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Post by thwhtguardian on Oct 18, 2020 18:45:56 GMT -5
It's said that god created the cosmos in but seven days, Hanukkah has eight crazy night and there are 12 days of Christmas but for the spookiest season of the year deserves something more... The Thirteen Nights of Halloween!
 Join us here with reviews or comments on your favorite films that make you positively shiver. |
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Post by brutalis on Oct 19, 2020 8:03:08 GMT -5
Saturday watched a pair of Halloween movies to enjoy. 1st up was David Harbour's version of Hellboy. 1st watching on dvd and while there are t&ings to enjoy in it, the horrendous CGI still sucks when seen on the small screen. Harbour mumbles, grumbles his lines or he shouts them heedlessly. Perlman will ALWAYS be Hellboy for me.
For my evening viewing it was again spent with Svengoolie showing Devil Doll. This one starts of eerily enough with creative special effects work. But the longer it goes on the less interesting it becomes.
And Sunday I popped in disc 1 of season 1 of Lucifer. Really well done show with lots of character bits. The soundtrack is amazing and Tom Ellis makes Mr. Morningstar a complex and fun character without becoming over the top or silly.
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Post by thwhtguardian on Oct 19, 2020 12:03:27 GMT -5
Saturday watched a pair of Halloween movies to enjoy. 1st up was David Harbour's version of Hellboy. 1st watching on dvd and while there are t&ings to enjoy in it, the horrendous CGI still sucks when seen on the small screen. Harbour mumbles, grumbles his lines or he shouts them heedlessly. Perlman will ALWAYS be Hellboy for me. For my evening viewing it was again spent with Svengoolie showing Devil Doll. This one starts of eerily enough with creative special effects work. But the longer it goes on the less interesting it becomes. And Sunday I popped in disc 1 of season 1 of Lucifer. Really well done show with lots of character bits. The soundtrack is amazing and Tom Ellis makes Mr. Morningstar a complex and fun character without becoming over the top or silly. Yeah, I was incredibly disappointed by the Hellboy reboot; I love Harbour and I thought he was good as Hellboy but nearly everything else was horrid. I really think the worst though were the creature effects, in a film about monsters starring a monster you need top notch creature effects and they just weren't. The prosthetics on Harbour were so bad that you could tell it was difficult for him to simply talk never mind convey any real emotions. |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Oct 19, 2020 15:04:19 GMT -5
For my first entry this year I went with... Frankenstein (2015, Alchemy Pictures)  This was a new one for me that I came across in a bin at the local dollar store; I'm always on the look out for new horror flicks and it was only a buck so I figured I couldn't go wrong...and I most certainly did not. I was a little wary at the off set as I had never heard of this movie at all and I'm a huge Frankenstein fan and modern adaptations are more miss than hit in my mind but once I settled in it really won me over. The design of the creature wasn't the best, he started out perfect and developed boils and lesions due to genetic deficiencies but it was enough to set him apart from everyone else and really empathize with his various trials. |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Oct 21, 2020 11:05:07 GMT -5
Last night's entry was another new one for me... Heredity (2018, A24)  In the vein of horror classics (and personal favorites of mine) like the Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, director Ari Aster really delivered a tense, claustrophobic, intensely character driven super natural horror film that's both creepy and thought provoking. Other than my love of demons and cults what I loved the most about this film was that up until the very end it was never clear if we were meant to believe that the supernatural elements were real or the result of the mother's mental illness. That cat and mouse game with reality and the drama around the family's misfortunes draw you into the world, giving you a true sense of reality about it all which made the ending all the more shocking.
10/10 |
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Post by tartanphantom on Oct 21, 2020 21:52:03 GMT -5
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Post by thwhtguardian on Oct 22, 2020 4:28:31 GMT -5
Some excellent decisions in there, the Haunting and the House on Haunted Hill are two of my favorites and for last nights viewing I very nearly went with Monster Squad but decided instead to go with Super 8(2011, Bad Robot)  This is the film that I think kind of sparked this decade's retrospective love of the 80's. In it's relatively short run time of just over a hundred minutes Abrams manages to squeeze in the plucky nerd herd saving their town, a kid coping with a broken family, a coming of age story, boys "discovering" girls, and a 50's B-Movie alien as a metaphor for the Cold War...and at no time does it feel over stuffed. Some may find the nostalgia for the 80's to be laid on a little thick but as it has the feel of Speilberg's films from the that period(which are some of my favorites) it hits just the right spot for me. In many ways the much loved Stranger Things is just Super 8 the TV show, as the elements of its success are nearly identical to Super 8 but as they are drawn from the same sources perhaps that was inevitable.
