• Welcome to Talking Time's third iteration! If you would like to register for an account, or have already registered but have not yet been confirmed, please read the following:

    1. The CAPTCHA key's answer is "Percy"
    2. Once you've completed the registration process please email us from the email you used for registration at percyreghelper@gmail.com and include the username you used for registration

    Once you have completed these steps, Moderation Staff will be able to get your account approved.

General Spoopmas Film Discussion

Purple

(She/Her)
What is happening in Phantasm? I watched it today, and cannot wrap my head around anything other than the Cerebral Bore from Turok 2 and “Boy!”.
The main thing going on in Phantasm is that...
a mysterious weirdo who definitely gets a detailed backstory and I think even a name in the 4th movie but everyone always just calls him The Tall Man is traveling around the U.S. taking over funeral homes so that he can steal all of their corpses, fill them with yellow goo to turn them into zombes, and compress them to jawa size so that their muscle density is higher and they are better suited to laboring on a high gravity planet he is not native to but teleports to, for reasons. He also sometimes transforms into a hot girl to seduce guys, which I don't feel needs any further explanation. Don't kinkshame. It's also strongly implied that he kills the general populace when nobody's using for maximum corpse collecting.

He is opposed in this by Some Kid (or BOY! if you will), his sketchy older brother who raised him, and said older brother's friend who runs an icecream truck.

In addition to being just kinda jacked and weirdly magical, and having the aforementioned zombie jawas, The Tall Man relies a lot on flying death spheres, which more than anything else actually get a lot of exposition in the sequels I shouldn't spoil here.

Past that a lot of weird stuff also happens, or maybe doesn't, as we are intentionally really damn vague on what is or is not a dream. And also early on the kid goes and sees an old fortune teller who just straight up gives him the gom jabar test from Dune just kinda for the hell of it, and this is never really brought up again.
 
I watched the original Night of the Living Dead this week! Was like a more tense and bleak Twilight Zone episode, with the occasional bit too gory for that show. Fully enjoyed it.
 
Its been a while since I've rewatched Night of the Living Dead, but it feels like a documentary film to me once it gets going. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the other film that feels like a documentary to me. They are effective in how real they feel.

I think one of the creepiest scenes I can think of in any movie is when the teenagers are exploring the outside of the house in TCM.
There is a generator running for I don't know what reason (its a rural house?) and then one of the teens runs her finger along the house siding and a tooth falls out (I don't remember if its human or animal). It creeps me out big time. Every fiber of my being is telling me to get away from the house.

***
Suitable Flesh (2023)
Who do you think you are!

A tribute film to Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and From Beyond.

Dr. Derby (Heather Graham), a female psychiatrist, encounters Asa Waite (Judah Lewis), a male patient, whose problems are beyond the norm...because his problems are H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos cosmic horror problems. Dr. Upton (Barbara Crampton), a doctor at Miskatonic University, tries to help her friend Dr. Derby from getting too deeply involved with her strange new patient.

Suitable Flesh is a fun movie that I will probably be revisiting in future spooky seasons.

The movie does a lot right. Heather Graham and Judah Lewis are great in the lead roles. The set decoration is consistently great and sets the mood well. Similar to Re-Animator, there is a small cast of characters that have stumbled onto a large otherworldly problem. The Cthulhu Mythos elements are hinted at in the film through book illustrations, dialog, and camera effects. The shape of the cosmic horror is left up the viewer's imagination, which works in the films favor.

Sex is a large theme in the film and sex is both compelling and horrifying at times in the film. I feel like this theme is in line with Re-Animator as well.

Suitable Flesh has some Stuart Gordon easter egg stuff but the easter eggs are not intrusive.

I have only two slight gripes with the film. First, Suitable Flesh does not feel like transgressive horror to me. In contrast, both Re-Animator and From Beyond feel like transgressive films. There is a danger to those films (I imagine some people and critics find them offensive) that I think is largely absent in Suitable Flesh. Second, there are some camera effects that are overused. There is a 360 camera rotation that happens over and over in the film and its tiresome.

