Tag: horror movies

31 Days of Horror: Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)

summer of sam poster



I’ve talked quite a bit about how I grew up watching slasher movies like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. I am a child of the ’80s and slashers were all the rage. But while I am a child of the ’80s I really came of age in the ’90s. This is a fallow period for horror movies. Slasher movies were either straight-to-video schlock or the 7th or 8th sequel to a long-since stale franchise.

Then in 1996 Scream was released and things changed. Written by Kevin Williamson, a horror buff, and directed by Wes Craven who directed many a horror film including the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. These were people who knew the genre and loved it. They also knew the tropes, and how tired they had become and made a film that played around with them. The characters in Scream are fans of horror movies and talk about the rules and tropes of the genre whilst simultaneously living through one. It is a self-aware slasher film, but one that is also a really good version of the genre.

I injected it straight into my veins. It was hugely successful and like all cinematic successes, it spawned countless imitators. They all had a cast of attractive up-and-comers (who were usually stars on the small screen but had yet to break onto the big screen) were filled with self-aware characters and the music was very much of the time (mostly 1990s alt-rock). Most of them were also instantly forgettable.

When Halloween H20: 20 Years Later came out I was all on board. I loved the original John Carpenter film (which essentially ignited the slasher craze of the 1980s) and I thought it would be really fun to give that film a boost with this new updated version of the old film. I hated it on that first viewing.

It is here that I admit that at this point I had only seen the original Halloween, but none of the sequels. So I was not well knowledged in the Halloween-verse lore. I was also expecting more Scream-esque shenanigans and got very little of that.

But I’ve seen the film a few times since that initial viewing and I’ve really come around to the film. I’ve also seen all the other Halloween films (excepting the Rob Zombie-directed Halloween II) so I’m better prepared to see how it fits into the canon.

Halloween H20 essentially pretends that every film after Halloween II (the original not the Rob Zombie remake, man this series gets weird with their naming) doesn’t exist. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) survived the attacks from Michael Myers, then faked her death and got on with her life. She’s now the headmistress of a posh, exclusive, and secluded prep school in California. She might be a functioning alcoholic, and she pops a lot of pills, but she’s not living in fear. Well, maybe she lives in a little fear, especially when the calendar gets closer to Halloween. Maybe a lot of fear when it is almost Halloween, and her son, John (Josh Hartnett) is about to turn 17, the same age she was when Michael Myers attacked.

Much like the original, this Halloween movie takes its time getting to the killings. Oh, there is a pretty great opening scene in which Michael Myers kills his former nurse to get some files on where Laurie is currently living, and he kills a couple of people along his route. But mostly the film is about how Laurie has started her new life. She seems to be a good teacher. She has a steady boyfriend (Adam Arkin). She is learning how to deal with her growing son, etc. We spend quite a bit of time with her son and his friends.

I liked these scenes. It is a film about trauma and how the violence of the early films has stayed with Laurie even as she tries to pretend everything is fine. These days it seems like every other film is about trauma (and certainly the new Halloween movies dig deep into that idea), but at the time this was something of a rarity. There are callbacks to earlier films but they don’t hit you on that head with it.

This isn’t a film that is self-aware like the Scream movies are. Nobody reference other horror movies or their tropes. LL Cool J provides some comic relief as a security guard who secretly wants to write romance novels, but that’s as jokey as it gets. The teenagers are young, and attractive, and populated by up-and-coming actors (Michelle Williams and Joseph Gordon-Levitt appear). The soundtrack is filled with cool alt-rock from the period. But it feels less like a 1990s new-slasher film than an update of the original.

When Michael Myers does show up the kills and the final battle are well-staged. There is nothing here that will make a highlight reel of the best kill scenes, but it does the job. And that really sums up the film. It is well made and well acted, it works as a serviceable slasher and a nice updating of the original. But there is nothing here that makes it special. But in a world filled with really terrible horror films, perfectly serviceable is a perfectly reasonable thing to hope for.

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.

31 Days of Horror: Werewolf By Night (2022)

werewolf at night

I’ve recently dissed Marvel movies and TV shows in this very blog. The truth is I actually like most of their movies. I am a fan of the MCU. What I’m not a fan of is how they’ve basically pushed everybody else out of the sandbox. The cinematic landscape has changed dramatically since Iron Man (2008) first landed in cinemas. I live in a small town. We have one movie theatre. It only shows big-budget, blockbuster-type movies. I yearn for the days of mid-budget, smaller films that weren’t about superheroes and saving the world.

Yes, I can get those through Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO and the like. No, it is not the same. And Disney is doing their best to take over the television as well.

