Halloween Horror Marathon 2016

[jkholm]

-Crimson Peak (2015): 9.5/10

I watched this a few days ago and really liked it. It's Del Toro's best movie since Pan's Labyrinth. How this didn't get even a nomination for best production design is beyond me. That house was amazing!

SPOILERS


One thing that bothered me for a little bit, until I reconsidered, was the ending. I thought for sure I knew what was going to happen in the third act. More than once, a character said the house was slowly sinking into the ground.* Combine that with the vats of blood-red clay in the basement and I was convinced multiple ghosts would rise up out of the vats, the clay would shoot up in enormous geysers throughout the house and the whole thing would sink as everyone tried to escape. Instead, the ending was quiet and relatively restrained (aside from all the Shining-like sneaking around in the snow). I have to give Del Toro credit for subverting my expectations.

* A house sinking into the ground is particularly frightening for me as I live in a part of the country with unusual amounts of clay in the soil which leads to my house (and everyone else's near me) shifting throughout the year. Maintaining a stable foundation is a challenge for North Texans. Also of note, my wife used to live in an area of East Texas where the soil was red, due to large amounts of iron. Not as red as what you see in Crimson Peak, but still...makes you wonder if DelToro ever lived somewhere with red clay.

[AndyDursin]

I didn't care for Crimson Peak...all dressed up with nowhere to go...but I can see where fans of his are fans of it

[Monterey Jack]

How this didn't get even a nomination for best production design is beyond me. That house was amazing!

Probably because Universal failed to put any effort into a "For Your Consideration" campaign after it lost so much money...shades of Rob Bottin's amazing makeup effects for The Thing not receiving an Oscar nomination because the movie was such a costly flop (and critics hated it). On every conceivable technical level, it's a masterful film. And I think it's just great filmmaking all around. Sorry you didn't care for it, Andy, but for me this will be a new October/Halloween staple, and I'm sure it will find a wider fanbase as the years go by.

[AndyDursin]

It will have a following among Del Toro fans but I don't see it doing anything other than that. Not nearly scary enough, slow moving, unappealing incest themes...you can make a pretty movie all you want but when you don't populate it with an appealing story its not going to find many takers.

[Monterey Jack]

Kitty...!

-Cat's Eye (1985): 8/10



Highly enjoyable anthology feature features three tales from Stephen King (two adapted from stories in his 1978 collection Night Shift, one penned directly for the screen), all connected by the presence of the titular kitty, on a quest that won't be resolved until the final segment. "Quitters, Inc." features a great performance by James Woods as a man so desperate to quit smoking that he finds himself sucked into the harshest therapy clinic imaginable (headed by a smarmy Alan King)...if Woods relents and sneaks a few puffs, his wife will be punished with electric shock therapy. And then his daughter (Drew Barrymore, in the first of several roles she will play across the three tales). And then things will turn very nasty. A delicious black-comic scenario for anyone who has ever tried to kick a terrible vice or habit. In "The Ledge", Airplane!'s Robert Hays plays a tennis pro whose affair with the wife of a well-off scumbag (Kenneth McMillan) is sussed out, and then said scumbag gives the pro a friendly wager...if he can makes his way all around the perilous ledge circling his high-rise apartment, he'll let him go with his life, his wife and a large cash prize. Filled with vertiginous camera trickery and excellent use of forced-perspective sets and matte paintings, this will give acrophobes a bad case of sweaty palms. Finally, "General" finds our feline hero as the star of a tale where he defends a helpless young girl (Barrymore) against a hideous little troll (designed by E.T. creator Carlo Rambaldi and voiced by Frank Welker) that lives behind the baseboard of her bedroom and is looking to steal her breath away...literally. The use of oversized sets, props and rear-screen projection is top-notch, and the final showdown between the cat and his snarling foe is great fun. Directed by Lewis Teague (who previously did great by King with his adaptation of Cujo), Cat's Eye is actually a film I prefer to Creepshow as far as King anthology features go. While this PG-13 production obviously lacks King's trademark gore, it's better paced than the earlier King/George Romero production (which, at a full two hours, was two segments and thirty minutes too long), and has a good sense of humor (plenty of in-jokes for King fans...I especially liked Woods watching The Dead Zone on TV and snapping it off while muttering, "Who writes this crap?!"). The only real demerit is Alan Silvestri's cheesy electronic score, which adds nothing to the film and is the only element that really dates it to the mid-80's period. Otherwise, this brisk, entertaining romp through King's imagination is the cat's meow.

[AndyDursin]

Really, one of the better Stephen King movies.

And I love this song! Seriously, it's better than Silvestri's score...

[sprocket]

Crimson Peak (2015): 9.5/10

Painfully obvious to me.

I was very disappointed; although the film looked great, it really didn't go anywhere.

[Monterey Jack]

And I love this song! Seriously, it's better than Silvestri's score...

That's not to hard, sadly...I've never been a fan of Silvestri's shrill, all-Synclavier 80's efforts. His Amazing Stories score for "Go To The Head Of The Class" is the only one I skip over on the Intrada sets. Shame, as the movie deserved better.

[AndyDursin]

Agree, some composers were better than others at writing for electronics. Silvestri was not one of them.

