Horror Movie a Day: October 2011

[Relaxing Dragon]

#13 - Frozen

What a piece of shit. 6.3 stars on IMDB?!? Am I missing a joke or something?I should've gone with my first instinct and turned it the hell off. The premise had some promise, but the acting and story execution is so lame, it ruins any chance this movie had to be decent. Oh my god, the acting! Simply atrocious. The characters are so unlikeable that you find yourselves rooting for the wolves. This movie doesn't even deserve what I've written about it.

GRADE: D-

I find a the divide between the lovers and haters for this film fascinating. That is, I'm one of those folks who enjoyed it, including (and even especially) the characters and how they were played. I found them to be... authentic, is the word I'm searching for I think (and in a good way). Go figure.

The line between an interesting character and an irritating one seems to be a thin one, and one that varies in location from person to person

[SJP]

My slightly long-winded review of the new The Thing, as reposted from somewhere else. I wrote this before I read any other reviews, to try and keep it all me and my fanboyish mind:

My review still isn't up yet, but I think it's safe to say there's great irony in not only are the movies very similar, but so are all the reviews.  Everything's a duplicate!  THE THING IS HERE!

Anyway, today's movie: Isle of the Dead (1946).  A Val Lewton Production.  If that name means nothing to you, find a way to see one of them.  Active in the 1940s (and sadly died of a heart attack in the early 50s), Lewton was hired by RKO Studios and given the most scandalous B-Movie titles to work with: Isle of the Dead!  The Body Snatcher!  Cat People!  Curse of the Cat People!  I Walked with a Zombie!  From these titles, they wanted him to make low budget movies to rake in a profit.

He got them a profit, but not how they intended.  Working mostly with director Mark Robson and occasionally with Robert Wise, Lewton turned these schlock titles into splendid, intelligent shockers where you are never quite sure if the supernatural is at work or simply reality.  Basically, Lewton was a man who could take crap and make gold out of it, and all of his productions are worth seeing.

This one is a sort of take on the Fall of the House of Usher, where Boris Karloff (not playing the villain, oddly enough) is a Greek general who takes a reporter with him to an island where his wife was buried.  Once there, they find that plague has broken out, and no one is allowed to leave.  Soon the general wonders if the plague is simply scientific, or if he can believe the words of a superstitious local, that the deaths are the result of a vampire-like spirit that inhabits the bodies of the unwary while they sleep.  Soon, people's faith in science, religion, and their own self-worth is put to the test as the bodies start piling up and a young girl looks like she might be responsible.

Fantastic work all around.  Even if you don't care much for black and white horror, Lewton's productions are some of the very best, regardless of genre, and worth watching for the mind games they play.

[Relaxing Dragon]

My slightly long-winded review of the new The Thing, as reposted from somewhere else. I wrote this before I read any other reviews, to try and keep it all me and my fanboyish mind:

My review still isn't up yet, but I think it's safe to say there's great irony in not only are the movies very similar, but so are all the reviews.  Everything's a duplicate!  THE THING IS HERE!

The most amusing part of the movie seems to be the many intros, variations, and puns people are coming up with for a "it's trying to make a copy, be a perfect imitation" joke in their reviews. It's quite a sight

[JimJ]

Movie #14: The Wicker Man (Nic Cage version) with RiffTrax

One of the best "so bad it's good" movies IMO.  This movie is so random and bizarre, especially considering that it's a studio film with a big name actor and a decent director.  It also features one of the great crazy Nic Cage performances.  I still LMAO every time I hear "How'd it get burned? Howditgetburnedhowditgetburned!!!!??!?!?"  The riff is pretty great too, and it really helps in getting through the first half of the movie which is pretty boring.

Film: 3/5  (Would rank it lower but it still entertains the hell out of me.  It totally fails as a horror film but makes up for it with tons of unintentional humor).
Riff: 4/5

[Compound]

Okay, 14 days in and I'm at 49 titles. I keep having to disqualify films as they aren't meeting my criteria for a horror film (namely that IMDB doesn't call it one.) A few notes:

So far, I've somehow seen 3 films with Joshua Jackson in them. I'm not quite sure why he keeps showing up in my movie selections.

I've stopped keeping track, but I suspect that I'm well past the 100 deaths mark.

Worst film seen so far? Probably Vampires Suck.  Worst serious film? Wicker Man.

I'll start the second half of the run tomorrow, and I suspect that the quality will sharply drop soon. I've got titles like Mulva: Zombie Asskicker, Malibu Beach Vampires, Silo Killer, and Sorority House Vampires from Hell queued up.

