Category: Friday Night Horror Movies

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The House of the Devil (2009)

the house of the devil

I’ve been hearing good things about Pearl and X, both films that were directed by Ti West and came out this year, and so when I saw that his 2009 film House of the Devil was on The Criterion Channel I decided to give it a shot.

I mostly loved it and I’m gonna try not to spoil anything as this is definitely a film that’s best if you go into it not knowing very much. It is also a film that clearly takes its influences from late 1970s/early 1980s horror. It is definitely a slow burn, that only gets “exciting” in the last twenty minutes. I put exciting in quotes because I found the rest of the film exhilarating, but not a whole lot happens in that build-up.

Joceline Donahue plays Samantha, a college student in need of help. Her roommate is terrible and she desperately wants to move. She’s found a place to rent, but she’s got to come up with the first month’s deposit, and she’s unemployed and broke. When she sees a flyer for someone needing a babysitter she immediately gives it a call. Despite the guy who answers the phone sounding like a creep and standing her up on their first meeting, she takes the job.

She gets her friend (Greta Gerwig) to drive her out to the isolated (and close to a cemetery) house where she meets Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan). He is strange, and kind of creepy. The house is big, old, and creepy as well. He tells her he lied, that this isn’t a babysitting job, but rather a looking after his elderly mother-in-law job. She is healthy and gets around just fine, so really all Sam has to do is make sure no emergencies happen and it will be smooth sailing. Especially since the mom is a private person and will likely stay in her room.

Despite the creepiness, and the warnings from her friend Sam stays. It should be easy, and besides the guy is offering $400 for one night’s work.

This is a horror movie called The Devil’s House so we are primed for Mr. Ulman to be a serial killer, or the mother-in-law to be a holy terror, or for devil worshipers to try to get into the house. Ti West knows this expectation and plays with it. For most of the film’s run-time literally, nothing happens. Sam sits in the house alone and bored. She watches TV. She orders a pizza. She plays pool while listening to her Walkman. She explores the house. But the way the film is shot. The way the camera lingers in certain places. The way it was shot in 16mm giving it a grainy look. The way the music acts like a creepy horror movie score. The way the house looks with its weird rooms, and deep shadows. The way Sam is perpetually scared. All of these things build up unrelenting tension.

There is one scene, relatively early on, that happens to someone who is not Sam, that lets you know all this tension building isn’t for naught, but mostly it’s just playing with your expectations. I loved it. So much so that I was actually kind of disappointed when things actually started to happen.

I’ll stop myself there. I have a few reservations about the ending, but mostly I really liked this one.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Psycho II (1983)

psycho II

Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho is about as close to perfection as horror films come. I love it. I’ve seen it probably half a dozen times over the years. Yet, I’ve never had any desire to see any of the sequels. There was no need to, in my opinion. Psycho said everything that needed to be said about Norman Bates. Hitchock never indicated he wanted to make any other films and all of the sequels came about after he had died. The general consensus of the sequels is that they are pretty bad, and so I never bothered with them.

But then the other day one of my favorite critics, Keith Phipps, wrote a piece about Psycho II and it intrigued me, and so it became my Friday Night Horror Movie.

As it turns out Psycho II is way better than it has any right to be.

Set 22 years after the events of Psycho, this sequel follows Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) as he is released from the psychiatric institute he’s lived in since being found guilty of the murders from the original film. He’s been found mentally sound by his psychiatrist (Robert Loggia) and sent back to his (surprisingly still intact) home. The hotel is there too and so is Mr. Toomey (a never-sleazier Dennis Franz), a guy hired by the institute to run the place in Norman’s absence.

The hotel has never been much of a money maker so Norman gets a job as a cook’s assistant at a nearby diner. There he meets Mary (Meg Tilly). They get chummy and when Mary’s boyfriend kicks her out Norman lets her sleep (and shower) at his place. Things go ok until little notes start showing up from Norman’s mother. And somebody keeps calling his house claiming to be his mother, too. Then the bodies start piling up.

Is Norman going crazy once again? Or is somebody else trying to get him locked back up?

What I find interesting about the film is that Norman Bates is a true protagonist. The film takes his side, it makes us like him. Anthony Perkins’s portrayal is sympathetic. It was sympathetic in the original, but here we really like him. Or at least I did. The murders in the first film were due to a deep psychosis. We believe he is cured. That’s a really interesting route to take in this film.

Director Richard Franklin (who had just come off the terrific Australian thriller Road Games) knows what he’s doing. There are lots of visual homages to Hitchcock throughout the film, but he makes it his own. This is a film that didn’t need to be made, but it makes you glad it exists.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Dark Glasses (2022)

dark glasses argento poster<

I am a very big fan of Dario Argento. He was one of the originators and the perfector of the Italian Giallo. Throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s, he churned out one masterpiece after another. But the hard truth is he hasn’t made a good movie in a very long time, and most of his output since the 1990s has been terrible.

So it was with some trepidation that I came to Dark Glasses, his first film since the godawful Dracula in 2012. Well, I’m happy to say Argento is back, baby.