While I do like a lot of the MCU I have to admit I’m growing tired of it. I saw the new Dr. Strange movie in the theater when it came out. I mostly liked it. But it also felt like I had to do homework before I watched it. You really need to have seen the previous Dr. Strange movies, the last Spider-Man movie, and the entire season of Wandavision for it to make sense. And like all Marvel movies these days it spent part of its runtime setting up movies that haven’t come out yet. That’s a lot to ask for what should be a dumb summertime popcorn flick.

But like I keep saying, I do like a lot of the Marvel stuff, and I enjoy watching them with my family. Enter Werewolf by Night.

Pleasantly this is a film that essentially exists on its own. It is mostly in black and white and it has a unique visual style. The plot isn’t amazing, but it is fun and exciting. It involves a group of monster hunters who have gathered to mourn their fallen leader and to fight for his throne and some magic hubajoob.

The magic thingy is placed on a big, bad monster and the group must find and slay the beast inside a maze of buildings and capture the stone. Oh, and it is totally okay to kill each other too. There are two fighters who do not belong. The first is the daughter of the fallen leader (Laura Donnelly) who wants the magic stone so she can rid herself of her evil family once and for all. The other is someone (Gael Garcia Bernal) with a dark, mysterious secret.

It exists inside the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but you could easily watch this film without having seen anything else in the MCU. There aren’t any callbacks and it doesn’t push toward another sequel. I imagine if it is popular enough they will probably throw these characters into another story, or give it a sequel, but for now it is nice that it exists on its own. Like all Marvel things, it is full of action and humor. I don’t mean to pretend this is some brilliant new thing they are doing. But it feels different enough to make it refreshing before jumping back into another Thor or Spider-Man movie.

31 Days of Horror: The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (1974)

the killer reserved nine seats

A rich man, Patrick Davenant (Chris Avram) invites a group of friends to an old abandoned theater that he owns. Once there they get locked inside and someone starts killing them one by one. Who is the killer? Why is he or she killing these nine people?

The Killer Reserved Nine Seats is an Italian Giallo by way of Agatha Christie.

All of the guests are financially connected to Davenant, in that he mostly supports them through various means. His death will benefit them all in various ways. It is his life that is almost taken first. I say almost because he is saved at the last minute. A large beam is cut free from its holding rope and it drops down on top of him, but just seconds before someone calls the man’s name, he moves and is saved.

Others are not so lucky. As the bodies pile up so do the accusations as to who could be the killer.

But first, there is a lot of silliness. Because this is a 1970s Italian Giallo and not some actual Christie adaptation by the BBC or some old 1940s movie, the characters spend a lot of their time taking off their clothes and getting horny with one another. What I love about that stuff is they are getting naked with one another even after the bodies start piling up.

There is one scene in which one of the women is attacked by the killer (he’s in a mask so she can’t tell who it is). She screams and shouts for help. A man comes in and fights off the killer. The woman escapes and runs to the others. None of them believe her. They say she is hysterical and hallucinating. When they return to the room where she was attacked and find the man who helped her dead by hanging. They decide he was the real killer and guilt drove him to suicide.

I couldn’t help but watch this scene and think of the #metoo movement. About all the statistics showing that when women cry for help, when they report harassment and sexual assault they all so often aren’t believed. I have no idea if the filmmakers were thinking about such things when they created this scene, but it feels very modern.

The script is mostly nonsense. At least the parts I could understand. There were several moments in which the characters inexplicably started speaking Italian and there were no subtitles. Italian films from this era often had the actors speak in whatever language was native to them, and then they would dub in the proper languages in post-production. Presumably, these sections were moments when the English dub has been lost.

What works in the film is its vibe. The theater setting gives us several different locations with different feels. The stage has working sets for the characters to play with. Curtains rise and fall. The auditorium and lobby are beautiful and ornate. The backstage area is filled with props and costumes. Upstairs the attic is dusty and filled with cobwebs. There is even an old crypt filled with candles downstairs. All of this gives the film atmosphere. The women are dressed in fabulous gowns, and the men are in nice suits. The camera moves about, and the lighting is filled with shadows.

I love that stuff. I can put up with all sorts of bewildering things in a script if the filmmaking is interesting.

31 Days of Horror: Macabre (1980)

macabre poster

There has been a lot of discourse over on Twitter lately about how cinema is more than just plot. This stems from a certain contingency of filmbros who loudly complain about things like perceived plot holes or a lack of narrative or some other problem within the film’s story without paying attention to the atmosphere or direction, acting or other aspects of a film’s artistry. The argument is that what makes movies special is not what actually happens, but how it happens, or how the story is told.

