Tag: horror movies

The Friday Night Horror Movie: John Dies At The End (2012)

john dies at the end

Don Coscarelli has had one interesting career as a director. After directing his very first feature film at the age of 18 he went on to create one of the more iconic horror mechanisms of the 1980s (Phantasm‘s flying silver ball). He followed that up with The Beastmaster a ridiculous, schlocky bit of fantasy starring Marc Singer as a bare-chested cross between Luke Skywalker and Doctor Doolittle which was a staple of late-night cable television in the early 1990s. He then made four increasingly bad Phantasm sequels which expanded the film’s mythology into incoherence. He also made Bubba Ho-Tep, a film that I haven’t seen but apparently stars Bruce Campbell as an elderly Elvis Presley who teams up with JFK to fight an ancient Egyptian mummy. His last film was this one which I just watched.

It is an absolute mess of a film, at times both brilliant and baffling. To explain the plot would be an exercise in futility. It involves a mind-altering drug, an alternate universe, bug aliens, and a lot of gross-out horror. It is a film so filled to the brim with ideas that it never pauses for a breath to let the viewer catch up, or to take stock of where it is going.

Coscarelli has a visual flair so it is generally interesting to look at (with the exception of some pretty dodgy CGI). It is well made and well acted (Paul Giamatti has a small role and he’s always great to see in anything – he also produced the film). There are lots of interesting things going on in the script, I just wished they had spent a little more time on any one idea and fleshed it out more, instead of throwing more and more and stuff at us. It has a tendency to be a little too jokey as well. In part, it wants to be this mind-bending, time-jumping sci-fi/horror film and in another part it wants to be a Judd Apatow-style bro-comedy. The two parts never really gel together in any coherent way.

It is definitely worth watching if you like Corscarelli or films that get a little crazy.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Black Phone (2021)

the black phone

As much as possible I try to go into a movie knowing very little. I find not having expectations on what to expect really helps the viewing experience. That’s probably a funny thing to say from a guy who regularly reviews movies a lot of you haven’t seen, but it is true.

The Black Phone is a movie I kept seeing people excitedly talking about when it came out, but I successfully kept myself from actually reading those things, and thus I came to it knowing nothing more than Ethan Hawke apparently wears a lot of scary-looking masks.

I’ll tell you all just slightly more about it. Hawke plays a crazy dude who abducts children and…well I won’t spoil what he does. Actually, I don’t really know because I haven’t finished the film. The main story revolves around one boy who is abducted and placed into a large basement. There is a phone on the wall, but it is disconnected. Except it keeps ringing and the people who answer on the other end are boys Ethan Hawke previously abducted.

I’m maybe 45 minutes into it and so far I’m digging it. It has that Blumhouse slickness to it that tends to keep me from loving films that come under that banner, but Hawke is creepy and the 1970s setting is done well. I especially was enjoying a foul-mouthed, and tough girl who is our hero’s sister. I hope she comes to his rescue before it is all said and done.

And now I must get back to it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Ring (2002)

the ring

In the early 2000s, horror nerds like myself began to discover what was then called J-Horror. This was a cycle of horror movies made in Japan that started in the early 1990s. Unlike the films made in the United States at the time, J-Horror relied more on atmosphere and mood to create their scares. They often involved haunted houses and evil spirits, the supernatural rather than knife-wielding psychopaths that were so popular in America at the time.

Discovering these films was like a fresh of breath air for folks like me who had long since grown tired of slashers. I believe Ringu (1998) was the first J-Horror film to really make a splash here in the US (I’m sure some horror hound could pop in now to tell me they were watching Japanese Hororr films long before Ringu popularized the genre, but whatever). It was a huge film in Japan and had decent success in America.

Enough so that an American producer decided to remake it as The Ring (2002). That movie was a surprise success and started a succession of American remakes of J-Horror films. Snob that I am I watched pretty much all of them, but always preferred the Japanese originals.

Tonight I decided to rewatch The Ring. I liked it more this time than my previous watches.

