Halloween Horror Marathon 2023

[Monterey Jack]

"We'll pray. For the last time, we'll pray..."

-Carrie (1976): 10/10



The recent death of Piper Laurie made me dig out her Oscar-nominated turn in Brian De Palma's Carrie, his masterful adaptation of Stephen King's first novel. The tale of a woeful teenage wallflower, Carrie White (Sissy Spacek, also Oscar-nominated), whose nascent telekinetic powers blossom following her ritual locker-room humiliation following her first period, Carrie remains a potent pop horror film, a dark Cinderella fable where Spacek strikes back against the beautiful but corrupt Mean Girls after a lifetime of tormented anguish. Laurie portrays Carrie's fiercely -- and irrationally -- religious mother, Margaret, and how her twisted "love" for her daughter comes to a head when she learns she's become a woman...and all of the unpleasantness with boys pawing at her "dirtypillows" that will inevitably entail. Spacek is one of the most squirmingly emphatic horror "monsters" even conceived, yearning for human connection yet held back by her mother's evangelical ravings about sin and damnation. Yet Laurie, despite her horrific acts of misguided motherhood, still gives you enough of a glimpse of the complicated humanity buried beneath her misreadings of the Bible's teachings to make you wince. A bravura monologue she delivers late in the film (as Carrie, following the hellfire conflagration of the film's famed prom climax, begs to be held and comforted) is one for the ages, and makes the literally backstabbing betrayal even more piercing than it would have been otherwise. It's a beaut of a performance, and even her grand guignol sendoff (turned into a pincushion by flying kitchen implements hurls by the power of Carrie's mind) is more disturbing not for simply having her scream in shock or pain, but due to her deep, sensual groaning as Margaret finally goes home to Jesus. As lyrical as it is terrifying (set to Pino Donaggio's wonderful score), Carrie remains one of the finest horror movies ever made.

[Monterey Jack]

-Blue Monkey (1987): 3.5/10



Lousy Canadian schlockfest about insects who enter a handyman's bloodstream via contact with a rare flower, break loose in the hospital where he's brought for treatment, and quickly grow to giant size and start the process of replication while the facility is put under quarantine by the government. Pokey effort is the poor man's Mimic, with mediocre creature F/X and a dearth of scares. Only the cast (including Steve Railsback as a police detective trapped inside with the patients and staff, John "Dean Wormer" Vernon as the head doc, SCTV's Joe Flaherty as an expectant father who has his wife's pregnancy charted with unerring precision and even a very young Sarah Polley as a chipmunk-cheeked moppet) has any distinction in this entomological stinkbug.

[Monterey Jack]

-Hocus Pocus (1993): 6/10

-Haunted Mansion (2023): 3.5/10





The Mouse House is full of seasonal spooks in today's twofer. 1993's Hocus Pocus concerns a trio of witches, the Sanderson Sisters (portrayed by Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker), who, in 1693, are tried for their supernatural crimes and hung. 300 years later, in Salem, Massachusetts, moody new kid in town Max (Omri Katz) has to unwillingly chaperone his kid sister Dani (Thora Birch) on her trick-or-treat rounds on Halloween night, but when he lights a candle in the local, abandoned historical museum, the witchy sisters are resurrected, and need to suk out his virginal spirit before the sun rises so they can be forever youthful and continue to feast on the essences of tasty children.

I had never seen this film before (being almost twenty when it dropped, it looked painfully kiddie to me at the time), and after three decades' worth of people around 8-10 years younger than I am holding it up as a childhood classic that they watch every October (despite Disney inexplicably dumping it in a midsummer release slot back in the day), I was curious to see if it was really that good, or if these people have been viewing it through rose-tinted glasses all this time. And the movie is perfectly...harmless. It's well-made on a technical level, litely creepy for the under-12 set, litely amusing for adults (although the incessant mugging of the leading actresses grows tiresome after a while), and bolstered by a spirited John Debney score (with a pied-piper lullaby the witches use to coax children to their doom penned by James Horner and lyricist Brock Walsh). It's probably nothing I'd watch again (there are so many other much-better offerings for family-friendly frights available, like the splendid ParaNorman), but it's a painless enough sit. I can totally see why people who saw it at a formative age would hold onto it as a seasonal perennial.

