General Spoopmas Film Discussion

[Johnny Unusual]

Rewatched Blood and Black Lace. I think I liked it even more the second time after knowing where it was headed. I feel like I didn't like the ending the first time but it worked better for me, even though it is a shift in tone.

The murders are perversely beautiful. Almost even more perverse because their luridness is decidedly non-explicit. The deaths are bloodless but they also accentuate the beauty of the victims and have them die in "beautiful" ways. It's an eye-poppingly colourful movie, I can only imagine what it looks like on the big screen.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

People really wanted me to watch Van Helsing. A movie where one of the Brides of Dracula says "Too Bad, So Sad" and an ancient text about Dracula is a Mad Magazine fold in. This movie was not good. Anytime it tried to be funny, it completely ate shit. It's trying to hint at stuff for a sequel nobody wants. The action set pieces, which I imagine took a lot of work to create, were completely uninteresting.

Dracula seemed to be having fun, though.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

I liked Talk to Me but I didn't love it. I think my favourite part is the first act when characters are just playing around and then things go to shit. The second act I was a little less excited by but it really is brought home in the third act Twilight Zone style. The movie gets to be Evil Dead for a solid couple minutes in act one and I kind of wish we got more of it. Still, acting and directing were pretty strong throughout.

 

[Voncaster]

WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

WNUF Halloween Special is a fake Halloween special set in 1987 that was created in 2013. The film makers use 3 recordings on VHS to scuzz up the picture and make it look like a VHS tape. It looks like a VHS tape.

WNUF Halloween Special is three things: A Halloween night news broadcast leading up to the special, the special itself and fake commercials. All three segments are done very well. There is some humor that feels more modern. If the humor was cut you could be forgiven for thinking the special was really from 1987.

But the humor here and there makes the movie for me. There is a paranormal investigator couple who has a cat as the 3rd member of their team who I found to be hilarious. The fake commercials are very funny. There is an ad for a gun range that is celebrating second amendment rights and an oil company that has a spill in town and states that they are doing their job to clean up the environment (but what are you doing?).

More than anything WNUF Halloween Special is a real curiosity. There is not anything that I've seen that is like it.

WNUF Halloween special is not a straight ahead story with a plot until the second half when the special starts. There are a ton of commercials which are fun, but also make it seem like your watching regular television. It almost feels like an exercise for filmmakers to see how authentically they could replicate the 80s in 2013.

Regardless its a fun 80-90 minutes, that I'm glad I watched. I watched the special on a blu-ray disc from Terror Vision. Not sure how else one can watch it.

Rating (out of 5): 1/2

 

[Johnny Unusual]

WNUF is another film I put in the like, not love, category. I think structurally it is a lot of fun. It does it's best to cover the 80s flavour but that is hard to perfectly recapture.

WNUF Halloween special is not a straight ahead story with a plot until the second half when the special starts.

Yeah, for better or worse, it's not a story first film. It's much more about 80s vibes. Almost a hang out horror movie. You'd think that this sort of child of the 80s pandering would be insufferable but it's actually a pretty fun watch.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Trap is more thriller than horror but it is a very stupid but very fun thriller. It helps that Josh Harnett is very, very charismatic throughout.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Made it a day for Found Footage Analog Horror, and so watched both WNUF Halloween Special and VHS Beyond

WNUF certainly did its job correctly, but Late Night With the Devil did it all better. Granted, that also came out, like, a number of years later, so it had a bit of a run up, and we can forgive that. Usually the question of where, exactly, the tape came from isn’t one you’re supposed to ask in a found footage movie, but it presents a pretty major plot hole in this one, so… kind of have to; the whole conceit is that it’s a news special filmed off a local tv channel, but… there’s explicit footage of the killers taunting their victims, and with enough context that it’s pretty clear who they were, so the idea that nobody knows what happened to the victims doesn’t make a lot of sense. Good set of red herrings with the commercials, you’re sure that some of them are relevant but you can’t really tell which.

VHS BEYOND on the other hand, was really good. Or at least 4/6 of the shorts were really good, which is well above average for an anthology. I was pretty concerned that one would be entire Dog Trauma focused but nope, something considerably more horrific. But also juuuust goofy enough that it’s defused so as to be watchable.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Deep Rising is a movie that makes me realize Stephen Sommers doesn't makes movies I like but he really wants to. One the positive, despite being so much CG sludge, it does get to be surprisingly nasty with showing that being killed by the monster is very painful and prolonged. There are some good "oh shit" moments. The problem is, the characters are all vague archetypes and the actors lack the charisma (like, say, a Josh Hartnett) to play their roles. The comic relief is weirdly both excruciating but also the most likable character simply because he feels like a character.

