October Horror Movie a Day 2013

[SJP]

The silent Frankenstein (1910) is about 12 minutes long.  Whether anyone wants to watch a silent film is another story.  But it is on Youtube.  Reason I thought of it:

Day 17: Frankenstein (1931)
It really is amazing how much less boring this is than Dracula.  Both films are the same length, but Frankenstein, for all its scenes of torch waving and silly expositional dialogue, is just far better made and much easier to watch.

Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) has been grave robbing in order to create life from death.  He succeeds, but because his hunchbacked assistant Fritz brought him the wrong kind of brain, the resulting behemoth is at turns frightened and malevolent, and eventually his rampage must be stopped.

Whether you like the classic Universal monsters or not, what I probably liked best about watching this was the Blu-ray restoration.  This movie is 82 years old now, and the love and care put into the clean-up was phenomenal.  It makes me sad seeing other films that can't get this sort of treatment...even My Bloody Valentine, only 32 years old now, has its deleted scenes look completely faded and damaged, when you'd think it would be at least possible to color correct them better than that without breaking the bank.  But that being said, the movie has really never looked or sounded better than it does now, probably even when it first showed in theaters.

RIFFABILITY: High in the first half, slightly lower in the second half.  There is a scene of some of the silliest exposition I have heard in a long time (to paraphrase, his fiancée is concerned about all the time he spends in his castle working on his experiments; we know this because she tells us so in the same way one would sound when saying the tea and biscuits hasn't turned out as well today as they normally do).

[Malt]

Day 17: Frankenstein (1931)
It really is amazing how much less boring this is than Dracula.  Both films are the same length, but Frankenstein, for all its scenes of torch waving and silly expositional dialogue, is just far better made and much easier to watch.

(Fixing Dracula) [Bela Lugosi ver]

What I do is: Watch the first half in it's original audio format. As soon as the camera enters the opera house and the music plays, turn on the additional soundtrack. You should hear the music begin when you See Dracula speaking to the maid. It's quite effective.

It makes a HUGE difference. It also fits in with the narrative/plot dividing the story into two pretty even halves.

I find if I start with the soundtrack on from the beginning it gets way too repetive. Also I think the silence builds tension properly during the first half, but the second half needs the music to support the action.

[Darth Geek]

Day 17: Frankenstein (1931)
It really is amazing how much less boring this is than Dracula.  Both films are the same length, but Frankenstein, for all its scenes of torch waving and silly expositional dialogue, is just far better made and much easier to watch.

(Fixing Dracula) [Bela Lugosi ver]

What I do is: Watch the first half in it's original audio format. As soon as the camera enters the opera house and the music plays, turn on the additional soundtrack. You should hear the music begin when you See Dracula speaking to the maid. It's quite effective.

It makes a HUGE difference. It also fits in with the narrative/plot dividing the story into two pretty even halves.

I find if I start with the soundtrack on from the beginning it gets way too repetive. Also I think the silence builds tension properly during the first half, but the second half needs the music to support the action.

I would suggest just watching it with the Hor-Riff-ic Productions riff. It's very funny.

[Malt]

Oct.15th-The Brain That Wouldn't Die (mst3k) - I'd seen about half of the actual movie before. Pretty good riffs. Funny ending with Dr. Forrester & Frank.
Oct.16th-Manos: The Hands of Fate (mst3k) - Crow's Torgo impersonation kills me every time, and the Torgo's Pizza bit was great as well.

Oct.17th-Earth vs The Spider (mst3k) - Wow, a great episode. Enjoyable and fun to watch, great host segments,  really funny riffs, and even the movie itself is semi watchable from time to time. Mike & Joel both on camera in the same scene. All this and a bonus short subject. This really seems like one of those 'perfect' episodes.
Oct.18th-Soultaker (mst3k)
Oct.19th-Hobgoblins (mst3k) - Wow, that movie was a real piece of shit. I don't think I could ever be on enough coke to make a film that bad.
Oct.20th-Revenge of the Creature (mst3k) - This isn't the first Creature from the Black Lagoon sequel I'd seen before, but this one had none of the charm or adventure that the original has. Good riffs from Mike & the bots though, loved the riffs during the cattle prod scene.
Oct.21st-House on Haunted Hill (Rifftrax) - I'd seen this movie a few times before and always trailed off somehwere and lost track of what's going on, but I found with the rifftrax audio I was actually more engaged with the plot. Loved it. Also really enjoyed the acoustics of the movie coming from the tv and the riffs coming from the stereo, but that's just a minor plus.

