The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Last Matinee (2020)

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In an old movie theater in Uraguay, a group of horror movie archetypes watch a low-budget horror movie whilst a black-gloved killer slashes them in incredibly gory ways.

The Last Matinee takes its influences from such art-house films as Goodbye Dragon Inn and Cinema Paradisio and the stylish Gialli of guys like Dario Argento and Mario Bava.

It looks great. Director Maximiliano Contenti and cinematographer Benjamín Silva make great use of the cinema’s lighting. The movie screen glows on the audience’s faces, while an usher beams his flashlight across the room. In other spaces, neon signs and popcorn machines add ambient light. The camera moves fluidly across these interesting closed spaces.

The main set consists of the movie auditorium. It is an old theater with a huge seating space and a large balcony. It is the kind of theater I wish still existed instead of the generic multi-plexes we’ve had for decades. In addition to this is the projection room, a dirty old bathroom, and lots of long hallways. The film makes great use of its single-setting.

Once it gets going it is great fun with the killer getting in some gruesome kills with stylish gore. But boy does it ever take its time getting there. It is a good hour before anything happens. Until then we spend time developing the characters.

The characters are your basic slasher film stock characters. There is the horny couple, the little kid, the old man, the punk teens, and our nice final girl.

I appreciate that the film fleshes these characters out a bit. I’ve seen slashers where the characters were nothing but cannon, er knife fodder, and that gets boring. If we don’t care about the characters just a little bit then the film becomes nothing but an exercise in gore effects.

But here we spend a little too much time developing them only to watch them get slashed and stabbed before the credits roll. Those early scenes have style, but not much else. But once the killer lets loose in that last half hour it turns into something quite fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Girl in the Pool (2024)

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Tom (Freddie Prinze, Jr) lives in a nice house in the suburbs. He’s got a beautiful wife (Monica Potter) and a couple of teenage kids. On paper, he’s got it all together. So, why is he so unhappy? In an early scene, we’ll see him on the phone with a friend and Tom asks, “Am I a good person?” We’ll quickly learn the answer to that question.

No. No he is not a good person.

Tom is having an affair with a much younger woman (Gabrielle Haugh). On his birthday he slips off work a little early and she comes over for a little fun in the pool. But they have an argument over whether or not he’ll ever leave his wife, and what her husband would do if he found out about them. Before too long she finds herself dead and he finds himself hiding her body in a pool cubby.

Before he can do anything else a bunch of people come over for a surprise birthday party.

We see the events with the mistress in choppy flashbacks. The film is coy about exactly what happened to her and why. In the present Tom slowly goes mad having to deal with a myriad of party guests, his spiteful father-in-law (Kevin Pollak), and a wife who increasingly thinks something is up.

That’s a good plot and it could be either a truly entertaining thriller or a very dark satiric comedy, but unfortunately, it is neither. Mostly it is just bland.

The thing is Tom is kind of an asshole. One of the first things we know about him is that he’s cheating on his wife with a girl who is his daughter’s age. He doesn’t seem to know half the people invited to his own birthday party and the ones he does know he doesn’t seem to like (and most of those are bros he works with). He’s hapless and sad. He’s the kind of guy who keeps thinking he has a plan to solve all his problems, but he can’t actually come up with anything other than yell at everybody.

But he’s not the kind of asshole you can love either. This isn’t Walter White or Tony Soprano – horrible people who we, if not identify with at least we can love to watch.

Every character in this film is kind of awful if I’m being honest. His friends are obnoxious, and his father-in-law is actively hateful. Even his wife and kids come off as disinterested.

You can make a great film filled with terrible people – Goodfellas comes immediately to mind. But I just never cared about any of these people, especially Tom. I never cared who killed the girl, or why he was hiding the body. I didn’t care if he got caught. So there was no real tension or interest.

