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General Spoopmas Film Discussion

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Nope still slaps. It's a movie that posits that the "Spielberg look" can kill.

I knew Bad Guys Haunted Heist was going to skew to kids and that's fine. I watch a lot of kids media. But really, my only issue was how formulaic it is.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
The wildest part of Nope is that, like, Steven Yeuns character could have been the whole movie, but he’s just an ancillary character in a movie about a horse trainer who noticed a weird cloud.
 

Purple

(She/Her)
So a friend and I do this thing every October where we have each other watch 3 horror movies we wouldn't just recommend all regular blind. My first this year is No One Will Save You which... HUH.

First of all, this movie has basically zero dialog. There's no weird gimmick like talking attracts monsters or anything, it's just that the protagonist is shunned by basically everyone and apparently pretty cool being a weird shut-in, so she never really has anyone to talk to. This was particularly odd though because I'm watching this with subtitles on and they are just NOTHING but "-[panting] -[door creaks] -[creature chitters]."

The other weird thing is... this is a movie from 2023 where we've just straight up got your classic scrawny grey aliens arriving in flying saucers. Not even as a big surprise reveal either, we just kinda open on that being the deal, no being even a little bit coy.

Anyway, weirdest ending I've seen in a while.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
I've heard that it's basically the classic Twilight Zone episode "The Invaders" minus the same twist (that said, watch the Invaders, excellent Halloween viewing).
 

Exposition Owl

more posts about buildings and food
(he/him/his)
-Hatching never went quite where I expected it to go. I was really impressed by the claustrophobic power of its portrayal of a young girl living with her perfectionist mother. I also really liked the ending—I always feel like “Now what?” is a more interesting question to be left with than “What just happened?”

-‘Salem’s Lot (2024) was a fun, meat-and-potatoes vampire flick, though the last act felt a bit rushed and it sometimes seemed like the town only got about an hour between sunrise and sunset. I respected the story’s traditionalism when it came to the vampires’ rules—all stakes and crosses and invitations to come inside. (I should note for the record that I haven’t read the book.)
 
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Purple

(She/Her)
I've heard that it's basically the classic Twilight Zone episode "The Invaders" minus the same twist (that said, watch the Invaders, excellent Halloween viewing).
Well also in that the aliens are super tiny where here they range from probably a bit taller than a human if they didn't love hunching over so much to significantly taller than that. And while the first like 20 minutes do hit kind of a similar vibe, being this no-dialog woman-freaks-out-as-alien-is-just-in-her-house-doing-stuff and then she just stabs it and it goes down quite easily actually, there's a good stretch after that where she forgets what the movie's called and starts wandering around town looking for someone to ask for help but ultimately doesn't even try because she is Really Not Well Liked By Her Community, and the chief of police in particular and then also turns out there's some bodysnatchers stuff going on when she decides to as for help somewhere her reputation isn't as known.

Also I forgot to mention but something it makes a big point of is that the aliens have telekinesis so attempts to just like, lock all the doors or barricade them consistently just result in more heavy objects around to be flung about, and the basic premise of "barricading yourself in somewhere so the monsters can't get to you" just being completely off the table is really interesting and could probably carry a whole movie on its own.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Watched Abigail. I knew from the previews how the plot was going to turn but less so the tonal change to be more Dante-esque. That said, if I knew it was from the same team as Ready or Not, I would be able to see it coming. These are films that very much feel of a kind. And overall, I liked it.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Finished Audition. It's a Hell of a movie and the slow burn aspect is the best part, even more than the infamous climax. But man... WHY IS THIS END THEME SUCH A BOP?

Anyway, I'm still chewing on my feelings of what it is saying and greater themes. There's been talk about whether it is a feminist or misogynistic movie and I can really see both sides. I'm not really taking into consideration the artistic intent but as for what happens on screen I feel it's a line blurrer. In fact, the film is a line blurrer in a lot of ways, especially... the guy in the bag. It's interesting how really deliberate and human the film is until things get crazy at the end.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
I like that when the lead of the Craft gets magical enlightenment... she basically achieves being petty.
It's a very 90s movie. It feels like it was directed by Joel Schumacher.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
I kind of liked the ending to No One Will Help You; the aliens realize that this lady is more trouble than she’s worth so they just brain blast her into her perfect life, since her actual life sucks so bad.

…or else they’ve been doing that to everyone and hers is the only one we see.
as you said, it’s kind of vague.

I liked the trying to discreetly hide a monster corpse part, that could have carried a movie.
 

