Halloween Horror Marathon 2022

[Monterey Jack]

-Umma (2022): 1.5/10



Tedious rural ghost story about a Korean woman named Amanda (Sandra Oh) who lives with her home-schooled daughter Chrissy (Fivel Stewart) on a remote farm, eschewing the modern convenience of electricity due to a claimed "allergy". But it's really due to a terrible childhood incident with her controlling mother, and now Amanda - having received her late mother's mortal remains from her uncle, finds herself convinced her "Umma"'s restless spirit is coming to claim her daughter's body for her own.

Dull supernatural thriller is clumsy, poorly-conceived and bereft of unique shocks. The acting is okay, but it's all frightfully dull.

Looks great, less filling...

-The Lost Boys (1987): 6.5/10

-Flatliners (1990): 5.5/10





The late Joel Schumacher was often derided during his lengthy career for being a director more in love with style than substance, and...well, it's not inaccurate. Today's pair of horror thrillers are good examples, both with gorgeously glossy surfaces with little dramatic substance below them. 1987's The Lost Boys is set in Santa Carla, California, where recent divorcee Lucy Emerson (Dianne Wiest) has relocated to with her teenage sons Sam (Corey Haim) and Michael (Jason Patric) to live with her retired, rather dotty father (Barnard Hughes). The boys are not too thrilled about the new living situation ("Where's the TV...?!"), but elder bro Michael finds himself immediately attracted to a stunning local girl, Star (Jami Gertz), whom he meets on the boardwalk, but her decadent delinquent of a boyfriend, David Powers (Kiefer Sutherland), and his pack of be-mulleted cronies (including a Bill & Ted-era "Alexander" Winter), have to put Michael through a series of initiation tests before he's allowed to become one of them. Soon, Michael sports sunglasses to protect against the glare of daylight, levitates to his bedroom's ceiling, and casts a see-through reflection in the mirror. Yep, he's become one of the near-undead, and fights against the temptation to give into his newfound bloodlust and become a vampire permanently, while the Frog Brothers (Corey Feldman, Jamison Newlander) - who run a local comic book store as cover for their real profession as vampire slayers - advise Sam on what to do to defend the family against their fanged foes.

The Lost Boys is one great-looking movie (only accentuated by its gorgeous new UHD transfer), with sumptuous cinematography by Michael Chapman that captures the sun and neon-drenched California locales with slick beauty. And the vamp makeup by Greg Cannom is superb. So then why, for all of the movie's audiovisual pleasures, does it come up short every time I watch it? Maybe it's because there's precious little time given to pesky character development. Patric and Gertz gaze at each other with ardent sizzle, yet we know virtually nothing about how she became the vampire clan's kept woman. She and Patric share a few heated glances, tumble into bed...and that's IT for their interactions within the movie. Couldn't they have shared a handful of meaningful dialogue exchanges about their respective backstories before hitting the sack? And while Sutherland is a fountain of raspy-voiced charisma as David Powers (and looks great with his demonic eyes and gnashing vampire teeth), the rest of his gang are given no individual quirks (hell, they barely have any dialogue), only acting as generic videogame ciphers to be mowed down in an action-packed climax that is admittedly full of great F/X and some fun gimmicks (like toy guns filled with holy water). Had I seen this movie between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, the shallowness of the dramatics wouldn't have bothered me at all, but I didn't get around to watching it until after the age of forty, and there's just not much nourishing blood to be sucked from the vein here. Compared to Fright Night or Near Dark, it's a distinctly anemic 80s vampire flick, with a wonderful visual style and nothing beyond that, enjoyable in fits and spurts but never as fun as you hope it will be.

1990's Flatliners features Sutherland again as Nelson Wright, an arrogant/ambitious young medical student in Philadelphia who concocts a scheme to explore what lies beyond the veil of death, volunteering to allow his heart to be stopped for one minute before being revived, hoping to bring back first-hand scientific observations of his experiences in the afterlife. He succeeds, causing his colleagues David Labraccio (Kevin Bacon), Joe Hurley (Stephen Baldwin) and Rachel Manus (Julia Roberts, hot on the heels of Pretty Woman) to follow up, goading each other into longer and longer jaunts into the unknown (Oliver Platt, as Randy Steckle, only observes and frets). But soon the four "Flatliners" find themselves assailed by images of past traumas that follow them out from the dreamscape of their afterlife experiences into the real world...ones that have the ability to physically manifest themselves. Can the four resolve their past sins and find a level of redemption before being driven mad, or worse?