[SJP]

Oct. 18: Fright Night (1981)

I'm not exactly against the remake...it had fixed a few issues I had with the original, to be honest (as in, why in the world are they hanging out with Evil the whole time when they seem to hate his guts?)...but the big problem with the remake is how it misses the point of how this is to old hammy horror classics what Indiana Jones is to the 1930s serials.  That is, it's adding a modern sensibility to something the filmmakers used to love as kids, while the new film just sort of made another vampire movie with Colin Farrell as the bad guy.  That's not to say that the original is perfect and untouchable, but there's a sense of fun and charm that's missing from the update.

Charlie Brewster (William Ragsdale) is convinced his new neighbor is a vampire...a conviction confirmed when Dandridge comes into his house at night and tries to kill him in blatantly supernatural fashion.  Unfortunately, no one will believe him...not his girlfriend, not his best "friend" (the term loosely because they never act like they like each other except in rare instances), not his mother, not the cops, and not even late night movie host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall).  It isn't until his friends hire a down on his luck Peter to perform a vampire 'test' that confirms the reality that Charlie and his friends end up in serious trouble, and work to take down the vampire before he claims another victim.

Ok, the movie is a touch silly (intentionally and otherwise), but it still has nice effects in it (some MUCH better than others), and like the couple in People Under the Stairs, everyone knows exactly what kind of movie they are in and play it up nicely.  Even though the movie is a very slow burn (nobody other than Charlie realizes he's a vampire until maybe halfway through the movie, if even then), it's still an easy watch from beginning to end.  Is it really scary anymore?  Probably not...though the one melting scene is still pretty effective...but it's a very upbeat movie.  And the soundtrack is 80s-riffic.  Always a good capper.

RIFFABILITY: High.  I was doing it during the movie, I will admit.  I mean, come on, every establishing shot of the house proves a vampire lives there, and nobody gets it?

[Relaxing Dragon]

The Hole

For a film that plays squarely in the realm of young adult horror, Joe Dante's The Hole (2009) goes to some very dark places. I mean, this is a movie for people who grew up reading Goosebumps and watched movies like Poltergeist or Arachnophobia or Gremlins (natch) on long autumn Saturdays back when Reagan was president. Had this been made back then, this likely would have had the imprimatur of Amblin and Steven Spielberg. It might even have been directed by Dante himself. But this film is different from the films Dante made in those halcyon days: more introspective, more in touch with psychological horror than with the antic possibilities of cinema. It's more of a horror movie than of Dante's features since The Howling. That's a long stretch of time.

The story in The Hole finds single-mom Susan Thomas moving into a new house with her two sons, Dane and Lucas. The new house has a basement and in that basement is a trap door that has been padlocked shut. Bereft of things to do with themselves before the start of the school year, Dane and Lucas open the door only to find a bottomless pit. The pit is the proverbial abyss, and as the saying goes, the abyss gazes also into you. Soon, Dane, Lucas, and Julie, the girl next door, find themselves being tormented by their worst fears. For Lucas, this manifests itself as a sinister clown doll that mysteriously appears and disappears around the house. For Julie, it's the memory of a childhood accident and the death of her best friend. For Dane, it's the legacy of his abusive father. They tromp out to the edge of town to find answers from the house's previous owner, "Creepy" Carl, who has squatted in an old factory and lit the place with hundreds of lamps. He knows what's in the hole, and he tells them that it's seen them, and that it's coming for them. There's nothing for it, it seems, but for the kids to face up to their worst fears and get past them. That's not such an easy thing when those fears are real and utterly malign...

This was made on a budget in Canada and occasionally it shows. The scope of this film is narrower than in any of Dante's older films, which were sometimes downright apocalyptic. There's a shortage of recognizable faces in the film, too, though Teri Polo is familiar enough from her long TV career, while "Crazy" Carl is played by Bruce Dern. The three kids are played by Chris Massoglia, Nathan Gamble, and Haley Bennett, and they're all good. Dante has always had a knack with adolescent actors. The Hole was made in 3-D and you can occasionally catch Dante having fun with it, using old-school "thrusting things at the audience" compositions. What he hasn't done is indulge in a texture of cinematic allusions. Oh, Gorgo shows up on TV once, and the factory where Crazy Carl lives is named "Gloves of Orlac," and the evil clown seems like a direct reference to Poltergeist, but compared to his older films, this one is positively reticent.