[SJP]

Black Sabbath (1963)

Anthology movie by Mario Bava, with in-between segments starring Boris Karloff (who also plays a bad guy in one of the stories).  The three stories are as follows:
A Drop of Water - Nurse is called to prepare a patient for burial, a patient known for fortunetelling.  Nurse sees a nice ring on the corpse's finger and takes it.  What follows is either the heavy hand of guilt or supernatural revenge.  Either way, as fake as it looks today, the corpse's face is damn scary.
The Telephone - Woman gets a call from someone she knows is dead...and things go downhill from there.  More about this story in a minute.
The Wurdulak - Boris Karloff claims he has killed a horrible, vampire-like monster that has been terrorizing the eastern European countryside, yet no one seems to question the fact that he has become mega-creepy and now has blue skin.  The family and their recent guest start to fall apart quickly as the monster is, to everyone's surprise, not as dead as they thought.

The film is available in two versions: one cut for the English-speaking market and one in Italian.  While it appears that the cast is speaking in English (most likely because they had heavy Italian accents), the Italian one, which I didn't see, is more definitive, because not only is the music a lot better, but because "The Telephone" actually makes sense.  In the English version, it is a ham-handed attempt to tell a ghost story, which doesn't work because the 'ghost' is clearly flesh and blood.  In the Italian version, it is NOT supernatural at all.  Why the change?  Because a subplot between the two main leads in the story is a lesbian relationship, which was considered by the American distributors to be a little too shocking for the era.  So, they cut out a few minutes of the movie and tried their best to still make it work somehow, which it doesn't.  However, I say the Italian version is MORE definitive, not JUST definitive, because we have Italian dialogue dubbed over people clearly speaking lines in English, including Boris Karloff, and some of the sound effects are apparently not quite as impressive as the English dub, so really we've ended up with two flawed versions of the movie.  Apparently, if a cut existed with the English dub, Italian music track, the missing "Telephone" footage, and a few segments of cut gore from "The Wurdulak," then the movie would be fine.

Either way, it's still decent.  And it's on streaming, if you think it's worth watching.

[JimJ]

Movie # 15: Re-Animator

Another long time favorite of mine.  Great gore, dark sense of humor.  It's a lot of fun.  4.5/5

[gojikranz]

watched deadspace tonight.  fairly ordinary alien ripoff.  the monster wasnt so well done but it did feature bryan cranston in a early role which was fun.

[D.B. Barnes]

#14 - Mutants
Maybe I'm a bit burned out on the zombie genre in general (although I recently watch the remake of Dawn of the Dead and loved it) but I found this movie pretty meh. There are some good deaths and the scenes involving the process of turning are well done. Unfortunately, after that it just gets kind of generic. It's an okay zombie movie. Nothing to write home about.

GRADE: C+


#15 - The Host

I dig Korean horror movies. On the surface, this is a creature feature, and that makes for cool horror tension and some good scares. But the most powerful aspect of the movie is the wonderfully-told story of a family struggling to reunite and survive. The characters are richly drawn and the performances are surprisingly good. There's also a fair amount of effective humor as well as some really sweet moments. It's a very emotional horror film, and quite good in my opinion. This CGI isn't exactly top-drawer, though.

GRADE: A-

[SJP]

The Wicker Man (1973)

Since everyone seems to have been watching the new one, I decided to sit down and watch the old one for the first time.

Interesting film.  I watched the "Extended Cut" which has some additional footage that helps set character and such, and what's great about it is that even though I went into it knowing what happens, it's the movie's sense of mystery that helps it work.  While the town is clearly up to something the whole time, it's interesting how it's set up that through the whole thing, they seem happy and generally pleasant and it's the hero police officer who is always getting into people's faces and trying to rile them up.  But unlike Cage's manic, infamous woman-punching performance, Edward Woodward acts believably and is still a likeable character.  Christopher Lee has good lines, as usual, but that's a given.  But what surprised me the most was that this is a musical.  Not in the sense that Les Miserables is a musical, but there's enough song moments here to qualify, and unlike most '60s/early '70s movies that throw in folk music numbers (cough cough Girl in Gold Boots cough cough), I actually LIKED these.  They're catchy and fun to listen to...except for the song about the corn.  Every time it played, it looked like an ad to come visit Scotland.

But for anyone who hasn't seen this one and HAS seen the Nicholas Cage one, it is actually possible to see children wearing animal masks and have it come off as innocent and very creepy simultaneously without wanting to bust out laughing.  No one need ask how it got burned; it's pretty self-explanatory.

EDIT: Just to mention, what Britt Ekland does DURING some of those music numbers is not why I like them, but it didn't hurt at all, either.   

[Compound]

In the Mouth of Madness

John Carpenter's homage to Lovecraft. Unfortunately, it falls apart in the last act and there's a number of eye rolling statements from Sam Neill throughout the film that end up making this one of the lesser Carpenter works. But that's not why I'm commenting here. Take a look at this guy:



Guess who that is. I'll give a hint. He doesn't like sand. Yep. Hayden Christensen.

