure that made a difference.

It's certainly not a great film, but it is excellent fun (if baffling). A baron who has some kind of unexplained magic is sentenced to be burned alive for being a heretic and also not being upset about being tortured, While he is being burned alive, he swears his vengeance, saying he'll disappear on the passing comet and come back and kill the descendants of the people who are burning him. Pretty weak vengeance IMO.

When he comes back he is some kind of weird brain-eating monster sometimes? He keeps a bowl of brains in a cupboard that he sometimes goes and have spoonsful of.

The movie is super cheap - half of it is filmed in front of photos that look like postcards. The monster cost $10, tops.

Somehow the movie is charming instead of a chore. We will definitely revisit this, though we are also curious to rewatch the Rifftrax too.

[Charles Castle]

5. October 9 - Dracula (1931)
https://forum.rifftrax.com/index.php/topic,5210.msg1041923.html#msg1041923

[Charles Castle]

October 7 we watched Final Destination. I have never seen any of these films before, but I heard they were pretty fun, and we wanted something mindless. It's fine, very goofy and has an abysmal soundtrack. I did spot a Cub poster in the background. A missed opportunity to have a cuddlecore soundtrack IMO

I would watch more from the series if they turned up on any of the streaming services we have, but I wouldn't go out of my way.

I've gotten some kicks from the escalating Rube Goldberg fatalities in this series, with the obvious trade off of extreme deficiencies in nearly every aspect of filmmaking. Some hind quarter of my brain seems to recall liking part 2 the most, though I made no log of my viewings to certify that recollection.

[Pastor of Muppets]

October 7 we watched Final Destination. I have never seen any of these films before, but I heard they were pretty fun, and we wanted something mindless. It's fine, very goofy and has an abysmal soundtrack. I did spot a Cub poster in the background. A missed opportunity to have a cuddlecore soundtrack IMO

I would watch more from the series if they turned up on any of the streaming services we have, but I wouldn't go out of my way.

I always loved the Final Destination movies.  They are so ridiculous.  I have seen all 5 and FYI, they NEVER explain why anybody is getting these glimpses of the future.

Each movie has different rules.  In the second movie, you can survive if somebody originally killed gives birth or is revived after being clinically dead.  In the third and fourth they go back to that thing from the first where you get to survive if you somehow survive your freak accident.  In the fifth one, you get to live if you kill someone else -- you trade your life for that person.

[SJP]

I always loved the Final Destination movies.  They are so ridiculous.  I have seen all 5 and FYI, they NEVER explain why anybody is getting these glimpses of the future.

I have a soft spot for the fourth one...not only because of the 3D (which I'm glad to own, despite the fact that I recently found out they don't even make 3D TVs anymore and mine is now a rare thing to covet and avoid my children destroying), but that the director is the (late) director of Snakes on a Plane and Shark Night, which I always thought would get an Unrated release (it just seemed like it should have been a lot gorier, but sadly, that ship appears to have sailed).

Day of the Reaper (1984)
A serial killer attacks people with weapons that just happen to appear right next to him as needed.  Hilarity ensues.
I entered this movie wondering why Amazon said it was a rare treat...and nearly turned it off 20 minutes in.  It was dull, plodding, tedious, and the costume of the villain was ridiculous.  "It's like The Room!  Who made this thing, a toddler?"
Turns out, that's not actually far off...turns out the reason this is such a big deal is because it was made by a 15-year-old who made his dream come true by saving up $1000 as a dishwasher to make his serial killer movie on Super 8.
Watching it with that lens, it suddenly all makes sense...the moon logic, the plodding shots, the goofy costume...this is the kind of crap my brother and I would make when we were kids, except he actually got it made into a film he released.
Now, is it any good?  Well...no.  It's still not a GOOD film, but kicking it seems a little harsh.  But any time the 'detective' comes onscreen is solid gold.  There are flubs in the ADR (think about this...they recorded sound after the fact and STILL make mistakes), but all of his exposition is hilarious, and worth every minute of screen time.  And the gore is decent as well...as is the completely out of left field finale in which the 'good' monster goes against the 'bad' monster.  I recommend for sheer novelty value, but I wouldn't blame you for not coming back for seconds.

Hocus Pocus (1993)
Witches terrorize a small town, while Kenny Ortega choreographs.  Bette Midler ensues.
I know this is becoming a classic for Halloween the same way that Die Hard became a Christmas classic, but this was a family watch.  It's not one of my favorites.  Though I do like how the zombie calls Midler a trollop.  I like to think the actor improved that moment.

Garden of the Dead (1972)
Escapees from a chain gang are shot while trying to escape, but all the formaldehyde they've been huffing brings them back as blue ghouls to take revenge on the police and one of their own who's trying to go straight.  Zombies ensue.
I think there is an error on Wikipedia...it says the movie is 85 minutes, but every copy I've seen is actually 58 minutes.  I don't know why it's so short, but hey, it ends when it ends.  Decent effects and has some genuinely eery moments (not played for comedy as you might suspect), but mostly notable for the inclusion of Marland Proctor, who plays one of the slabs of meat from Planet of the Dinosaurs.

