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Spooky Time Discussion and Recommendations!

I watched Re-Animator last night. I was feeling tired. Re-Animator has a run time of 1hr and 24 minutes and so I watched it.

Barbara Crampton is great as Megan Halsey. She senses trouble when her boyfriend Dan Cain rents a room in his house to Herbert West. Jeffery Combs as Herbert West is equally great. He plays a doctor driven by ambition that will get results at any cost. He is the charismatic engine of chaos in the movie.

Re-Animator is definitely a Halloween treat anytime I watch it.

💀 💀 💀 💀 1/2
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Black Sunday... is good. It's beloved so I was expecting a bit more but compared to Black Sabbath, I wasn't as enamored. But it's a fun, old-fashioned spook em up that... I think I might have slept through parts.

As mentioned elsewhere, the Simpsons have shockingly gotten TWO Halloween specials this year, one a classic trilogy and one a full length It parody. But the amazing part is they are both great across the board. More than you might thinks. The Babadook parody starts slow but becomes a pretty good episode about Marge's resentment over being the most kicked around family member and ends sweetly and is genuinely a little scary (for a Simpsons episode, anyway). The Death Note parody is the weakest but it's still pretty funny, very well-animated and has fun with the premise (the lion in the toilet is funny gag). The Westworld parody is a very fun and surprisingly rich examination of the show as a piece of IP and it being reduced to memories, memes and catchphrases (Homer getting fed up with disappearing into the hedges, pushing other people into the hedges and inexplicable having the people die from it is a great, weird gag). And maybe it was a line stolen from the original show (I haven't seen it) but I like the line "Mom, those are real people." "So are we." *kills the fuck out of Simpsons nerds for freedom*).

And only one of the episodes was from new writers so it isn't just new blood. The show is just... better, here. Tonally, it occurs to me that I feel like some of the people involved are looking at shows like Gravity Falls or other quality animated TV and taking a little of that, at least having each story having some emotional weight and sense of genuine tension or drama that makes it more engaging again.
 
Inferno is great.
I have not seen Phenomena, but my sister got me a blu-ray of it for my Birthday. Its on my watch list.
Opera I have not seen.

I have a soft spot for Trauma. Trauma is shot in Minneapolis which is where I live. It is cool to see a favorite director shoot a movie and know some of the exact shooting locations.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
To cap off Halloween I went with 100 Monsters and Extraordinary Tales. The former is a 1960s yokai movie where some corrupt Edo-era officials wind up on the bad end of some vengeful monsters. It's OK but frankly, we get about 40 monsters. That's, like, pretty good but not the advertised amounts. There's some cool stuff but most of it is waiting for the monsters, considering this is basically a Japanese Tales from the Crypt.

Extraordinary Tales is 5 Edgar Allen Poe stories in animated form. It's... OK. Basically it's like an animated books on tape, except the last one, with narrators like Christopher Lee and through archive footage Bela Legosi. The animation is... fine. But this isn't a quick knock off, the writer/director clearly did this as a labour of love and not for huge buckets of money. So it's a bit of a bummer that it doesn't look amazing, it just looks like a decent enough independent endevour. I find the framing device about Poe's ghost kind of clunky, though.
 
I watched the Last Gasp yesterday. A land developer, the T1000 from T2, is building an expensive development on Totec Indian land in Mexico. The Totec are ritualistic and regularly perform human sacrifices. The Totec's kill the construction workers to stop construction and satisfy their god(s). The land developer hires some hitmen and they exterminate the troublesome Totec.

There is a legend that a Totec dying warriors spirit is passed on during his last breath (Last Gasp). The land developer becomes possessed by the Totec.

The movie jumps ahead 6 years to Pittsburg where the land developer is working. A woman hires a private eye to determine what happened to her missing boyfriend. The private eye finds a connection between the missing boyfriend and the land developer. The private eye is killed but not before tipping off the woman about the land developer.

Horror shenanigans ensue with Totec Indian music.

A reasonably fun horror movie. I find the first half to be much more compelling than the second half.

Rating (out of 5): 💀💀💀
 
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