Otherwise, The Hole follows a familiar pattern for Dante's films: he's a firm believer in showing the vacuity of middle America by letting the dragons into Eden and letting them wreck the place. In the past, he's skewered Christmas and corporatism and the early 1960s and conformity and authority. He's always believed in movies as a safety valve while growing up a misfit, but you don't get much of that here. I wonder if the long period between this film and his last has soured him on the healing power of movies. In any event, his eye for family dynamics is keen and it plays out here with a beautifully observed relationship between Dane and Lucas. Dante takes his time setting things up, and we've spent a third of the movie getting to know them by the time the film starts to turn the screws.

Dante used to be thought of as one of the young turks of 1970s horror filmmaking, but whatever sensibility that encompasses, the director is nothing if not adaptable. The horror beats during the film's long middle act occasionally play like Spielbergian variants of J-horror tropes, particularly the ghost girl who torments Julie. All of that gets blown apart in the film's finale, which sucks Dane and Lucas into the hole and thus, into Dane's private hell. This section of the film is pure Dante: an amalgam of Looney Tunes and The Twilight Zone (recalling the weird geometries of Dante's version of "It's a Good Life" from the 1982 film) but overlaid with deeper psychological resonance. This is the nightmare world of an abused child, complete with futile hiding places and an ogrish avatar of a brutal parent. This is territory that most makers of family-oriented thrillers would never go near, but Dante has always been the id hiding behind such films.

I'm pretty late in saying so, but excellent review here. I was very impressed when I saw this one. Dante has crafted a movie that works aces as a horror movie for the teen/just-above-tween age group, which is tricky to do when the phrase "teen horror" is something of an insult when it comes to genre pictures. It's pretty genuinely freaky at times, while always managing to be pretty fun (I managed to catch this in a theater, and the packed house ate it up). It also does a fine job of mixing childhood fears, combing both the irrational ones and the ones that are all too real.

Escape From Tomorrow. Yes, this is the one that was secretly filmed (guerrilla style) at Disneyland and Disneyworld. Which in and of itself is really quite a marvel, since the bulk of the movie (save for a few necessary greenscreen shots) take place in these crowded park scenes. Happily, the movie is also able to rise above the gimmick (as it were) as it crafts itself into a fascinating existential crisis picture. The movie focuses on a man who's on the last day of his vacation with his family at the park, and, following an early-morning phone call where he is somewhat abruptly fired from his job, slowly loses his mind. The relationship he has between each member of his family slowly deteriorates in various ways as the day goes on, while he simultaneously starts lusting after a pair of french teens he keeps running into (and eventually stalks). And then there's the strange woman with the magical amulet, the deadly virus going around, the horrors of the Epcot center that are linked to his past... a general hodge-podge of madness gripping him at the Happiest Place On Earth, all while he's surrounded by evil, grinning faces and a monochrome world so washed out with white it's like someone dumped a bucket of bleach in his eyes.

Yeah, it's a weird one. It gets a little jumbled here and there, and is sometimes unclear on exactly what it's indicting Disney for (co-opting real happiness for an illusion? Sweeping the horrors of life under the rug? Charging $8 for a soda?), but it's definitely a picture worth watching and examining.

[Malt]

Escape From Tomorrow. Yes, this is the one that was secretly filmed (guerrilla style) at Disneyland and Disneyworld. Which in and of itself is really quite a marvel, since the bulk of the movie (save for a few necessary greenscreen shots) take place in these crowded park scenes. Happily, the movie is also able to rise above the gimmick (as it were) as it crafts itself into a fascinating existential crisis picture. The movie focuses on a man who's on the last day of his vacation with his family at the park, and, following an early-morning phone call where he is somewhat abruptly fired from his job, slowly loses his mind. The relationship he has between each member of his family slowly deteriorates in various ways as the day goes on, while he simultaneously starts lusting after a pair of french teens he keeps running into (and eventually stalks). And then there's the strange woman with the magical amulet, the deadly virus going around, the horrors of the Epcot center that are linked to his past... a general hodge-podge of madness gripping him at the Happiest Place On Earth, all while he's surrounded by evil, grinning faces and a monochrome world so washed out with white it's like someone dumped a bucket of bleach in his eyes.

