Tag: horror movies

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003)

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The Criterion Channel is featuring a plethora of horror movies this month. They have at least three different horror themes going on, one of which is Japanese Horror. Naturally, I’ve seen almost all of them, but I’d never watched this sequel. I try to watch the originals again before I watch the sequel which is why you were treated to my thoughts on Ju-On: The Grudge yesterday.

This sequel is basically the same film with different characters. Once again it acts like a series of vignettes in which a bunch of people are haunted, terrified, and murdered by some evil spirits. The same evil spirits that haunted the house in the first movie (er, the third movie as there were two films before Ju-On: The Grudge). There is the creepy kid and the freaky girl who can twist her body in extreme ways.

This one does have more of a semblance of a plot and there is a bit of a through line, but it still jumbles up the chronology. It, more or less, follows horror film actress “Horror Queen” Kyoko Harase (Noriko Sakai) who is given a role in a paranormal television show. They “investigate” haunted houses and the like. For this episode, they visit the house from the last film.

Naturally, things do not go well. Nearly everyone involved in the shoot is haunted by the curse and killed. The kills remain quite effective and creepy. I might even give the ones in this film a slight edge over the last one.

There is an excellent sequence in which a woman keeps hearing a banging on her apartment wall at a certain time at night. The reasons behind it are quite clever and scary.

The way this film moves back and forth in time is much more effective than the previous one. I was often confused during the previous film, but here they will show a snippet of the same scene, albeit from a different character’s point of view, before moving on to something we haven’t seen before. Those connecting points allowed me to understand what was happening at all times. That worked for me much better than in the previous film.

But really, much like the other film, the plot in this one is just an excuse to move us from one creepy scene to another. And again this worked completely for me.

31 Days of Horror: Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)

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A title card tells us that a Ju-On is a curse that is born when a person dies in a deep and powerful rage. The film will then spend the next 90 minutes showing us exactly what it means.

Ju-On: The Grudge was part of a cycle of Japanese horror films (collectively known as J-Horror) that came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Unlike their American counterparts (which were mostly self-aware slashers and other schlocky, gore-inflicted films) J-Horror tended to focus more on mood, and the psychology of fear, with plots that revolved around Japanese folklore. The violence was usually off-screen and not very graphic (though there were exceptions – I’m looking at you, Takashi Miike).

For a few years, J-horror became quite popular in America and several of them were remade by Hollywood. Someday I may do a theme where I review the Japanese horror films alongside their American remakes, but for now, we’re just talking about this one.

Ju-On: The Grudge was actually the third film in the Ju-On franchise (the previous two were straight-to-video releases) but it was the first one most of us watched (I’ve only seen this one and the first American remake).

The film is really a series of vignettes, each focusing on a different character, most of which are set in the same house located in Nerima, Tokyo.

I’ll be honest here, I just watched the film but if you paid me $1,000 to explain who each character was and what their relationship to each other is, I’d still be broke. Each vignette is so short, and each character is given so little to distinguish each other from each other I’m at a loss to tell you who is who.

They all do seem to be related to one another either by family or friendship or work. It begins with Rika (Megumi Okina) a social worker volunteer being tasked by her boss to visit an old lady at the cursed house (though neither of them realizes it is cursed at this point.) She enters to find the old lady in a daze, lying in bed. She picks her up to find that she has soiled herself.

After cleaning her up and doing a little housekeeping she hears a noise upstairs. In the bedroom, she finds a closet that has been taped over and she hears a cat meowing inside. Opening it she sees the cat and then a small, pale boy. She goes downstairs to call her boss and witnesses a black fog kill the old lady. Rika then passes out.

Others come to the house and most find themselves infected by the curse. They’ll become haunted by the boy, the cat, and the boy’s parents. Sometimes they’ll be killed inside the house, other times they’ll take the curse with them infecting their homes.

The film jumps around in time, making it a bit disorienting.

We will learn more about the boy and his family, and why they are haunting this house, but it really doesn’t matter. The plot isn’t really the point. Scaring the bejeebus out of us is the point and this film does that really well.

There are jump scares aplenty, and all sorts of creepy noises and visuals. These evil spirits appear out of nowhere – sometimes they attack, sometimes they just scare the characters, and sometimes they aren’t even seen by the character but by the audience giving us a jolt of fear. This happens so often that you’ll find yourself tensing up in anticipation, looking in corners and backgrounds half-expecting to see a ghost.