It is about a VHS tape that kills you after seven days after your first viewing. Typing that out just now makes me realize how dumb that summary sounds. The film on the tape is like a short film some goth art school kid would make to try and freak everybody out. A couple of teenagers watch the tape and seven days later they die horrible deaths. Naomi Watts plays a journalist who was related to one of the teens. She sniffs a story and investigates.

She finds, then watches the creepy tape and immediately after she receives a phone call telling her she has seven days to live. When her young son accidentally watches the tape and starts drawing creepy drawings she knows she has to solve the mystery.

The original Japanese film is super creepy and atmospheric and really good (you can read my review of it over at Cinema Sentries). The remake is very Americanized in that it provides a few more jump scares, has slicker production values, and juices up the narrative a little bit so that the story is explained to the viewer in clearer turns.

Still, it is effective in its own way. The jump scares work for the most part, and it is still moody enough to give it that J-Horror feels even if it is a little sanitized.

X (2022) & Pearl (2022)

xpearl

When I wrote about House of the Devil (2009) I indicated that I watched it because I’d heard good things about these two films which were also directed by Ti West. Well, I finally got around to watching them, and I’m glad I did.

Much like House of the Devil, X is an homage to gritty 1970s horror. It is more influenced by rural terror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Last House on the Left (1972) than the occult slasher that so influenced Devil.

The plot involves a group of young filmmakers who head off to a secluded Texas farm to produce a pornographic film. It takes place in 1979 when hardcore films had obtained a certain amount of mainstream success. But that success doesn’t lead to acceptance in rural Texas which is why the producer Wayne (Martin Henderson) didn’t bother to tell the elderly couple (Stephen Ure and Mia Goth under a lot of prosthetics and makeup) what they were planning to do. That will come to haunt (and murder) them later in the film.

But much like House of the Devil, X takes its time getting to the overt violence and gore. X is a lot more fun, and funny. Shooting the porn scenes creates a lot of humor. Mia Goth (without the prosthetics) plays Maxine, an exotic dancer who thinks this film will make her a star. Brittany Snow plays Bobby-Lynne, an old pro at pornographic movies. She has no aspirations of being a mainstream star, but would really like to make enough money to buy a house with a pool.

There is one scene in which Bobby-Lynne is performing with Jackson Hole (Kid Cudi) and he says something that makes her genuinely laugh. The film’s director RJ (Owen Campbell) – who thinks of himself as some low-budget, arthouse auteur – zooms in on Bobby-Lynnes’s laughing face. It is perhaps the only authentic bit of acting she’s ever done. The moment Bobby-Lynne realizes the camera is capturing her laugh, she immediately switches to porn-actress mode and makes the requisite “oohs” and “ahhs.”

There’s also the producer of the movie Wayne (Martin Henderson) who is attempting to cash in on the adult film craze of the moment, and the boom mic operator Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) who is also RJ’s girlfriend and had no idea they were making a porno.

I enjoyed the slower moments much more than I did the graphic violence. Once the blood-letting began the film became a lot less interesting to me.

Pearl is a prequel to X which acts as an origin story to the old lady who does most of the murdering in that film. She’s Pearl of the title and is again played by Mia Goth, but without the old age makeup. She grew up on that same farm. Her father has been paralyzed by the Spanish Flu and her domineering mother (Tandi Wright) constantly criticizes her. Pearl loves the movies and dreams of being a star.

Where X was shot like a gritty 1970s horror movie, Pearl is made like a 1940s melodrama with some classic musicals for inspiration, too. It is full of big, bright colors, and there are a couple of wonderful fantasy sequences.

It also feels completely unnecessary. I was reminded of The Conjuring Universe where you have the main movies and then there are all these side stories where relatively unimportant objects in the main movies get their own films. Pearl is a prequel that no one would have asked for.