Freddie Prinze, Jr. is one of a slew of actors including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Matthew Lillard, Josh Hartnett, and Jennifer Love Hewitt who were huge in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But unlike those other actors, I never liked Freddie Prinze, Jr. I never thought he was a good actor. But his low-key woodenness works for him here. The rest of the cast is fine as well, so I think it is the script and direction that just didn’t work for me.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Mr. Vampire (1985)

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My pneumonia is subsiding, but definitely not fully gone. I’d say I’m up about 80 percent on that front. But you may recall when I first started getting sick I complained about having done something to my hip. Well, that is back with a vengeance. I don’t know what I’ve done to it, but it hurt like crazy anytime I stand up and try to walk.

Getting is old is not fun, my friends.

I’m in no shape to write a long review tonight, but since I missed last week’s Friday Night Horror and haven’t written much since then I wanted to talk a little bit about this movie.

I actually started Smile 2 this evening. Got about halfway through then got hungry. When I had finished my meal, my daughter had snuck into my room to watch something of her own. My wife was downstairs and she doesn’t like horror movies so after a bit we landed on this, a rather silly and not very scary horror movie.

Mr. Vampire is the first in what you might call the Hopping Vampire genre of Hong Kong cinema (I previously reviewed a later film in the genre, Encouter of the Spooky Kind (1980). The hopping vampires are actually Jiangshi, which come from traditional Chinese folklore and are something like a mix between vampires and zombies. Or so says Wikipedia anyway.

This film follows a Taoist priest and his two inept assistants who battle a super strong vampire, a couple of other vampires that he’s recently turned and eventually a succubus type ghost.

As you might suspect from that description it is a very silly movie. There are lots of broad jokes, goofy physical humor, and some pretty good kung fu action. It is, perhaps, a little too silly for my particular senses, but ultimately it won me over in its sheer entertainment value.

My wife seemed to enjoy it too. Definitely recommended when you are looking for something different.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Smile (2022)

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Smile is a horror movie in the vein of The Ring (2002) or It Follows (2014) in that it creates a sustained mood and follows a heroine as she attempts to figure out a fairly complicated mythology of the supernatural thing that wants to kill her. It isn’t as good as either of those films and it has a few too many jump scares for my tastes, but it is still a good time at the movies.

Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a therapist at the emergency psychiatric ward of a hospital. She is overworked and always exhausted, but kind and generous with her time. One day Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) comes into the hospital. She says she recently witnessed her professor kill himself and ever since she has been terrorized by an entity that appears as different people smiling strangely at her. This entity has foretold her death. Then Laura gets her own creepy smile and slices her face open.

Rose then begins seeing strange visions of people smiling that same strange smile. She first enlists the help of her boyfriend (Jessie T. Usher) and her therapist (Robin Weigert) but neither of them truly believes what is happening to her. She is able to get her cop ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner) to assist her and they learn that she has become cursed by some evil entity that thrives on trauma. Each person with the curse kills themself in some horrible manner in front of a witness causing the curse to be passed onto them.

Rose has previously suffered her own trauma watching her mother succumb to mental illness as a child and being the one to find her dead body after she killed herself. It has become cliche these days for horror movies to be about trauma, but all too often those films don’t do the work. So, it is nice to see a film that understands trauma and how it lingers. And how other characters around you may not understand how your trauma affects you, even when they have well meaning intentions.

Like It Follows I found myself constantly studying the the background, the edges of the screen looking for someone with that smile. Knowing the entity could appear at any moment and look like anyone kept an edge-of-my-seat tension going throughout. I kind of wish there had been more of that. There weren’t enough moments where she’s seeing strangers smile.

In the same way, I wish they’d followed her just a little while longer researching The Smile. Rose and Joel figured out that it affected a few people then basically stop. They talk to one guy who survived it and get a sort-of answer but then do nothing about it. I’m pushing towards true spoiler territory here so I’ll just say the decisions it makes with these things didn’t always work for me. This is especially true of the very end which felt more like a setup for the inevitable series of sequels than a truly satisfying conclusion to this movie.

