Halloween Horror Marathon 2018

[Monterey Jack]

Am I the only one watching horror movies here...?!

[Monterey Jack]

-Twice-Told Tales (1963): 5/10



Tepid triptych of terror tales -- adapted from the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne -- all feature Vincent Price (who also narrates in his trademark dulcet tones). In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”, Price portrays an elderly doctor with an even-more-decrepit friend (Sebastian Cabot) who both discover a literal fountain of youth in the crypt of Cabot’s wife (Mari Blanchard), whose corpse has been miraculously preserved by the water dripping upon her coffin for the last 38 years. In “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, Price portrays a man so determined to keep his daughter (Joyce Taylor) away from the evils of young, courting suitors that he mixes her blood with the blooms of a virulently poisonous plant growing in his walled-off garden, where he keeps both well-tended. In “House Of The Seven Gables”, Price plays a man returning to his childhood home after a 17-year absence tempted by a treasure rumored to be hidden somewhere on the grounds, only to fall under the sway of a curse that has plagued the male members of his family for over 150 years. A fairly routine anthology feature that fails to match the classy chills of the Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe adaptations of the period featuring Price, with logy pacing (the three stories take a combined two hours to fully play out) and obvious payoffs.

[AndyDursin]

Yeah that one is very stilted, pretty much...in its execution and adaptation overall. It's funny, though -- even the quality Poe/Corman AIP films are a little bit slow-going for me at times. As I've gotten older my patience on those wears a bit.

[AndyDursin]

During Paul's visit we did check out a few horrors.

THE SHALLOWS is probably a good deal more fun than I originally wrote (I think I had a bad cold when I watched it and/or was exhausted from a 1 or 2 year old running around). The ending is implausible and a little silly but the rest of it is pretty well done for what it was.

GHOST STORY remains a favorite. Beautifully shot and scored -- compromised by some judicious editing and a feature-running time that prevented it from being something greater, but a classy, studio-made picture nevertheless with lots of atmosphere.

[AndyDursin]

We must all have these by now, but Best Buy has produced a really nice looking repackage of the 8 film Universal Monsters set using the exclusive Alex Ross artwork...

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/universal- ... _MTRYhoLOQ

[Paul MacLean]

During Paul's visit we did check out a few horrors.

THE SHALLOWS is probably a good deal more fun than I originally wrote (I think I had a bad cold when I watched it and/or was exhausted from a 1 or 2 year old running around). The ending is implausible and a little silly but the rest of it is pretty well done for what it was.

GHOST STORY remains a favorite. Beautifully shot and scored -- compromised by some judicious editing and a feature-running time that prevented it from being something greater, but a classy, studio-made picture nevertheless with lots of atmosphere.

Despite its tiny cast and single location, The Shallows proves a relentlessly effective thriller. Moreover it manages to be so without ripping off Jaws, which is more than I can say for another horror movie Andy I took in last week -- Grizzly, which was nothing but "Jaws in the Mountains" (or, as my sister used to call it, "Paws").

The bear attacks were hilariously funny though...



Ghost Story, despite some awkward moments is a moody, atmospheric thriller. Philippe Sarde's score adds much to the experience -- being the kind of melodic, beautifully-orchestrated "foreground" type of score, which is virtually extinct today.

[Monterey Jack]

-All The Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006): 3.5/10



Torpid suspenser about a much-desired high school girl (Amber Heard) who inadvertently instigates a tragedy at a pool party from a drunken dude trying to impress her. Nine months later, she and a group of friends attend a party at a remote cattle ranch, and suddenly they start getting picked off one-by-one by a mysterious killer. Mandy Lane is nicely-shot, but shuffles between boredom and ugly excess, and ends with a who-cares? quasi-twist that doesn’t seem like much of a motive to hang a murder spree on. Bleh.

-Hideaway (1995): 3.5/10



Hilariously chintzy thriller about a husband and father (Jeff Goldblum) who takes a long dunk in a freezing river after a car accident and is revived by a doctor (Alfred Molina) after two+ hours who utilizes a new technique to bring him back from the brink of death…but has Goldblum’s mind been tethered to that of a serial killer (Jeremy Sisto) while he was hovering outside of the Pearly Gates? Directed by Brett Leonard (The Lawnmower Man) and adapted from a novel by Dean Koontz (aka the author who must have been thrilled to have his tomes put on the shelf alphabetically next to Stephen King in the horror section of bookstores in the 80’s and 90’s), Hideaway is a good example of the typically low-grade serial-killer schlock that bred like rabbits in the early-to-mid 90’s thanks to the commercial and critical success of genuinely artful shockers like Silence Of The Lambs and Se7en, but what really yokes it to the period it was birthed in are the now-laughable CGI effects used to depict the metaphysical “Other Side” Goldblum and Sisto often see during their shared visions. It’s all screamingly mid-90’s at this point, never more obviously when we see that Goldblum’s sure-to-be-imperiled teen daughter is played by a pre-Clueless Alicia Silverstone (at one point he tries to win her favor by surprising her with tickets to see Pearl Jam). Dumb, dankly-shot in generic Ontario locations and wearyingly cliché-ridden, only noteworthy for the presence of Silverstone on the cusp of her oh-so-brief stardom and for those tacky, Spawn-level CG effects.

