So by the time Halloween had come and gone, there were still a lot of movies that I had not written reviews for yet. So, in an attempt to complete this, here are 16 more reviews. There will probably be more coming when time permits.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
Genre: Slasher
Format: DVD
This movie surprised me right from the get-go! I've never seen such a surprisingly quick, violent, action-packed start to a horror movie. I challenge anyone to find a franchise horror movie with such a jarring film opening. Where most of the F13 movies start with some sort of recap or introductory slaying, this one starts with nothing you expect.
From there, though, it begins to play out kind of how you expect it. Granted, there are some interesting twists and kills, but there's not too much that's going to catch you off guard.
In the last F13 movie, Jason was reduced to a child-sized puddle of nuclear waste in a Manhattan sewer. That's a pretty conclusive ending. In this movie, Jason is chasing a hot blonde, but he looks more like Super Shredder and less like a man-child that's grown up in the shell of an abandoned summer camp, been stabbed, shot, and bludgeoned multiple times, killed, raised from the dead, chained to the bottom of a lake, resurrected, and re-chained. In theory, Jason would be a hulking, rotten corpse monster (because we use theory and logic in THE REAL WORLD...just kidding). In this movie, he's bigger and more blistered than ever, and his mask...well....he really just looks like Super Shredder instead of like Jason. So the nuclear waste at the end of Jason Takes Manhattan was actually the Ooze from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze.
But this doesn't last long, because Super Shredder Jason gets blasted apart by the military, and his soul begins passing along from person to person in a weird, unholy, disembodies demon spirit thing. You're taking a leap of faith with this movie, but it does its best to steer closer to the F13 roots.
I should also take the time to let you know that there are lots of boobs in this movie, so if that's your thing, dig in with this one.
There were some really cool things going on in this one besides the Jason mythology. The Necronomicon from The Evil Dead 2 makes a brief cameo. And the special effects in this film are WAY above my expectations. You don't see body melt scenes like this very often. F13:IX Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (jeez that's a long title), features some incredible effects. Well done, team!
I won't spoil the twists to Jason's history, and I won't spoil the surprise ending here. I heard about it on the playground as a kid and thought it was setting up for one of the coolest movies ever. I saw that "coolest movie ever" as an adult when it was released in the theaters. I was kind of drunk, so I'll have to revisit that one later.
Final Note: This VHS cover scared me bad as a kid. It also informed me of what I thought Hell actually looked like - flames and demon snakes. Good God, it still terrifies me on some levels.
Poltergiest II: The Other Side (1986)
Genre: Possession
Format: streaming
I decided to wrap up the Poltergeist series recently since I love the original movie so much. The team of Spielberg and Hooper worked really, really well for the first movie. It was creepy and gross and you could sympathize with all of the characters. Well, maybe not with the weird dwarf woman, but everyone else in the family. Even the villain in the film, the white developer, was guilty only of not believing urban legends. And the original movie was light-hearted enough that you could keep watching in between the terrific and dreadful scares.
A crazy old zealot made some bad decisions (predicting the end of the world), and he ended up inadvertently killing all of his followers in a very depressing way. Early in the movie, we see a big snake-ish, eel-thing ooze out of this guy's gooey remains, and this signals that the game is on!
The situation takes the kind of path you'd expect, and I'd hate to ruin anything for you. The audience gets some genuine character development (albeit through some crappy montages and too-goofy-for-this-movie humor) and some AWESOME special effects. The ending doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but this is Poltergeist II, sequel to a GREAT horror movie without the original team that made it.
Give this movie a chance. It will surprise you.
Poltergeist 3 (1988)
Genre: Haunted House
Format: streaming
I mean, Kane's featured in this movie. He's still chasing after Carol Anne. He's just played by someone else in bad makeup. Still creepy. It just feels cheapened. For all of the other directions this movie tries to go in, I don't understand why the filmmakers felt the need to carry over this character.
I also realize that it's not good to speak poorly of the deceased, but the actress that portrayed Carol Anne was not very good at acting. So...I don't think I'll be adding this one to my collection. There are some neat special effects here, but it doesn't feature enough of the chemistry that made the first two movies so good.
Dolly Dearest (1991)
Genre: Killer Dolls
Format: DVD
Torso (1973)
Genre: Slasher
Format: bluray
This is a really good movie, and I absolutely understand why Roth was so excited to talk about the ending. I don't want to ruin the movie for anyone, so I'll do my best not to spoil it. The movie is a really slow burner with a lot of red herrings. There were a couple times that I debated stopping the show and selling my copy of the movie back.