This is a GREAT idea for a thriller, one rife with all sorts of scientific and religious implications, but screenwriter Peter Filardi bungles this intriguing setup, and turns it into essentially a Nightmare On Elm Street sequel, only one shorn of the imaginatively surreal visual effects that made those movies (even the crummy ones) such guilty-pleasure junk food schlock. Cinematographer Jan De Bont bathes the imagery in saturated hues of blue and red to suggest the presence of supernatural forces at play (the new Arrow UHD replicates the film's widescreen visuals superbly), yet Schumacher - despite his racing, fluid camerawork - can't do much to give the ideas any real visceral kick. And the half-baked ideas don't have much consistent sense...why is Sutherland's character subjected to endless physical beatings by the young boy he did a terrible wrong to as a child (in one unintentionally funny moment, he gets loogie'd upon in dramatic slo-mo), while the other three characters only have to deal with a handful of mild guilt-ridden hallucinations? The film looks great, and composer James Newton Howard toils mightily to lend the proceedings a religioso gravity they simply do not earn, yet it's not terribly scary, and the themes of characters coming to terms with past misdeeds that haunt them lack any real emotional or dramatic kick. Sadly, even a 2017 "requel" (also featuring Sutherland) couldn't find much of interest to do with such a fascinating idea. Shame.

[Monterey Jack]

-Shutter Island (2010): 9/10



Psychological puzzle box about a pair of "DOO-ly appointed federal mah-shalls", Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), who make a trip to Shutter Island off the coast of Boston, circa 1954, to investigate a missing person case from a facility to study and treat the criminally insane. The missing woman, Rachel Solando, is referred to by the facility's head shrink, John Cawley (Ben Kingsley), as having vanished as if she "evaporated, through the walls". Teddy and Chuck interview the staff and inmates, hoping to shake out clues, but Teddy has an ulterior motive for being there, wanting to find the firebug inmate who torched his apartment building, leading to the death if his late wife, Dolories (played in a series of surreal dream sequences by a stunning Michelle Williams). But Teddy finds enough evidence to convince him that sinister experiments are being conducted on the unwilling inmates. Is he on the track of a vast conspiracy, or are the traumas of his past skewing his perspective on things?

Director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis (adapting the novel by Boston Noir expert Dennis Lehane), fashion an eerie suspense thriller with a fantastic, dankly atmospheric setting. Working with an excellent tech crew (cinematographer Robert Richardson, production designer Dante Ferretti, VFX supervisor Rob Legato), Scorsese stews up an engrossing slice of overheated pulp, one that swirls around with the ferocity of the hurricane-level rainstorm that envelops the prison and surrounding grounds. And while the ultimate reveal of what's unfolding may or may not be guessed by astute viewers, in this case, complaining that you could "see it coming" is like ignoring the forest for the trees. DiCaprio does some career-best acting here, and his final line is a shattering example of a man coming to grips with a horrible misdeed. A great film.

-Pitch Black (2000): 8/10



Neat little sci-fi/horror hybrid about a space flight that comes across a rogue asteroid storm, causing the craft to violently crash upon the surface of a planet whose surface is scorched by a trio of suns. The survivors include scrappy Radha Mitchell as co-pilot Carolyn Fry (not related to Philip J., one surmises), genre fave Keith David as a Muslim priest travelling with three young boys on the way to New Mecca, Cole Hauser as William Johns, a bounty hunter...and Vin Diesel as Richard B. Riddick, Johns' prisoner who he's taking in for a hefty sum. Riddick's got goggles to protect his eyes from the glare of the light (he had them polished by a prison doctor so he could see potential killers sneaking up in the dark), a bullet-shaped chrome dome, and an attitude as short as his gravelly rasp. The survivors find an abandoned settlement, and a shuttlecraft capable of getting them off this dusty rock...but then an eclipse of the sun(s) reveals that the planet's core is filled with nasty, flesh-eating beasties (they're like hairless bats with snapping Hammerhead Shark noggins), and they all have to work together to find a way to keep the light on long enough to make it to the shuttle, fuel it up, and get their asses out of dodge before they become critter chow.