[esteban miranda]

Am I the only one watching horror movies here...?!

If I watch "horror" movies for the Halloween season I pretty much do that the last weekend before 10/31. We're not there yet but I do have them picked out...

[Monterey Jack]

Fangs for the memories…

-Dracula (Spanish version, 1931): 8/10

-Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992): 7/10





Had a double-Drac sandwich today, starting off with a fascinating oddity…a full-length Spanish language version of Dracula, made at the same time as the famous 1931 version with Bela Lugosi, shot late at night on the same Universal sets and utilizing many of the same props. And yet it’s not just a Xerox of the version fans have been familiar with for decades. Nearly a half-hour longer, and with much more elaborate, flowing camerawork and more subtle, spectral details (like when the Count walks through a floor-to-ceiling cobweb without disturbing it), it’s quite the interesting companion piece to the Universal film. Carlos Villarias cuts an impressive figure as Drac, with his vulpine smile and popping eyes, even if he can’t hope to match the magnetic charisma of Lugosi’s oft-imitated performance. Contained as an extra feature on the Blu-Ray of the Universal film, it’s certainly worth a view.

Francis Ford Coppola’s extravagant 1992 take on the material, despite featuring the author’s name in the title, was dubbed “MTV’s Dracula” by more than one critic at the time, and it’s a lavish yet frustrating spectacle, about one-third exceptional, one-third hyperbolic, and one-third absolutely insane. One the plus side are the performances by Gary Oldman as Drac (in a variety of guises – from wizened, Yoda-esque crone to dapper ladykiller to frightful bats and wolves – all courtesy of Oscar-winning makeup wizard Greg Cannom) and a ravishing Winona Ryder as Mina, the reincarnation of his centuries-lost love (yep, it’s that old vampire chestnut). Their scenes of courtship, set to the most passionate passages of Wojciech Kilar’s superb score, are easily the best-acted and most compelling sequences in the film. On the other hand, the rest of the performances range from clichéd ciphers (Cary Elwes as – what else? – a stuffy British prig, The Rocketeer’s Bill Campbell as an American cowboy stereotype so broad you expect him to start taking potshots at Bugs Bunny) to riotously miscast (a wincingly stilted Keanu Reeves as Mina’s intended beau, Jonathan Harker) to just plain riotous (Anthony Hopkins as Abraham Van Helsing, gnawing the scenery with hammy hilarity). And Coppola, taking a page from the overheated stylings of early-90’s Oliver Stone, jams the movie with admittedly-impressive visual hyperbole that feels like a two-hour compilation reel for a television miniseries. There’s always something interesting to look at, and the cast is clad in stunning, Oscar-winning costumes by Eiko Ishioka, and yet the film lurches from one extreme of emotion to another that it shuffles between being exhilarating and exhausting. It’s a shame, because the Oldman/Ryder core of the film is so moving and well-acted you wish the movie would breathe a little to allow it to flower like it should. It’s hard to think of another movie with so much great stuff in it that you can’t quite bring yourself to love.

[Monterey Jack]

-ParaNorman (2012): 10/10



Gorgeous stop-motion feature from Laika has become one of my go-to Halloween-time films when it comes to "family-friendly" spooky fare. It evokes that kind of "80's PG" Amblin vibe when "scary" fare for kids wasn't afraid to go right up to the doorbell and ring it. An account of a lonely boy named Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who has the unasked-for "gift" of communing with spirits that have yet to move onto whatever comes next, and how he gets passed down the task of keeping a witch's curse at bay from his eccentric uncle (John Goodman) that threatens to tear apart his small hometown of Blithe Hollow, ParaNorman is stunningly animated, every madly-detailed frame bursting with compellingly askew character and set designs. And yet, for all of the pleasurable laughs and genre shout-outs (including visual homages to Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and a hilarious opening parody of badly-made 80's zombie movies), it's in the film's final half-hour that it blossoms into a startlingly emotional climax, one that facilitates between rage and forgiveness with an uncanny storytelling grace. It's Pixar levels of tear-jerking, and alone turns this into an all-time classic. Fantastic.

[AndyDursin]

MANDY
3/10



Pretentious oddball fare from Panos Cosmatos (son of George P.) stars Nicolas Cage (of course) as a guy whose girlfriend (Andrea Riseborough) is abducted by a local cult for nefarious purposes. After an interminable set-up (taking nearly 50 minutes), “Mandy” settles in for “the good stuff,” with a revenge-seeking Cage dousing himself with alcohol, screaming and using a chainsaw to do battle with the cult leader (Linus Roache).