Purple

(She/Her)
Having had some time to chew over it and confer a bit, all your standard grey lanky boys are just hosts being puppeted by the tentacle-y heart things, and we see when she gets one shoved down her throat that while those are controlling your body you get some happy idealized dream life... but she completely rejected that immediately and kept trying to go all killy-resisty on them no matter what. So the actual ending is they haul her on up to the mothership to properly read her mind and work out what the hell her deal even is, at which point they still didn't really know what to do, had a bit of a meeting about it, and what they eventually settled on was OK fine, we bodysnatch everyone ELSE on Earth but OK this one woman we don't bodysnatch and instead I guess try just being really nice to her and maybe she stops stabbing our hosts in the head so much, and yeah she's sufficiently starved for basic kindness that that actually works out fine by her.

Which is a freaking wild ending to go with, really. Mostly just because it really makes you have to go so wait what is even their motivation? Because they seem pretty cool just living the suburban life after taking over all these human bodies. And I guess now I just have to headcanon that this is like, a secret sequel to The Hidden and yeah the one guy was basically just an id machine with no self control but MOST body controlling throat parasites are actually just happy to be piloting humans and that's kind of enough for them, no need to speed around in fancy cars or have sex with people to death for them. Just a nice cup of coffee every morning and a sock hop now and then.
 
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Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Anyone making a list of good films for the Halloweeny season, Dead & Buried is a good choice. I was able to guess a lot of the big reveals but the way things go down is really impressive. There's dark humour but it is in it's climax shockingly sad. Definitely check it out without learning too much ahead of time.
 

Purple

(She/Her)
So tonight I'm finishing my challenge trio, which coincidentally, laid out together not only feel like a coherent single title, they also sound weirdly similar to the opening of Underground, you know, the David Bowie song. From Labyrinth- No One Will Save You, The Empty Man, May.

I already covered NOWSY, and I'm just starting May, but yeah, The Empty Man.

My main take away here is... how many different movies did I just watch? We've got this opening scene with people hiking around a snowy mountain, finding a cool skeleton, one of them starts like praying to it. It's very very much a The Ritual vibe... and I kinda feel like... nothing at all that follows is even the slightest bit connected to it? Like I legit thought this was some kind of an anthology for a bit.

Then it turns into... garbage. Suddenly we're doing this whole thing where some woman is hiring this detective to find her daughter who went missing under Offbrand Bloody Mary circumstances. And this whole stretch of the movie is... really just unwatchable. I am apparently part of a long chain of people watching this on the recommendation of other people who all got to this point in the movie and questioned why the hell the last person recommended this crap. It's boring as hell. It goes on forever. It's really cookie cutter. It feels aimed at teenagers. Bad things happen to a dog. It's lit like a TV show. It's shot in the most boring imaginable way. There's no tension. It freaking DRAGS.

And then like an hour in... we haven't dropped that plot, but it still feels like it's a different movie, and now it's some big weird investigating-a-conspiracy/spooky cult/maybe Lovecraftian sorta deal? Like I don't wanna compare it to At the Mountains of Madness or anything, but we're going for more of that vibe anyway.

And then there's the ending, and the ending is really good. It's got a really fun twist, and some fun visuals, and like if I was watching this on TV (and wow does it feel like the sort of movie you would) and I just caught this ending, I'd be super super intrigued and want to go back and watch the whole thing, because yeah this is the ending to a really good movie. ... but I'm still kinda down on it because I didn't watch that movie, and this ending still doesn't really feel connected to the opening. But I do get how other people who sat through the whole thing were really surprised at how it picks up there and want to recommend it.

Anyway spoilery bit. Spoilery both for this and because there's a thing that reminds me of a thing in one of the Silent Hill games and I sure don't wanna go spoiling that, so go play all of those if you haven't then meet me back here.
So the big weird twist when the main character gets to the end of the whole supernatural detective story arc is... turns out the detective is actually a tulpa created by the missing girl because the cult needs a new vessel for their weird god thing and there's this whole laundry list of necessary qualities as far as the host's emotional state and lack of connections and such that seemed like way too much of a pain to actually find out in the wild, so they just wrote this supernatural detective story where the generic lead checks all the boxes and willed him into being and before he can really process this concept screw you, vessel'd! That's neat, and I dig it... but here's the problem.

RIGHT before I started this movie, I watched the end of someone livestreaming Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. And like, if that wasn't THAT fresh in my mind, I'd be thinking wow! What an incredibly weird and original idea that ending was! But I literally JUST finished being reminded how much I like this other horror thing that is ALSO about some guy going on this whole tense spooky investigation to find this missing girl and turns out she just created him and his post car accident trauma and whole adventure as a tulpa. And yeah it was a super cool twist there too, but then also that whole game actually built up to it as a cool reveal and didn't feel like an anthology of totally disconnected stories.
 