Director David Twohy (who scripted with Jim and Ken Wheat) takes a basic survivalist premise and squeezes more juice out of it than you might expect. While the movie's budget is modest, he makes the most out of it, with an exciting early crash sequence and solid creature effects. Diesel holds the screen with his surly charisma, and his interactions with Hauser and Mitchell makes for a tense triangle of constantly-shifting allegiances that keep the tension simmering even before the monsters show up. A pair of disappointing sequels never managed to make good on this movie's promise (2003's Chronicles Of Riddick was an incomprehensible, bloated affair that tried to wed the character to a generic "The One" sci-fi premise, 2013's Riddick was basically a less-enjoyable remake of the first), but Pitch Black stands as a rock-solid example of low-budget ingenuity and skillful suspense.

[Monterey Jack]

Entering Dante's Inferno...

-Piranha (1978): 7/10

-The Howling (1981): 6/10





The first two major features from director Joe Dante (both recently reissued as dandy new UHD editions from Scream Factory) offer a droll mixture of shocks and in-joke references for horror fans. 1978's Piranha features Heather Menzies as a skiptracer on the trail of a pair of missing teens who vanished on a hike along Lost River Lake. Along with an alkie guide (Bradford Dillman), they trace the teens to a pond inside of a seemingly abandoned military facility...only to be violently assaulted by a scientist (Dante favorite Kevin McCarthy) when they initiate a purge of the pool, which unleashes hoards of flesh-eating piranha fish, who have been genetically engineered to survive non-tropical water temperatures...and breed rapidly. Now it's up to the trio to raft downstream as fast as they can to warn the nearby summer camp, as well as the luxe new Lost River resort that has just opened, both of which offer up a virtual smorgasbord of potential victims.

Probably the best of the 70s Jaws ripoffs (Steven Spielberg enjoyed it so much he chose Dante to helm a segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, as well as Gremlins), Piranha gets good mileage out of shots of fingers and toes getting graphically nibbled on (while electronic chittering fills the soundtrack), with fine gore effects by a young Rob Bottin in one of his earliest film credits. It also doesn't take itself very seriously (Menzies using her...uh, talents to distract a military guard comes immediately to mind), with just as many chuckles and chills. Personally, I think Alexandre Aja's outrageously gross 2010 remake is even more fun (provided you have a strong stomach), but Dante's original still holds up as a fun little B-flick.

1981's The Howling (one of three lycanthropic horror films released that year) features 80s genre MILF Dee Wallace as Karen White, a reporter suffered from traumatic stress inspired by a run-in with a psycho (Dante fave Robert Picardo) during a police sting inside of a porno theater. In order to relax, she and her husband Bill (Wallace's real-life future husband Christopher Stone) take a scenic drive to "The Colony", a new-age retreat from modern-day living. Once there, though, Bill finds himself having unfaithful thoughts about the sexy temptress Marsha (Elisabeth Brooks), while Karen finds out that the Colony is actually home to a pack of werewolves!

Like Piranha, The Howling is penned by John Sayles (along with Terrence H, Winkless, both adapting the novel by Gary Brandner), and it shares a similar mix of gory violence and snarky humor. Rob Bottin is back to supervise the werewolf effects, and it's a spectacular breakthrough in horror technology, trading the simple lap dissolve transformations of the old Universal films of the 1940s for ones that feature once-human faces bubbling and cracking open to reveal slavering, elongated snouts and devilishly pointed, canine ears. The F/X sequences are so good that they make the rest of the film seem better than it actually is. Sadly, I've never found this film to be a favorite. Like The Lost Boys, it's all luscious artifice, and no substance. When the werewolves are off-screen, the movie feels sketchy and thin, with not enough interesting dramatic tension or characterization to keep one's interest. Wallace is good (she's always good), and Pino Donaggio (another Piranha alum) provides a suitably creepy score, but the movie is never as good as you hope it is, albeit watchable just for the impressive tech credits.

[Monterey Jack]

Shaddup or I'll make ya shaddup...

