50 Nights of Horror Challenge: Week One - Dorkishness

50 NIGHTS OF HORROR WEEK ONE!

I've blogged about what a big deal Halloween and Horror movies are to me in the fall time.  Falls past have almost been determined by the depth and breadth of the weirdness that come with those things scary.  It's a weird season where one second you're super comfortable with the windows open, the smell of charcoal from neighbors floating about, and a cold beer in your hand, and the next second you're shivering cold, you hear nothing (not even crickets or bugs or dogs barking), it's super dark outside, and now you need a blanket and a bourbon because everything tastes flat and meaningless.  Naturally, one becomes more susceptible to the spooky.  

This season I've decided to challenge myself to watch 50 horror movies before Halloween.  When the idea struck me, I figured I had *just* about 50 nights until Halloween (give or take a couple weeks, and figure in nights where the fiance will just not tolerate it).  It will be an excuse to stay up late at night and work my way through a bulging, swollen collection of horror movies, several of which I haven't seen yet.  It will be an added bonus if I'm able to watch some of these with my buds (because sometimes it's more fun to share these things than to sit and slobber alone).  So here goes.  Wish me luck.  Below is my review of the  hits and misses of my first week.

WEEK 1 of the 50 Nights of Horror Challenge

The Boogeyman (1980)


I absolutely did not know what the expect when I sat down to watch this, the first of my horror movie challenge.  I knew that it was memorable enough to spawn not only two direct sequels, but it also generated a remake with a slew of remake sequels.  So it can't be all that bad, right?  I had picked up Boogeyman 2 on a whim for $.25 several months ago, and I recently found a double movie DVD that had the original Boogeyman as well as The Boogeyman Returns (the third in the series).  So I thought I might dive into the Boogeyman trilogy.

What struck me first about this movie was how similar it was to Halloween.  There is the same repeated, synth-heavy title track.  There's a flashback to the tragic events of some children.  And there's a faceless bad guy doing bad guy things to children.  Fast forward, and one of those children has grown into babehood.  Said babe has a brother who has become mute after witnessing the awful things shown in the flashback.  He's strong, he wears bib overalls, and the movie kind of suggested that he was mentally deficient but super strong.

There isn't ever really an appearance of "The Boogeyman."  Based on the similarities to Halloween earlier in the film, I thought we were going to be watching a film about a killer.  A big, silent, lumbering, ominous slasher dude.  But there was no such person.  There's no man.  Instead, there's an evil essence that exists in the world.  To make a long movie short, there's a kind of legend or popular myth that when mirrors "witness" evil things, they harbor all of these evil things, and when the mirror is shattered, that collective evilness is released into the world to do more evil things.  

Sound scary?  I didn't think so, either, and I was never really proven wrong.  The movie should really be called "The Evil Mirror" because that's what's really going on here (ironically, I think that's what the title was translated to in Spain).  When the evil mirror shines or reflects somewhere around someone, bad things happen.  That's seriously the suspense you have to deal with here.

These characters aren't really relatable, either.  The babe is already married to some dullard, and they have a kid.  The babe's aforementioned brother is mute.  They live with their aunt and uncle on a farm.  The babe visits a psychiatrist to discuss what she went through as a child.  The psychiatrist is kind of a dick that pushes her to revisit the event despite her hesitation.

There is some solid gore, though it only comes into play in two scenes.  The editing is pretty bad.  The acting is pretty bad.  The babe is the cornerstone of this movie.  There are some other babes that meet swift endings.

(this babe is about to meet an untimely end)

One scene that stuck out to me in particular was about mid-movie and centered on the brother.  He's at work in the barn, y'know, doing barn things.  A sentient wind pushes a sentient brown paper bag into the doorway to the barn.  The brother stops doing barn things, picks up the bag, shakes it upside down, emptying the bag's contents onto the ground.  Tiny pieces of shattered, evil mirror fall to the ground.  A hot girl wanders into the barn and tells the brother that she's been checking him out during church (WHAT?!).  He responds by choking her *ALMOST* to death, but then he lets her go.  She scrambles away, he goes back to work, and then he narrowly dodges a sentient, levitating pitchfork that had been...I don't know...possessed by the evil mirror pieces.  This was all so awful/awesome that it convinced me that this movie was way too awful/awesome for me to sell the DVD back.  It is a keeper.

There is a pretty awesome ending that reminded me of one of the scariest scenes from The Evil Dead.  Something is wrong in the house.  One girl is acting way too calmly, but you can't see her face.  I won't ruin it for you, but I'll tell you that you will be surprised and excited when this girl turns around.  If the entire movie had been as fun as this scene, it might have made this a considerably more satisfying movie for me.  Ultimately, I can't figure out how this movie generated sequels or why anyone decided to remake it.  I see potential for improvement, but I don't know how it earned a devoted fanbase.  I'll probably rewatch this someday.  Maybe I'll be convinced then.

Street Trash (1987)


Do you hate the homeless?  Do you laugh at scenes of dicks being ripped off, juggled, and then played "Keep-Away" with?  Have you wondered what a melting person would look like?  How about what an exploding person would look like?  Do you think rape scenes have been too difficult to come by in modern cinema?  Necrophilia?  Are you tired of feeling bad about veterans of foreign wars?  If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, man, do I have the movie for you.

Necrophilia?  Necrophilia.