Yeah, it's a weird one. It gets a little jumbled here and there, and is sometimes unclear on exactly what it's indicting Disney for (co-opting real happiness for an illusion? Sweeping the horrors of life under the rug? Charging $8 for a soda?), but it's definitely a picture worth watching and examining.

I saw the poster for this and had a 'wtf?' moment, so now I know what it was I was looking at. Thanks for the review, I'll have to check it out when I get a chance.

At first glance it seems like David Koenig's Mouse Tales books turned into a fictional movie, which could be kinda cool.

[SJP]

Day 19: The Conjuring (2013)

Caught this today, but unfortunately my review will have to come later...just have enough time to post up my movie of the day at the moment.

EDIT: Ok, back.

I will say this up front: I did not find this movie scary.  I say this with all due respect to people who do.  My personal reason that I do not, and have never found, demonic possession and satanic cults frightening in film.  The Exorcist never bothered me, nor did The Omen.  This is a purely personal feeling; I don't know whether I just can't fathom how creepy it could be or what, but I attribute it more to being much more frightened by the likes of David Cronenberg films and the 'body horror' genre...as in, I'm less concerned about my mind being blanked out and something using my body to do crazy stuff than to be fully aware that something is slowly and horribly going wrong with me physically that I would be unable to stop.  This does not mean I didn't find the movie enjoyable; I'm not being contrarian, because I thought the movie was fun to watch.  I just didn't think it was the scariest movie I'd ever seen because I generally just don't find things that happen in these kinds of movies frightening.  To compare, I thought The House of the Devil a bit more tense because the satanic cult stuff was actually less of a plot element than watching Tom Noonan trying to sound nice when you KNOW he's up to something.

The Perrons move into their new home, only to find doors slamming, their things being knocked around the walls, and rooms boarded up for no reason.  As things steadily get worse, they realize there is an entity in the house that plans them harm, and they call upon the Warrens, two paranormal investigators, to see about getting the house back under control before they suffer much further.

While the movie does have a few hokey elements (a few scenes of the Warrens where they are essentially having the "we're the most wonderful people in the world!" chats with themselves), most of it is effective and the movie goes along at a good pace.  It certainly is an entertaining watch, and...
I actually liked how despite its rating, it was very 'Poltergeist,' in the way that it pulled off horror without anybody getting killed in the whole movie...
...but the doll thing did seem a little unnecessary.  Granted, that doll is possibly the creepiest thing ever put in a motion picture (the one from Poltergeist included), but besides adding about 10 minutes to the movie, it didn't really figure into the plot at large.  Hell, make a whole movie about it!  Brad Dourif has shown us it's possible.

Overall, decent flick, but as a guy whose more unnerved with faces being peeled off and crap like that, I didn't find it as frightening as most of the reviewers.  Still recommend it, though.  And WAY better than any of the Paranormal Activities.

RIFFABILITY: Medium.  The suspense is done effectively enough to make getting in words edgeways tough, but some of the dialogue lends itself well.  Plus, seeing Ron Livingston as Mr. Perron, despite him playing the role completely straight and well enough, did make me wonder if the demons were mad that he didn't file those TPS reports properly.

[d00hickey]

Day 19: The Conjuring (2013)

Caught this today, but unfortunately my review will have to come later...just have enough time to post up my movie of the day at the moment.

I was a little disappointing in The Conjuring. A recent horror movie I really liked was Sinister if you haven't seen it.

[Malt]

I was a little disappointing in The Conjuring.

Don't feel bad, I could tell you were trying.

[Charles Castle]

More from my October haul:

Event Horizon

Back when Event Horizon (1997, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson) was first in theaters, a friend of mine came back from a first-night showing and absolutely raged at how stupid it was. Such was his vitriol that I eventually passed on it. I never did catch up to it in the years since. Now I find myself approaching it with apprehension. The premise--which my friend detailed with the loving umbrage of the truly offended--is genuinely silly: The first interstellar spacecraft--equipped with a gravity drive that folds space and allows it to use an extra-dimensional shortcut to bypass the speed limit imposed by relativity--mysteriously vanishes on its first voyage. Seven years later, it reappears in orbit around Neptune, having, literally, gone through hell. Yes, hell. H-E-double toothpicks. As a literal place.

