October Horror Movie a Day 2012

[SJP]

Eesh.  Just realized how late it really was in the month, and how many I have to make up per day if I want to get 50 movies in total in.  Guess that means more movies that I know and love so I can do other things than watch every second of every movie with rapt attention..but as for the last two days (in short, short versions since there's 8 of them)...

Kairo (Pulse)
I like the atmosphere of this movie, and the creepy death scene about a quarter of the way in, but I just do not find this movie scary.  It has a lot of good scenes and I like that it is trying to be smart and philosophical, but I do not find it as horrifying as a lot of people I know say it is.  I still recommend it, but you may see it a lot more creepy than I did, is all.

The Horde
French zombie film.  Nonsensical and nihilist, but kind of fun in its way.  And the major zombies in this movie just do not die without brutality normally reserved for a superhero flick.  If this movie did not set a record for most times a solitary zombie was shot without actually killing it (with squibs galore), it came damn close.

Angst
I probably would have appreciated it more if I could have understood the narration a lot more coherently (I got some of the jist from interpreting the Spanish subtitles via my years of French, and a fat lot of good it did me in the end anyway), but for a movie that is essentially an hour and a half snuff film, it works in a lot of very dark humor.  The wheelchair scene(s) especially reminded me of early Peter Jackson-type 'splatstick.'  That, and thanks to Mitchell and Webb, I now dub any time someone has the camera attached to a person and filming them the "Sir Digby Chicken Caesar" cam, and I can't help but laugh when I see it used, which this movie did a LOT.

Creature
Now, when it comes to ripping off Alien films, this has a LOT more in common with Alien than Alien did with It!  Has some pretty impressive face-tearing effects, and it has the guy who played Ferris Bueller's dad in it, but one in a long line of mostly unmemorable deadly alien flicks from the early 80s.  Not without its charm, I wouldn't say it's a classic.

Black Christmas
The original, not the crap remake.  Still holds up very well, even though it's been awhile since I've seen it.  If you've never heard about it other than the title, than I won't spoil anything for you...this is a movie I went into pretty blind and was thankful I did.

Night of the Ghouls/Bride of the Monster
Took in an Ed Wood double feature to prepare for Birdemic.  Bride of the Monster is delightfully incompetent, but Night of the Ghouls is worth watching for probably being the best Wood would ever make.  It was within his budget, the writing isn't quite as bad as it normally is, and some of the actors actually appear to be trying.  It's still not GOOD, but compared to Bride it's practically genius.  That does mean it doesn't have such memorable dialogue as "The police don't believe in monsters.  This is the twentieth century!"  "Don't be too sure!  About monsters, that is."

Tales of Terror
I really don't know how I missed this one.  Vincent Price headlines three (loosely based on) Edgar Allan Poe stories, along with Peter Lorré and Basil Rathbone and directed by Corman.  Probably its biggest problem is that, like nearly every other adaptation before or since, it spends way too much time on The Black Cat, with that story about 45 minutes to the other two's 15 minute and 25 minute, respectively.  I don't what it is about the Black Cat that gives directors the "Let's stretch this thing out as long as possible" hard-on, but this version is no different.  However, Price is awesome in all three stories, so it's worth a look.  And even with what I said about the Black Cat, Price makes about 30 different..."Price"-less facial expressions in it, which are definitely worth watching.

[SJP]

Also, can somebody point me to where "Wingscraft 2: Wings of Hauserness" came from?  It never got added to my list, so I don't know if I missed it or if it's all in good fun.  If I missed it, I have some ground to make up...

[Compound]

Also, can somebody point me to where "Wingscraft 2: Wings of Hauserness" came from?  It never got added to my list, so I don't know if I missed it or if it's all in good fun.  If I missed it, I have some ground to make up...

I made that one up after noting that Mr. Hauser kept appearing in things.  Not a real one.

[Compound]

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972)

...I'm going to find the poster who suggested the guys riff this one and hit him. Or her. Not really sure of the gender.

Oh, my. 90 minutes of early 70s British folk yelling at each other. Not the charming British folks like Wodehouse would write about. These are basically (Old) Jersey Shore types. But in the late 1800s. It's like a Kate Beaton Jersey Shore, I guess. Oh, and then the werewolves show up in the last few minutes.

Not recommended. Not sure if it'd be a good riff either since I spent most of the movie hating the characters.

[JimJ]

Movie #35: Dracula (1931)

Somehow I'd manage to not see this until now.  I really enjoyed it.  Lugosi is great as Dracula and the film was really well done and deserves it's classic status.  4/5

Movie #36: Mutant (1984) with Rifftrax

Enjoyable, though cheesy, 80's horror, made much better by the great riff.  2.5/5

Movie #37: The Devil's Carnival (2012)

This was....different.  It's made by the same people that did Repo! The Genetic Opera, which I never got around to seeing.  I kind of enjoyed it, I guess.  It was just really bizarre and not what I was expecting.  It's a musical, and I liked some of the songs (some others not so much).  My favorite song was the one that was cut from the actual film and put in the end credits.  For a movie that was made on a really tiny budget, it was pretty well done.  3/5

[Compound]

Okay, just watched a scene where Christian Slater was implied to be masturbating.