Treat Williams is terribly miscast in the Kurt Russell role (apparently it was supposed to be Harrison Ford which would be interesting but I don't think would work). Treat has fun dad energy but not so much a "charming rogue" energy. The romance makes NO SENSE and happens because the characters look and smile at each other while being surrounded by digestion tentacles and their allies are dying. I wanted a fun b-grade monster movie and Sommers is clearly aiming for that but in the end, the problem isn't the characters are broad and dumb, it's that they are kind of dull: most of them are generic mercenaries.

 

[Octopus Prime]

VHS 1985 stunk out loud, 0/5 enjoyable segments. The only moment I said “Oh hey, all right” was when we got an expository the song over the end credits

 

[Exposition Owl]

I tried watching the original Fright Night for the first time, but I couldn’t make it past the first scene. I can’t get behind a main character who tries to whine his girlfriend into giving him sexual consent.

On the other hand, I re-watched El Laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth on my flight back from Spain, and loved it just as much this time. A beautifully realized fairy tale crossed with a powerful war story, with an eminently hateable villain and A++ art direction. Also, that is one Spanish-ass movie. Just Spanish as all get out.

 

[Octopus Prime]

VHS ‘94 was a fun one. The weakest segment was the only one that went for “spooky” and, like… it did not succeed at that (and the found footage bit absolutely did not make sense in that context), but it was still a fun section. Not as good as Beyond, overall, but easily my silver place for the series so far

 

[Johnny Unusual]

American Psycho is a very funny dark comedy. Patrick Bateman is basically a Ben Stiller character with a bit of George Costanza thrown in.

 

[Voncaster]

On the other hand, I re-watched El Laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth on my flight back from Spain, and loved it just as much this time. A beautifully realized fairy tale crossed with a powerful war story, with an eminently hateable villain and A++ art direction. Also, that is one Spanish-ass movie. Just Spanish as all get out.

For my money its the best del Toro film. Its fantastic.

In 2006, Pan's Labyrinth was playing at the Uptown Theater by me. Its a local art house theater in Minneapolis that is now a concert venue.

My mom and I went to the theater to get a ticket. The line was around the block. We got in line, but had no idea the movie would be this popular nor did we know if we would get into see it. We did.

Before the movie started. A tall lanky guy came out and introduced himself as Doug Jones and he explained that he played the faun in the film and he talked about how special it was to work with Del Toro. Neither my mom nor I knew anyone involved with the film was at the screening. It was one of my favorite movie going experiences. Quite an unexpected surprise.

Aside, I do get a little sad when I think about all the movie theaters that have closed around me.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Creature from the Black Lagoon is a high end b-picture. The monster looks really good and there are some genuinely beautiful shots but mostly it's a very flat picture with a lot of padding, even though it's an hour 15 minutes. The dialogue is faux-deep as characters talk about science and history, desperately trying to give weight to the movie that doesn't have it. The beauty is in the monster itself and some of the scenes in the grotto. But Arnold is a b-film guy who it's a b-film with good effects.

Going to continue with the other two movies in the series...

 

[Adrenaline]

I watched and quite liked MaXXXine. The whole trilogy is unique in horror in that all the entries are pretty different from each other.

X - 1979, slasher movie where a bunch of young people shooting a porno on a farm get murdered
Pearl - 1918, mostly a character piece where Mia Goth gets to show off her range, with some violence
MaXXXine - 1985, hard to describe, basically a mystery and satire of 80s Hollywood, with some violence

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Finished Revenge of the Creature. It's weird that the film is about the Gill-Man being taken to Marineland to be prodded and tortured and the film has surprisingly little sympathy for it. Also it wants us to like John Agar. Clearly the product of an alien mind. The monster suit actually looks a little better, though, with the monster's neck bulging like a frog's as it breathes. I'll finish off the trilogy tomorrow but from what little I've seen the last suit looks REALLY bad.

 

[Paul le Fou]

Longlegs had fantastic cinematography, and was pretty good at building foreboding atmosphere, but I don't think it ever quite delivered on the promises it set up and the story kind of falls apart in the third act.

 

[Octopus Prime]

The overall connecting tissue in VHS ‘99 is “Shitty teens receive commuppence”. I’d put it in the middle of the pack overall, but To Hell and Back is a solid contender for my favorite short in the series

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Finally finished the last of the Creature movies. The Creature Walks Among Us is a step up from the second one, which was just dull. This one still has problems but 1) it remembers it's supposed to be scary and the mood of the night scenes is eerier and 2) it has a weird plot. Scientists track the beast and it ends up being set on fire. They save the monster with surgery and thankfully it's strange evolution has given it lungs (now working) and skin under the scales. But now the monster can't return to the sea because it will drown. A great premise and one with melancholy. Too bad there's too much of the human's plot in here.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

The Ninth Gate is a bore but it does have a dramatic sting on the reveal of an ass.