Quite a few of these sequences have become iconic for horror fans. The girl walking on all fours, contorting herself in unusual ways, the hand in the shower, the girl under the covers, etc. have all become part of our communal horror fabric.

I can’t say that Ju-On: The Grudge is a great film in any sort of artistic, cinematic sense, but it is a great one to put on late at night when you are all alone and scare yourself silly.

31 Days of Horror: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

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One of the fun things about being a physical media collector is getting to display your stuff. Digital collections are great, but all you have to show for it is a hard drive (yes I know it is the actual art – the music, the films, the writing – that truly matters not the physical objects, but still…).

I love Steelbooks, collector’s editions, and Blu-rays with fun artwork. Sometimes the releases come with collectibles. Sometimes they come with really cool collectibles. The new Dark Sky 4K UHD edition of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a lifesized plastic chainsaw! How cool is that?

The movie is great, too. An all-time horror classic.

You can read my full film review and the set over at Cinema Sentries.

Bring Out the Perverts: In The Folds of the Flesh (1970)

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This is the only film in the collection which I had not previously watched. It also happens to be the worst of the bunch, and I’d hardly call it a Giallo at all.

I’ve talked before about how most Gialli don’t make all that much logical sense. They often have plot inconsistencies and characters will behave in a nonsensical manner. But In the Folds of the Flesh is on a whole new level of nonsense. Honestly, I’m not sure I could describe everything that goes on in this film, or how any of it fits into the plot.

But I’ll try.

A convict escapes from a mental hospital. He comes across a woman who has just killed her husband and is burying him in her yard. But before he can do anything he is captured by the police. Many years later a long-lost cousin shows up to the house and is promptly murdered. Then an old friend comes to the house and he gets his head sliced off. Then the convict finds his way back to the house, tries to blackmail the family, and finds himself in an acid bath.

I think there is a police investigation and there are definitely flashbacks to a Nazi concentration camp, and probably a bunch of other stuff too. I really can’t remember. It all happens so haphazardly it was difficult to keep up. Or to care.

It is shot with psychedelic glee. There are a lot of flash zooms and kaleidoscope-y split screens. The kills (which feature quite a few decapitations) are pretty fun. And goofy.

It is overwrought and trashy. And a little bit of fun. But not enough to make me recommend it.

31 Days of Horror: The Blob (1988)

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As I wrote in this week’s Pick of the Week, I love 1950s-era science fiction/horror films. They are oh-so-very cheesy, but often they are made by good craftsmen and they can be quite enjoyable to watch.

The 1980s saw a string of those old movies being remade. John Carpenter turned The Thing From Another World (1951), an actually pretty great Cold War metaphor into his masterpiece, The Thing (1982). David Cronenberg turned the wonderfully silly The Fly (1958) into one of the all-time great body horror films. (We could also mention Phillip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but that would bring us back to 1978 and I want to stick to the 1980s.)

In 1988 Chuck Russell got into the game and remade the goofy The Blob into a goopy, gnarly little horror film. It is my least favorite of these films, but it is still pretty great.

One of my favorite things about the film is that it introduces several characters in the beginning, people who give off Main Character Energy whom you figure will make it to the end of the film, and then it brutally murders them within the first half hour. It gives the movie that Game of Thrones feeling where nobody is really safe.

A meteorite lands just outside of a small town in California. Inside it is some gelatinous goo that feeds on human flesh and grows bigger every time it does.

The film takes time with its characters. It gives us some nice beats letting us understand them a little bit, even when it kills them soon after. This gives the movie the feeling of something more than just a big glob of goo murdering everyone.

Those kills are pretty sweet though. The special effects crew do a great job of making the blob look, well not realistic in any way, but effectively cool. The kills are varied and violent and bloody.

The plot gets pretty silly – there is a whole thing about a government agency swooping in to keep the blob safe in order to use it as a biological weapon (or did they invent it in the first place?), and the acting (led by Kevin Dillon and Shawnee Smith) is less than stellar. But mostly it is a lot of fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Subservience (2024)

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I don’t pay super close attention to what new movies are coming out and when. I follow enough movie critics on social media that I hear some of the buzz, but I really don’t give it much heed. I don’t spend a lot of time watching new movie trailers or reading reviews, etc. But I have a general idea of what movies people are talking about.