That said, it's a masterpiece compared to this year's flaccid Haunted Mansion, the second attempt by Disney to make a film version of their well-loved Disneyland attraction (a poorly-reviewed version starring Eddie Murphy -- unseen by me -- came and went twenty years ago). LaKeith Stanfield plays a New Orleans guide named Ben Matthias who specializes in tours of supposedly haunted city locations despite his own fervent disbelief in the afterlife (he's nursing the recent loss of his wife). But when the new tenants (Rosario Dawson as Gabbie and Chase W. Dillon as her son, Travis) of the crumbling Gracey Manor find themselves accosted by angry, restless spirits, Ben teams up with a priest (Owen Wilson) crackpot psychic (Tiffany Haddish) and local professor (Danny DeVito) to investigate the mansion's history and give everyone a measure of peace and quiet.

Haunted Mansion is typical of modern-day Disney, as it's as textureless and bland as well-mixed tapioca. Even kids will be bored by this movie's tepid attempts at scare tactics, and adults will find the film's humor completely flat-footed (there's a bit with Wilson getting chased through doorways from one side of a corridor to the other by ghosts that's quite literally swiped from an old Scooby-Doo cartoon). And it's as ugly as sin, the murky, underlit images making even the rare scenes shot in full daylight look underexposed and dim. Hocus Pocus, for all its Disney Channel silliness, looks like The Shining in comparison to this. Add to that substandard F/X and a bloated, two-hour running time, and this is a chore to sit through. Only an uncredited cameo by Winona Ryder as a deadpan historical tour guide generates a few weak chuckles, otherwise this movie is as insubstantial as any of its substandard spirits.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Mist (2007): 10/10



Chilling adaptation of the Stephen King novella about a group of people in a small town in Maine (small-town Maine setting? In a Stephen King story? Unheard of!) trapped inside of a supermarket by a mysterious cloud that envelops everything outside...and that contains vicious creatures that tear those who venture outside apart, inch by screaming inch. Now the people find themselves split down the middle, the rational (including Thomas Jane as a father desperate to keep his young son safe from harm) and irrational (led by a harridan of a religious zealot, played to the hateful hilt by Marcia Gay Harden) coming to a head as the pressure-cooker situation they're all trapped in drives them to make horrid moral decisions that make the beasties roaming outside seem like small potatoes in comparison.

Adapted for the screen and directed by Frank Darabont (who previously helmed the far more hopeful, dramatic King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile), The Mist is a canny updating of the old Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street", wherein human beings, in all of their fear-driven frailties, can be driven to the most horrible acts on each other. It's certainly not a unique observation, but, considering the socio-political hellscape we've all had to forge across over the last 3-1/2 years, it's one that's easier than ever to believe. Darabont -- utilizing the camera crew and DP from his tenure directing episodes of The Shield -- adopts a looser, more improvisatory visual style than in his previous, more classically-staged King adaptations, and it suits the material well, giving the images a fractured kineticism as the mores of polite society break down with disturbing rapidity. The acting is convincingly desperate across the board, as things progress from bad to worse to human behavior at its ugliest and most grasping, and the film's visualization of its menagerie of otherworldly monsters, while hampered by the film's very small budget (although some of the dodgier F/X shots are assisted by the nifty B&W version of the film that Darabont prepped for home media consumption, which gives the whole thing a vintage 1960s horror vibe), nevertheless are well-designed and appropriately frightening (especially an ill-advised excursion to the pharmacy next door, which will make arachnophobes shiver with revulsion).

What really turns this B-movie material (which King likened to "The Alamo as directed by Bert I. Gordon" in the afterword to his 1985 short-story collection Skeleton Crew) into one of the most haunting horror films of the last twenty years, however, is the controversial ending, which expands on the ambiguous, Birds-like finale of King's novella and ends the film on such a ghoulish note that you expect to hear Burgess Meredith cry out "It's not fair! It's not FAIR!" It's an ending that a lot of people detested back in the day (and you still often see a thumbnail image of the film attached to articles about "The worst movie endings ever"), but, for me, it pushes the movie into risky greatness, a bleak, despairing sucker-punch that's a worthy heir to such beautiful bummer conclusions as Night Of The Living Dead and Brian De Palma's Blow Out. But, love it or hate it, it's something that's almost impossible to shake. The Mist remains a terrific terror flick, and one that seems to improve with each viewing.