But it kind of works. It is well-made and entertaining. Mia Goth is magnificent. But I doubt I’ll ever watch it again, whereas I’ll most likely watch X many more times in the future.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Down (2001)

down

Friday night comes and I need a horror movie to watch. I really want to watch something I’ve not seen before, but scrolling through my current streaming services doesn’t turn up much. I start to put on The Ring (2002) the American remake of the excellent Japanese film Ringu (1988) with Naomi Watts, but I’ve seen it before, and as I said I’m wanting something new. I land on this film which also stars Naomi Watts. It is about an evil elevator in a New York skyrise and that sounds like fun.

Sometimes when you randomly watch something after flipping through the streaming channels you discover something really good. Sometimes, like tonight, you realize you’ve made a terrible mistake.

Down is a remake of a Dutch film called The Lift which is something of a cult classic. Dick Maas directed both of them. I haven’t seen the original but if the remake is anything like it I won’t be bothering with it at all.

It seems to be trying for some sort of blending of horror and comedy but it fails at both. The comedy is broad and bad and not all of the actors seem to understand they should be going for laughs, while others seem to think they are in a Marx Brothers film. It was made just before Watts became a star so while she is featured prominently in all the promotional material she actually isn’t the lead. That role goes to James Marshall who, if you are like me, you’ll stare at for a long time trying to remember where you know him from before you finally look it up and realize he was in Twin Peaks. He plays everything quite straight whereas Naomi Watts seems to have walked in from some SNL skit from the early 1990s. She lays it on thick and broad and sports the worst Brooklyn accent I’ve heard in a while.

The film has great character actors like Dan Hedaya and Michael Ironside, Ron Perlman and Edward Hermann in small roles, all of which seem to be playing in different movies.

This is a movie that begins with two security mooks looking through those tourist telescope things on the observation deck of this big skyscraper. They are looking into the window of a nearby window watching a couple of prostitutes get sexy with some dude. It is played for laughs like it’s one of those low-budget comedies the USA Network used to play on Friday nights. It goes downhill from there.

While the comedy is bad the horror is worse. It builds very little suspense, the deaths are sometimes gruesome but never effective. I’d say it was more of a supernatural thriller instead of horror but it isn’t very thrilling either. In the last 15 minutes or so it does switch from just bad to so-bad-its-good territory but by then I was just ready for it to be over.

As an interesting bit of trivia, the film was scheduled for a 2001 release but then 9/11 happened and for obvious reasons, it got pushed back into oblivion. At some point, they think the elevator mishaps are caused by terrorists. There are actually characters who talk about how Bin Laden tried to take down the twin towers which is now kind of creepy. And that’s about as creepy at the film gets.

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.

31 Days of Horror: Halloween Ends (2022)

halloween ends

Somewhere around 2007 or 2008, I started keeping track of all the films I was watching. It was a fun way of remembering what movies I had watched and when I watched them. I’ve since moved all my tracking to my Letterboxd account (which you can view here).

That first year I watched right at 100 movies. That seemed like a decent amount of films to watch, so I decided I would try to watch 100 movies every year. I quickly calculated and decided that I should watch 10 movies a month to meet my goal. Now, I’m bad at math, but I’m not that bad at math – I knew that 10 movies a month times 12 months equaled 120 per year but that was easier than doing the real math (it is 8.3333 movies per month if you really want to know) and 10 is a nice round number so I just went with it. Plus watching 120 movies a year is better than watching 100 movies a year and I was happy to increase my goal.

Ten movies a month is 2-3 movies per week and I worked diligently to meet that goal. Those of you who know me, you’ll know I actually stressed myself out more than once when I didn’t meet that goal. I managed to watch 120 movies or more for most of the years I was tracking it. For those of you keeping count, there were a couple of years in which my wife was in charge of a study abroad program and we spent three months a year living in Europe. I did not meet my goals during those years.

As my daughter got older I started watching more movies. She no longer needed my attention every moment of every day and so when she would play with her toys or whatever, I’d throw on a movie. She also started going to bed earlier and when she’d go down I’d put on another movie. My annual views went up.