Lamberto Bava’s first film as a director Macabre is a good example of what I’m talking about. The plot is razor-thin. A woman returns to a rambling old mansion where she rents an apartment after being away for several years. The apartment is not her home, but rather a place she used to sneak away to and have an extra-marital affair. This was before her daughter drowned her son and before an automobile accident decapitated her lover (which happened just moments after she learned about the dead son). The reason she was away was due to being in a mental institute, having broken down after those two deaths.

All of this happens within the first five minutes of the film. For the rest of the movie the lady spends most of her time in her apartment having spirited relations with some unknown lover all the while the blind man who owns the building listens attentively downstairs. The woman’s daughter (who was not arrested for her brother’s murder as she made it look like an accident) periodically shows up and asks a lot of questions.

There is a mystery around the woman’s lover as he is never seen. And she has the freezer locked up for some reason. It is pretty easy to figure out what’s going on, especially since the posters and synopsis tend to give away the surprise.

But Bava (who is the son of Mario Bava, one of the grandfathers of Italian horror) knows how to make a movie, even when the plot is slim and rather hokey. The mansion is filled with creaky old stuff and interesting bric-a-brac. He films it from various angles with lots of shadows and light giving it a great gothic feel.

It reminded me a lot of really old films that clearly didn’t have much of a budget and were hemmed in by the censors from creating something really creepy. But were still able to create a mood, a vibe, and then had some ridiculous twist at the end. Bava does his best to create tension about what it is that freezer. He moves his camera slowly towards it, adds in mysterious music, etc. Even though you know what it is, and how ridiculous the idea is, you are still along for the ride. At least I was.

31 Days of Horror: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)

jekyll and hyde

Over the last few months, I have watched no fewer than four different versions of this story. Honestly, at this point, they are all starting to blend together. This is especially true since three of the adaptations I watched all follow what is called the Sullivan plot. In 1887 Thomas Russell Sullivan created the first serious theatrical rendering of Robert Louis Stevenson’s book for the stage. He reworked the plot around a romantic love interest (apparently there is no romance in the book).

Each film (this one from 1920, a 1931 adaptation starring Frederic March and another one from 1941 with Spencer Tracy) does its own variations on that central plot, but they are mostly the same. The differences are in the staging and the performances.

Over the last year or two I’ve been trying to watch more silent films, a part of film history I don’t really know much about. I have to admit I’ve struggled with the project. Silent Films obviously rely heavily on the visuals, since there is no dialogue, except what is periodically written on card inserts. And while many silent films contain some very striking images, they often also present what I’d consider to be fairly flat visuals.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde does some interesting things with the visuals, there are some nice sets and the transformation of Dr. Jekyll to Mr Hyde is pretty cool. But there is also any number of scenes in which characters sit and the dinner table, or stand in the drawing room and talk. Sometimes, my mind wandered. It is a struggle to stay focused on the acting and the scenery. This is again, especially true with a film like this in which I am all too familiar with the story.

Still, there are some nice moments. John Barrymore shines as the titular characters. He is especially great when he transforms into the manic Mr. Hyde.

The more silent films I watch the more I am able to get into their particular groove. The do make you be more attentive to what is happening on the screen, versus allowing your eyes to wander to your phone or some other object, relying just on the dialogue to tell the story. This is a good thing, even if I still do struggle a bit with them.

31 Days of Horror: Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

silent night deadly night

Halloween (1978) was such a huge success that it essentially ignited the 1980s slasher craze and spawned a whole slew of holiday-themed knock-offs. Naturally, it didn’t take too long for someone to make a Christmas-themed slasher. Although, if you want to get technical, Black Christmas (1974) was the first Christmas-themed slasher and it came out four years before Halloween hit theaters (though it is now considered a classic of the genre, Black Christmas was a bit of a dud at the box-office which is why Halloween gets all the accolades for kicking off the slasher crazy).

While I am clearly still a horror fan, I am less and less interested in the gore aspects of the genre. As a younger lad, I used to seek out the most controversial, the most gore-soaked films I could find. Fans of horror often talk about the kills in the films. We look for how many people are violently murdered and hope for interesting ways in which they reach their demise. There is a whole psychological essay one could write about why we like this stuff (from the thrill of being scared to the technical aspects of filming the stunts and practical aspects of created gore) but I’ll leave that to someone else.