This is not Argento at his peak. It isn’t as good as Suspiria or Dark Red, but it is still pretty darn good. Gone is the shoddy CGI and dull cinematography. The film looks great and it absolutely contains some of his famous stylistic flairs.

The story involves a woman who is blinded in an accident and chased by a crazed maniac. It is none too special in that department but it works well enough. There are enough surprises to keep you guessing, and while the killer’s reveal is pretty dumb, getting there is quite effective.

This is a film that were it directed by someone else, some up-and-comer, you’d be hearing a lot more chatter about it. But because it is from a master of horror, and that it is perhaps not the peak of his career it is already being forgotten about. That’s a shame because I really liked it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Wolfen (1981)

wolfen poster

If you are any sort of cinephile. If you have grown tired of the latest Marvel movie, or are looking for something besides the next big blockbuster coming soon to Disney+ then I highly recommend the Criterion Channel. They not only have some of the world’s greatest cinema, but they do an incredible job of curation. Most streaming services seem content to just throw a whole lot of stuff at your screen and hope that something sticks.

It amazes me that Netflix and Amazon and most of the other streamers will spend a ton of money to make a film or gather exclusive rights to a movie – movies with great stars and directors, etc. – and then will just dump it in next to all the other crap they bought on the cheap and give it absolutely no advertising.

The Criterion Channel actually thinks about the films they bring in, they support them and curate them. They come with themes and bring in critics to talk about them. I love it. I won’t say that every film they have available is the greatest ever, but I’ve never been disappointed that I watched something through their service.

What I really love is that they often bring to my attention films that I’ve never heard of. Like tonight’s film, Wolfen. I didn’t know it existed until it shows up in the 1980s horror collection.

It stars Albert Finney as a disgraced New York City detective who is brought back to solve a high-profile case of a rich mover and shaker who was ripped to shreds by someone (or something – one imagines it will be a werewolf given the title of the film, but I haven’t gotten that far yet).

I’m just a half hour in, but so far I’m loving it. And I would have never have seen it were it not for Criterion. God bless ’em.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Near Dark (1987)

near dark poster
I watched a couple of Halloween movies earlier today (Part III and IV for those keeping track) which I’ll talk about later this weekend. I’m half asleep already so I probably won’t finish Near Dark but I’m making it The Friday Night Horror Movie anyway.

This is a film that has been on my radar for a while now, but I’ve kept putting it off. The Criterion Channel has a couple of wonderful collections going on this month – one with vampires, the other with a bunch of horror films from the 1980s – and Near Dark, Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire flick from 1987 fits both bills. Both collections are sending me way off my list of films I wanted to watch this month, but I can’t say I mind.

I’m only about 30 minutes into the film but so far I’m totally on its wavelength. Stylish vampire films are very much my jam, so I’m tuning off and trying to snooze before I get to the end.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Thirst (2009)

thirst movie poster
My Letterboxd profile says that I watched this movie once before, but I have absolutely no memory of it. I’m about halfway through the film right now and nothing has rung a bell. I don’t know if I just logged it wrong (maybe I watched something else and thought it was this, or just accidentally logged it) or if my memory is just that faulty. But I’m glad I decided to watch it again because I love it so far.

Directed by the always fantastic Park Chan-wook, thirst is a vampire movie, and so much more. It stars Song Kang-ho as a priest who volunteers to take an experimental vaccine for a deadly disease. The trouble is he doesn’t actually have the condition so he also volunteers to get it.

It kills him and then turns him into a vampire. A Catholic priest vampire is such a cool idea that I’m surprised no one has thought of it before. His morals keep him from outright killing people so he finds creative ways to quelch his blood lust (volunteering at a hospital he sucks on the other end of an IV out of a comatose patient for starters).

He meets a woman (played by Kim Ok-vin) who is very unhappy and is also into a bit of masochism. The two form quite a pair and that’s about as far as I’ve gotten into the plot.

Chan-wood injects all of this with his usual visual flair and perverse sense of humor. My wife especially appreciated when a sick man is playing a flute and then vomits up a bucket of blood (I’m just kidding, she just happened to be walking by during that scene and cursed my name for letting her see it, then quickly ran away).

And now I must get back to watching it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: They Live (1988)

they live poster

John Carpenter is one of my favorite filmmakers. Not every film he’s made is an all-time classic. Let’s be honest here and say he’s made a few outright stinkers, especially in his twilight years. But his best films (Halloween, The Thing, Assault On Precinct 12, Christine) are pretty darn fantastic. During his height, even the films that didn’t quite achieve ultimate excellence (Big Trouble in Little China, The Fog) are still renewably rewatchable.

For tonight’s Friday Night Horror Movie I chose They Live which is perhaps more science fiction than horror, but I’m rolling with it anyways. If you are a stickler for this sort of thing then please note I did watch Carpenter’s remake of Village of the Damned earlier tonight and you can count that one for me.

It has been a really long time since I’ve watched They Live so I’m pretty excited to give it another go.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Cure (1997)

cure movie poster

Unlike previous Friday nights, I’ve actually sat through tonight’s entire Horror Movie before writing this post. Theoretically, this means I can actually write a review of it now, instead of making vague promises to tell you what I think of it tomorrow (and then forgetting to actually do so). In reality, it is late, and I am tired, and my brain cannot think of anything to say about it.