Rifftrax: Beast of the Yellow Night (1971/2014)
A man dies, is brought back to life, and occasionally eats people as Filipino Satan desires.  Roundness ensues.
I used to not care for this Rifftrax, but I found more to like this time around.  I found myself laughing at the "The search for the credits lasted well into the night, involving all branches of the military" line more than I'd like to admit.

Rifftrax: Lycan Colony (2006/2020)
MISTAKE! ensues.
What's to say?  Like Day of the Reaper, it's a labor of love.  Unlike Day of the Reaper, Rob Roy doesn't have the excuse of being a 15-year-old kid to explain why nothing in this film is even remotely consistent, not even the aspect ratio.  Still love the cave drawing animations where they go "Diddle-iddle-iddle" as the legs wiggle back and forth.

Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015)
Dracula is bound and determined to prove his grandson is vampire enough to stay in Transylvania.  Nutsy-koo-koo ensues.
Another family watch, but this one is honestly my favorite of the series.  Maybe it's because I saw this one ad nauseam when my wife was pregnant and it was one of three movies she wanted to watch, but I think everything clicks in this one in ways it doesn't in the other three.

[SJP]

Rifftrax: Stitches (2001/2020)
Devil comes to a boarding house to win souls.  I ran out of the desire to do 'ensues' jokes.
The riffing is good, but I actually fail to see the purpose of this movie.
Sure, the whole point is that Satan wins and every becomes a paper soul puppet, but there's no journey.  The demon learns nothing.  No character development.  Even freaking Friday the 13th movies have the final survivors learn SOMETHING about themselves.
It's basically a gag reel of the devil winning arguments.
That said, Full Moon is very good at making B-movie fare that treads the line between something truly cult classic and something that just falls short.  This is one of those falling short moments.

Bloodbath in the House of Death (1984)
Paranormal investigators come to a house where 18 people suffered a horrible demise a decade before.  It does not end well.
I had never heard of this movie before this year, and I don't know how that is the case.  Sure, it bombed horribly when it came out and is not well regarded (which I will admit, I can understand), but I still found myself laughing.  Apparently it was intended as a vehicle for then popular Kenny Everett (who passed in the mid-90s from AIDS) that never went anywhere, but is mostly memorable for being the last British movie Vincent Price attached himself to...and even though he's barely onscreen, every moment of him, like the detective in Reaper, is hilarious.  This is a great example of getting somebody to act and say things you would never expect them to say (you just have to see it to believe it), far better than Michael Cera in This Is The End.  I like to think of it as Britain's answer to Airplane, and as long as you see it that way and don't expect much (the ending falls apart rather quickly), it's got a fair share of giggles.  Outside of Price, the library scene is worth a glance, as well as the first five minutes or so; if you get through that with a grin on your face, you'll probably be able to watch the whole thing.  I don't know, maybe I was just in the right mood for this when I turned it on, but I had a good time with it, despite the reputation I found out it had earned.

Pharaoh's Curse (1957)
Trouble besets a dig on a pharaoh's tomb, and it becomes clear something strange is going on once the mummy vanishes and a member of the crew begins sucking the blood out of everybody.
I started watching this, and then halfway through realized that several scenes looked familiar.  I went back and checked, and I saw this one back in 2014.  I didn't review it then, which probably didn't help me remember much, but then, considering I'm pushing roughly 400 or so films over a decade that I've only seen once, I'm probably going to forget I watched a few unless they were really memorable.  That said, its not a bad movie considering it was made for roughly $0, if the director's reputation is to be believed, but it's also unremarkable.  Some good mood-setting shots, but the monster isn't particularly threatening and the explanation behind the goings-on is a little far-fetched (as in, why such an elaborate plot in the first place?), but I can see why I didn't recognize this one until I got further in...it's nothing special.

[Charles Castle]

6. October 10 - Psycho III
https://forum.rifftrax.com/index.php/topic,5210.msg1041931.html#msg1041931

[WhyDontTheyLook]

Mon 10/9: My Bloody Valentine (2009) - Ten years after a miner goes around killing people in a mine, the son of the family that owns the mine comes back, and the carnage starts up again. A 'summer break' movie from Jensen Ackles, and one of the better horror remakes of the aughts. Some nice bloody mayhem in this one. (Tubi)

Tue 10/10: Film is Pwn: Moon of the Wolf (1972) - A creepy and cheesy werewolf movie set in a small Louisiana town. Film is Pwn delivers a good, if not great, riff of this one. (VOD iriff: https://www.rifftrax.com/iriff/film-is-pwn-presents-moon-of-the-wolf-vod )

Wed 10/11: Book of Blood (2020) - Fair adaptation of three of the stories from Clive Barker's "Books of Blood." I believe this was originally going to be an anthology series, before it got truncated into being an anthology movie. Barely a patch on Barker's work, but has some good moments. (Hulu)