[Relaxing Dragon]

I see that comment a lot, how Mouth of Madness starts to fall apart towards the end, but I just don't see it. I think it ramps up nicely, works with the whole meta nature of the movie. I mean, with a title like that, getting anything more coherent to finish the movie just wouldn't work.

Alright, here's my few for the last few days:

28 Weeks Later. This one starts out pretty promising. The concept fits and the military occupation and rebuilding of the country is something that I think looked really neat (I especially loved the snipers on the rooftops). The introduction of a character who can contract and carry the disease but not show symptoms is also a very interesting concept. The trouble starts when some shockingly stupid decisions get made, and I'm talking the sort that movies introduce just to further the plot despite making no actual sense in-universe. In this case, it's not posting one single guard in the easily-accessed, virus-ridden prisoner, and then taking all the healthy people and locking them in a small, poorly-lit, also poorly guarded room once the outbreak starts. Yeah, that was bound to end well. Anyway, once the head-palming moments get out of the way things pick up a bit, but by the end you're still stuck with some annoying kids and characters you haven't had enough time to get to know (in at least one case he disappears for long stretches of time, despite being pretty important). Overall not a bad movie, it being enjoyable enough, but definitely not in the same ballpark as the original.

Don't Go in the House. Guy goes several shades of nuts after his abusive mom dies, builds a flameproof room in his house, buys a flamethrower, and starts kidnapping women to "punish". One of those early 80s (very late 70s, actually) movies that House of the Devil wanted to be. Alright, this one's less Satanism Cults and more Psycho, but the idea is there. Not half bad either, with some decent acting and effects (well, the overlay-flame-thing doesn't always work, but the toasted corpses afterward do). I rather like the idea of the house, especially the flame room. All in all a pretty decent era flick.

I Saw the Devil. Man, those Koreans really know how to put a revenge thriller together. Here, a very skilled secret agent tracks down the very capable serial killer that killed his fiance, and starts to brutally mess with his life. Very dark, gritty, and well-executed, this is a damn fine movie for those who are fans of the revenge genre. Sure, it runs about twenty minutes longer than it should (though watching it again, I didn't feel it drag as much as I did the first time), and the standard "You can't become a monster to hunt a monster" message these movies have is pounded in (in fact that exact line is spoken out loud at one point), but it all still works really well. Helps that the main guy is so damn slick and cool to watch sometimes; he's just such a capable badass, questionable decision-making thought processes aside.

Putting the kills for The Thing down here as well, I forgot them the other day:
The Thing:
Favorite Things: As much as they still bug me, the transformations/Things did look pretty cool. All that body horror and tentacles and teeth and whatnot.They just didn't belong in a Thing movie. I said it before and I'll say it again, if this were any other property (or hell, even eased way up on being so slavishly devoted to the original) I'd be a lot more happy about it. Also, nitpick: What the hell was a British guy doing as the radio operator down there? I don't think they ever bothered to explain that one.
Death Count: 13

28 Weeks Later:
Favorite Bits: All the stuff related to the rooftop snipers (the main character up there being a just-barely-not-famous-yet Jeremy Renner) I really liked. The scene where they all have to start opening fire on the infected (first just confirmed infected, and then everyone down there, just to be sure) was especially effective. In fact, most of the military bits worked well, which is what made those moments of maximum-idiot-plot seem all the worse.
Death Count: 6 (just sticking to named characters here, trying to get into all the deaths during the chaos is a fool's errand)

Don't Go in the House:
Favorite Bit: That flame room. It's good stuff in there, as helped by the wicked cool flame suit. The ending is also nice; I'd say it copied from Maniac, but given that Maniac was released a few months after this movie I guess I'm going to have to call it a coincidence. Or maybe this sort of ending was common from the era.
Death Count: 4

I Saw the Devil:
Favorite Moment: It's actually a moment that made my Best Deaths list for the LOC, so I won't say it just yet in case it comes up there. Another moment I love is when the main dude tracks his prey down to another serial killers house (there's a lot of those psychos in this movie. The one killer just keeps running into them for some reason), and begins to hunt them just as they hunt him. Seeing him be so damn calm, collected, agile, and effective as he skitters around the house and delivers some hard punches and kicks... so damn brutal and cool.
Death Count: 6

[JimJ]

Movie #16: Deadtime Stories Volume 1

Oh, George Romero, your name being on a movie used to mean something. This was awful   Terrible acting and the stories were pretty lame. The last story, Housecall" was the only redeeming quality here, but it can't save the film from the first two. 1.5/5

[dignan]

Okay, so after soldiering relentlessly through the Friday the 13th movies like an unstoppable, single-minded...something, I decided to finally watch a few decent horror movies, and a few that were "eh."

Day 13: Near Dark
Day 14: Day of the Dead
Day 15: The Birds
Day 16: Pitch Black
Day 17: The Fog

[MrTorso]

I am gonna watch Friday the 13th part 7 tonight because I just met Kane Hodder!!!!!