Purple

(She/Her)
And rounding this year's trio out, wow I hated May!

On paper it should be great. We've got this rushed black comedy intro. We make it as obvious as possible as early as possible that we are on a course for the protagonist to hack up a bunch of people to make a Frankenstein and date that Frankenstein. We've got bright colors and a pop/punk soundtrack. And we're really aggressive about establishing that she's bi right off the bat, and hey, that's still weirdly rare to see! We are totally getting onto some kind Vampire Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl/Franken Fran/Blood Diner sorta wavelength, right?

But then no! We're not! The structure of the whole thing is clearly going for "she dates this guy with the really nice hands and this girl with the really nice neck and they're both gonna suddenly take cruel turns so she's gonna murder them and Frankenstein up a new lovefriend with his hands and her neck and obviously we're going to introduce more characters to fill that out," but then it just completely drops the ball. Both love interests are just really nice and accommodating, and the protagonist is just a genuinely awful irredeemable person with zero empathy and no real understanding of basic human interaction. The boyfriend's big crime is... not being into it when she imitates his student film and starts trying to actually cannibalize him while making out, and the girlfriend's big crime is having another girlfriend... who she's immediately willing to bring into a 3-way deal or dump for an exclusive relationship... with the protagonist who again, also has a boyfriend on the side. And we don't keep introducing new characters until we have a whole body either. Second-worst of all, we don't even get a Frankenstein date at the end! That pile of sewn together corpse bits just lies on the floor like you'd actually expect! Actual worst of all is the protagonist just also straight up murders her cat at one point. Just kinda because.

On the upside, oh yeah, Franken Fran is a thing. And last I looked had started updating again after a long hiatus. Off I go to binge it.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
The Mist is a movie that feels like the platonic ideal of a Stephen King. Small town folk, mean religious lady, monsters, a surprisingly epic feel. Mick Garris WISHES he captured King as well as Darabont.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
I watched Death Becomes Her. It's basically a prolonged Tales from the Crypt. One of the better ones, but that already a show with more misses than hits. The three leads are good actors but Bruce Willis is really miscast as the nerd. I think early in his career he could do goofy but the point of the character is he's pathetic and weak and that doesn't quite land. Originally it was going to be Kevin Kline and that makes more sense. Someone @Purple pointed out it's really a Rick Moranis role and I think that would have been the best choice. In the end, it's just OK.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
The Ritual was very cool. Lots of different influences from horror tropes but overall I'd say it's a mix between The Blair Witch Project and The Descent. But it goes places I was not expecting.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Frankenstein's Monster's Monster, Frankenstein: A parody of the pretensions of the great actor/director Orson Welles, this special has a lot of comedic beats but as a whole doesn't entirely come together. The best bits are in the smaller moments, such as a character saying that his mother "really loved morphine" and the nurse saying how nice that is. It is a good show case for David Harbour comedically, doing a very strong Welles impression. Overall, it's fine but for a meta-comedy, it's not swinging for the fences.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Watched the infamous "gird your loins for this one" art house horror Antichrist. I will say, I was really into this for the first half of it's runtime. Gorgeously and imaginatively shot, I was really into this film about the fear of the entropy of nature and the meaningless of life. But when the story is positioning itself also to talk about gender... not so much. The fact that there are two characters named "He" and "She" and the film has She basically turn into an unknowable maniac who turns to misogyny kind of makes me think Lars Von Trier isn't the guy to turn to for this. The acting is really good but the film trying to be ambiguous doesn't hide the fact that it's not good at saying stuff about women.

Also, it only contained one talking fox.
 
The Brain (1988)
Mind over matter.

An alien brain takes over a television and research center and uses the airwaves to control the human populace.

Am I talking about John Carpenter's They Live? No I'm talking about the Brain. Both movies came out in 1988. They Live is the superior horror satire film for sure, but the Brain has its charms.

I decided to watch the film because David Gale is in it and plays an evil doctor. Re-animator is a favorite of mine and I'm always up to see horror movies with the Re-animator cast.

The titular Brain is a pretty fun prop. Its a giant brain with a face on it similar to Mars Attacks alien heads or the RE licker if it had eyes. In any case its a fun campy monster. The Brain is big enough to eat humans whole.

This was my absolute favorite part of the movie:

The main character is high school student who loves pranks. In the beginning of the film he takes pure sodium and flushes it down the toilet at school. The sodium causes the water to jet out of faucets in geysers (Like when the Goonies bang on pipes). The principal who is at the bathroom sink, get sprayed by a geyser of water.

Lesson learned. Sodium and water creates a violent mix.

Later, the high school student is in the basement of the TV studio and research center and it has a comically large vat of sodium. The alien brain confronts the high school student. This is going to be great I thought: the student is going to open up a pipe of water and combine it with the vat of sodium to create a finale sized explosion!