Minor gripes aside I think most Stuart Gordon fans will like Suitable Flesh. Suitable Flesh is a Halloween treat.

Rating (out of 5): 💀 💀 💀 💀
 
Last edited:

FelixSH

(He/Him)
I watched The Faculty. Years ago, probably still in the 00s, it introduced me to Body Snatcher style movies. When remembering it, I didn't remember what I watched, so I went with the one from the 70s. Which was great, but it wasn't what I had watched way back. All I remembered was, that in the movie I watched, there were teenagers.

So yesterday, I watched the Faculty. First, the cast is pretty great. There is a young Josh Hartnett, a young Elijah Wood, Bebe Neuwirth (who played Lilith on Cheers and Frasier), plus a lot of other people I don't know, but who seem to be well-known actors too (that's on me, I don't know many actors).

Aside from that, it was pretty fun and creepy. Like Body Snatchers, it's creepier in the first half, where no one knows what's up. It plays in a high school, and starts with the football coach being taken over by some creature. And we get a scene in a school at night, with no one but the principal and the coach, who is hunting her. A school building at night, with the lights out and no one there, is inherently creepy, and it worked very well for me.

Then we continue on with teachers acting weird, and a bunch of students realizing that something is up. It actually reminded me, structurally, a bit of the Simpson Halloween special, where the teachers eat the students. We get a fun group of students, all well realized with good dialogue, and tension that never really stops.

I think talking about more would be spoilery (what I mentioned happens at the very start, so I hope that's fine). I enjoyed the movie a lot, even though it was a bit too gross at two or three points. Like, the beginning has a character getting a pencil rammed into her hand. But if this is no problem, I think it's a movie well worth watching.
 
I watched The Faculty at a birthday sleepover in the 90s and we were all pretty convinced it was a bad movie, a daft alien slasher type deal. So has been weird seeing it considered pretty solid in the years since - but I guess we maybe had no real metric for actual badness yet at that age.

Tonight - having a friend over to watch Carpenter's Halloween, should be a good time.
 
Did Halloween as threatened. In a crowd that mostly found it daft and hilarious but I felt some genuine menace throughout at least. It has perhaps suffered from decades of iteration and parody, though.
 

FelixSH

(He/Him)
Hmm, I still need a movie for today. Maybe I should finally watch Halloween. That or Friday the 13th. Haven't seen either one, and it feels like I'm lacking a bit in the pop-cultural department, because of it.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
Did Halloween as threatened. In a crowd that mostly found it daft and hilarious but I felt some genuine menace throughout at least. It has perhaps suffered from decades of iteration and parody, though.
I think Slashers more than any other genre, and Halloween specifically, are the hardest movies to imagine watching at the time of their original release. It really is astronomical how parodied and referenced the Slasher genre became by the 2000s, and I think that makes it difficult to appreciate the cultural context of something like Halloween or the original Friday the 13th.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Hmm, I still need a movie for today. Maybe I should finally watch Halloween. That or Friday the 13th. Haven't seen either one, and it feels like I'm lacking a bit in the pop-cultural department, because of it.
Both are good in their way. Halloween isn't the first slasher but it's the most influential one, though few are as smart about it (very little blood in Halloween). Friday the 13th is the opposite, a fun popcorn movie that experiments with onscreen gore.

It's interesting about how the genre begins being about urban legends. I mean, that's remained common but those two in particular.
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
Halloween is a good movie with a bunch of bad sequels. Friday the 13th is a bad movie with a bunch of bad sequels.
 

FelixSH

(He/Him)
I generally prefer no gore, so I'll go with Halloween. I generally don't watch horror movies, and never liked these parodies much, so it might work pretty well for me, I guess.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
I generally prefer no gore, so I'll go with Halloween. I generally don't watch horror movies, and never liked these parodies much, so it might work pretty well for me, I guess.
Halloween takes itself seriously and is incredibly subdued in comparison to the rest of the genre it spawned. It's a "classic" movie, but it's also a classic movie for the right reasons. If that makes sense.
 
But not 3, right?
Correct. 3 is not a bad sequel; its an amazing sequel. Its up there with Empire.