-A Quiet Place (2018): 9/10

-A Quiet Place Part II (2021): 8/10





Silence is salvation in this pair of sci-fi suspense pieces. In A Quiet Place, real-life couple John Krasinski (who also directed and co-wrote) and Emily Blunt portray Lee & Evelyn Abbott, who are weathering the supposed end of the world by invading monsters who are triggered by the slightest noises, honing in on their sources in order to rend the offending party to pieces. They have taught their children, Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Regan (Millicent Simmonds), to keep all extraneous noises to a bare minimum in order to survive, assisted by the fact they are all fluent in sign language (daughter Regan is deaf, as is actress Simmonds in real life). They've eked out a living in an isolated farmhouse, sneaking around barefoot on pathways consisting of soft sand, as dad Lee tries to contact pockets of human survivors (he lights a signal fire each night, and sees other ones glowing on the horizon) with his radio equipment. But, when Evelyn - pregnant with a new child - finds her water breaking at the most inopportune time, the family finds themselves fighting for their little corner of the world as the monsters (who sort of resemble the Cloverfield beastie with elongated ear canals) are drawn into their hidden enclave.

Working from a screenplay he concocted with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, Krasinski takes a high concept idea - stay quiet or die - and wrings a great deal of hovering dread out of it. Considering how so many modern horror movies eschew any sort of sustained tension in favor of obnoxiously loud scraps, bangs and shrieks on the soundtrack, it's refreshing to see one that trusts the viewer to lean in closer, afraid of the slightest erroneous noise coming from any of the theater speakers. The acting is superb from the four leads. Krasinski and Blunt making for loving but fiercely defensive parents determined to keep their children safe no matter what (their youngest child is not so lucky, snatched away in the film's startling prologue). Jupe, with his expressively anxious face, does a great job is selling his character's perpetual sense of terror. But it's SImmonds who really shines here, running a gamut from guilt (over her perceived failings in keeping her lost brother safe) to a determination to not allow past mistakes to repeat. It all builds steadily to a marvelous cut-to-black punchline, one that seemed like a perfectly satisfying way for a thriller to conclude...

...but money talks in Hollywood, so a sequel was quickly put into production when the original became a well-deserved word-of-mouth smash at the box office. Arriving a year late (thanks to Covid shutting down movie theaters weeks before its intended March of 2020 release date), A Quiet Place Part II opens mere minutes after the conclusion of the first movie, with survivors Evelyn, Regan and Marcus - along with their newborn baby brother - escaping from the violent catharsis at their farmhouse and setting out to find a new place of safety, eventually meeting with Emmett (Cillian Murphy, back in 28 Days Later territory), who has kept himself alive inside of a steel foundry. He wants nothing to do with them, only wanting to cover inside his place of safety, but Regan - who discovered the monsters' weakness at the climax of the previous movie - wants to find the radio station playing Bobby Darrin's "Beyond The Sea" on an endless loop and use the signal to broadcast the frequency that may bring an end to the monster invasion once and for all.

A Quiet Place was such a perfect one-and-done experience that a sequel had the strong possibility to seem like nothing more than a gratuitous cash grab, but Krasinski (returning as director, working from his own solo screenplay) retains all of the strongest elements of the first movie (sustained tension, excellent performances, brilliant sound design), and makes a movie that, while lacking the sense of surprise the first one did, functions as effectively as a "made-to-order" sequel can. The artful crosscutting between the dual climaxes, with Simmonds and Jupe both reaching simultaneous moments of gratifyingly vengeful catharsis, is especially effective. It also thankfully doesn't indulge in the typical Kid In A Candy Store excesses that so many sequels to unexpected hits do. It doesn't flood the screen with fancy, overproduced F/X just because it has a larger budget, it doesn't unnecessarily bloat out the runtime just because the director has more clout to demand it (it runs all of seven minutes longer than the first, which already came in at an economical 90 minutes), it functions as a perfect companion piece to the original in all respects. Yeah, it lacks that out-of-nowhere frisson that a good, non-IP movie can always generate if it really connects (now it's Just Another Franchise), but A Quiet Place Part II doesn't detract from its predecessor in any way, shape or form, and offers a replication of its thrills with as much skill as you would hope for. I don't know if we need more of this (a third movie and a spin-off are in the works), but these two movies basically comprise one damn good three-hour suspense experience.

[Monterey Jack]

The power of Hyde compels you! The power of Hyde compels you...!

-Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (1931): 10/10

-Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (1941): 6/10





A pair of adaptations of Robert Lewis Stevenson's famous novel about the duality of man, and how one scientist's dream of forever separating the two halves of our incipient personalities can lead to a horrid imbalance. The 1931 adaptation stars Frederic March as the esteemed Dr. Henry Jekyll, whose probing into the possibilities of separating man's inclinations towards good and evil are put to the test when he downs a new formula of his own concoction. Soon, he's sprouting hair, a sloping, simian cranium and a mouthful of gnashing fangs. The newly-christened "Mr. Hyde" is now free to indulge in all of the most base impulses that "civilized" man has keep suppressed for centuries, and he quickly means to engage in the pleasures of the flesh with a brash bar singer, Ivy (Miriam Hopkins), and satiate his lust for women, spirits and bludgeoning violence, while his fiancee Muriel (Rose Hobart) wonders why her beloved Henry is acting so distant lately...

Directed brilliantly by Rouben Mamoulian, this take on Stevenson's novel earned a well-deserved Best Actor for March, which still stands as one of the very few times they've deigned to give an award to a performance in a horror movie. His visage as the feral, cunning Hyde is a physical transformation worthy of Lon Chaney in The Phantom Of The Opera, his remarkable makeup enhanced by March's popping eyes and apelike body language. The movie is surprisingly racy for its era (like March giving Hopkins' cleavage a lusty smooch), and full of startling transformation sequences and moments of violence that still have the power to shock. A great film worthy of the best of the Universal Monster films of the era.

The same cannot be said for the 1941 adaptation directed by Victor Fleming. Oh, it's a good-looking movie, with lavish production value and a great score by the redoubtable Franz Waxman. Yet Spencer Tracy is a misfire. He's fine, if a bit stiff, as Dr. Jekyll, but his transformation into Hyde is disappointing on a number of levels. He lacks the slavering madness of March's performance, and the makeup is fairly lame in comparison, nothing but tousled, unkempt hair & eyebrows, exaggerated crow's feet around the eyes and teeth in need of a good flossing. It also miscasts the two leading ladies. Lana Turner (as Henry's fiancee Beatrix) and Ingrid Bergman (as the saucy barmaid Ivy) should have swapped roles, frankly. Turner (who played one of the ultimate film noir temptresses in The Postman Always Rings Twice) and Bergman (the same year as she co-starred with Bogie in Casablanca) are ill-at-ease with their characters, and deliver stilted performances (although both look ravishingly glamorous, of course). Mainly, the film lacks thrills, on both the horror and prurient levels. It lacks the pre-code sauciness of the 1931 film, coming across as tasteful to a fault. It needed to be more vulgar to get at the melodramatic juice of Stevenson's novel. If you've seen the 1931 film, why settle for this handsomely-produced but inferior take? If you can have Filet Mignon, why settle for a Big Mac (even a well-assembled one)?

-Wendell & Wild (2022): 8/10



The new animated film from director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, James & The Giant Peach, Coraline) is a typical blast of surreal imagination, about a young girl named Kat (voiced by Lyric Ross) who loses her parents in a car crash, blames herself, and spends the next five years bouncing from one foster home to another, hardening into a 13-year-old delinquent who finally comes back to her hometown of Rust Bank, only to discover it's a ghost town taken over by the greedy corporation Klaxon Corp. Resettled into a girls' school, Kat accidentally comes into contact with Wendell & Wild (Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, who produced and co-scripted with Selick), a pair of scheming demons who utilize the tube of hair cream they use to sprout new follicles on the massive head of their demon daddy, Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames), to resurrect Kat's parents from the graveyard (don't even ask).

Based on his own (unpublished) book, Selick's Wendell & WIld is hard to describe, yet it's so relentlessly creative and visually striking that it's a pretty irresistible experience nonetheless. The character designs have that lovingly skewed look characteristic of Selick's work, and the detail in bringing them to life is staggeringly meticulous. Older kids will appreciate this lite PG-13 production as charmingly cracked Halloween fare, while adult animation fans will delight in the movie's technical polish and witty visual and verbal asides.

[Paul MacLean]

The Wolfman Directors Cut (6.5/10)

This is one of those movies where everything is "there" for it to be terrific -- a fine script, a great cast, an excellent director -- but it just isn't that good. Benicio Del Toro proves a charismatic hero, as does Emily Blunt a sympathetic leading lady. A supporting cast of great actors like Art Malik, Geraldine Chaplin and Hugo Weaving bring genuine gravitas to the film. On the other hand, Anthony Hopkins pretty much phones-in his perfomance and is probably the film's weakest link.