Yeah, that qualifies as horror.

[JimJ]

Movie #38: Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) with live Rifftrax

Terrible movie, great live riff.  Had a great time, as did the rest of my theater.  1/5

[SJP]

I agree about Birdemic.  I had not seen it going into it, and had no idea how bad it turned out to be.  It actually changed my opinion about another movie I watched today.  Not by MUCH, but it did.

As for the last movies I watched...

Donovan's Brain
Walter Donovan, rich businessman, dies in a plane crash...at least, most of him does.  His brain is rescued by a benevolent scientist working in the field of...well, "Keeping Brains Alive" studies.  Unfortunately, the good scientist's work backfires as the brain gains psychic powers, and the less-than-pleasant Donovan mind controls the people around him in order to avoid being charged with tax fraud...with maybe a murder or two along the way.  It's much better than it sounds, a clever and funny '50s charmer.

Hypothermia
Turns out this was directed by the same guy who made "The Off Season," one of the worst films I've ever seen (no, not the Hume Cronyn Santa movie, it's another one), and thankfully this tale of a monster living under the ice attacking two families is MUCH more watchable.  Sure, its dialogue is stupid, the monster looks like someone in a hang-gliding lycra body suit with a cheap mask (but is tastefully shot only in quick cuts to make it less obviously noticeable), and in the end it has no point, but at least it's short and has a few good gore effects.  Skippable, but watchable if there's nothing else on.

The Uninvited
I had not planned on watching this, but my first choice had scratches on the disc that needed buffing out before I could watch it.  And man, when you can lay out an entire plot just by reading the blurb on the back of the box...
"With a twist ending, two sisters invest-...oh, God, one of them is a ghost, a fake, or a hallucination by the main character."  And yes, that's exactly what happens, and obviously so when you see the one sister get ignored by everyone and conveniently leave the room when conversation starts.  People have been milking the Tom Tryon train for a LOOONG time, haven't they?
You just know it ain't gonna be good.  It has a few cool atmospheric moments, but it's just mostly Dullsville with dumb character decisions until you get to the obvious ending.

Invaders from Mars (1986)
I have fond childhood memories of the first 25 minutes and then the last 5 minutes of this movie, because somehow I always ended up missing the majority of it when it was on TV.  Now I've seen the whole thing...and it really wasn't as good as I thought it would be.  It's obviously played for campy laughs, and it has a few of them, but the movie is more interested in loosely connected action scenes with special effects that don't hold up well today than making a story worth watching.  I think it was about this time that people realized Tobe Hooper either got lucky on Texas Chainsaw Massacre or was starting to lose his touch, since most of this seems to be 'Poltergeist-lite' and it just doesn't work as well.  It gives me the same sort of pained feeling when I watch "90s and later" John Carpenter films...that feeling that you know a master is never going to re-capture that magic they used to weave so well.

Howling 3: The Marsupials
Oh, God.  Just...oh, god.  Anyone who has ever seen the Highlander series crap out needs to remember that at least the people on those tried to get the franchise going again.  Christopher Lee had no need to apologize for what he did in Howling II...at least he wasn't in this.  An utterly toothless, trying very hard to be funny collection of nearly unrelated scenes all somehow taking place in Australia is a failure on nearly every level.  All I'd ever really seen of this is the fake movie-in-the-movie "They Came from Uranus," where you see a deliberately terrible werewolf effect take place.  I didn't realize that effect was as good or BETTER than the actual transformation scenes.  And despite being nearly bloodless, this somehow got a PG-13 rating, and there's quite a bit of nudity in it...some of it involves wolf nipples, I know, but I still don't know how it got by the censors.  I saw a couple of bad movies this month, but this is the only one I wanted to end, and even at only 93 minutes it just wouldn't.  Avoid, avoid, avoid at all costs.  This is the kind of film that retroactively makes the original BETTER, since it only serves to show us how lucky we were to have Joe Dante in the early 80s (and who also got John Carpenter syndrome when he hit the 90s, though I haven't seen The Hole yet to see if he's been redeemed).

Let the Right One In
And oh, God, thank you for following Howling 3 with this.  This is the Swedish version, and it is the masterpiece I've heard it to be.  Full of depth, wit, charm, and enough vampire fun when it looks like it could get boring.  It seems like the plot does get a little lost along the way until the ending, but the character-driven ride getting there is worth the wait.  It's really hard to describe a vampire horror movie as heartwarming, but this pulls it off.  I'm actually interested in seeing the American remake after hearing it's as good or better than this one, since that's a tough act to pull off.