Halloween 3 was the first R rated movie I ever saw. It was at a friends house for a sleep over. It left an impression!

***
On the 80s horror franchises. Nightmare on Elm Street was, is and always will be my favorite 80s (favorite period?) horror franchise.

I've always felt Micheal Myers and Jason Voorhees are vastly inferior to Freddy Krueger. Freddy has personality that the other two icons lack.

I appreciate how pure and simple Myers is in the first film. He is a random terror that hits Haddonfield with no rhyme or reason and that is scary. It feels unfortunately current as well with random gun violence.

F13 feels the most trashy; which I also enjoy. Combine kills and nudity and kids will pay for it. Jason takes Manhattan is a personal favorite of mine because I feel like VHS covers would often oversell the product. Jason going to Manhattan for like 5 minutes at the end of the film feels in line with VHS covers overselling their contents. I also enjoy the gonzo ending of that film: NY city flushes its sewers with acid nightly?
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is about what I expected. Not in a bad way. I remember not being into the songs divorced from the source, slowly warming to some of them. I like it a lot more now, overall that I've seen it in it's entirety and while everyone is doing well, it really is Tim Curry who kills it. He really did need to be in more musical films rather than "generic but fun and over the top" villain roles that he often got (look he still got lots of great parts but there's a lot of filler in the man's career) and did his best with. I will say that a musical often explains a lot in the songs but I couldn't always parse what was happening in the lyrics, so I feel like I'm missing a lot of character stuff (I'm still not sure why Frank is relieved to go home to space in his last musical number). I mean, most is not hard to intuit but I feel like there is intended nuance (yes, in this movie) to motivations that I'm missing.

I loved Phantom of the Paradise. It's such a weird, fantastic movie that goes to some wild places. I thought I knew what to expect and for better and worse, I was NOT prepared for Beef. God, the Phantom is such a cool looking character (even if he's a rube) and Paul Williams wrote some amazing songs for the film (and was the Phantom's singing voice. Everything in the production design and set pieces is just over the top cool. It's not perfect but it's such fun and a great way to cap off Halloween.
 

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
So Spooky Season is over for this year but I have stumbled upon a horror movie title that I know nothing about but feel compelled to check out - once the time of year is right.

And that movie is:
Flesh for Frankenstein
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Finished my first Halloween movie, the Beast Within. Mostly, I knew this one as the movie with one famously absurd monster effect because the makers decided to push bladder effects as far as they could for fun and kept it in the movie.
thebeastywithin9.jpg


The movie itself is a werewolf movie except it's not a werewolf, it's a... cicada man (metaphorically) who transfers his evil soul to his biological son. When we get an explanation in the climax, it's kind of convoluted. I guess just eating corpses gives you magic possession powers.


But when I say it's a werewolf movie, it mostly follows a dude who sometimes becomes a monsterman and is terrified of his actions. It begins and ends with sexual assault so when I saw the first scene I was expecting the movie to be groady but most of the movie is pretty conventional horror stuff. It's not a good movie. It's basically a very weak film. But it's watchable in things keep happening. Also, the bad guy from Robocop is in it as a nice dad. No, not the one from that 70s show. This one.

487085.jpg


The film also ends very abruptly. Not wretched but really a movie with stuff lots of other movies have done better.

This trailer goes a lot harder than the film does.

 
Burial Ground (1981)
The gates of Hell have opened

Might as well get this out of the way at the start. This is the movie is famous for a scene where a zombie child eats a piece of his mother's breast. That scene fits in with the tone of the rest of movie.

In the preface, a professor working in an old Italian castle excavates a tomb on the grounds. Zombies are unleashed and kill the professor.

Later, three couples and one couple's child take a vacation to the same castle. The couples play in the countryside on the grounds. Their play is interrupted by zombies and they retreat to the castle to try and survive. Here, Burial Ground becomes a siege movie.

This is a sleazy movie. Burial Ground wants every scene to have either topless women, gross zombie makeup or gore.

I enjoyed Burial Ground, but its not high art. Its exploitation horror for the midnight movie crowd.