[Monterey Jack]

Had to lighten the mood after yesterday's bad-mood bomb...

Frame-by-frame frights...!

-Corpse Bride (2005): 10/10

-The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993): 11/10

-Frankenweenie (2012): 9/10







Tim Burton's troika of delightfully macabre stop-motion animated features were on tap today (but not quite in release order...)

Corpse Bride concerns one Victor Van Dort (voiced with tremulous nervousness by Johnny Depp), a natty gent in his small victorian town who has been betrothed -- sight unseen -- to Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson) by his parents (Paul Whitehouse and Tracey Ullman), in order to assure their financial survival...little realizing that Emily's equally-penniless parents (Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley) are hoping for the exact same thing. Making a shambles of the wedding rehearsal, Victor relocates to the nearby woods to practice his wedding vows, placing the ring intended for his intended upon a gnarled branch sticking out of the ground...only to discover it's actually the dessicated digit of Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), a corpse who disinters herself from her shallow grave and whisks Victor away to the land of the dead in order to enjoy their honeymoon. An understandably freaked Victor fights to return to the land of the living and to the warm embrace of Victoria, even as he begins to feel sympathy for Emily, a surprisingly comely cadaver (who could resist those lovely, exposed cheekbones...?), and finds his affections split between both women, one with the beat of a pulse, and one with a nattering maggot residing behind her eye socket (one that speaks in a Peter Lorre rasp).

A charmingly cracked romantic triangle, Corpse Bride is full of impeccable voice characterizations (including Burton favorites like Christopher Lee and Michael Gough), gorgeously-designed settings, fluid animation (that nevertheless has that compellingly jittery, tactile stop-motion flavor), witty gags both visual and verbal and a lovely Danny Elfman score studded with enjoyable songs (like the show-stopping "Remains Of The Day").

But a dozen years before Corpse Bride, there was Burton's Halloween favorite The Nightmare Before Christmas (with directorial duties handed over to Coraline's Henry Selick), the tale of Jack Skellington (spoken by Chris Sarandon and beautifully sung by Danny Elfman), the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown, a fabulously evocative and gloomy fantasia where it's Halloween 365 days a year. But Jack grows weary of the same-old frights and spooks, so when he opens an enticing Christmas tree-shaped door in the woods, he falls into Christmastown, and becomes entranced by all of the color, happiness and joy he witnesses. He simply must make this holiday his own, and he conspired to kidnap the "Sandy Claws" (Ed Ivory) and give him a vacation as he delivers his own idea of delightfully seasonal gifts, with disastrous results.

Set to a Danny Elfman song score that's a career highlight, and boasting superb design, voicework and a sweetly sinister story, Nightmare Before Christmas has become an October staple for a reason, and getting to see it on the big screen to celebrate its 30th(!!) anniversary is a trick that's a real treat.

Capping off Burton's animated trilogy (although I hope he has at least one more of these in the tank somewhere) is Frankenweenie, a feature-length expansion of his 1984 half-hour live-action short that reimagines Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) as a modern-day kid in the suburban sprawl of "New Holland" who loses his beloved pooch Sparky when he's run down in the street. Prostrate with grief, Victor is inspired by his science teacher Mr. Rzykruski (a very Bela Lugosi-esque Martin Landau) to harness to power of an electrical storm to resurrect his doggie from his premature grave. It goes swimmingly (even if the freshly-reanimated Sparky does have a tendency to shed random body parts), but when word of Victor's success story gets out to his science-room classmates, they attempt to re-create his experiment, and loose a menagerie of beasties (including sea monkeys that turn into a gaggle of chattering, prankish Gremlin-style amphibians and a pet turtle who swells to Gamera dimensions) upon the local town fair.