But that tension building really worked for me and there are several truly great jump scares. Sosie Bacon is terrific and it is always great to see Robin Weigert in anything. The direction from first-timer Parker Finn is mostly good but there were far too many crooked angle shots and that thing where a shot starts out upside down and then it slowly rights itself.

If you liked It Follows and The Ring then I’d definitely give this one a shot.

The Friday Night Horror Movie(s) – Someone’s Watching Me (1978) & The Ward (2010)

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John Carpenter is one of my favorite genre filmmakers. He’s one of the few guys making genre films that has no pretensions as to being any other kind of filmmaker. He wasn’t making horror films as a means to fund his arthouse projects, he was making them because he loves horror movies.

When he was good there were few better, when he was bad…well I started to say I don’t want to talk about when he was bad, but I have to talk about The Ward.

After I watched The Ward but before I sat down to write anything I decided to put on another movie. Browsing through the Criterion Channel I discovered another John Carpenter movie Someone’s Watching Me, and I decided to make it a double feature.

Made in 2010 The Ward remains the last film Carpenter ever directed. Considering that was 14 years ago, that he’s now in his mid-70s, and has expressed no desire to ever make a film again, I think it is safe to say it will be his last film.

Made in 1978 Someone’s Watching Me was the third film he’d ever directed, coming just after the experimental student film Dark Star and the low-budget, independent (but still great) Assault on Precinct 13.

The Ward was made by an elder statesman with nothing left to prove. A man who had grown tired of making films. It was his first film after a ten-year break from feature films. A man who admitted he was burned out, and fallen out of love with filmmaking.

Someone’s Watching Me was made by a young artist, hungry. He not only directed his previous two films but wrote their scripts and scored them. Warner Brothers asked him to write the script for Someone’s Watching Me based on a true story that happened in Chicago. When they decided to turn it into a made-for-TV movie they offered him the director’s chair. Carpenter jumped at the chance.

It would mean a bigger budget (even 1970s made-for-TV money was more than he was used to working with) and access to better equipment and good crews. It even gave him his Director’s Guild union card.

It isn’t that The Ward is a bad film, it’s just generic. Were it made by any other filmmaker it would be largely forgotten. But because it was made by Carpenter and it was his “comeback” film after 10 years away it is nothing but disappointing. His films weren’t always great but they were never generic, they were always made by a filmmaker with a vision.

There are generic aspects of Someone’s Watching Me’s plot, it is your basic woman being stalked by an unknown stranger story that has been told many times. But Carpenter infuses it with style and does his very best to keep it interesting. It is full of camera movement and shots that clearly took time to set up and were well thought out.

The Ward feels dull in comparison. It is a story that has been told many times before as well. A young woman finds herself in a psychiatric ward where something is stalking her and her fellow patients. But is it real or is it all inside her head?

But Carpenter does nothing with the material. Unlike most of his films, he didn’t have a hand in writing The Ward and he didn’t score it either. It was more or less a director-for-hire type film and he phoned it in.

It was fun watching these two films from both sides of his long, storied career. His best material lies between the two (he almost immediately started making Halloween just after he wrapped on Someone’s Watching Me and he says he learned many of the techniques he’d use on that horror masterpiece there). But is always interesting to see a filmmaker at the beginning of his career and then at the end.

For the pedantic film nerds among you, I am aware that Carpenter directed two episodes of the Masters of Horror series after that ten-year hiatus, and he recently filmed an episode of John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams, but those weren’t feature-length films so I made an editorial decision and left them out of the discussion.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Leopard Man (1943)

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We are halfway through November and I’ve only written about two film noirs. Truth be told I’ve only watched nine film noirs this month. Work has been physically exhausting these last few weeks and when I come home I’m often too tired to watch much of anything, and certainly too tired to write about what I watch. Then we had those plumbing issues that kept me away from the house last weekend, and I’ve had some things to watch and review for Cinema Sentries.

Things should lighten up now on all fronts so hopefully I’ll be able to get some good noir viewing in and do a little writing too.

