Halloween Horror Marathon 2012

[Monterey Jack]

List all of the scary movies you watch this month.

[AndyDursin]

Nice LOVE this thread MJ, thank you for starting it!! I will be starting soon once I get over this damn head cold!!

[Mike Skerritt]

I got started a couple days early this year with the documentary CROPSEY over the weekend.

Not quite what I was expecting but I ended up enjoying it, despite the fact that I have a young daughter (more on that in a second).

Every wooded area has its own legendary boogeyman, traded down to new generations over spooky campfires. In Staten Island it's Cropsey, who is less a person and more an amalgam of every story told about the goings on around the Willowbrook State School, a home for severely retarded children sitting on a few hundred wooded acres that was closed in 1987 after years of public outcry against the conditions and allegations of medical experiments. Cropsey is the madman from the school who would come for the kids in the area. THE BURNING was made

Going in I thought the film would deal more with mythmaking, but it turned out to be about very real disappearances and the suspect involved, a transient who lived in the woods around the school and worked there as an orderly. The bulk of it deals with his connection to many unsolved kidnappings in the 70's/80's. He's convicted of kidnapping in one of them, but not murder, after the girl's remains are found, and the story picks up as the end of his sentence is nearing. The pressure is on to link him to other kidnappings to keep him behind bars.

It's categorized as a "horror" film but it's more of a true crime piece. If made by more seasoned filmmakers, it might have been something special. But it's still a moody, earnest and curious film that plays like a very good episode of Unsolved Mysteries.

[Monterey Jack]

-28 Days Later (2003): 9/10

-28 Weeks Later (2007): 9/10

[AndyDursin]

Paul MacLean is here so we started off this week with a couple of genre flicks:

WARLOCK 7/10
This is an entertaining, 1988 New World Pictures B-movie riff on "The Terminator" with Julian Sands as a warlock from Salem Mass circa the late 1600s who travels ahead 200 years to bring Satan's wrath down on the world. Richard E. Grant is terrific as the medieval hunter likewise propelled ahead in time -- Lori Singer is somewhat less so as the modern valley girl who gets mixed up in their battle. Steve Miner directed "Warlock" from a script by David Twohy that has its moments of humor. Too bad Jerry Goldsmith didn't get into the spirit with an often leaden score that fails to energize the movie and ranks as one of his most disappointing, with few melodic passages. Overall though -- it's fun, even if the only real way to enjoy it is in the few European Blu-Ray releases out in circulation (and the occasional airing on HDNet Movies).

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1990) 3/10 (for the movie)
Twilight Time's Blu-Ray is generating a lot of negative internet whining for its "darkened" appearance, but truthfully, it looked just fine to us when we took a look at it. The progression from light to dark makes sense and the transfer has plenty of detail. Unfortunately, the film itself is as bad as I recall -- stilted and dull, with a terrible Paul McCollough score, a laughable "social statement" ending, and an almost complete absence of terror. For genre addicts only.

[Monterey Jack]

Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark (2011): 7.5/10

Underrated Guillrmo Del Toro production, with classy cinematography by Oliver Stapleton and a wonderful Marco Beltrami score (honestly, Battleship gets a CD release, but not this?).

[Monterey Jack]

Re-Animator (1985): 8.5/10

Giddy, gory hoot that I had not seen before. Shame that Richard Band's plagaristic score is basically just Herrmann's Psycho with 80's drum machines laid on top.

[AndyDursin]

I reviewed a bunch of Full Moon soundtracks that Lukas sent me way back when. Richard Band was...displeased...when I called him a hack (or whatever I said about his music). But he IS a hack!

[Monterey Jack]

I reviewed a bunch of Full Moon soundtracks that Lukas sent me way back when. Richard Band was...displeased...when I called him a hack (or whatever I said about his music). But he IS a hack!

It's one thing to plagarize a score no one's heard of (which is why Tyler Bates thought he could get away with stealing Eliott Goldenthal's Titus for 300, although I was pleased immensely when he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar), but literally one of the most famous film scores of all time? It'd be like inserting the Imperial March into your score and switching a few notes around. Oh wait, that's what James Horner did in Something Wicked This Way Comes...

[Monterey Jack]

The Faculty (1998): 7/10

If one were to stick a movie in a time capsule to represent the late 90's Miramax/Dimension teen horror boom, this would be a perfect selection. Agreeable high school riff on the usual Body Snatchers formula energized by Robert Rodriguez's typically kinetic direction/editing and a fun cast (someone needs to buy Josh Hartnett a comb, however).

Ugh, Harry Knowles cameo?

[Monterey Jack]

Basket Case (1982): 4/10

Awful (and awfully funny) low-budget horror movie is the dumbest thing I've seen since It's Alive, and at least that film had a Bernard Herrmann score. That X-Files episode "Humbug" took the same basic premise and was far more creative.

[Monterey Jack]

Black Christmas (1974): 7/10

Pre-Halloween slasher is interesting from a historical standpoint for establishing many of the cliches that John Carpenter and countless other horror/suspense filmmakers have been riffing on ever since, yet it's needlessly (if amusingly) vulgar, and, honestly, none of the cops decided to take a look in the attic?

[Monterey Jack]

Frankenweenie (1984): 10/10

Still delightful. I hope that the new stop-motion version can arrest Tim Burton's current artistic slide.

[Monterey Jack]

Black Christmas (2006): 1/10

Ugly, mean-spirited slasher remake has none of the humor and style of director Glen Morgan's fun remake of Willard, crammed with gratuitous gore (being produced at the height of the mid-00's "Torture Porn" craze) designed specifically to showcase a number of attractive, nubile young ladies (including Michelle Tractenberg, Lacey Chabert and -- *sigh* -- Mary Elizabeth Winstead) being brutally slaughtered. Happy Holidays! Even Shirley Walker's final score is a disappointment, being performed entirely on cheap, tinny synthesizers. Yuck.

[AndyDursin]

Ugh, that SUCKED. Utterly reprehensible!