Rating (out of 5): 💀 💀 💀 1/2
 
Last edited:

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is an unfortunate beast of a movie. It takes it's ridiculous conceit seriously, an approach that could work. The obvious route is comedy but there's a way to make it work where you know that the situation is dumb but it still feels cool and makes your heart soar. But the fact is, the action scenes, despite the director trying to imbue every moment with epicness, are just sort of lifeless,

Similarly, the first act feels more like a wikipedia page of the movie than an actual thing. I know what is happening but I really don't care about the characters. I think in my heart of hearts, the metaphor also falls apart; the vampires are supposed to be the evils of America but in having vampires represent a human evil, within the text of the film humans aren't as responsible and it makes it feel... not great.

But heck, there are lots of movies with that kind of flaw where I still love it (such as Back to the Future having a white guy invent rock and roll for black people). Unfortunately, this film echoes more exciting action movies without being one itself and the wild premise turns out to be more window dressing than having a point. It's not even terribly audacious, instead being simple a snooze.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
You'd think a movie with a name like that would go to town on the wacky!
With a name like that, it's also a warning it might be trying to hard. I feel like there was a brief period of this in the 2000s, possibly triggered by Seth Grahame-Smith's novels like that and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and they really feel like a precursor to the Syfy mess of "let's combine some shit for fun". It's better than that by a wide margin and a little less cynical but it feels like it's expecting the title and premise to do the heavy lifting while telling a more generic story.
 

Beta Metroid

At peace
(he/him)
Do kids die in the original Fright Night? From Talking Time discussion, it sounds like a spook-em-up that my wife and I would enjoy, but Does the Dog Die.com (very useful site for sussing out potential landmines in movies, by the way!) seems to indicate there's child death in it, which is a hard pass for my wife. However, the site doesn't elaborate, and I realize it could refer to any legal minor. If it's a teenager played by a 20-something, that usually goes down easier (which sounds weird to type out, but I think it's a matter of young kids dying in horror usually playing up the grief, shattered innocence, etc, while teen victims have more associations with the classic slasher tropes that aren't portrayed as "heavily").
 

Purple

(She/Her)
It's been a bit, but my recollection of both versions is that mostly we've only got the one death of, you know, this dirtbag vampire some teenager is hoping to team up with an older theatrical weirdo to deal with, but in both I'm pretty sure the vampire vampirizes a non-zero number of the protagonist's peers, off camera, so you're gonna have some number of vampire minions who were technically highschoolers pre-vampirization, who I don't think die on camera at that? so I think you are PRETTY in the clear with either movie if you have any sort of child endangerment triggers.

Also with the remake, the main character is played by the guy who played Chekov in Abrams Trek who is pretty dang childlike in appearance and did tragically die in real life shortly after said remake was made, so... that may have caused some crossed wires on content warnings?
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Communion is a movie that is interesting because the film has a few moments of the bizarre and feeling truly unhinged but at the same time, is a rather dull film for the most part. There are a couple of moments of genuine creepiness early on but it's undercut by the fact that the aliens really look like they wandered in from the Mos Eisley Cantina.

The real weirdness, though, isn't the alien conceit of this "true story" but how the film represents a normal happy family coming unglued due to trauma. Because Walken seems really unglued to begin with. I'm not placing the blame at his feet because frankly his absolutely wild performance is one of the saving graces of the film. But it dialogue and portrayal of "normalcy" to juxtapose when shit goes down seems far removed from that.

In many ways, it reminds me of Neil Breen. Phillipe Mora is a far more capable filmmaker and Whitley is far less an ubermensch on his way to expose the ills of the world but the sense that something is off with how people are portrayed is telling. Of course, putting aside the fact that I don't believe in alien abduction may play a part but simply the nature of how characters react to it seems so far removed from my understanding of people. Really, see it for the big swings but you might want to just fast-forward through a lot of it.
 

ASandoval

Old Man Gamer
(he/him)
I feel like if I hadn't read the book somewhat recently I would have enjoyed the new Salem's Lot more. It looks great, and the cast holds it together, but it's very much style over substance and left me feeling kind of empty at the end.
 
Top