Instead he grabs a small bottle of sodium from a shelf in the basement. He throws the bottle in the Brain's mouth. I guess the saliva in the Brains mouth is enough to cause the sodium to react. The Brain dies in a mini explosion and the movie is over.

The giant vat of sodium is never used!


It felt like a Poochie driving by the fireworks factory situation. Got to love the VHS era. Where the box art or the film way under delivers on its set up!

Rating (out of 5): 🧠🧠🧠1/2
 
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Issun

(He/Him)
Watched the infamous "gird your loins for this one" art house horror Antichrist. I will say, I was really into this for the first half of it's runtime. Gorgeously and imaginatively shot, I was really into this film about the fear of the entropy of nature and the meaningless of life. But when the story is positioning itself also to talk about gender... not so much. The fact that there are two characters named "He" and "She" and the film has She basically turn into an unknowable maniac who turns to misogyny kind of makes me think Lars Von Trier isn't the guy to turn to for this. The acting is really good but the film trying to be ambiguous doesn't hide the fact that it's not good at saying stuff about women.

Also, it only contained one talking fox.
Lars von Trier is a terrible person that every actor is falling over themselves to work with because his cruel, pretentious bullshit has been labeled "prestige" by other pretentious shitheels with influence.
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
So I watched From Beyond, a Lovecraft story (very loosely) adapted by the re-animator director (and starring two of the same actors). It was...surprisingly fun? It was suuuper corny, don't get me wrong, but dumb in an enjoyable way. Very good wet puppets.

Then I was browsing prime and saw The Resonator: Miskatonic U which I just had to watch. It was indeed a remake, or re-adaptation of the original story or something, even though the plot is almost entirely different. But holy shit it's so bad. It starts bad and it just keeps getting worse. Like every new scene is stupider than the last. I definitely had fun with how bad it was, though.

I think they make for a good double feature.
 
I love From Beyond and Re-Animator. For my money nothing feels more Halloween to me than fun horror movies. I can't think of many horror movies that are more fun than From Beyond and Re-Animator.

I will have to watch Dagon at some point.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
I can't think of many horror movies that are more fun than From Beyond and Re-Animator.
I haven't seen From Beyond but yeah, Re-Animator is a blast. Jeffrey Coombs is so great. I hear the sequels suck but that's a shame because I think you could do a whole Re-Animator series where Coombs as West is like an asshole Dr. Who. Not time traveling but a brilliant guy who solves terrible threats to the world. Except they are all threats HE causes. He's the worst and he's kind of wonderful because of it.

But in the realm of capital "F" fun horror, Return of the Living Dead, Halloween III, Phantasm, Deadstream, House (1977) and Evil Dead II rank high.
 
But in the realm of capital "F" fun horror, Return of the Living Dead, Halloween III, Phantasm, Deadstream, House (1977) and Evil Dead II rank high.

From the movies I've seen from your list, I agree! Fun films. I'll have to check out Deadstream.

Other fun horror movies: Night of the Creeps, The Outing, Flesh Eater, and Van Helsing.

Night of the Creeps is a must see for anyone who hasn't seen it and likes fun horror movies. Its a combination of 50s horror homage, zombie horror homage and alien horror homage. It never fails to put a smile on my face when I watch it.

The Outing has teenagers stow away overnight in the history museum from a class field trip. The premise really cracks me up; its literally the joke from the Simpsons (No children at the museum of natural history? Am I so out of touch?).

Flesh Eater is a zombie movie from one of the actors from Night of the Living Dead. Kids are taking a weekend trip to a camp ground. Someone, either the kids or the groundskeeper, finds a coffin with a pentagram on it and they decide to open the coffin. Very bad move, as the coffin releases a zombie plague into the camp.

Van Helsing is probably the most controversial of my fun horror recommendations. Its way overlong, full of CGI, and filled with terrible acting. Its a guilty pleasure for me though. Its the cinematic equivalent of being home alone and eating an entire package of Double Stuff Oreos. I know its not good for me, and I shouldn't know I shouldn't do it. But sometimes I just get the urge to give into junk.
 

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
The Outing has teenagers stow away overnight in the history museum from a class field trip. The premise really cracks me up; its literally the joke from the Simpsons (No children at the museum of natural history? Am I so out of touch?).
I feel like we've been here before. I'm getting deja vu all over again!
At one point it might have been shocking for someone to sneak into a mall, bowling alley or abandoned property but it's been done so much that it's passe. If you tried to do it you'd probably have to wait in line with a bunch of other sheep. But it takes a real rebel to sneak into a museum.
 
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