Frankenweenie has all of the strengths of Burton's previous animated efforts (great voice casting, gorgeous visuals, another fine musical effort from Elfman), only hampered ever-so-slightly by the familiarity to the terrific short film that birthed it. Still, it expands on that film in many ingenious and elaborate ways, and provides plenty of seasonal spirit for kids and adult animation fans alike.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Mutations (1974): 5/10



Silly sci-fi horror flick about a college professor (Donald Pleasence) who experiments in creating a fusion of human and plant DNA, utilizing a hulking henchman (Tom Baker) from a local carny freakshow to procure the healthy young bodies he requires for his ghoulish procedures, leading him on with promises to reverse his genetic abnormalities and make him "normal".

Directed by the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff, The Mutations is not a badly-made film, and the novelty of casting startling, real-life carnival sideshow attractions gives it a certain cachet, but it's certainly no patch on the genuine chills generated by Tod Browning's classic 1932 film Freaks. Yet it's hard to completely dislike something like this, the kind of "Creature Double Feature" fare that typified the genre junk I grew up on (although the copious nudity in The Mutations would have obviously been snipped out for Saturday-afternoon TV broadcasts in the 70s and 80s).

[Monterey Jack]

Hunting the hunters...

-Beast (2022): 8/10

-Prey (2022): 8/10





Human beings are stalked by ravenous creatures both terrestrial and extra in today's twofer. Beast stars Idris Elba as Dr. Nate Samuels, a recent widower who travels to a wildlife preserve in South Africa in an attempt to reconnect with his two young daughters, Meredith and Norah (Iyana Halley & Leah Sava Jeffries), who are none too happy at their father's absence during their mother's illness in her declining months. Warmly received by Nate's old university chum Martin Battles (Sharlto Copley), they're taken on a wildlife tour of the region...only to fall prey to the relentless assaults of a vicious lion, driven to bloodthirsty mania by the poachers who slaughtered his entire pride. Now, with their transportation wrecked and miles from any rescue, Nate must fight to keep his family safe.

Beast is kind of like Cujo with a lion instead of a rabid St. Bernard, and it generates solid tension as our trapped protagonists have to improvise desperately to keep themselves out of the dripping jaws of their slasher of the serengeti. Director Baltasar Kormakur (assisted by veteran cinematographer Philippe Rousselot) makes the remote, sun-baked locales into an ideal setting for suspense, often letting scenes play out in lengthy, De Palma-style "oners" to allow moments of tension to stretch out effectively. Elba makes for a compelling lead, and while the film's digital lion is certainly not 100% convincing in every shot, it works well enough within the movie's modest budget.

Meanwhile, in Prey, a young Comanche woman named Naru (Amber Midthunder) in the year 1719 is desperate to prove her worthiness as a great hunter to her tribe, and finds herself put to the ultimate test with the title character from 1987's Predator -- an alien big game hunter -- touches down to carve himself up some local wildlife and take home a few trophy skulls. After running like a hot knife through butter through her fellow tribal warriors and a pack of leering, French/Canadian trappers, Naru is left to face her hulking alien foe alone, and to earn her place as a fierce warrior.

The latest attempt to resurrect the long-running Fox sci-fi/horror franchise was dumped directly to Hulu last year, but has finally been released from its streaming purgatory with a terrific new 4K UHD release. As for the film itself? It's far from surprising -- how could it be, given the inherent limitations of the franchise's core premise? -- yet director and co-writer Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane) does a good job lensing the film's scenic Canadian locations, and the action sequences offer up plenty of well-staged mayhem and bracing gore even if the computer-generated Predator is not a patch on any of its practical predecessors. Midthunder also makes for a fetching heroine. With her penetrating eyes and cherubic facial features, she kind of resembles a Native American Aubrey Plaza, and she holds the screen with her fierce charisma, leading to an exciting climax. Prey is nothing more than a reskinned franchise reboot, but it's an extremely well-made one that deserved a proper theatrical release. The only major disappointment is the total lack of Alan Silvestri's classic score from the first movie (although he curiously gets a "Theme by" notation in the end credits. Where...?)