Danny Elfman's score is among his better efforts, and the art direction is very arresting -- though the photography is uneven; I like its expressionistic style but it is too grainy and "gauzy" in a lot of scenes -- almost like the work of Janusz Kaminski. Rick Baker's make-up is superb however -- and did anyone else catch Baker's five-second cameo, where he is (ironically) killed by a CGI wolfman?

Ultimately though, The Wolfman has little emotional resonance, it isn't particularly scary or suspenseful, and it is slow-moving and lacks energy (leading me to suspect the cut-down, studio sanctioned version of this film is probably better than this directors cut).

[AndyDursin]

I reread my review and some other materials -- Universal didn't like how long it took to get the Wolfman to show up, so they trimmed like 20 minutes out of it in an effort to speed up the process. You may well have liked the theatrical cut better. I agree the story was unnecessarily dour and serious -- but all the visceral elements of the film and its look and feel were evocative of classic Universal Monster fare and I appreciated it on that level. They could've simplified the plot and left out most of the psychoanalysis though.

Funny thing is even though it's Elfman's credit, the final score in the movie was also the work of Conrad Pope and some other people. The musical history of the project is bizarre:

The musical history of Joe Johnston’s film The Wolfman is chequered, to say the least. Danny Elfman was originally hired to score it but it kept being pushed back and pushed back; he wrote the bulk of the score, but needed to draft in Edward Shearmur and T.J. Lindgren to compose some parts because the schedule now clashed with Alice in Wonderland. Then, the studio reacted in traditional fashion when test screenings didn’t go to plan, by dumping the score (against the director’s wishes); and, much to the film music community’s horror, the (to be polite) somewhat undistinguished Paul Haslinger was brought in to write the replacement. Then, something even stranger happened – the new score was so bad, it was dumped right at the last minute and Johnston’s lobbying to have Elfman’s music reinstated was successful. Unfortunately, by this time the film had been rather re-edited from the one that Elfman had scored and so for scenes where his music no longer fitted, Conrad Pope was hired to write new music (not based on Elfman’s score). All rather odd.

http://www.movie-wave.net/the-wolfman/

Johnston said this:

Danny [Elfman] had to score a film that was half an hour longer [than what the film is now]. And he had to score it very early. It was last summer, I think. He said, “This has happened to me before, and I know it’s going to happen now. You’re going to re-cut the film and my score isn’t going to work.” We re-cut the film, we put his score in. And what happened is he had themes he had spaced out and it worked great in his cut. When we took out that half hour, his themes were closer together. So things get familiar and you go, “Wait, I just heard that.” We previewed the film, we all recognized it didn’t work. But there was a reaction from someone high up at NBC/Universal, because a new trailer had been cut with the electronic score, someone said, “Hey, let’s do the whole film that way!” It was something I reacted to pretty violently. That’s the wrong idea, guys. They said they were going to try it. I had been so worn down, I said, “Okay, let’s try it.” They hired a guy who is a talented composer in his own right. They assigned him something that was almost impossible to do. When we put his music to the picture, even though the music was working, it was so out of context with what you were seeing.

Varese's CD (out of print) was all what Elfman originally wrote. You can find Conrad Pope's contributions (about 20 mins worth) on the usual site.

[Paul MacLean]

^^ Interesting. It's weird how these incidents of indecision happen with scores.

I'm reminded of Heaven Help Us, for which James Horner wrote a small-ensemble "Chieftains"-style score for Irish instruments -- which was rejected, but Horner's services retained, being requested to re-score it using arrangements of classical and baroque music. That didn't work either, so they just had him adapt the original Irish score for orchestra and traditional instruments!

Or The NeverEnding Story, in which only portions of Klaus Doldinger's score were replaced by Giorgio Mororder.

And of course the notorious Breakdown, with its three Basil Poledouris scores (each less thematic than the last).

[Monterey Jack]

Morbid teenage girls commune with the dead in this pair of films set in the year of Our Lord, 1988...