As I get older I find the violence less interesting, but still enjoy the thrill of being scared, the filmmaking techniques, and the more suspenseful aspects of the genre. A good horror film can create a mood, an eeriness that I still find quite wonderful.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is a nasty piece of work. The plot begins with a young boy who watches his father and mother get murdered by a man in a Santa suit. He’s sent to a strict Catholic orphanage where the sadistic Mother Superior beats him for the simplest of errors. When he’s all grown up he’s sent into a long killing spree over one Christmas holiday.

While there is plenty of violence, it isn’t that much more than I’ve seen in a million other slashers. It is a very low budget film and that actually gives it a bit of charm. But I think what made me rather hate this film is that there are no heroes. There was no one to root for. Now I have no problem with anti-heroes, and I don’t think every film needs to have a full-fledged hero or a white knight. I am completely down with ambiguous morality in a film.

But with a film like this, where we follow a boy as he gets traumatized as a boy and then turns into a crazed killer but we never really get to know him, or anybody else. Anti-heroes like Tony Soprano or Walter White, both are terrible humans, but they are also incredibly charismatic. We get to know them throughout their respective television series. They aren’t people we’d root for in real life, but within the context of the series, we are interested in the plights.

The main character in this film is just generic. We never spend enough time with him to really care about what is happening to him psychologically. And so when he starts to kill it is just nameless slaughter.

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.

31 Days of Horror: The Hidden (1987)

the hidden movie poster

I’m a big, fat dumb-dumb. Back when I was posting bootlegs every day I would periodically get burned out. I would get burned out because I felt like I had to add 3 or 4 or 7 bootlegs every day to the blog. Even though no one ever complained if I didn’t, you all seemed to be happy no matter what I posted no matter how often. But I pressured myself to post as much as possible every single day.

Now I’m not posting bootlegs, but talking about movies. When October began I thought it would be fun to do some 31 Days of Horror posts. I didn’t think I’d watch a horror movie every day of the month and I certainly didn’t think I’d be writing about them more than maybe a dozen times. Yet here we are on October 20th and with but a few exceptions I’ve watched and written about a horror movie every day.

This week has been rather stressful. Work has been a pain. Nothing too terrible has happened, but I’ve been very busy. I’ve also had some non-horror stuff to watch and review for Cinema Sentries. But I put pressure on myself to keep watching horror flicks and to write about them.

So here I am at 9:30 in the PM, trying to scratch something together about The Hidden. It is a good movie, I’d like to talk about it. Also, I’m tired. Really tired.

So, The Hidden is a very 1980s horror film that stars Michael Nouri as a copy who teams up with Kyle MacLachlan’s FBI agent who is tracking an alien that is able to move from one human body to another. It is a mixture of Men in Black, the Species series and every 1980s buddy cop movie. I kind of loved it.

31 Days of Horror: Near Dark (1987)

near dark

A couple of young guys are hanging out one evening on a sidewalk. They spy a pretty woman standing alone. One of the guys, Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) walks over to her. Or rather he struts. He’s full of confidence. He asks the girl her name – it’s Mae (Jenny Wright). He asks if she’s got a boyfriend. She says she needs a ride home.

In his truck, he is full of flirt. He asks her to slide over. He puts his arm around her. She asks him to stop so they can look at the night. He tries to kiss her, but she pulls away. Later they stop again. He literally lassos her and tries to kiss her again. She sees the dawn coming and says she has to get home. Now. He says he won’t take her unless she kisses him.

The beginning of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark begins with a push and pull of the most interesting power dynamics. It is a situation most women will recognize, I imagine. A man offers kindness to a woman, but the wants something in return, and he gets more and more demanding if not immediately satisfied. But we know something poor old Caleb doesn’t – Mae is a vampire and she can bite him anytime she wants. She does exactly that when he tries to stop her from returning to her home before daylight.

When he turns, she introduces him to her band of fiends which includes Lance Henriksen as the defacto leader who has been around since the Civil War, Jennette Goldstein, Joshua John Miller who plays a vampire who was turned when he was just a kid and Bill Paxton whose channeling his Aliens character’s energy, but without the fear and a whole lot of nutso bravado. If you are paying attention you’ll notice that half the cast was also in James Cameron’s Aliens. He was dating Bigelow at the time and basically told her his cast would be perfect for her film and she agreed. So do I.

It is a western take on the vampire story and it is rather glorious. Shot in parts of Texas and Oklahoma, Bigelow fills the screen with this wideshots of beautiful, desolate landscapes. There are bar brawls and shoot-outs. The violence is stylish and brutal. The story – which winds up being about Caleb’s reluctance to take human life – is a bit too familiar, but I love the way it is told. And Paxton is bloody fantastic.