I am so glad I decided to ride this one out. This is a really beautiful movie with lots of really beautiful women. It oozes sleaze and sex and violence, but it does so very deliberately. It is not unlike an issue of Playboy very carefully tucked inside a school book. Or a terrifically juicy hamburger held within the confines of a delicately baked fresh bun. On its surface, this movie is a straight-ahead toss-away slasher, but there's a lot more going on, and that's what makes it really, really good.
You know...I saw a couple other movies that were really well done. I should go ahead and review them now, too.
Watch this movie, though. it's solid, and I understand why Eli Roth was so excited about it.
Repulsion (1965)
Genre: Psychological Horror
Format: bluray
Catherine Deneuve portrays Carol, a beautiful young woman who just doesn't have a spot in this world. She's simply off-kilter. Her "safe place" is an apartment she shares with her sister and a job as a stylist's assistant at a spa full of sympathetic women. And it seems like Carol's life is humming along ok because it exists in a bubble. But then her sister brings a man home. And a guy begins pursuing Carol in an attempt to court her. And her sister takes a vacation, leaving Carol alone and unsupervised. And things take a turn for the worse.
Without her support system in place, the cracks in Carol's world become big, gaping fissures. Little things take on a life of their own. And Carol slowly goes crazy. That's the story, as simple as that, but Roman Polanski tells a really wonderful, ambitious story here. This movie is really a piece of art, and I feel more cultured for having watched it. Wonderful. Let's keep this thing going. Here's another beautiful, ambitious classic horror movie called Possession.
Possession (1981)
Genre: Insanity
Format: DVD
That is Possession. Andrzej Zulawski crafted together a poignant 2-hour nightmare that is communicated so personally and yet so effectively that the audience feels like they have stepped into a nightmare. What makes this movie so much scarier is that you can believe and live in this nightmare along with the director.
I had heard about this movie because it kept popping up on lists of great 80s horror movies. I would have watched just *because*, and I would have expected it to lump in with movies like Cat People or The Gate or other eccentric 80s horror movies that didn't spawn franchises. Then I read an article in which Beneciou del Toro said a woman has sex with an eel monster in Possession. So I moved it up on the Netflix queue. But none of these descriptions or write-ups or lists do this film any justice. This is less a movie, and more of a peak inside another person's mind. And the thoughts and images we get to share are not pretty.
I take that back. They're extremely pretty. This is one of the prettiest, most colorful movies I've seen in a long time. I imagine that if Repulsion had not been in black and white, it would have shared a similar color scheme. But the colors aren't just there to make the film more palatable, because sometimes they were so off-putting and effective that they disgusted me. Oh, it was so gross.
The acting, too, seemed WAY too real. To me, Sam Neill was always a smart guy from Jurassic Park, and any other role came a distant runner-up. I won't ever be able to look at him the same after this film. And I don't think I'd ever seen Isabelle Adjani in a movie before, but I fell in love with her right from the start, even though her character Anna never really seems all that likable. It's hard to describe WHY I felt the way I felt, but it was certainly passion.
What transpires trough the film is difficult to describe. Like most dreams, this isn't exactly linear. The story starts before the movie starts, and similarly, you can assume it continues after the movie's ending. I did a lot of reading about these three films after I'd watched them, and I don't think most reviewers can settle on what they think the ultimate theme of the movie is. There are some obvious take aways, but there's a lot more going on here than a simple Kramer vs. Kramer movie about divorce. I feel like the director pierced his own personal Hell, observed as best he could, and then made a movie to communicate that Hell to a larger audience.
Last year I watched a movie with Pat called Inside, and I never want to see that movie again. It was an ordeal to watch because of how much physical pain was involved throughout. This movie was painful in a very different way, and I haven't settled on whether or not I'll ever be able to watch it again. If I do, it won't be for a good, long time. And the scenes where Anna looks directly into the camera? Shivers. Holy shit, the shivers...
Nightbreed (1990)
Genre: Fantasy Horror
Format: bluray
From what I gather, this film has a pretty devoted following, and I get it. Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) made a movie called Southland Tales that seems, to me, like one big convoluted dream sequence. I felt like Kelly had an extremely vivid dream, woke up, and immediately wrote everything down regardless of how much sense it made.
If I didn't know that this movie was based on a short story that Clive Barker had written beforehand, if I didn't know that he had plenty of time to really think this one through, then I would probably be a little more forgiving with it. I also read that the movie studio interfered with the final cut of this movie and really changed the tone of it. I can't imagine they changed the film so much that any incarnation of it would have been really watchable.