The Substance is a new horror movie starring Demi Moore. It is getting a lot of good buzz and is definitely on my radar. Subservience is a new horror movie starring Megan Fox. It is not getting good buzz, but rather a lot of panning when anyone is talking about it at all.

Because I don’t pay close attention to these things I got these two movies mixed up. I put on Subservience thinking it was getting a good buzz. Within twenty minutes of watching it, I was confused.

People are really liking this movie? Maybe it gets better towards the end.

My friends, it did not get better towards the end, or at the end, or after the credits rolled. It is a stupid, stupid movie. It takes a old, dumb trope, and does nothing new with it. I should have realized something was up the moment I saw it was directed by S.K. Dale who also helmed Til Death which was just as dumb.

But it is also kind of fun? It reminded me a little of those dumb erotic thrillers I used to watch in the 1990s.

Nick (Michele Morrone) is a decent dude. He has a good job, a loving wife, a precocious daughter, and a baby boy. He’s living the American Dream. Except for that loving wife, she’s dying. She desperately needs a heart transplant.

Working that good job while taking care of those two kids and trying to be there for his wife is a little more than he can handle. So he does what anyone in that situation would do. He buys a super hot robot to handle the domestic chores.

Her name is Alice (Megan Fox) and she’s programmed to take care of his every need and desire (wink, wink, nudge nudge.) He doesn’t bother to tell his wife, Maggie (Madeline Zima) who is basically a permanent resident at the hospital that the robot he bought looks like Megan Fox. The look on her face when she first sees Alice is precious.

Alice is good with the kids, she’s great at cleaning up, and she’s a pretty good cook (though her lasagna is nothing like mom’s.) She can tell Nick is stressed out and would do anything to help relieve it for him.

You can see where this is going. Alice’s programming gets mucked up causing her to go haywire. If Nick is stressed then she’ll take off her robe and give him a release. If some guy at work is causing problems then she’ll go to his house and shoot him in the face. If Maggie’s health problems are causing trouble then she has to go to.

It is the kind of film where you have to just enjoy the ride. Because if you start thinking about it you’ll start to wonder things like: How can a guy with a relatively low-level construction job afford a big house, what must be enormous medical bills, and what can only be an incredibly expensive robot? Or why is the robot anatomically correct in every way? Are they all programmed to seduce? Or how can a person who just had a heart transplant do all that running and sexing and fighting?

Those aren’t questions the film is prepared to answer. It is better to just enjoy the not-particularly talented Megan Fox give a robotic performance that actually works in her favor for once. Or dig into the nostalgic vibe this thing is giving off. They don’t really make erotic thrillers like this anymore (even if the erotic aspects are fairly tame and it never quite thrills like you want it to.)

Bring Out the Perverts: Tenebrae (1982)


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While Mario Bava may have invented the Giallo, it was Dario Argento who popularized it in 1970 with The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Without that film, we wouldn’t be talking about Giallo at all. Then in 1975, he perfected the genre with Deep Red.

While the genre was a very popular one, it had its critics. Many criticized its overt sexualization of violence and its graphic violence towards women. In 1982, just over a decade after making The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and thus creating the Giallo craze, Argento made Tenebrae, a film that can be viewed as the director’s direct response to the criticism of his films. While the genre would continue to be popular throughout the 1980s and Argento would make several more, Tenebrae can also be looked at as a final statement about the genre from the director.

While The Bird With the Crystal Plumage opens with the killer typing something on a typewriter – he is the creator of the art, Tenebrae opens with the killer reading an already-published novel – he is an audience to the art. That novel, also titled Tenebrae, was written by our protagonist Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) and it could rightly be considered a Giallo. It is about a killer who attacks women he considers to be perversions to society.

The real killer acts like a copycat to the killer inside the book (inside this film). We see him murder a woman who offers herself up sexually in order to get out of a shoplifting charge, and then later a lesbian couple with an open relationship. Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, the killer believes he has been sent to rid the streets of so-called scum.