For tonight’s horror movie, I wanted to watch something…if not an actual noir at least noir adjacent. Something that emerged in the 1940s when film noir was at its peak. Something with some great noir-ish lighting and camera work.

The Leopard Man fits those bills perfectly. It was directed by Jaques Tourneur who also directed Out of the Past, one of the great film noirs, and Berlin Express which I watched the other day and hopefully will write about soon.

There is a lot to love about The Leopard Man but it also feels disjointed – like a series of vignettes instead of a cohesive story. With a runtime of just 66 minutes, I wish they’d added another twenty minutes of story or so and fleshed it out a bit more.

Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks) is a nightclub singer in a small New Mexico border town. One night her manager Jerry Mannin (Dennis O’Keefe) concocts a foolish bit of promotion and has Kiki drag a leopard out on the stage while her rival Gabriella (Margo) is performing. Wise to the shenanigans Gabriella uses her castanets to frighten the leopard causing Kiki to let go of its leash and send the leopard fleeing into the night.

Later that night a young woman is out shopping and is attacked and killed by the leopard. A night or two later another young woman is killed while visiting her father’s grave. And then even later yet another woman is killed. All of the deaths seem to be caused by the leopard, but Jerry begins to suspect a human killer. He and Kiki investigate.

The film looks great. Tourneur and cinematographer Robert De Grasse created these wonderful images bound in deep shadows and creeping light. The film creates a wonderfully suspenseful atmosphere with some excellent local color. Tourneur always seems to be sensitive to his characters of color and minorities, and here he makes his Mexican characters real people and not just caricatures. Unusual for its time he also casts Latino actors for the roles instead of white people in brownface.

The story he’s telling is quite good too. I enjoyed the mystery and the various vignettes. But like I say I wish the film had an additional half hour to tell them. All too often a character will be introduced only to be forgotten about in the next scene.

For example, the first woman who is killed has a mother and a brother. We get a nice little scene with them. The mother is fussing at the girl to go to the shop for her, and the brother teases her that she’s scared of the dark and the leopard. The girl is killed on her doorstep, banging on the door while her mother desperately tries to save her. But then we get nothing. We see the mother at the official inquest but she has no lines. Then we don’t see her again at all.

This type of thing happens a lot. There just isn’t enough time to flesh out any character stories save the leads.

But what we do get is quite good.

Bring Out the Perverts: Strip Nude For Your Killer (1975)

strip nude for your killer poster

Horror films have always been at least a little transgressive and salacious. They are trying to evoke strong emotions after all. Starting in the 1960s and moving strongly in the 1970s and 1980s they began to rely heavily on sex and violence. Horror tends to be watched by younger people and younger people buy tickets when that’s what you’re selling.

Giallo always trodded on those tropes. This makes sense since Giallo is at heart a genre about violence against women. The best films in the genre examine those tropes, they ponder the male gaze (while often at the same time offering up examples of it) and probe the links between sex and violence. The worst ones simply give the audience plenty of naked flesh and blood-letting without much thought behind it beyond making a few dollars.

Strip Nude For Your Killer is one of the sleaziest horror films I’ve ever seen. Hardly a scene goes by without someone (usually any number of beautiful women) taking off their clothes. Actually, it is always the women. This is a film that has no problem showing full-frontal nudity from a woman but always pans up just as the men are taking off their pants.

It begins with a woman lying naked on her back, her feet in stirrups. She’s getting a back-alley abortion. The doctor’s head is strategically placed so that we can see pubic hair, but not her actual genitals. That’s about as sophisticated as the film gets.

I won’t get too far into the plot, as you can read more about that in my review of the Blu-ray over at Cinema Sentries. There isn’t much plot to be found if I’m being honest. It is basically someone killing a bunch of people connected to a modeling agency.

The kills aren’t particularly interesting, and the filmmaking is rather plain. There is a groovy soundtrack and the killer does wear a pretty rad-looking leather biker suit (someday I’m gonna make a list of all the films that have a killer wearing a similar suit – there are a lot of them, and they always seem to keep their helmets on!)