Preface:  I did some research, and I found that the creators of this movie intentionally made a film that would at some point offend anyone/everyone that viewed it.  With this punk rock attitude in mind, I found the movie a bit more tolerable, but still way insane.  I regard this very similarly to how I feel about Hobo With A Shotgun.

Like The Boogeyman, there are hardly any likable characters in this movie.  That being said, all of the people you're supposed to despise in this movie (and there are plenty) have at least one scene where you empathize and wish they lived in a better universe.  If you had to peg one person as the central character to the movie, it would be Fred, the homeless scamp that steals, kills, rapes, and commits vagabondery.  He does have a poor, homeless, kid brother that is trying to do good by a local activist (she works for the owner of the junkyard where all the homeless people live, and he constantly tries to rape her).  THERE IS A LOT OF RAPE IN THIS MOVIE!  I just realized that.

Bronson, the main baddie of the movie.  A Vietnam vet/crazy killer/king of the junkyard's homeless.

I was going to list all of the characters in this movie and their relation to rape, but one major problem with the movie is the over-abundance of characters.  That, and their direct relation to rape.  And none of these characters are really likable.  Just about every one of them is miserable.

There is some solid grossness, but I wouldn't call most of it "gore."  The ending is kind of gory.  Most of it is just gross.  At one point a man's penis is ripped off, and then the homeless junkyard gang plays keep-away with is.  At one point it's obviously just a dildo.  Then the director decided to do a close-up of what is obviously a dirty, detached dick.  Gross.

I could dote on how wrong this movie is for several more paragraphs, but I'm already bored of this.  I'm sure this movie has an audience somewhere.  I doubt I'll ever watch it again.  There's a better write-up of this movie here.  If this movie was more about people melting and exploding, it would have been considerably better.

Exploding man

The Strangeness (1985)

About five years ago I made the mistake of watching The Descent.  Since then, any movie that takes place underground in tunnels or caves seems silly to me.  And I swear I tried to watch this movie, but it was so damned dark that I couldn't make out which character was talking, who they were talking to, or why they were being such assholes with each other.

The gist of this movie is that a group of researches, miners, and an author couple are going into some abandoned mines to search for precious metals despite a history of people being killed/disappeared inside these tunnels.  It was really dark and really slow.  I lost interest shortly after my favorite character died.  That's not true. I lost interest in this movie much earlier on.  God love it, I'm sure there are some people out there that really enjoy this film.

There is an effed-up creature that kills people.  Click on this link if you want to see it.  Click on this link if you want to read a better review of the film.

Tales from the Crypt:  Demon Knight (1995)

This might be one of my favorite movie trailers ever.  It sums up perfectly anything that I could write about the movie.  I really, really enjoyed this one.

Tales from the Crypt:  Bordello of Blood (1996)

Anything associated with Tales from the Crypt has potential to be a good time.  This movie was no exception.  There was a lot of potential here.  It just seems that Dennis Miller stunk up the scene.  Erika Eleniak didn't help much.  And Angie Everheart seemed flat.  It was a nice change of pace to watch a horror movie with big studio resources to pull from (CGI, editing, actors, etc.), but the movie fell flat.  And nothing, NOTHING with Chris Sarandon as a mega-church, hypocrite, demon-wielder should ever fall flat.  Chris Sarandon is cool.

Chris Sarandon.  So awesome.

Highlights:  tons of gore, tons of CGI evil, tons of boobs, Corey Feldman, and Chris Sarandon.  
Bonus Points:  I watched it on VHS.  This is the perfect medium for this movie.

Worth mentioning:  WHOOPI GOLDBERG CAMEO FTW!  (so 90's).

The Bad:  At some point, this movie about vampire hookers ran off the tracks and seemed like Dennis Miller's reinterpretation of From Dusk Till Dawn.  FDTD came out the same year, almost 8 months earlier.  Erika Eleniak wasn't anything to write home about.  Dennis Miller's joke delivery sucked. 

I suspect that this movie is the cause for the end of the Tales from the Crypt franchise, and that sucks.  I really think it could make a comeback right here and now.  If you think about it, True Blood incorporates many of the same themes and images that TftC had.  American Horror Story shares many similarities.  Hell, even Lost succeeded with the weird and creepy.  Tales from the Crypt would return to HBO and pull hella-ratings.  Mark my words.

The Boogens (1981)


After watching The Strangeness, this seemed like a much better underground, tunnel monster movie.  The production was surprisingly good.  There were genuine scares.  And it features the best dog acting I've ever seen!  

For what it is, this is actually a fun, scary movie.  I watched this as my fiance flipped around on her iPad and giggled when I would mutter a quick "whatthefuckwasthat" comment.  There are boobs.  There is a little gore.  There is good chemistry between the characters.  Come to think of it, there's not a single dislikable character in this movie, and that's a nice change of pace after some of the movies I watched earlier in the week.

The biggest disappointment in the movie is finding out what an actual Boogen is.  (It's here)  What a drag.  Still, this is worth watching.  I recommend it.

Six down.  Forty-four to go.
So that's that for week 1.  My biggest take away is that Tales from the Crypt needs to be revisited and relaunched for TV.  Next week I'll dip my toe into the Child's Play franchise.  I'll revisit the Boogeyman franchise when Boogeyman 2 is delivered (my VHS copy wouldn't play).  There are some good movies on Netflix that I'll start.  And I really want to see V/H/S.  More later.