Peter Neal is in Rome for a book tour celebrating Tenebrae. His agent Bullmer (John Saxon) keeps booking him interviews in which Peter is constantly being asked about what effects the violence in his book may create in society. That’s Argento getting meta, as he was often asked similar questions about his movies.

When one of the murder victims has pages of his book inserted into her mouth the police begin asking Peter questions. Later the killer will slide quotes from Tenebrae under his door. Peter and his assistant Anne (Daria Nicolodi) start their own investigation.

The film is filled with scenes exactly what you’ve come to expect from an Argento-directed Giallo. There are sly camera angles, extreme close-ups, surprising jump-scares, blood-soaked violence, and a righteous score from Goblin (well, three of the members at least).

While the film does present lots of questions about violence and art – does it create violence in society or is it simply a depiction of the existing violence in society? Argento doesn’t give us any concrete answers. His on-screen surrogate, Peter Neal bats the questions away with pat answers, but the movie seems to indulge the idea both ways. Perhaps his films are a reflection of the real-life violence Argento was surrounded by, or perhaps his films influenced others to violence in society. Maybe a little bit of both occurred. It is clear Argento loved depicting violence in his films. I suspect he was never ever to truly untangle the reasons why. I love his films and abhor real-life violence so I have no pat answers either.

What we are left with is a pretty darn good little film filled with stylish violence and an interesting mystery. That is more than enough for me.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Trap (2024)

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I watched The Sixth Sense in the theatre when it first came out. I managed to see it before the surprise ending was ruined for me. I remember liking it that first viewing quite a lot. But then some friends of mine wanted to see it and I was visiting them in Arkansas so I felt like I couldn’t say no. Even though I was pretty sure that the film would disappoint since I now knew the surprise. It did disappoint. I was bored during that second viewing.

That whole day was weird. I was good friends with her in high school. But since going away for college I hadn’t talked to her in over a year. Her husband I didn’t know at all. So the day was full of awkward conversations and then this movie I didn’t want to see. I also randomly remember her listening to The Eagle’s greatest hits on cassette and I hate the freaking Eagles.

Anyway, The Sixth Sense was of course an enormous hit and made M. Night Shyamalan an instant celebrity director. He followed it up with the underrated Unbreakable and then the quite fun but rather ridiculous Signs, and then the very creepy but completely dumb after the trick ending is revealed The Village.

By this point, he was starting to feel like a one-trick pony where every movie had a surprise ending. Everybody hated Lady in the Water and The Happening became an instant joke.

Shyamalan was on the outs. But then a funny thing happened on the way to career suicide. People started liking him again. It was as if after all the hype died down, and expectations became low, people realized he was actually a pretty good stylist and while his scripts were often ridiculous, his films were rather fun.

Or maybe that’s just me. I like most of his movies. They are dumb, but he’s a skilled enough director to keep me interested.

Trap is an absolutely stupid movie. There are so many instances in the film where I kept shouting at the screen that whatever was happening wasn’t the way things work. People don’t behave like that. Concerts don’t have multiple random intermissions. Police don’t let serial killers hug their daughters and play with their son’s bicycles.

And yet, I still quite enjoyed myself.

The plot involves a serial killer named Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett), known as “The Butcher,” (and this isn’t a spoiler as it was revealed in all the trailers, reviews, and the first ten minutes of the film). He’s kidnapped at least a dozen people, then killed them, then chopped them up into pieces and displayed their parts in public. But he’s also a decent family guy.

He’s taken his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see pop star Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan – the director’s real-life daughter who is in fact a real singer – you gotta love a dad who basically makes a movie to show off his daughter’s talents). But the cops and the feds have been clued into the fact that The Butcher is gonna be there so the entire concert is one big trap for him.

Cooper must find a way to escape so he can continue killing. And being a family guy. It is a testament to Hartnett’s skill as an actor and Shyamalan as a director that I found myself rooting for a serial killer for most of the film’s runtime.

Truly this is one of the most ridiculous films I’ve seen in a long time. Ridiculous decision after ridiculous decision is made by Cooper, the police, Lady Raven, and everyone really. My eyes rolled into the back of my head and then fell right out.

And yet, again, I quite enjoyed myself. Shyamalan never takes anything too seriously. He’s quite aware his film is dumb. But he’s having fun. And so was I.