-Beetlejuice (1988): 8.5/10

-My Best Friend's Exorcism (2022): 5/10





A young married couple, Adam & Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), plunge to their deaths off of a covered bridge in their small Connecticut town of WInter River, and find themselves amongst the recently deceased. Confined to their home, they're aghast when, months later, the Deetz clan moves in. Father Charles (Jeffrey Jones) is delighted by the home's...homey charms, while his brittle socialite second wife Delia (Catherine O'Hara) is less than enthused. Charles' gothy teenage daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder) just wants nothing to do with either of them...until she finds she's the only one who can see the Maitlands, who are desperate to scare away the new tenants before they can transform their house into a altar of garish, art-deco kitsch. To aid in their desires, they hire the services of "Betlegeuse" (Michael Keaton), a thoroughly repellant "Bio-Exorcist" who specializes in chasing pesky living beings away from haunted abodes.

Only Tim Burton's second feature-length movie, Beetlejuice is already rife with the elements that would become obligatory building blocks of his personal style (the infectious, whirligig Danny Elfman music, tactile stop-motion effects, wraith-pale characters with dark-ringed eyes, and an overall atmosphere of surreal whimsy), but here its when they were at their freshest, before they ossified into repetitive self-parody. The film is brimming with big laughs, sly asides, awesome visuals (including ghoulishly amusing, Oscar-winning makeup effects) and some choice Harry Belafonte song cuts. Keaton is a riot as the titular "Ghost with the most", riding a fine line between exhilaration and obnoxiousness, and the rest of the cast acquit themselves nicely.

Meanwhile, this year's Amazon Prime movie My Best Friend's Exorcism is only set in 1988, the era of big hair and Debbie Gibson, where high school chums Abby Rivers (Elsie Fisher) and Gretchen Lang (Amiah Miller), engage in a game of Ouija at their summer home, and unleash a demon that possesses Gretchen, which leads to an increasingly catty dissolvement of their friendship until Abby engages the services of a yogurt-loving Christian bodybuilder (Christopher Lowell) to drive the unclean spirit from her bestie and restore order.

Produced by Christopher Landon and adapted from a 2016 novel, My Best Friend's Exorcism is a fairly routine mixture of Heathers-style teen satire and gross-out horror/comedy, with mediocre special effects and jokes that just kind of peter out. It has none of the crack comic timing or innovative gore that distinguished Landon's films like Happy Death Day and Freaky. Its period 80s setting seems fairly arbitrary, as well, just an excuse to flood the soundtrack with a bunch of well-worn pop singles (were teen girls still listening to Culture Club in '88?) and dress them up with mountains of frizzy hair. It's not a terrible film, but it does little to distinguish itself from dozens of other middling horror/comedy films that glut the streaming services every October.

[Monterey Jack]

-Saint Maud (2021): 8.5/10



Chilling descent into misplaced religious fervor stars Morfyyd Clark (currently playing a young Galadriel on Amazon's Rings Of Power) as Maud, a young woman who - following a tragic hospital incident - has become devoutly religious, and works as a nurse for a retired dancer named Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) who is suffering from cancer and is on a downward slope. Amanda's a definite Norma Desmond type, still boozing and carousing despite her fading health, and Maud oversteps her bounds in attempting to steer away the younger woman Carol (Lily Frazier) who keeps Amanda's company and whom Maud finds to be a bad influence. Dismissed from her duties following a humiliating confrontation at Amanda's birthday party, Maud - cut off from her moorings and adrift in a sea of self-flagellating piety - is driven even further into her own skewed mind, and it erupts over into a pair of shocking incidents where she puts her faith to the ultimate test.

Writer/director Rose Glass concocts a psychological pressure-cooker of a melodrama, and Clark's central performance is key in making this intimate film (set in a small, seaside town somewhere in London) into a gripping dissection of an unwell mind that uses religion as a misplaced crutch to absolve guilt, climaxing in a moment of "devotion" that's as tragic as it is startling. The movie also gets bonus points for not belaboring the point...coming in at an economical 84 minutes, it only makes the story all the more impactful. Someone like A24 favorite Ari Aster would have tacked on another hour to this, but with its abbreviated narrative structure, Saint Maud has the terse, cut-down effectiveness of an old Twilight Zone. I liked this film well enough last year, but it works even better on a second viewing.