[Monterey Jack]

-Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998): 6/10



Twenty years after surviving the attack of her half-brother Michael on Halloween night, 1978, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) -- having changed her identity and gone into hiding as the headmistress of California's posh Hillcrest Academy -- works through the stress that every October brings her, instilling her sullen teenage son John (Josh Hartnett, receiving an "and introducing..." credit) the paranoia she's lived with for two decades that, someday, Michael will come back to finish the job. Well, it's dying time again, as Michael finally tracks Laurie down and prepares to build up another body count (potential victims include a Dawson's Creek-era Michelle Williams as John's girlfriend and L.L. Cool J as an ineffectual security guard) before making his way to her again.

The first "direct sequel to the classic original!" Halloween series entry, H20 isn't all wet, but it's nothing more than...fine. Workmanlike, efficient, with slasher hack Steve Miner (Friday The 13th parts 2 & 3) generating enough mild scares and a decent approximation of series creator John Carpenter's visual sense in teasing out moments of shock and grue to make this one of the more watchable sequels (and certainly a major step up from the abysmal dregs of Halloween 5). Still, considering this "direct sequel" was in itself struck from the record and rendered non-canon by the 2018 Halloween makes it seem even more perfunctory than it must have felt 25 years ago.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Birds (1963): 10/10

-The Fog (1980): 8/10





Seaside shockers from the Master of Suspense and one of his numerous disciples. The Birds stars "Tippi" Hedren as Melanie Daniels, who travels to the picturesque seaside community of Bodega Bay spurred on by a chance encounter with the frustrating -- and handsome -- Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a pet store in order to deliver a pair of lovebirds for Mitch's sister Cathy (a young Veronica Cartwright, setting herself up for a career of being terrorized in films like Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and Alien) to celebrate her 11th birthday. But soon, the local avian population (gulls, crows, blackbirds, sparrows, the whole lot) seems to go nuts, swooping and attacking the populace with increasingly vicious fervor. Soon Melanie, Mitch and his family are fighting for their very lives against an airborne threat that comes in ceaseless waves...

Screenwriter Even Hunter adapts a story by Daphne Du Maurier in one of director Alfred Hitchcock's most shocking and effective thrillers, and one of the few to push past the boundary of polite, erudite suspense into the realm of outright terror. Utilizing all of the best tech tricks of the day, Hitchcock takes a while setting up the film's character arcs and local flavor, but once the birds start to attack (their kamikaze dives accompanied by disturbingly serrated synthesized shrieks, with Hitch's preferred music man Bernard Herrmann receiving a "sound consultant" credit for a movie that's sans a traditional score), the movie still delivers even by today's heightened standards of what's considered shocking. Even after sixty years, The Birds will still send a shiver fluttering up your spine, and getting to see it on the big screen for the first time was a treat.

Seventeen years later, the Bodega Bay settings were utilized by director John Carpenter in The Fog. Only here it's been re-christened "Antonio Bay", where a shipwreck off the coast took the lives of a leper colony that was to settle near the township, the town's elders orchestrating it in order to steal their cache of gold and allow their own community to flourish. Precisely one hundred years later, the town in invaded by a spectral fog, one that conceals the rotting, seaweed-encrusted cadavers of those lost lepers, who have come back to get even with the ancestors of those who sent them to their watery graves. Now the town's selectwoman (Janet Leigh), a feisty hitchhiker (Leigh's daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis), an alcoholic priest (Hal Holbrook) and the local DJ (Carpenter's comely spouse, Adrienne Barbeau), among others, have to band together to repel their waterlogged assailants and live to see the dawn.

Carpenter's follow-up to Halloween, The Fog is a movie that positively drips with atmosphere...you can practically smell the salt and feel the seaside chill in the air while watching. Dean Cundey does some career-best work lighting the movie to conceal and reveal threats, and Carpenter orchestrates some great boo-scares along the way. It's not quite a great film, but it's a great "watch it with friends who haven't seen it yet" shock show.

[Monterey Jack]

Let's all go to the lobby / let's all go to the lobby / let's all go to the lobby / to get ourselves deceased!