The Phantom of the Opera (1989)
Robert Englund just can't get away from Freddy-esque makeup, can he?  A so-so adaptation...the acting's decent enough, but the violence almost seems like it was thrown in to get an R rating instead of sitting comfortably in the story.  Not bad, but not great...if you're looking for 19th century gorey hijinks, Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd is a better bet. (Phantom is actually what I was planning to watch when I was forced to watch Uninvited, and this film was pretty much guaranteed to be better, which may have colored my perception a bit).

Sssssss!
Really only watched it because a site claimed it was technically a Body Horror, and I didn't want to resort to Cronenberg to check that off, since pretty much everyone does in the end.  But the movie was actually sort of fun...if you actually aren't waiting for the snake monster to show up.  That only really happens in the last fifteen minutes, and the ending is less a sucker punch than a slap to the face.  But the snake handling scenes (done without puppets except for one or two shots) are actually quite impressive, and Reb Brown not only makes his acting debut, he does it with his trademarked shouting, which is worth the price of admission alone.  Just know that the ending is more "Huh?" than "Ah" and you'll get through it fine.

Birdemic
Since I'm already rambling, all I'll say is this made me glad Howling 3 was actually shot on film stock.  That one thing alone raised Howling 3 a very large step above Birdemic.  How a director can show traffic calmly and obviously passing by during the Apocalypse and get his film into any theater in the world is mindboggling.  Mike, Kevin, and Bill almost didn't need to be there, but I'm glad they were.

[Compound]

Dark Harvest 2: The Maize

After a precognition that his daughters were in trouble, a man heads to a corn maze only to be confronted by a pair of ghosts and a psychopath.

Well, I rented this as it showed up on IMDB's list of bottom 100 films and honestly? I can't see why. It's not a great film, but there's nothing there that really would cause it to be ranked near Manos or Birdemic. It's just a rather low budget film with slightly bad acting.

[JimJ]

Movie #38: Nightmare at Noon (1988) with Rifftrax

I thought this was a much worse movie than Mutant, which I found kind of enjoyable for it's 80's cheese.  This was more dull.  I also didn't like this riff as much as that one.  I may need a rewatch though, as I hadn't gotten much sleep and ended up pausing it for about an hour and a half nap halfway through.  1.5/5

Movie #39: From Beyond (1986)

Now this is what I'm talking about!  Great, over the top, gorefest from the makers of one of my favorites, The Re-Animator.  Jeffery Combs stars in this one as well, along with Ken Foree from Dawn of the Dead.  Really liked this one.  4/5

[Compound]

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Not bad, but the bad history hurts us. It burns us. It wasn't as bad as, say, Young Einstein, but it's the equal of, say, Bill & Ted.

[SJP]

The Manster

This goes great on a double bill with "Donovan's Brain."  Both are laugh riots, but not in the "Man, is this movie bad" sort of way, but in the way a child says something completely ridiculous without realizing it...both are movies that are silly in premise, but quite endearing in the way they are presented.  Also, somebody gets brutally murdered for no reason at the 35 second mark...not bad for a 50s film.  Plot goes a reporter in Japan, whose been estranged from his wife because of his overseas assignment, is about to head home when he gets a chance to interview the reclusive Dr. Suzuki, who promptly drugs and injects the poor fellow with his serum to encourage fresh strains of mutation and evolution.  This eventually leads to the reporter growing a second head and murdering people.  Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but it's really very entertaining, and the split-off scene towards the end is handled very well with the clever use of a tree.  Essentially, this is Sssssss, but without Reb Brown and better plotting and pacing.  Man, I've seen a lot of movies like that this year, now that I think about it.

Silent Hill: Revelation

My review should be going live on Cinemanerdz fairly soon, but I think I can safely say this almost contains more exposition than a Metal Gear Solid entry...and just as unnecessary.  What sucks is this was supposed to be my 3D entry, and the theater movie times lied to me.  Even though the time said a 3D show, I only saw the 2D.  Guess the Fright Night remake will have to suffice.

[Johnny Unusual]

Silent Hill: Revelation

My review should be going live on Cinemanerdz fairly soon, but I think I can safely say this almost contains more exposition than a Metal Gear Solid entry...and just as unnecessary.  What sucks is this was supposed to be my 3D entry, and the theater movie times lied to me.  Even though the time said a 3D show, I only saw the 2D.  Guess the Fright Night remake will have to suffice.

Boy, were you not missing much.

[Compound]

Zombiethon (1986)

A quite boring film comprised of clips from various zombie films. Unfortunately, due to when it was made, that mostly meant clips from various low rent Italian zombie films and something from Ted V. Mikels. The Italian films are a bit too high on the nudity and gore scale for my tastes, and Ted V. Mikels is Ted V. Mikels. Not anywhere near as entertaining as, say, It Came From Hollywood. And while these days, you'd be able to toss in clips from dozens of zombie films from Dead Snow to Slither to Motorcross Zombies from Hell, with this if you've seen one naked woman brutally mutilated by Italian zombies, you've seen them all.

[JimJ]

Movie #40: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

I usually find silent movies pretty hard to get into, but this was a great, unsettling story, and I really loved the ending. 3.5/5