It also stars Edwige Fenech and I’ll never complain about that. However, she’s not given much to do (other than strip off her clothes at every opportunity) even as she is the main character and the one who is investigating the murders.

It isn’t a terrible film, it just isn’t particularly exciting which is quite a thing to say considering how much nudity and murder it has in it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Girl In Room 2A (1974)

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I watched The Girl in Room 2A via my Forgotten Gialli Blu-ray collection from Severin Films. “Forgotten” makes them sound like some overlooked classics or some incredible bits of cinema that were lost to time. But in reality, they were forgotten for a reason. That reason being they are mostly rubbish.

That’s not entirely fair to The Girl in Room 2A. It isn’t complete rubbish, it has a few moments that make it sort-of interesting. Or at least worth a watch if you are digging into the deep well of Giallo.

It starts out with a bang. A woman is kidnapped as she leaves a building. She’s grabbed, tossed into the back of a car, and taken to some dungeon. There she is stripped and punctured with these spikey metal rods. Then she’s driven to a cliff and dumped overboard. And all of that occurs during the opening credits.

Then we meet our heroine Margaret Bradley (Daniela Giordano). She’s just been released from prison and she sets herself up in the titular Room 2A in a sort-of halfway house.

The owner of the house is nice, but a bit nosey. The room is comfortable but there is a strange red spot on the floor. She’ll clean it up, but later it will reappear. At night she hears strange noises and she keeps having strange dreams about queer-looking people dressed in red robes doing…things to her.

I quite liked this part of the film. I love a good haunted house mystery. But then the film decides to show us what’s going on. In detail. They don’t just let us see the killers but it explains who they are and what their purpose is. In detail. I won’t bother with it, but all the explanations bog the film down. The mystery is lost and it becomes rather dull.

There is also a love interest which is dull in its own way, but at least that makes sense. I can accept a love interest in this sort of film, but there is no reason to spend so much time with the death cult explaining their motivations.

There is a final action sequence that’s pretty great, but it isn’t enough to make the film interesting.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Final Destination 2 (2003)

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In the first Final Destination, a group of teenagers board a plane for a fun trip to Paris. One of them falls asleep and has a premonition that the plane is gonna explode mid-air. He, a teacher, and a few other friends get the heck off the plane, and sure enough, it does explode. Then the survivors slowly get picked off in increasingly ridiculous Rube Goldberg-esque death traps because Death is mad they escaped his grasp the first time.

Final Destination 2 is basically the same film but with less melodrama and better deaths.

Exactly one year after the plane explosion in the first movie, Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) heads out for a Spring Break holiday with three of her friends. Just before she pulls onto the highway she has a premonition of a massive, deadly, pile-up on that highway (we see it too and it is the best scene in the movie). Freaked out she decides not to pull out. Moments later that accident does occur.

Knowing the story from the first movie, Kimberly is now afraid that those she saved are now being stalked by death. Knowing this is a movie, we now anxiously await those deaths.

Most of them are top-notch. The film does an amazing job of setting up a scene, showing us multiple possible ways a character could die then finding ways to surprise us. It is terrific fun.

It is less fun when it is giving us exposition. At least twice in the first twenty minutes, characters explain to us the setup of the movie (by explaining the plot of the first movie, which presumably the majority of folks watching the sequel have already seen.) Between kills the characters discuss what they need to do in order to survive.

Clear Rivers (Ali Larter, first billed but who doesn’t show up until a good 30 minutes into this 90-minute movie), the Final Girl of the first movie, has been living in a psych ward (padded cells seem safer than the real world) is brought out for helpful advice (and explain the rules of this movie).

There is less exposition in this one than in the first film, and it is cleaner and faster, but still kind of a drag. The death scenes work best when they seem to be freaks of nature rather than supernatural in nature. The early ones are the best, by the end Death (always invisible) starts moving things on his own which is a lot less fun than random crap killing the characters.