The story here finds starship engineer Dr. William Weir taking a ship out to Neptune, where his brainchild, the Event Horizon, has reappeared after seven years beyond our spacetime. His ride is the Lewis and Clark, a search and rescue ship helmed by no-nonsense Captain Miller, and crewed by a seasoned group of rescue techs. Weir's mission is top secret. The fact that the Event Horizon is equipped with an experimental faster than light drive is the reason for the secrecy, also the last transmission from the ship, which bodes ill. Once they arrive and begin exploring, things become dire. The Event Horizon sends out a gravitic pulse shortly after the Lewis and Clark docks and once our heroes begin exploring, ripping a hole in the hull. The Event Horizon itself can only sustain life for twenty hours, so repairing their trip home becomes of paramount importance. They decamp to the Event Horizon while this is ongoing, only to discover that the ship is alive, that it is feeding our heroes their darkest nightmares, and that the gravity drive itself, powered by a black hole at its core, is a gateway to somewhere... else...

This is basically Hellraiser in space. And, yes, I know that the fourth Hellraiser movie was also Hellraiser in space. "In space," is a Sargasso where horror franchises go to die and drift, derelict, on the shifting tides of the back shelves of video stores and, these days, in the back pages of streaming video. Event Horizon trumps these movies by omitting the franchise beforehand. I will say this, it's probably a more creative plot than yet another Alien rip-off, though this doesn't entirely avoid that trap, either, given that it was shot by Adrian Biddle, who was a cameraman on Alien and the Director of Cinemtography on Aliens. So it looks like Alien(s) in spite of itself. It also borrows from Aliens the idea of a time-limit as plot motivation and from Alien the idea of a distress call as dire warning. Event Horizon is another movie suffering from The Curse of the Krell: its monsters are monsters from the id, made flesh by the force at the center of the film. The gravity drive generator? It's one part Hellraiser puzzle box, one part Krell planetary machinery. The line of descent for this runs through Solaris, of which, this film plays like a pulp fiction rethinking.

Okay, maybe this isn't that creative after all.

This is a film that eschewed American production resources. It was made entirely in the UK using British effects houses and production designer resources. There is certainly a different "feel" to the texture of this film, even if the production designers are looking back at films created by IML or Digital Domain for inspiration. The sets are more intricately decorated than an equivalent film from, say, James Cameron. The look of the film is downright baroque. And, certainly, its horror set-pieces are more thoroughly nasty than what Americans were making at the time. The funniest conceit from the production designers is placing the Event Horizon into the upper atmosphere of Neptune so that clouds and thunder and lightning can rage outside the ship and then designing its med bay to look like the nave of a cathedral, stone arches and all, turning the whole enterprise into a proper full-dress Gothic. One only misses the rattling of chains in a dungeon, but it covers that in the endgame. The chamber with the gravity drive, I've already mentioned, is designed to recall the puzzle boxes from Hellraiser, but this film has it's own version of Pinhead, too, and spills gallons--nay, tanker trucks--of blood. Allegedly, Clive Barker was a consultant on this film, so it's not terribly surprising.

The actors are good, though they are made to inhabit characters who are stupider than they are. Sam Neill is Dr. Weir, a character who knows more than he's telling. Laurence Fishburn plays Miller, and he's the very model of a tough space ship captain. Also in the cast are Kathleen Quinlan, Sean Pertwee, Joelly Richardson, and Jason Isaacs. The supporting characters have been conceived by the filmmakers as stand-ins for the audience, ignorant of the theories behind Weir's faster than light drive in order to give the movie an excuse to explain it. This is absurd on its face, given that these characters all live and work in space, so it's not like they're ignoramuses--or it's not like they should be. On the other hand, Weir's reluctance to explain anything goes to this film's conception of him as a mad scientist, particularly late in the film. For a film that relies on the gee-whiz elements of science fiction for its best effects, this sure does distrust science. There are places that mankind was not meant to go, this film intimates in classic science horror fashion, but it resorts to an overtly religious ideation as a check on mankind's progress. Trespass on god's domain and you're going to hell.

Did I mention that this film is insultingly stupid? Well, there you are.

********

A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Master

I lost track of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies somewhere in the mid-eighties. I saw the first three in the theater and then never got around to another one until New Nightmare. I'm not really a fan of the series, though I do like the New Nightmare quite a bit--I think it's Wes Craven's best film, actually. In truth, I haven't even thought much about the series in the years since. So the fourth entry, A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Master (1988, directed by Renny Harlin) was terra incognito for me. I'm hazy on which characters are held over from the third movie, but it doesn't matter much. They're all meat for the grinder.