Saying “Mandy” is for an acquired taste is probably the understatement of the year. Cosmatos has an eye for colorful widescreen composition, and between Benjamin Loeb’s cinematography and moody scoring of the late Johann Johannson, it’s easy to fall under the spell of “Mandy” for a few minutes. The problem are the remaining, oh, 115 or so minutes, which move at a snail’s pace, offer precious little story or dramatic engagement, and come complete with full frontal nudity, violence, gore and imagery that looks to have been inspired from a Meatloaf album cover. Cosmatos might have a future working with better material than this, as well as an editor who should’ve cut this self-indulgent headtrip down to 90 minutes or less -- but in this form it's next to impossible to sit through.

RLJE’s Blu-Ray (out October 30th) includes a superb 1080p (2.40) transfer and 5.1 DTS MA sound, one Making Of featurette and 13 minutes of added deleted scenes.

[Monterey Jack]

-Dr. Giggles (1992): 3/10



Lousy horror flick about an escaped, constantly-sniggering mental patient (L.A. Law’s Larry Drake) who returns to his old hometown and takes up his late father’s former practice, in order to torment the local populace (including a pre-Charmed Holly Marie Combs as a teen with a defective heart). Had the movie played up Drake as an actual doctor, with real patients, and allowed the horror to build gradually as the audience realized he was not quite right, the film might have played off of the queasy fear pretty much everyone has about going to the doctor’s office, but this is basically your run-of-the-mill slasher, with Drake dressing up in Dad’s decades-old lab coat and killing random people while delivering awful medical puns. The gore in standard, the pacing logy and overall the film is a tremendous chore to sit through even at only 90 minutes.

-The Cabin In The Woods (2012): 8/10



The Whitman’s Sampler of horror films, this larky hoot of a thriller is essentially a riff on Dark City, with a group of generic college-aged “types” (the Bimbo, the Jock, the Virgin, etc.) acting out a standard-issue hey-let’s-go-out-to-my-relative’s-remote-cabin scenario…while a group of jaded workplace drones (represented mostly by a droll Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) monitor and subtly “direct” their actions from an antiseptic subterranean location far beneath the titular Cabin to…well, just watch the movie. Written by the master of postmodern snark, Joss Whedon, along with director Drew Goddard (who went on to write the script for Ridley Scott’s The Martian and write and direct the new theatrical release Bad Times At The El Royale), The Cabin In The Woods picks apart horror clichés with a loving eye for the conventions of the genre, but it’s the insane final twenty minutes or so that really makes the film, a visually-overpowering wave of ideas and archetypes that will delight hardcore fans of Scary Movies.

[Monterey Jack]

A Black Mass…

-The Omen (1976): 8/10

-Damien: Omen II (1978): 7/10

-The Final Conflict: Omen III (1981): 5/10







The rare example of a horror trilogy with three distinct chapters that tell a complete and finite story, the Omen films, while decreasing in quality with each installment, nevertheless remain an intriguing experiment. The 1976 original (the first major directorial outing for Richard Donner, who’d use the film’s considerable commercial success to land the plum assignment of directing Superman: The Movie two years later) is the best of the bunch, a taut, well-acted thriller about a well-to-do middle-aged couple, Robert and Kathy Thorn (Gregory Peck and Lee Remick) who lose their baby in childbirth. Lacking the courage to break the terrible news to his wife, Robert is compelled by a priest to adopt a young baby in the same Rome hospital who lost his mother in childbirth the same night (“She need never know”). They happily raise the child, whom they name Damien (the chipmunk-cheeked Harvey Stephens) to the age of five...and then people around them start to die, in a series of bizarre “accidents”. Is there some malign import around this rash of deaths? And why is Damien suddenly receiving a load of attention, both malign and protective/possessive, from a variety of sources? Why, yes, he IS the literal Son Of Satan, and Robert must come to grips with making an unforgivable decision for the greater good of mankind. The Omen is a slick, engrossing, well-paced thriller with numerous memorable sequences (including a famous cinematic beheading) and fine performances from Peck – lending his old-Hollywood gravitas to fairly pulpy material – and Remick. That said, it’s not quite a classic, falling short of other paranoid religious-flavored horror films of the period like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Still, it’s frightfully good, and Jerry Goldsmith’s chilling score (which, incredibly, earned him the only Oscar of his long and brilliant career) is definitely the icing on the cake.