[Monterey Jack]

-Warlock (1991): 3/10



Deeply stupid supernatural thriller about a 17th-century Warlock (Julian Sands) who escapes his would-be murder at the hands of the puritan folk who have incarcerated him and flies forward in time three centuries into the late 20th century (this 1991 release showing how long it sat on the shelf with every prop and hairdo screaming '88), with a Scottish witch hunter (Richard E. Grant) in pursuit. Said witch hunter throws in with a contemporary woman (Lori Singer) who joins in on his quest when she starts rapidly aging after Sands' warlock steals a bracelet from her (don't ask). This barely even qualifies as horror...it's more like one of those umpteen 80's science fiction movies with someone from the past or the future arriving in some neon-fringed parking lot and marveling at all of the advances/ancient geegaws and punk hairdos on display. Directed with little style by Steve Miner and featuring a synth-heavy Jerry Goldsmith score that -- while a far cry from his best work -- nevertheless outclasses anything else in this cheapjack production by a mile, Warlock doesn't know whether to be scary or funny, and fails pretty consistently at both. Sands has a few droll moments (like when he French-kisses Singer's gay roommate, bites his tongue off, and spits it neatly into a convenient skillet), but otherwise this is the kind of low-rent 80's schlock that you yearn to be accompanied by commentary from the MST3K crew.

[AndyDursin]

Whoa, harsh!!

WARLOCK has a definite tongue in cheek sense of humor. Grant is terrific playing that up...tough to do MST3K when the movie is in on it.

It's a fun little TERMINATOR-esque rip-off from the era. Nothing more, nothing less. For me, I'll take an entertaining B-movie like that over an A-grade bore like CRIMSON PEAK any day.

[Monterey Jack]

Granted, the abysmal full-frame DVD that Netflix sent me didn't help, but I found Warlock pretty lame.

Anyhoo...

-Curtains (1983): 6.5/10



Not-bad slasher about an aging actress named Samantha Sherwood (The Brood's Samantha Eggar) who -- in a fit of method-actor pretention worthy of Kirk Lazarus -- actually fakes a nervous breakdown in order to be committed to a madhouse in order to research her latest role. But when her director, Jonathan Stryker (John Vernon), starts interviewing beautiful younger actresses for the role, inviting six of them up to his snowbound mansion to audition (and possibly more), Samantha escapes the mental institution and makes an appearance at Jonathan's house...and suddenly the bodies start piling up. The revenge setup is pretty routine, but Curtains is a bit more stylish than you'd expect, and there's an ending that upends your expectations is a mildly surprising manner. No classic, but worth a view. Keep an eye peeled for veteran Hollywood heavy Michael Wincott in an early role.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Initiation (1984): 5/10



Okay (if run-of-the-mill) slasher about a college student named Kelly (a pre-Spaceballs Daphne Zuniga, earning an "And Introducing..." credit) plagued by vivid nightmares that seem to express some of her experiences before she contracted amnesia as a child and forgot everything that happened to her before the age of nine. In-between traumatic dream therapy sessions with a college graduate assistant (James Read) and terse interactions with her overbearing mother (a slumming Vera Miles, a long way from Psycho...or even Psycho II), her initiation rites with the local sorority include having to steal the uniform of the security guard of a local mall (skivvies and all)...but is there a killer lurking amongst the various store displays? Reasonably well-made, with enthusiastic gore effects and acceptable acting (and a not-bad obligatory twist), but simply not very frightening or unique for seasoned students of the genre.

[Monterey Jack]

Four heads are better than two...

-The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971): 2.5/10



-The Thing With Two Heads (1972): 3.5/10



A pair of laughable drive-in AIP cheapies from the early-70's, both are the kind of lousy horror movies that used to play all the time on late-night TV, and as such are best appreciated with a lot of beer and with some friends to tear them apart with. Transplant features Bruce Dern as your typical Mad Scientist experimenting on grafting extra heads onto lab animals (why? Why not?), when an violent escapee from the local mental hospital (Albert Cole) abducts his wife (Pat Priest from The Munsters, distracting from the general lousiness by being clad in either a bikini or a filmy nightie for 90% of her screentime). He pursues them and guns the criminal down, then sticks his now legally-dead noggin onto the robust physique of the mentally-challenged son (John Bloom) of his gardener. Oh yeah, and the nominal hero is a local doctor played by Casey Kasem(!). Slow, awkward and with a ridiculously awful score (which seems to consist of nothing more than bass guitar chords and random hi-hat cymbal crashes), this isn't even so-bad-it's-funny, it's mostly dull. The Thing... is about a bigoted, dying surgeon (Ray Milland, clearly needing a paycheck) who -- in his fanatical quest to prolong his life due to a terminal cancer -- starts experimenting on finding a suitable host body to sustain his head until a more permanent solution can be found (he starts off with a two-headed gorilla, played by makeup wiz Rick Baker). Soon, a likely candidate is found...a death-row inmate who just happens to be black (and played by "Rosey" Grier). It's like the setup for some horrible fake sitcom on The Simpsons starring Troy McClure ("We're the original Odd Couple!"), and while it's still plenty terrible, at least the sight of Milland and Grier going cheek-to-cheek has a certain goofy charm, and you might conveniently forget that the film is about a two-headed "monster" when most of the last half-hour consists of an endless motorcycle chase with more crunched police cars than The Blues Brothers.

[Monterey Jack]

Just for fun (can you name them all?)...