-Popcorn (1991): 8/10

-Demons (1985): 8/10

-Matinee (1993): 8/10







The last 3-1/2 years tried its hardest to kill the theatrical experience for us all, but there's still nothing quite like settling into a seat in a darkened movie theater, hoping to be thrilled, excited...and yes, scared out of one's wits. Today's threefer is about how even the confines of the silver screen cannot fully contain the horrors being projected upon it. Popcorn is about Maggie Butler (80's genre babe Jill Schoelen), a budding film student beset by vivid nightmares about sacrifice that she uses as grist for her latest screenplay. Her film class rents a dilapidated movie palace in order to show a midnight-'til-dawn marathon of old sci-fi/horror B-flicks and use to profits to fund their respective student film projects, little realizing a crazed, disfigured killer (who disguises himself behind elaborate latex masks) is lurking in the wings, and soon real blood starts to flow as her fellow classmates find themselves butchered one by one as the audience hoots and hollers at the schlock on the screen.

Popcorn, as a Phantom Of The Opera-style revenge horror thriller, is solid and entertaining by itself, but it's within the movie's myriad of spoofy programmers unfurling on the screen that the real wit lies, inspired sendups like the 3D big bug thriller Mosquito, The Attack Of The Amazing Electrified Man (in Shock-O-Scope) and the badly-dubbed Japanese ecological horror flick The Stench (in fragrant Odorama, replete with complimentary clothespin "noseguards"). For hardcore movie buffs, these faux movie fragments offer up a bevy of laughs, and the movie itself is a lot of arch fun.

Italian import Demons is about a pair of female university students who accept some free tickets to a showing of a new horror flick at the Metropol, but soon they -- and the rest of the audience -- find themselves trapped inside by slavering demonic beings who echo the actions being played out in the movie and who spread their bloodthirsty fervor to those they bite or slash.

Director Lamberto Bava isn't as interested in the fakery of his movie-within-a-movie, yet the movie works very well as a semi-zombie movie, with ample, well-orchestrated gore effects and a delightfully absurd climax with the two survivors weaving through the theater seat rows on a motorcycle slaying demonic foes with a katana sword(!!), which is something that would have seemed the coolest thing ever when I was twelve (and it still pretty damn cool).

Finally, Matinee relocates to sunny Florida, circa 1962 (at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis), where the real-life anxieties of a looming nuclear apocalypse are cannily exploited by hack movie producer Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), who is arriving in town with his latest horror flick, the wonderfully-titled Mant! ("Half-man, half-ant...all terror!"). Soon a local horror-loving nerd (Simon Fenton) his firebrand school crush (Lisa Jakob) and others converge on the Saturday sneak preview, being presented in "Rumble-Rama" and with gimmicks like on-stage pyrotechnics and a local hood hired to run around the aisles in a cheesy rubber Mant! costume.

A loving homage to the films of William Castle by real-life genre geek Joe Dante, Matinee is one of the director's most charming films, with appealing performances (especially Goodman, having a ball revelling in all of his showman's hucksterism), a bouncy Jerry Goldsmith score and one of the funniest movies-within-a-movie ever conceived, playing out every possible 1950s sci-fi/horror cliche to the hilt. Look fast for a young Naomi Watts in a brief and very funny sendup of silly 1960s Disney comedies The Shook-Up Shopping Cart.

[Monterey Jack]

-Hell Night (1981): 5/10



Four college students allow themselves to be locked in a crumbling deserted mansion, whose owner is purported to have went crazy and gruesomely did away with his wife and two deformed children before hanging himself, as part of a pledge initiation. But it seems like the legends that have grown up around the Garth Manor are not entirely fictional, and the four find themselves hunted by a mysterious figure as they also have to navigate a series of pranks set up by their fellow frat members, who have no idea their games are turning very real, and very deadly.

Hell Night has a decent concept, and isn't ineptly made, but it's just sort of...there, being neither genuinely creepy nor unintentionally funny. It doesn't help that the only surviving elements of the film are in such shoddy condition that it looks like one of the fake trailers from Grindhouse (and Edgar Wright's haunted-house advertisement Don't was more entertaining in under two minutes then this is over a baggy 100). Look for Frank Darabont listed as a production assistant in the end credits.

[AndyDursin]

Don't mean to interrupt MJ's great annual train of genre reviews but...