None of the characters are particularly well-developed, but honestly, who cares? You come to these films for the intricate death scenes and this one delivers on that front incredibly well.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Salem’s Lot (2024)

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‘Salem’s Lot was not the first Stephen King book I ever read (that honor would go to the short story The Langoliers) nor was it the one that turned me into a lifelong fan (that would be Mr. Mercedes) but it was the one where I realized how good of a writer he is and that I should maybe start paying attention to him (I wouldn’t do that for a few more years, but the seed was planted then.)

It remains one of my favorite King books.

The story’s basic idea is: what if a vampire came to a small town? But like so many of King’s books, it is so much more than that. It follows Ben Mears, a writer who has returned to the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot, where he grew up, to write about the Marsten House. That’s your classic old spooky mansion on top of the hill, where he saw a ghost as a child.

Naturally, that’s where the vampire lives. But before he gets there Ben makes a friend with a schoolteacher and falls in love with a girl, and meets lots of interesting people. That’s what I love about Stephen King. Sure, he’s written a terrifying story about an ancient vampire taking over a small town, but it is really a story about small-town living and the characters that fill it up.

Tobe Hooper directed a two-part miniseries of Salem’s Lot for CBS in 1979. It is far from perfect, but Hooper understands the heart of the story is its characters and the scares should be built around that. But he also creates some truly memorably scary images.

TNT adapted a version of the story with Rob Lowe in the lead in 2004 but the less said about it the better.

When I heard that had made a new adaptation for Max I was excited. I’m always excited to learn about new Stephen King adaptations. Then I watched the trailer and that excitement flew right out the window. It looked cheap. Worse than that it looked like it was going to rely too heavily on violence and jump scares. Then the reviews started coming in and they were not good.

But it is spooky season and I’m still a sucker for King adaptations so I crossed my fingers and pressed Play.

My friends I am happy to report it is not that bad. It is a long way from great, and you won’t exchange this for the Hooper version in your collection, but it is worth the watching.

They say writer/director Gary Dauberman has a three-hour cut but Max made him edit it down to just under 2 and you can feel it. The movie plays like the greatest hits of the story. It isn’t so much that it jumps straight to the action, but that it shortcuts through everything.

We meet Ben (Lewis Pullman) as he’s driving into town (the soundtrack plays Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” which is a great choice) he meets Susan (Makenzie Leigh) at the real estate office. She’s reading his book but doesn’t recognize him. But by the next scene, she’s inviting him to the movies, and we learn both their stories within a few minutes. Movies always have characters falling in love way too fast, but here it is even faster.

The realization that the weird stuff going on in this town is caused by vampires happens extraordinarily fast as well. Ben’s newfound friend, Matt (the always great Bill Camp) sees a friend in a bar looking a little pale and pekid. He takes him home and notices the guy has a couple of little scars on his neck. Later he thinks he sees the guy scurrying into an upstairs window.

That little bit of information convinces him that the town is full of vampires. He quickly convinces Ben and Susan of this information. Then the alcoholic priest (John Benjamin Hickey). The new schoolboy in town, Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter) doesn’t need to be convinced, he already knows. He’s an old-school horror nerd who doesn’t take crap from nobody.

This happens throughout the film. Relationships deepen and plot points happen offscreen, in the cuts. Before I realized that they were literally happening in the cuts, that more details had been shot and then edited out at the last minute I thought it was an interesting story choice. Now it just seems distracting.

But what is left is well done, if a little disjointed. The editing is interesting. There are a lot of shots like one in which a man is alone on a bed. The camera moves slowly to look under the bed, then it moves upward and the room is full of people – a great deal of time has shifted while the camera was under the bed. Or the camera will focus on an object and then it will cut to a similar object in a different scene.

When the violence comes it comes with that frantic modern style of scaring you with jumps, and quick edits, which is not to my liking at all. They changed the ending quite a bit. Some of it I liked – they moved it from the Marsten House to somewhere interesting. Some of it I did not – far too much generic action. But more or less it worked for me. Or perhaps my expectations were so low that anything not terrible would have been enjoyed by me at this point.