The plot finds Kristen, one of the previous film's survivors, having ominous dreams that indicate that Freddy Krueger may still be out there, somewhere. She communicates this to her fellow survivors, to no avail. The final Elm Street kids are all killed in the end. Before she dies, Kristen pulls her friend, Alice into her dreams (a power established in the previous film) and bestows her powers on her. This draws Freddy's attentions, and he begins manipulating Alice in order to pull more kids into his domain. But Alice has a power that Freddy hasn't counted on: she assumes the powers of every kid that Freddy kills. A showdown is inevitable.

This movie is thin on plot. What plot there is exists as a framework for the dream sequences, many of which function more as pop-culture allusions than as the kinds of dreams that people actually have. This, of course, is the problem with this film. It's not scary. It's just going through the motions rather than plumbing the psychological traumas of adolescence. Even if you view this as a kind of superhero film--and there's some justification for that interpretation--it lacks the spectacle you would want from such a thing. And it's not like director Renny Harlin doesn't have an appetite for such things. He does. Like most of the people involved with this film, he's cashing a paycheck.

It's a mark of the series' decadence that it devolves to a power fantasy in which the protagonist has some wild talent rather than relying on mere humanity. The later slashers became so godlike in their abilities that this was a necessity if they were to keep to the formula rather than charge off into some more interesting direction. This is something the Friday the 13th films eventually adopt, as well. The exceptionalism of its heroine short circuits whatever path the earlier films might have had to the part of the unconscious that experiences horror. This was a problem with the ridiculousness of its villain from the second film onward, and with this film, it extends it to the heroes. And unlike Freddy, they have no distinct personalities.

Freddy, for his part, sleepwalks through the action, delivering his tired witticisms. Somewhere in the middle of the film, I wanted to buy Freddy a collection of bon mots by H. L. Menken or Dorothy Parker. His way with words leaves a lot to be desired here. This film is light on special effects, too, though some of them are clever. I do have some fondness for the pizza scene in which each peperoni and each meatball is a soul for Freddy to spear with one of his finger knives and gobble up, and I do like the low-rent Fly rip-off in which one of the victims is turned into a cockroach and trapped in a roach motel. The finale, in which all of the souls Freddy has devoured erupt from his body is nicely handled, too, so kudos to Kevin Yagher's effects team, who alone of the filmmakers chose not to phone it in.

Anyway, I feel no burning need to sit through the next film any time soon.

********

Trick 'r Treat

Back in the 1980s, John Carpenter and Debra Hill conceived of turning their Halloween movies into a kind of anthology, with each year giving us a new Halloween movie that had nothing to do with the previous one. That idea never took flight. Fans of those movies wanted more Michael Myers, and the one movie they made with the anthology model in mind, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, bombed. I kind of like that movie, myself(and I watched it right after watching Trick 'r Treat). As I was watching Trick 'r Treat (2007, directed by Michael Dougherty), all I could think was that this is the kind of movie that Carpenter and Hill must have imagined. It's their proposed series in microcosm.

I can totally get behind the premise of Trick 'r Treat, which posits a spirit of Halloween that exacts a harsh vengeance on those Scrooges who fail to get into the holiday. This is an anthology movie that casts a wink and a nod to the old EC Comics with four stories with a twist of the tale at the end. So far as I can tell, this never got a theatrical run, but it has much better production values and actors than you would expect from a direct to video movie. It's probably just as well. This is a throwback, the kind of movie that in past years was discovered on the shelves of mom and pop video stores and shown at slumber parties. It's a fun movie, and "fun" is a value that's seriously undervalued these days. Most horror movies that make it into theaters these days have almost no acquaintance with fun. It's nice to know that its still around.

The four stories here are as follows: A nebbish of a high school principle moonlights as a serial killer, a group of college students cajole their virginal friend into picking up a guy for their Halloween night revel, a group of trick or treaters play a mean prank on a nerdy girl only to have it backfire in their faces, and a mean old man who sicks his dog on trick or treaters gets his comeuppance at the hands of a demonic child with a burlap mask and candy filled with razorblades. These all play out in classic form, but this movie is unusual for an anthology film in so far as it finds clever ways to interweave its stories without that hoary old chestnut, the framing sequence. It's unusually well-made.