The Whip and the Body (1963)

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I’ve written about Mario Bava’s kinky melodramatic gothic romance before. It was a Friday Night Horror Movie last summer. But I got a nice Blu-ray copy of it this past spring and wrote another thing about it for Cinema Sentries. I always like it when I write two reviews of something many months apart. It is a fun way to see how my feelings have changed.

They didn’t change all that much with this one. I always find the visuals to be incredible, but the story to be a little lacking. You can read the Blu-ray review here and my Friday Night Horror essay here.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: An American Werewolf In London (1981)

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There are certain movies that evoke a particular time and place in your memories. An American Werewolf in London is one such movie for me. I don’t remember the first time I ever watched it. I know I owned a copy of the VHS tape in college. My collection was pretty small back then, so the movies I owned made it into rotation regularly.

I’d pop this film on during a lazy Sunday afternoon, or after school on a Tuesday night. Me and my roommates would sit and watch it and laugh. We’d marvel at the special effects or how every song in it contained lyrics about the moon. I’m pretty sure its placement of “Moondance” began my journey into Van Morrison super fandom.

It became background noise in a sense. We’d put it on casually, not really paying much attention to it. This was before smartphones so we didn’t have social media or whatever to distract us so movies like this became something to do.

But at some point, I kind of turned on it. Sure the special effects were great and the needle drops, while super obvious, were on point, but it also felt very shallow. There wasn’t any depth to it.

That opinion stayed with me for decades. I don’t think I’ve watched the film since I left college, certainly, I haven’t seen it in a couple of decades. But for some reason, it crept into my thoughts this past week. Probably someone mentioned it on social media and I decided to give it another show.

My opinion didn’t change that much with this viewing. It is a shallow film. There isn’t much to it. But, also, I find I don’t care. Not every film needs to be deep. Not every movie has to carry with it layers of meaning and symbolism.

This movie is such fun to watch. And at 90 minutes it gets in, gets out, and leaves you satisfied.

The plot is quite simple. Two Americans, David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne), are backpacking across Europe. While Jack would really prefer to be in sun-soaked Italy they begin their travels in the North of England. We are introduced to them riding in the back of a sheep-filled truck.

They walk along the moors for a bit then stop at a pub for a hot beverage and a bite to eat. They are greeted like a stranger in one of those old Western movies. The entire pub stares at them quietly. But then one of them mentions Texas and one of the punters tells a joke about the Alamao and everybody laughs. Then David mentions the pentangle on the wall and the bar goes quiet again. They are told to get out. To get lost. Oh, and be mindful of the full moon and stay on the road.

Naturally, there is a full moon out and the boys wander off the road. Jack is killed by a werewolf and David is pretty good and mangled. He awakes in London in a hospital with a pretty nurse named Alex (Jenny Agutter). David keeps having terrible dreams and one day Jack appears to him. As a corpse. His face all torn to shreds. He tells David that he will turn into a werewolf at the next full moon and that he is now forced to wander the Earth as the living dead unless David, the last in the werewolf line kills himself.

David and Alex get cozy. David turns into a werewolf and kills a bunch of people. Can Alex save him? The end.

There really is nothing to it. But writer/director John Landis fills it with a real feeling of time and place. It isn’t the real England, but rather the England of movies. That pub (wonderfully called The Slaughtered Lamb) feels like it comes straight out of one of those old Hammer Horror movies I so love. Most of the English characters are like characters Americans have of English people.

It wonderfully blends horror and comedy. The murders are gruesome and the camera lingers on the gore. There are some nice scenes of suspense from when the boys are in the moors and something keeps howling at them to a late scene when the werewolf stalks a man through the underground. There are good gags and the editing often strikes a wonderfully jarring juxtaposition between the horror and the humor.

The special effects really are the gold standard for this sort of thing. There is a long scene where we watch David turn into a werewolf and it is fantastic. An absolutely brilliant use of practical effects. Every time Jack shows up after he’s dead, his body deteriorates even more. I can’t imagine how long Griffin Dunne had to sit in makeup to get all his flesh to look like it was hanging off of him, but it was time well spent.

So maybe not the greatest movie ever made. Certainly, it doesn’t have much to say about the state of humanity, but it is a completely entertaining 90 minutes to spend at the movies.