Thu 10/12: Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023) - Not that any of the Pet Sematary movies/remakes have been classics in my book, but this manages to slide under even that mediocre bar. They tried switching it up some, at least, but that's all I can say for it. (Prime)

[Charles Castle]

6. October 11 - Popcorn (1991)
https://forum.rifftrax.com/index.php/topic,5210.msg1041935.html#msg1041935

[SJP]

11: Hellboy (2019)
Hellboy must defeat a resurrected Witch Queen with a medium and another BPRD agent, but to do so, he will need to understand the legacy of King Arthur.
Firstly, this was 18% on Rotten Tomatoes?  Sure, it's not a fantastic movie, but this is well above "Lycan Colony" levels.  It's crime is that it's essentially retelling the plot of the original Ron Perlman movie with (more) CG blood and an R rating (which come on, CG blood and one character dropping F bombs constantly does not an R rating really make; this is an R rating as envisioned by a 13-year-old, which ironically makes it more PG-13 than the original movies).  Harbour is fine, and the monster encounters are interesting in concept, but the visuals are just so LAZY.  The giant fight, which should be spectacular, looks faker than 1980s stuff because you can tell Harbour is greenscreened into either an empty field somewhere in England or a completely fake CG landscape, and perspective is so weird-looking as he runs around.  I don't think it deserves to be considered so awfully (it admittedly is going to be compared to Del Toro's two movies, which are a tough act to compare to), but it's definitely not great.

12: Dark Tower (1987)
Something paranormal is murdering people in an office building in Spain, and a contractor who happens to be mildly psychic is trying to figure out why.
The movie itself is slow and fairly predictable once you know where the plot is going (very hard to be surprised when you have literally one suspect to choose from); the more interesting stuff is the people involved.  Kevin McCarthy shows up at the end for about five minutes to be Kevin McCarthy, American Werewolf in London's Jenny Agutter plays the sultry architect/former architect's wife, and the most surprising, the writer of the film is Ken Widerhorn.  If you don't know him, you probably should, since this gig introduced him to the producer, which led to them working on making Return of the Living Dead II together, with Wiederhorn as director.  How much you like that movie is probably mostly based in nostalgia, but Wiederhorn's sense of humor doesn't really show up until the second half, and there is a great scene where a professor in the supernatural tries to speak with the ghost and ends up sliding into a monologue about how his colleagues don't show him respect.  Otherwise pretty skippable.

13: Cry of the Banshee (1970)
Vincent Price plays evil Vincent Price, a 15th century lord whose desire to rid the area of witchcraft ends up being much more deadly than if he'd left well enough alone.
I'm torn on this one.  The story is just OK, Price is surprisingly restrained, and all the gentry being a bunch of evil jerks who have their way with women is a little much (though that may be just because I recently listen to Pillars of the Earth where all the same crap happens and I'm just overloaded on medieval chicanery), but in the way I didn't care for the visuals in Hellboy, damn, this movie makes $50 look like a million bucks.  Especially in the begining of the movie, this movie has incredible cinematography, and maybe it's the film stock or something, but the movie looks more like it was filmed in the mid-80s than something on the tail end of the 60s.  This movie had to have been a low budget production, but it doesn't look that way, to its great credit.

14: Destroyer (1988)
A gigantic serial killer is put in the electric chair.  It doesn't work.  Years later, a movie crew filming at the decommissioned prison find out exactly by how much.
Ah.  I've been waiting for something that's pure schlock.  Starring the late Lyle Alzado as the serial killer (who is intimidating, but not scary, until the scene where he eats hair...hair, for Pete's sake!), this is an 80s trash fest that has it all: decent if minor gore, Anthony Perkins (who actually shows up for more than 5 minutes, amazingly), electronic music, and pointless nudity (which is amusingly enough satirized, as the movie crew points out, "It's the 80s, everyone's naked, Nicholson, Streep..." which would be a stronger point if it were in a smarter movie than this).  Nothing spectacular, but fun for what it is.
Of bonus note to aspiring filmmakers...you know, when you want to make your killer seem dangerously unkillable...don't make your leads get up just as easily as he does after they've been beaten senseless.  It makes everyone else who was murdered offscreen seem really, really incompetent.

[Edward J Grug III]

October 10 - Truth or Dare?: A Critical Madness (With Rifftrax). WTF

[Edward J Grug III]

October 12 - Diabolique. Beautiful, dark and atmospheric - A fantastic French thriller/horror movie set in a boarding school run by a horrible, abusive headmaster. His wife and his mistress plot a murder. Strongly recommended, has Hitchcock vibes for sure.

[Edward J Grug III]

October 15 - The 'Burbs. First watch in over a decade. The movie is fantastically put together, and I had forgotten how fun Tom Hanks used to be. Probably should have got my hands on more Dante for this month.