The big stars in the cast are Anna Paquin, Dylan Baker, and Brian Cox, and the movie uses all three of them well. Baker, in particular, is note perfect as our nebbish-y serial killer and doting father. His segment may be the most fun, but Anna Paquin's vies for the honor with a shaggy dog ending that dovetails nicely with Baker's segment. Paquin's segment is the most reminiscent of EC; it seems to be directly inspired by one of their more famous stories (one that would spoil this movie were I to name it). The kid segment is probably the most linear, even though it involves a flashback to "the Halloween School Bus Massacre." It's the cruelest segment, too; the just desserts it serves up are a bit harsh for the crime. The last segment features this movie's signature image of the kid with the burlap mask (a surprisingly similar image to the main ghost in The Orphanage, actually, as if that film had been filtered through Tim Burton). This segment plays like a Halloweeny version of A Christmas Carol, with mean old Mr. Kreeg finding the true meaning of Halloween. Of course, its ending isn't as treacly. It's actually pretty droll. This segment has a major flaw, though, and one not shared with the rest of the movie: the design of its spirit of Halloween is superb while it's wearing the burlap mask, but it looks ridiculous once its unmasked. This isn't the first movie undone by dodgy special effects, but it's kind of disappointing because the rest of the movie is so well executed.

This film skips around chronologically and in the best tradition of Dead of Night, ends where it begins, and most of the characters have walk-on roles in the other segments (Baker features prominently in Anna Paquin's segment, Cox features prominently in Baker's, etc.). This could result in narrative mush, but it's done with such aplomb--it denotes it's shifts in time with comic book-style captions, placing its tongue firmly in its cheek--that it comes off as playful rather than pretentious. Hell, that's the tone of the movie. Playful. It's a good natured Halloween prank.

[SJP]

Day 20: Night of the Creeps (1986)

One of director Fred Dekker's three claims to fame, and probably his second best (his other two being Monster Squad and Robocop 3, which plays much better as a Fred Dekker film than an actual Robocop sequel, if you view it in that light).  While a bit more gory than his other films, the film is a little inconsistently written, even though it's still hilarious and a bizarre little film in its own right.  It also has the amazing distinction of beating two very well-made horror films to the punch on their most iconic scenes (Slither for the whole brain slugs angle, Dead Alive for taking on zombies with a lawnmower).

Chris (Jason Lively, aka Rusty from European Vacation) and his pal J.C. are looking to score for Prom Night in 1986, and Cynthia is the one Chris has his eyes on.  Too bad she's currently the item of the douchey head of the local fraternity, and Chris thinks the only way he has a shot is to join up.  However, their hazing involves grabbing a corpse from the school morgue, but the two nerds make a wrong turn and end up wandering into a cryogenics lab where a student from 1959 has been stored with a parasite incubating in his head.  Releasing him, the zombie's head bursts open and releases alien brain slugs around campus, who in turn begin taking over people and turning them into murderous zombies as well.  Throw in a cop with issues (the brilliant Tom Atkins) who lost his girlfriend to an axe murderer the night the brain slugs first arrived on Earth and you have a collision course with wackiness!

It sounds like a weird, complicated mess...and to be fair, it is.  But it is still a hilarious cult classic with a number of great lines ("Screaming like banshees!"), mostly stemming from Tom Atkins playing the most cynical a-hole detective this side of Dirty Harry.  Personally, I'd have to say Monster Squad is a better film in plot, structure, and wider audience appeal, but Creeps has a charm all its own as well.  You know a movie doesn't take itself seriously at all when the girlfriend is explaining to her ex why she feels the way she does while brain slugs fall out of his drooling mouth, completely unnoticed by her.  Too bad Dekker still doesn't make movies, or that the guy who played J.C. never really went anywhere.

RIFFABILITY: High.  Dopey, good natured fun all around make this a decent target, despite its intentional humor.

[Compound]

Ugh. Too many movies with psychotic killers in a row. Finding a giant monster film to watch.

[Darth Geek]

Anybody here trying to watch movies riffed by Hor-Riff-ic and RoninFox?

[SJP]

Will most likely do so at some point.  I did pick up the Friday Blu box set, so there's plenty to watch on that one...but I've been trying to avoid familiar films so far unless I have to, since there's so much out there to enjoy.