The casual observer might enjoy the fact that David Cronenburg played Dr. Decker, a psychiatrist that is also a duplicitous slasher killer (I'm not spoiling anything - this is explained within the first 15 minutes). Unfortunately, Cronenberg is as good an actor as Barker is a director. That is to say, he was bad. It's a shame. But it's doubly shameful that Cronenberg, a man responsible for so many unique, horrifying, thoughtful movies was on set with Barker during the making of Nightbreed, and he didn't pitch in more or give more direction. Cronenberg should have anchored this movie, because if anyone could have helped this, I think it would have been him.
Boone and Lori would have been characters that I might have bought into if...well...no. I don't think the actors were really that good, and their storyline was pretty silly.
I'm probably being overly-critical of this movie. Admittedly, I had high hopes for it for some reason. I don't know why. I'm not a huge Clive Barker fan. I didn't love Hellraiser or Candyman. I didn't really buy into The Midnight Meat Train. Barker, I respect your work, but I don't want to hear about your dreams anymore.
Night of the Demons 2 (1994)
Genre: Haunted House/Demons
Format: Netflix Streaming
This movie has really surprised me! For reasons unknown, I thought I'd seen it shortly after I watched the original Night of the Demons the first time. But as I sit and watch this now, I realize that I know NOTHING about this movie.
If you sat my friends and me down in a room back in 1994, this is probably the horror movie that we would have put together. It features plenty of sex, violence, and black humor to make it extremely entertaining, especially if you're a young teenager. These kinds of movies really resonate for me on a weird level. It's a nice mishmash of horror comics, scary stories, haunted houses, and all of the scatterings that make Halloween such a fun holiday.
And I had no idea, but Ben Stiller's wife, Christine Taylor, has been in THREE movies from this year's batch of horror movies. I had no idea she'd ever been in ANY horror movies! She's featured here in NotD2, she was in Campfire Tales, and she also played a role in The Craft.
Stake Land (2010)
Genre: Dystopian Vampire Zombies
Format: Netflix Streaming
I'm a sucker for most post-apocalyptic movies to begin with. The filmmakers did a very good job crafting a bleak version of America here. I got the impression that they weren't working with a lot, but they made it feel pretty authentic.
And the actors did a good job making their characters seem real. That being said, each character is a derivative of characters you've seen in similar movies or TV shows (The Road and The Walking Dead both came to mind). But that's totally ok, because I enjoyed both of those shows, and Stake Land uses those themes and plots devices very well. I suppose you could compare it to Zombieland without most of that movie's humor.
The movie is surprisingly good, and it's worth watching.
Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)
Genre: Ghost Story, Slasher, Revenge
Format: DVD
That's only halfway a joke. I had no idea this had been a CBS made-for-TV movie when I started watching it. The movie has a great cast, and there are scenes that are genuinely scary. I started to get suspicious, though, when some characters met some gruesome deaths, but no gore was shown. That's when I did some reading to find out that it had aired on CBS on a Halloween Saturday night back in 1981.
How cool would it be if the major stations still showed Saturday night movies? And how cool would it be if these channels invested money to make their own movies, especially seasonal movies? I suppose it would be more difficult now that there are so many damn channels out there. I digress.
Even though this was a made-for-TV scary movie, it's still genuinely scary and creepy. Supposedly this movie started the killer Scarecrow sub-genre. I don't think I've ever seen any other killer Scarecrow movies, but I'll look them up now because of this one.
The Outing (aka The Lamp) (1987)
Genre: Dark Magic
Format: DVD
A group of clumsy high school kids get their hands on an evil magic lamp. The ringleader of the group gets possessed by the lamp's genie, and she invites her friends to spend the night in the museum her father curates. From there, the kids start dropping like flies, killed magically by different things the genie possesses.
With a plot like that, I suppose you can't have really high expectations. It's kind of hard to say what it was in particular about this movie that bothered me. I guess it didn't help that I saw an edited version of the film (4-movie horror marathon from Scream Factory), so I know I missed the end of a couple characters. Overall it seems really watered down. The first scene and the tone of the movie seem like a hard R, but then it gets cluttered with PG-13 melodrama.
Or maybe I just had high hopes for this movie. Too high. Someday I'll watch it again, and now that I know what I'm getting myself into, maybe I'll appreciate it more.
What's The Matter With Helen? (1971)
Genre: Psychological Horror
Format: DVD
That's not to say that it isn't a good movie, it's just not the movie I thought I was going to watch. Shelley Winters plays a really good off-kilter woman, and Debbie Reynolds plays a woman determined to be a starmaker.
