Halloween Horror Marathon 2016

[Paul MacLean]

-The Curse Of The Werewolf (1961)

I'm a bit late in responding to this one (sorry!) but thanks for the review. I started watching this movie on TV when I was a kid (back when they used to show good old horror flicks), but for some reason turned it off about 15 minutes in. Having forgotten the title, I have spent the intervening years wondering what this movie was! When I read your description of the beggar and the prince who locks him up, it all clicked!

I remember the title sequence of this film being particularly creepy, with its close-up of the monster's teary eyes (maybe that's why I turned it off!).

[Monterey Jack]

I can't let it go...!

-Ouija (2014): 4/10



Morbid curiosity (and the unexpected excellence of the prequel, Origin Of Evil) got me to finally check this one out, and good God, it's hard to think of a sequel/prequel that trounces the original film in quality to the degree that OOE does. This film, in comparison, is as generic a scare machine as any I've watched in recent memory, which doesn't mean it's the worst film of its type, just wildly forgettable and bland. Jam-packed with the usual photogenic teenage cipers (only lead Olivia Cooke, with her melancholy, baby Rose Byrne loveliness, leaves any impression) being picked off one by one, the usual portentious banging and rumbling on the soundtrack (what did hack horror filmmakers have to lean on before the invention of the subwoofer?), the usual cheap-assed "let's sneak up on someone for no reason" jump scares, it's all frightfully mundane, and the fact that the events of OOE have little connection to how they're vaguely described in this film only make this even more disposable. I'll be pretending that OOE is the only Ouija film in the future, and I'm sure I won't be the only one.

[AndyDursin]

Didn't think much of the first Ouija movie which is probably why the sequel, as well as it was reviewed, didn't do much of anything at the box office. Maybe they should've tried to make a fresh film without the branding...

[Monterey Jack]

Maybe they should've tried to make a fresh film without the branding...

Dude, it's 2016...EVERY movie has to be "branded" somehow. I just credit director Mike Flanagan for taking an obvious cash-in prequel (to a cash-in original) and actually making a MOVIE out of it, and a damn good one. Shame it did such mediocre business by being tainted by association with the profitable but lousy original, but what can you do? It will find an appreciative audience at home, like many an overlooked horror movie (seriously...is there another genre where so many GREAT films do so lousy at the box office? Look at The Thing).

[AndyDursin]

I know but when the branding is a patently mediocre film nobody liked, in this instance, it undoubtedly kept viewers away.

[Monterey Jack]

I know but when the branding is a patently mediocre film nobody liked, in this instance, it undoubtedly kept viewers away.

A patently mediocre film that made like TWENTY TIMES its budget. Money talks. Ever meet someone who liked any of the Transformers movies? Yet they're making a fifth one right now.

[AndyDursin]

I get that. But there are times when Hollywood needs to realize just because a movie makes money doesn't mean anyone actually liked it, and that WILL trickle down to a sequel. We've seen it over and over this year with one underperforming sequel after another (and this is pretty much another one).

Clearly they knew it to some degree because the OUIJA prequel was budgeted way low at $9 million, but the movie has done less than half the original's in-take worldwide so far...which is why I'm saying, in this instance, they may have been better off screwing the tie-in with the first one, as tenuous as it might be. That first movie is what kept people away, it didn't do anything to bring people in from what I can see.