Briefly, the plot involves a series of grisly murders being committed by seemingly ordinary people. There is a detective (Kôji Yakusho) trying to understand why this is happening, and an amnesiac (Masato Hagiwara) who may be hypnotizing them into doing it.

The plot is, at times, a bit silly and it is a whole lot enigmatic, but the director Kiyoshi Kurosawa fills it with atmosphere and mood. It is all about the vibe of the film more than the actual plot. I really quite loved it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Fox With the Velvet Tail (1971)

the fox with the velvet tail

Once again I’m letting you know the title of the Friday Night Horror Movie before I actually watched it. With luck, I’ll actually write something about it tomorrow.

I am a very big fan of the horror subgenre called Giallo. That’s an Italian genre that was very popular in the 1970s. It usually involves a black-gloved killer who murders beautiful people with a knife or some other sharp object. They are usually very stylish with brilliant use of colors and interesting camera placement and movement.

This film is apparently better known as In the Eye of the Hurricane, but The Fox With the Velvet Tail is a much better title in my opinion (and it is much more of a Giallo title) so I’m going with that. I don’t actually know anything about the film other than it is a Giallo and I’m trying to watch everything I can within that genre. I’m about half an hour in and so far it is very stylish but also rather dull.

I will try to update you later, once I’ve finished it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Two Evil Eyes (1990)

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When my daughter was much younger, and we were living in a little apartment we used to have what we called sleepover nights. Regularly, on a Friday night, my wife and I would drag our mattress into the living room and we’d make up the couch into a little bed for the girl. We’d make some popcorn and stay up late watching movies. Then we’d all sleep together in the living room. It was always a very fun time.

Then we bought a two-story house. The bedrooms were all upstairs so it was impossible to drag a mattress downstairs to the living room. Luckily, we have a television in our bedroom so we’d make a palette for the daughter on the floor and continued our sleepovers there.

Eventually, my daughter decided my wife and I snored too loud and she stopped sleeping in our room. But we’d still stay up late on Friday nights watching movies. One Friday night I realized our local college TV station was playing Tom Baker-era Doctor Who stories and I started watching them each week. My wife likes classic Doctor Who as well so she’d join me. My daughter loves Nu-Who, but she’s never quite got the appeal of the classic series. Still, she’d bring in her toys and play while we watched the TV show.

Eventually, this turned into us just watching the new series so my daughter could enjoy it with us. At some point, I started going downstairs after the show was over and my wife and daughter would stay in our bedroom watching YouTube videos.

I’d usually turn on a movie downstairs, usually falling asleep on the couch. Eventually, random movies turned into horror movies. Friday has become my favorite night of the week as we order a pizza, watch Doctor Who and then I watch a horror movie late into the evening.

I thought it might be fun to make a regular post of my Friday Night Horror Movies, so here we are.

The thing is, I haven’t actually watched the movie yet, and this will be true of every Friday night posting. Like I said I usually fall asleep on the couch watching the movie and so I won’t be able to actually talk about what I’ve watched until Saturday. But it seems silly to have a post called The Friday Night Horror Movie when I’m writing it on a Saturday morning.

What I’d like to do is start the post on Friday Nights and then maybe sometime on Saturday edit in a review.

This week’s movie is Two Evil Eyes, which is actually two movies in one. Originally planned as an anthology movie with multiple directors it turned into two one-hour films with Dario Argento and George A. Romero taking a stab at adapting an Edgar Allan Poe story. I’ll let you know what I think of it tomorrow.

Ok, it is Sunday now, so obviously I forgot to tell you what I thought “tomorrow.”

And now I’ve seen like five movies since watching this one so my memory is a little blurry. Basically, I liked this movie pretty well. I’m not well read in Poe’s books. I’ve read one or two stories and of course “The Raven” but that’s about it. I have seen several different cinematic adaptations of The Black Cat, two of which were adapted by Argento’s Italian compatriots Sergio Martino and Lucio Fulci. So that story is quite familiar to me even if I haven’t read the book.

The Romero story, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdem, is completely unfamiliar to me. It involves a woman who married an old, rich bastard in order to get his money. But he’s taking too long to die so she and an ex-boyfriend hatch a plan to hypnotize him, get him to sign over all his wealth to her, and then murder him. Everything goes to plan except after he’s dead he keeps on living.

Or something. It isn’t very clear whether he turns into a zombie or a ghost or something else. It has Romero’s typical social commentary (rich people are both horrible and weird), some nice gore, and little else.

Argento’s Black Cat adaptation doesn’t do anything new with the material. A crime scene photographer (played with gusto by Harvey Keitel) kills his girlfriend, ties her corpse to some coat hangers then builds a wall around her. A black cat helps get him captured by the police.

It has some of Argento’s typical style (there is a POV shot of the cat and some great extreme close-ups) and lots of blood-soaked violence. The opening scene is basically the aftermath of Poe’s story The Pit and the Pendulum.

All in all neither film is particularly great, but if you are a fan of either director there is enough here to make it worth your time.