One interesting fact about the film: Debbie Reynolds was actually having a nervous breakdown while she was portraying a woman going through her own mental breakdown. So that's neat.
I don't think I'll watch this one again. It's not bad by any means, but it didn't do much for me.
Castle Freak (1995)
Genre: Monster Movie, Slasher
Format: DVD
Stuart Gordon took another H.P. Lovecraft story and made an above-average horror movie out of it. In this one, a family inherits a castle in Italy from a relative they weren't familiar with. Gordon regular Jeffrey Combs is the father in this family, and he's dealing with the consequences of his drunk driving accident. The accident claimed both the eyesight of his daughter and the life of his son. So he's already in a weird spot. Now he's uprooted his family to another country, and on top of that there's something weird going on in this castle.
The weird thing going on in the castle is actually a human monster that's been chained in a weird little prison room in the castle's bowels. The previous owner used to give this person just enough sustenance that it would survive being whipped and beat over and over again. So the monster is a little sympathetic. Kind of like The Phantom of the Opera or Frankenstein's Monster.
But things being to topple quickly. When he's spurned by his wife, Jeffrey Combs' character John begins whoring and drinking and falling into the bad graces of the local authorities. Meanwhile, the Freak breaks free of his chains and begins doing weird things in the castle. The Freak kills some visitors. He pervs out on the blind daughter. He is more of a menace than a monster, and sometimes these movies make me wonder why the monsters are never given a chance.
Wait. It could be because the Freak eats a woman's boobs off. That's pretty gross. Disregard everything I said about sympathizing with the Freak. Kill it with fire! NOW!
Jennifer's Body (2009)
Genre: Demons, Dark Comedy
Format: bluray
You know, as I type this, I think Jennifer's Body is the culmination of multiple guilty pleasures that I harbor. I was still living in Kentucky. I worked late. It was Halloween weather outside (chilly and drizzling). I decided that I wanted to go see a movie by myself before going home (guilty pleasure). I settled on what was supposed to be a campy horror movie (guilty pleasure). I snuck in a pint of bourbon (guilty pleasure). I made a dinner of popcorn, a big bourbon-and-coke cocktail, and I sat in an almost-empty theater on a week night.
I had never really bought into Megan Fox, and in this movie she reminded me a lot of Juno (Ellen Page), cute but unremarkable. Now Amanda Seyfriend, on the other hand, earned herself a new fan for this movie. She was really fun to watch (and the next movie I saw her in, Chloe, made me an even bigger fan).
The movie in itself is very silly. The tone never takes itself too seriously, but I remember jumping at least once when I saw it in the movie theater. When I rewatched recently, my wife kept looking up from her phone, looking at me, and shaking her head when she would hear some of the dialog.
I don't need to defend the movie. I recognize that it's not scary or gory enough to win as a standalone horror movie. It's not funny enough to be a standalone comedy. But on one funky night, I got buzzed in a movie theater with two strangers on a date, we laughed and shrieked together from across the theater, and this movie earned a fan. I watch this one about once a year.
Bride of Re-Animator (1989)
Genre: Mad Scientist, Zombies
Format: DVD
The second kink in this movie is a nosy detective, Lt. Chapham, investigating the murders of the first Miskatonic Massacre (from the first movie). Chapham also has a personal stake in the game because his once-dead wife was reanimated during the events of the first film (apparently, a lot of zombies were captured and confined to a mental hospital because nobody knows what's wrong with them). Chapham is slowly narrowing his investigation on West and Cain.
The third new player in this movie is Jillian Francesca, an Italian journalist that Dr. Cain fell in love with during his stint in Peru. Of all the plot points in this movie, this is definitely the weakest. It does serve as a device to drive conflict between West and Cain. But other than that, there's not much reason for her to be involved.
And a neat new twist in this movie is that the reagent can be used like zombie crazy glue. At one point, Dr. West "glues" together an arm and a leg, and the arm-leg gains sentience and tries to fight West. There are a lot of possibilities with this kind of logic. I don't want to ruin the ending for you, but all of these different themes come together for one wild final act. It was so fun and creative that I'm bumping up the third movie in the series (Beyond Re-Animator) way up in my Netflix queue. Well done!
Conclusion:
So Halloween season is gone. It's been almost a month now. But I don't think I'll be taking my foot off of the gas any time soon. I might start trying to publish these on a more regular basis. Maybe weekly? Maybe bi-monthly? I don't know yet. Stay tuned.
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