 

[Octopus Prime]

The original movie isn’t on any of my streaming services, so with VHS Viral done, I’m calling the series finished.

Viral stunk out loud. I’d heard that before so I lowered my expectations but clearly they were far too high. It had Skatepunks fight skeletons, so, like… it had that. So it wasn’t a complete loss.

My overall ranking for them is
Beyond
‘94
1999
2

And I guess 1985 and Viral for completion sake.

My favorite segments overall were To Hell and Back (1999), Stowaway (Beyond) and a tie between Safe Haven (2) and… the Robocop one from 94 (forgot the title)

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Cronos is mid-level Del Toro. I prefer it to Pacific Rim but it is reflective of his better work so it pales in comparison to that. Still, it's a very good horror-fairy tale that Del Toro works so well with, a film that is about the humanity of a monster and the human monsters he faces. I also feel it is one of the few vampire movies where immortality is degrading rather than seductive.

Young Ron Perlman looks like Joe Piscopo wearing a mask made out of face and damn this man is entertaining to watch. I love that he followed up being the romantic monster in a popular TV series to being a lunkheaded gangster bully.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

From Beyond isn't as good as Re-Animator, in part because Herbert West is SUCH a good antihero, but I love that it is a film that GOES THERE. It's a movie about something to be sure, that weird feeling of being both repulsed by and drawn to something (the film is just... the most SEX, even when it isn't literally). But while Cronenberg would approach that with cool intellectualism while still delivering impactful, effecting horror, this is just a straight up rollercoaster ride of madness.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Cursed isn't good but it was trying. It clearly wanted to Craven and Williamson putting the Scream magic on a monster movie but it doesn't work. Partly because while Craven and Williamson can do great things, sometimes they can both... kinda suck at movies, sometimes. But even worse, the Weinsteins fired the effects team to bring in CGI guys. There's a genuinely fun reveal I've never seen in a werewolf movie and the lame effects killed the moment. With some exceptions, it's at it's worst when it tries to be funny. Except the scene where Christina Ricci roasts the werewolf so hard, it shows up to flip her off.

 

[Torzelbaum]

the scene where Christina Ricci roasts the werewolf so hard, it shows up to flip her off.

That was one of the moments.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Death Walks at Midnight... the title never comes into it. The movie takes place almost exclusively at daytime. It's a fun romp for the first half, the premise being a woman witnesses a murder while super high on a popular new drug for a tabloid newspaper exclusive but witnesses a murder while high. When she explains it, it matches a murder 6 month prior except the victim and killer don't match the people she saw.
It's a good hook and the film is fun for the first hour, though pretty repetitive in the "no one believes her mode". The explanation makes sense but it's kind of underwhelming, Despite the fact it comes with a giggling knife throwing lunatic in the mix. To me the big problem is the protagonist barely gets agency in the big climactic battle.
It's watchable enough but not one of the stronger giallo. And in that genre, more Hitchcock than horror. Though, like, dumb Hitchcock.

 

[Voncaster]

Lair of the White Worm (1988)

In a rural England an immortal white worm is fed victims by an immortal priestess (Amanda Donohoe).

Two sisters (Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis), an archeologist (Doctor Who Capaldi), and their land lord (Hugh Grant) investigate the disappearance of the sisters parents. These four make the connection between the disappearance of the parents and the white worm and priestess.

This is a campy and fun movie and the cast seems to know the kind of movie they are making.

Amanda Donohoe is the star of this film. She is delightfully evil (she seduces and kills an English boy scout!) and she loves anytime she gets to use a double entendre. She is also wearing a different ridiculous sexy outfit and hair style in every scene. Donohoe's priestess is like a cross between Combs Herbert West in screen magnetism and Oldman's Dracula in ever changing costumes.

I had a good time with this movie. Its not high art but it is probably pretty good if you're high.

The only thing that didn't work for me in the film were the acid trip blown out image flashbacks. The flashback fx did not age well for me.

Rating (Out of 5): 1/2

 

[Purple]

Don't forget the actual plot point that the heroes begin to suspect something is up with her because nobody who isn't some sort of weird snake cultist/vampire would ever actually enjoy playing Snakes & Ladders.

 

[Voncaster]

She also owns a limited White Worm edition of Snakes & Ladders. I thought that was a nice touch.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Spookies is a movie that I'm positive had no script even when it wasn't a wild re-edit. It's bewildering and throws you into it's broad non-characters and confused tone. I guess it's a comedy except when it isn't. I actually think there are some good horror movies that I could describe similarly but this is a film that's sense of humour is confounding.

I almost admire it for throwing monster after monster at the audience and clearly there was passion to designing the monsters. Everything else, however, felt like everyone was fucking around.