-My Bloody Valentine (2009): 3/10



An incident in a small-town mine leads to the deaths of several of the workers, and the one survivor, Harry Warden (Richard John Walters), emerges from a coma after a year and goes on a gore-soaked rampage, eventually meeting his purported end in the underground tunnels. A decade later, Tom Hanniger (Supernatural's Jensen Ackles), whose supposed negligence led to the accident that claimed so many lives and kicked off Warden's reign of terror, returns to his hometown looking to sell off his father's mine and make a tidy profit, but soon a new string of pickaxe murders start occuring. Is Harry Warden back from the grave, and seeking additional vengeance?

A tacky remake of the slightly less tacky 1981 slasher "classic", My Bloody Valentine (directed by former Wes Craven editor Patrick Lussier) is dumb, crude and witless (and the "mystery" surrounding Harry Warden's new string of murders is not at all hard to figure out). I'm sure it offered up some cheap thrills viewed in cheesy pop-out 3D in theaters (see the spiked eyeball fly right out at you...!), but shorn of its central gimmick, it's a Whitman's Sampler box full of the crummiest, half-eaten bonbons that no one wants.

[Monterey Jack]

Another Halloween season comes to an end...



"Always check your candy..."

-Trick 'r Treat (2009): 9/10



In the town of Warren Valley, Ohio, they take the yearly tradition of Halloween VERY seriously, and in writer/director Michael Dougherty's delightful horror anthology Trick 'r Treat, we follow several terror tales as they unfold over the course of All Hallow's Eve. A quartet of middle-schoolers play a terribly mean prank on a local "retard" (Samm Todd) utilizing a local legend, only to be delivered a gruesome comeuppance. A virginal young woman (Anna Paquin) looks to give up her maidenhood to a prospective mate, only to find herself acting out a feminist riff on Little Red Riding hood. A serial killer (Dylan Baker) - who is also the local school Principal - engages in tampered treats and violent tricks along with his budding sociopath of a son. A wheezy, holiday-hating curmudgeon (Brian Cox) is assaulted by a nasty l'il bag-headed imp named Sam inside of his crumbling house, and fights for his life.

All of these tales (including a darkly funny prologue with Leslie Bibb learning not to tamper with the old traditions) overlap and intersect in a way that makes this the Pulp Fiction of horror anthologies. Michael Dougherty is obviously an avid fan of the visual accoutrements of the season, and fills the frame with Jack O' Lanterns, drifting leaves, and costumed kids and adults blissfully unaware of the scares occurring around them. All of the shocks and gore go down easy due to the movie's deft mix of scares and quirky humor. Set to a sprightly score by Douglas Pipes (based around that sing-songy childhood refrain of "Trick or treat / smell my feet / give me something good to eat..."), Trick r' Treat is as good as scary anthology features get, and thankfully doesn't overstay its welcome with its economical 82-minute running time.

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



No need to recap this classic yet again, but it's one of the high points of producer/story creator Tim Burton's career, sweet and lightly creepy and set to a series of infectious/romantic Danny Elfman tunes. Gorgeously animated by the tech crew assembled by director Henry Selick, it's a perfect animated seasonal perennial that has lost none of its luster over the course of nearly thirty years, and acts as the ideal hand-off between the morbidity of the halloween season and the more festive delights of Christmas. Wonderful.

See you all again in 365...!

[Monterey Jack]

Eighty movies this year (eighty-six including September appetizers).



I need a nice romance or silly comedy.

[AndyDursin]

You need a holiday movie marathon thread! Maybe not a bad idea. Even if you only watch a few, I think others might be more amenable to contributing in that genre.

As always a delightful run. I felt good I watched a few. Some like THE EXORCIST I am saving my next viewing for the 4K

[Monterey Jack]

You need a holiday movie marathon thread! Maybe not a bad idea. Even if you only watch a few, I think others might be more amenable to contributing in that genre.

Too goody-good for my tastes.

Anyways, these annual threads represent about 90% of my in-depth writing on film over the course of an average year, so it's always nice to have an audience. I post the same reviews in the annual Halloween movies thread at BR.com, and it's fun engaging with people as obsessed with the macabre as I am. Thanks as always to Andy for hosting.

[BobaMike]

Always enjoy reading these reviews- thanks for sharing them. I'm not a horror fan at all, but it's interesting reading each post and learning some of the trivia behind the films