THE BLOB (1988)
8/10

I picked up Shout's 4K and this is a really excellent presentation of a movie that manages to entertain each and every time -- in fact I think this one gets better with age. The Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont script is on a higher level than usual, with its characters being engagingly outlined and performed -- even within the confines of a tight 95-minute the movie gives you pretty much everything you'd hope for: appealing leads (Kevin Dillon and Shawnee Smith generate some chemistry together), memorably over the top death sequences (gory but not too extreme), and a sense of humor that I feel raises the movie up as one of the best modern "monster movie" updates of its kind.

Shout's 4K is mistakenly labeled as Dolby Vision but the HDR10 is still well implemented across this presentation; interestingly the 5.1 remix adds some rear channel info compared to the original Ultra Stereo 2.0 track which is mostly confined to the front channels (even having Ultra Stereo is a sign this movie was independently made with Tri-Star only involved as a distributor). Personally I love me some Shawnee Smith -- as she notes in her commentary she never really made it as a leading lady (netting the forgettable John Candy comedy WHO IS HARRY CRUMB after this but that's it) but her personality kept her employed in a mostly under-the-radar career.

It's interesting how much action she actually carries in the film too -- shades of the Ripley/ALIENS influence undoubtedly at play given the movie went into production right after Cameron's classic was released. (Crazy isn't it that women were allowed to do this kind of thing back in the 80s?!?!

[Monterey Jack]

It's interesting how much action she actually carries in the film too -- shades of the Ripley/ALIENS influence undoubtedly at play given the movie went into production right after Cameron's classic was released. (Crazy isn't it that women were allowed to do this kind of thing back in the 80s?!?!

[Monterey Jack]

-The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974): 10/10



No matter how many sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes and ripoffs have come over the nearly five decades since Tobe Hooper's masterful shocker has been unleashed on audiences, not one has managed to touch the sheer terror of this original drive-in classic. The tale of five youths beset by the fractious cannibalistic family unit (most famously "Leatherface", portrayed by Gunnar Hansen as a gibbering baby trapped in the form of a hulking monstrosity weidling his titular instrument) in the wilds of Texas one sweltering summer day in 1973, Massacre is magnificently unnerving to this day, despite gore that actually rather restrained compared to the truly disgusting fare that would follow in its wake. Hooper directs the rapidly accelerating mayhem with a serrated edge (even this new 4K UHD release still looks like something dead left to bake in the Texas sun for weeks) and yet a surprising amount of visual elegance (including one of the best anticipatory "Don't go in there!" sequences since Hitchcock's Psycho, which , like this film, was inspired by the ghoulish real-life atrocities of madman Ed Gein in the 1950s). The unforgettable final shot is one of those to send the audience reeling out of the cinema in stunned disbelief.

[Monterey Jack]

-Smile (2022): 8/10



A young doctor named Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon, daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick) witnesses a new arrival in her psychiatric hospital rave about a mysterious force coming for her, before fatally slashing her own throat...while grinning from ear to ear. Soon, Rose is beset by visions of figures sharing the same sinister smile, ones that her fiance (Jessie T. Usher), sister (Gillian Zinser) and concerned supervisor at work (Kal Penn) cannot see. Digging back into the patient's past, she becomes aware of a concerning pattern of suicides, where those who witness the deaths seem to contract a curse that compels them to commit suicide as well, passing it along like a virus. Can Rose escape this inexplicable curse by confronting the demons of her past?

Smile is a film that rides two recurring horror movie trends, ones that are metaphors for emotional trauma (kicked off by movies like The Babadook) and ones about curses that pass from one victim to the other (kicked off by the Japanese "J-Horror" films of the late 90s and early 2000s and their American remakes), thus it's travelling down some well-trodden paths. That said, director and writer Parker Finn generates some real tension along the way, goosing the audience with some startling imagery while Bacon delivers a compelling, convincingly desperate performance as her mind unravels under the strain. One of the real sleepers of last fall, riding a well-orchestrated ad campaign to a $217 million worldwide gross (on a $17 million pittance of a budget) and already with a sequel set to shoot whenever the goddamn actor's strike ends. Creepy and effective.