In Damien: Omen II, we re-visit Damien seven years later, where he’s now a strapping lad of twelve (and played by Jonathan Scott-Taylor) and living with Robert Thorn’s brother, Richard (William Holden, adding a similar dash of class to the genre proceedings as Peck did) his second wife (Lee Grant) and his cousin, Mark (Lucas Donat). Entering military school, Damien’s life seems pretty set…until the school’s Sergeant (Lance Henriksen, in an early film role) sets him on the road to discovering his Satanic lineage. Directed with faceless efficiency by Don Taylor (replacing Mike Hodges a few days into the production, although Hodges retains a co-screenplay credit with Stanley Mann) and set to another terrific Goldsmith score (the ghastly, guttural choral croak that accompanies the jet-black crow that serves as Damien’s familiar is a particular standout), Omen II is a perfectly serviceable follow-up that plays like an early example of Hollywood’s penchant for constructing franchise sequels around “setpieces” more than a well-constructed narrative (there’s a subplot with subordinate Robert Foxworth buying up land for Holden’s Thorn Industries company – and possibly murdering landowners who refuse to sell -- that goes nowhere), but on that level, the film constructs and executes a number of grisly death scenarios with enthusiastic panache (the death of Thorn Industries bigwig Lew Ayres beneath the surface of an icy lake is a standout). Patchy, but fun.

Finally, The Final Conflict leaps ahead two decades to Damien an age 32 (now portrayed by a devilishly handsome and charismatic Sam Neill), as he consolidates his clout as the head honcho of Thorn Industries into a bid for the position of Ambassador to Great Britain, utilizing some of his trademark, gruesome “accidents” to pave the way…but his finds his ascension to power threated by the literal Second Coming of Christ, and he sets off a ghoulish plot to murder every child born on the specific date of the Nazarene’s prophesized return. Neill is terrific in the lead role, given many juicy monologues to deliver, and Goldsmith delivers his finest score for the trilogy, a virtual dark opera that stands with some of his all-time best work (with a particularly thrilling cue for a fox hunt midway through the picture), and yet it’s fitting that this particular Conflict was the Final one, because the series is coasting on fumes by this point. It’s not especially terrible, but there’s nothing you haven’t seen before in this particular series, and the snoozy pacing doesn’t help. Were it not for series MVP Goldsmith’s phenomenal music lifting up the proceedings, I would probably have less charitable things to say about the film as a whole. Not a bad end to a series of films, but it should have delivered more of a punch as a concluding chapter.

[Paul MacLean]

As far as the Omen trilogy, my favorite of the three is actually Damien: Omen II.

I find D:O3 a far-more interesting film than the other two. I always found the transformation of Damien from likable kid to reluctant antichrist, and finally ruthless prince of darkness made for a compelling character arc (the character development in the other films is far-less complex). Despite the absence of a love theme, I also find Jerry Goldsmith's score for the second film better than that for the first -- the cues develop in more interesting ways (and I suppose the film -- not so much the composer -- are what largely dictates that, but that doesn't make the music any less interesting).

No argument about the third film containing Jerry Goldsmith's best score for the series (and one of his best of all time). The Final Conflict is certainly a great-looking film, and one which is often very atmospheric, with some impressive sequences.

However, it proves a somewhat dissatisfying film as well (for me anyway). Ostensibly based on the Book of Revelation, the film's depiction of Damien's rise to power (and more particularly the "Second Coming") is depicted with frustratingly limited scope. Revelation prophesies that the antichrist will subjugate all the peoples of the Earth -- and those who refuse to submit to his authority will face persecution and death. Where is this in the movie? Damien never rises to power of any kind. In fact all he does is bump-off a few priests, and dispatch some "guardians of the watch" to murder babies. That's pretty diabolical yes, but nowhere near as bad as branding all mankind with the "mark of the beast" or beheading those who refuse to renounce their faith (as Revelation describes).

The film isn't very ecumenical either. All of the clergy who plot to stop Damien in The Final Conflict are Catholic priests. I'm not trying to diminish the Catholic faith (don't get me wrong) -- but didn't the filmmakers think that maybe Anglicans, Lutherans, Coptics, Baptists, Evangelicals, etc. might also want to lend a hand in preventing the antichrist from taking over the world?

Moreover, there is nothing in Revelation that says Jesus Christ will return as an infant, as the film depicts. It says he will return in the guise of incalculable majesty and power, and that all -- including the antichrist -- will bow to him on the day of that return. What does The Final Conflict show us? Some astronomers looking at a conjunction, and then at the end Damien getting stabbed by an angry mother as some abstract apparition appears.

Goldsmith's music crescendos in ecclesiastical ecstasy and scripture verses appear on screen -- while the priest holds the dead kid's body. Is this a happy or sad ending? Plus Goldsmith brings back the "evil" theme over the end credits, further confusing one as the whether Damien truly has been vanquished. I've long-suspected the filmmakers didn't know how to end The Final Conflict which is why it has such a half-baked resolution.

[mkaroly]

Great comments Paul!