Then COVID hit and we stopped going anywhere for a couple of years. I watched movies like a fiend. I’d get off work, spend a little time talking to my family then I’d start a movie. I might finish it, or I might not. Then there would be supper and clean up. Maybe a TV show or a game with the family. Then I’d put on another movie, or finish the one I started. But it was the weekends that made me a true movie addict. I’d watch something after work on Friday. Then I’d watch a horror movie that night, maybe two. Then on Saturdays, I’d watch 3 or 4 or 5. I think 6 was my record. I’d watch 2-4 more on Sunday. I was averaging something like 9 movies a week. Suddenly I was watching some 400 movies a year.

Even now when we are venturing out more on the weekends I’m still averaging about 1 movie per day or more.

Still, I watched a lot of movies this month. Fifty to be exact. Forty-four of these were horror movies. That’s a little crazy.

But I like stats so I’m going to break them down even more.

Twelve of the movies I had seen before. Twenty were made before I was born. The most movies I watched in one day were four. I did that twice. I only went to a movie theater once and that was to watch the original Halloween on the big screen. My final movie this month was indeed Halloween Ends. But it was kind of terrible and I don’t want to talk about it.

Truth is there was a bit of sickness in my family this month which kept us home on a couple of weekends. Also, the budget has been tight of late which kept us home even more. I tend to watch movies when I’m home.

I’ve done 31 Days of Horror for a few years now and I’ve never watched this many horror movies. Usually, I watch maybe 12 or 15 horror movies in October. I had no intention of writing about them every day either. But once I wrote my first 31 Days of Horror post I couldn’t stop. When I start something like that I have this weird need to keep it going. So I kept watching horror movies so that I could keep up with my posting. I’d watch multiple horror movies on the weekend so I could ensure that I’d have movies to write about even if I wasn’t able to watch a full movie on any given weekday.

To tell you the truth I’m kind of tired of watching horror movies

Next month is Noirvember. I’ll do a post about it tomorrow. I do not think that I will watch a film noir every day, nor do I plan to write about them every single day of the month. But I’ve said that before. I’m definitely looking forward to watching something that doesn’t have a lot of blood splatter.

31 Days of Horror: Gremlins (1984)

gremlins poster

I was eight years old in 1984 when Gremlins came out. I saw it at least once in the theater, but I suspect I saw it more than that. Certainly, I remember talking to my friends about it at school and on the playground. We all loved it. Famously it was one of the movies that created the PG-13 rating (the other was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). There is quite a bit of violence in the film including scenes in which Gremlins are pureed in a food processor and blown up in a microwave. Some audience members were disturbed by this, having taken their young children to the movie due to its PG rating. Steven Spielberg who produced this movie and directed Temple of Doom used his clout to suggest a rating between PG and R and thus the PG-13 rating was born.

As kids, of course, it was those very scenes that we loved and were talking about on the playground.

If you haven’t seen it, Gremlins is about how a father buys a cute little furry creature from a mystical old Chinese man (we’re gonna overlook the terrible caricature that trope has always been, but do note I am completely aware of it). for his son Billy (Zach Galligan). Well, technically he buys it from the man’s grandson, but that detail isn’t that important. The creature called a Mogwai and named Gizmo by Billy comes with three rules.

He doesn’t like bright lights, and sunlight will kill him.
Never get him wet.
Never, ever, feed him after midnight.

As a side note, I once bought the woman who would become my wife a stuffed Gizmo but made her recite the rules to me before I would give it to her. She still has it, and pulled him out while watching the movie.

Naturally, all three of these rules will be broken in the course of the movie.

When water is accidentally spilled onto Gizmo he spawns a bunch of other Mogwai. Unlike Gizmo these spawns are more mischievous and malevolent. They trick Billy into feeding them after midnight which metamorphosizes them into larger, nastier creatures with evil intent.

Mayhem and quite a bit of pretty bloody violence ensue.

Director Joe Dante directs Gremlins from a script by Chris Columbus with a wonderful mix of humor and gore. As a kid I loved it. As an adult I still do.

It takes place on Christmas Eve so technically you could call it a Christmas movie rather than a Halloween one, but I’m still counting it for my 31 Days of Horror scoreboard.