I really wonder where that zeitgeist that seemed to be ever present in the 80's came from? The idea of a group of unsupervised young boys going off on an adventure wasn't just in Spielberg's films like ET and the Goonies, or in movies inspired by his work like Monster Squad but was also present in the works of Stephen King at the time in his novella The Body and of course in It. Is our nostalgia for the 80's really a nostalgia for the late 50's early 60's when these guys were children? |
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Post by tartanphantom on Oct 22, 2020 9:24:20 GMT -5
Looks like I've got to add "Super 8" to my list, I've never seen it. Tonight I think, is going to be a "silly fun" Halloween movie night. I have the following queued up for the evening: Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959)13 Ghosts (1960) (complete with "ghost viewer"!) I really wonder where that zeitgeist that seemed to be ever present in the 80's came from? The idea of a group of unsupervised young boys going off on an adventure wasn't just in Spielberg's films like ET and the Goonies, or in movies inspired by his work like Monster Squad but was also present in the works of Stephen King at the time in his novella The Body and of course in It. Is our nostalgia for the 80's really a nostalgia for the late 50's early 60's when these guys were children? I think you are onto something with that last sentence. I grew up in the late 60's and 1970's, and was in college in the early 80's. My nostalgic sentiment tends to lie in a time frame well prior to 1983. When I was a kid in the early '70's, me and my buddies went on adventures daily... what our moms usually said was "just be home by suppertime, dear." |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Oct 22, 2020 9:32:53 GMT -5
Just don't die in a Super 8 Motel.
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Post by tartanphantom on Oct 22, 2020 9:34:36 GMT -5
Just don't die in a Super 8 Motel.
Yeah, they don't "Leave the light on for you" like Motel 6 does.  |
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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 22, 2020 10:06:24 GMT -5
These are longtime favorites of mine. Glad to see love for The Uninvited and The Changeling in particular. Discovered the former by chance via TCM and can watch it anytime for different reasons. The superb black-and-white photography; the brooding atmosphere of the cliffs that alternates with the coziness of the village; the psycho-sexual subtext* (straight out of Rebecca and the Brontës); the cairn terrier (I never miss a movie with one, and there are many); the acting by a great cast; and the music, especially "Stella by Starlight," which was written for the movie, but appears in many others. All of this enjoyment is made quite poignant by the real-life tragedy that Gail Russell (Stella)'s life became. * A letter from the Legion of Decency criticized The Uninvited because "large audiences of questionable type attended this film at unusual hours drawn by certain erotic and esoteric elements." As for Peter Medak's The Changeling, it's a well crafted, no-nonsense story, with fine acting by George C. Scott and Melvyn Douglas and some of the scariest moments I've ever experienced in a movie. One involves a ball, the other a noise (reminds me of The Haunting, now that I think of it). The opening is absolutely shattering, and was quite different for its time. Now we see its like even on television shows, but it still packs a punch. The latter provoked my most frightened reaction in a movie theatre. I won't ruin anything for those who have not seen it, but just let me say that some very clever ushers (remember those days) knew exactly when a certain moment was going to occur and enhanced the fright by pounding on the fire doors from outside the theatre. Holy Schick Razor Blades, did I jump! |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 22, 2020 12:33:34 GMT -5
The Changeling is genuinely scary....forgot the lady's name but she went snooping in the attic and got chased by the wheelchair....no stupid special effects, no awful CGI, just something genuinely spooky.
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Post by thwhtguardian on Oct 22, 2020 16:26:59 GMT -5
Looks like I've got to add "Super 8" to my list, I've never seen it. Tonight I think, is going to be a "silly fun" Halloween movie night. I have the following queued up for the evening: Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959)13 Ghosts (1960) (complete with "ghost viewer"!) I really wonder where that zeitgeist that seemed to be ever present in the 80's came from? The idea of a group of unsupervised young boys going off on an adventure wasn't just in Spielberg's films like ET and the Goonies, or in movies inspired by his work like Monster Squad but was also present in the works of Stephen King at the time in his novella The Body and of course in It. Is our nostalgia for the 80's really a nostalgia for the late 50's early 60's when these guys were children? I think you are onto something with that last sentence. I grew up in the late 60's and 1970's, and was in college in the early 80's. My nostalgic sentiment tends to lie in a time frame well prior to 1983. When I was a kid in the early '70's, me and my buddies went on adventures daily... what our moms usually said was "just be home by suppertime, dear." Great minds, I'm thinking of queuing up a silly fun Halloween film myself tonight; I was thinking of either Mr. Boogedy, Ernest: Scared Stupid or the Canterville Ghost. |
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Post by tartanphantom on Oct 22, 2020 16:44:50 GMT -5
Great minds, I'm thinking of queuing up a silly fun Halloween film myself tonight; I was thinking of either Mr. Boogedy, Ernest: Scared Stupid or the Canterville Ghost. Can't go wrong with those. Scared Stupid is a personal favorite. |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Oct 22, 2020 16:59:07 GMT -5
Great minds, I'm thinking of queuing up a silly fun Halloween film myself tonight; I was thinking of either Mr. Boogedy, Ernest: Scared Stupid or the Canterville Ghost. Can't go wrong with those. Scared Stupid is a personal favorite. I remember thinking the troll was really scary as a kid, and the costume still looks cool to this day. |
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