Halloween Horror Marathon 2023

[Monterey Jack]

Halloween Horror Marathon '12

Halloween Horror Marathon '13

Halloween Horror Marathon '14

Halloween Horror Marathon '15

Halloween Horror Marathon '16

Halloween Horror Marathon '17

Halloween Horror Marathon '18

Halloween Horror Marathon '19

Halloween Horror Marathon '20

Halloween Horror Marathon '21

Halloween Horror Marathon '22



INT., MOVIE THEATER SCREENING ROOM, DAY (NIGHT?). TITLE CARD READS ""Marathon Man - June 21st, 1985"

We are witness to an orgy of cinematic bliss, a roomful of rowdy horror movie fans hooting and hollering, popcorn flying around as much as the screams and laughter, as -- on the screen -- a comely young blonde ingenue is currently in the middle of disrobing as she prepares to enter a running shower. Suddenly one of the teenage patrons about four rows from the screen is enveloped by a dazzling CORONA OF BLUE LIGHT. When it recedes, he has been replaced by time traveler DR. SAM BECKETT, mid-thirties, with a noteworthy white streak through his otherwise sandy-brown hair. As per the usual, Sam has a quizzical expression on his face as he rapidly takes in his new surroundings. A half-empty popcorn bucket caroms off the side of his head, helping him to focus, as he looks up at the movie screen...just in time to see a MASKED INTRUDER enter the now very steamy bathroom. The blonde ingenue is too enraptured in provocatively cleansing herself to notice the BLOODY BUTCHER KNIFE held in the intruder's trembling hand. Sam winces.

TEENAGE BOY IN SEAT NEXT TO SAM: [excited] Here it comes...!

Sam looks over to see his seatmate, a popcorn bag balanced on one knee, a cup of Coke in one hand, as he stares at the screen in obvious pleasure. Sam gets a general read on the time period he's just leapt into by his choice of dress, replete with POPPED COLLAR, two-toned punk hair, and a nose ring.

SAM: Y-yes, it...certainly seems that way.

On the screen, the ingenue is soaping her naked body, as, in the foreground, we see the masked intruder's hand reach towards the handle of the shower's frosted-glass door. The crowd's screams and hoots are temporarily suspended in a hushed, anticipatory bubble.

SAM: [to teen next to him] I think I'm going to, uhhhhhh, freshen up this popcorn.

TEEN: [darting his eyes over to Sam] What?! This is the best part!

SAM: [taking an educated guess] Come on, I've seen this one before.

TEEN: [smiles] Right. Well, don't be too long, the next one's starting in ten. [he looks back at the screen and takes a sip of Coke]

Sam gets out of his seat and maneuvers himself down the row of seats, stepping on more than one pair of toes and eliciting a chorus of "Down in front!" sentiments from the people in the row behind him. As he reaches the aisle a fresh bout of SCREAMS and CHEERS erupts as his focus is directed back to the screen, where the ingenue finds her midsection pierced by the intruder's serrated blade. Sam turns green as he turns towards the exit...and sees a familiar figure standing by the doors. It's his old friend AL CALAVICCI (sixty-ish), or at least the holographic projection of him. As per the norm, he's clad more loudly than the crowd of howling mid-80s teenagers around him, with a purple silk tie, floral-print shirt, cranberry slacks and gleaming wingtip shoes. His ever-present cigar is jutting upwards as Al grins lasciviously through the smoke at the nubile young woman on the screen. Sam makes his way up to Al.

AL: You know, my fifth - no, fourth! - wife was really into these kinds of movies when we were first dating back in the day. Nothing better than a good horror movie to get a girl to jump right into your lap. And that's not even counting the babes on the screen...!

SAM: [under breath] Bathroom. Now.

AL: Oh, come on, Sam, we're just at the best pa --

Sam just walks past without another word. Al continues to leer at the screen for a few moments before exiting through the closed doors, his holographic form melting through them like a ghost.

INT., THEATER LOBBY, DAY [night?]:

The walls are covered with posters for coming attractions, including such horror outings as A Nightmare On Elm Street 2, The Bride, Creepers and Day Of The Dead. The floor is sticky with various spilled sodas and popcorn drifts about like salty snow. Sam is standing at the concession stand, buying a fresh tub of corn as he nods his head to the side, in the direction of the men's restroom.

INT., THEATER BATHROOM, DAY [night?]:

Both men enter as Sam glances at the mirror. A MUSICAL GLISS plays on the soundtrack as Sam looks at the pale, pimply teenage face staring back at him through a pair of thick, owlish eyeglasses. Sam grimaces (revealing a set of shiny braces on his teeth) before entering an unoccupied stall. Al melts through the locked doors as Sam places the popcorn bag on the closed toilet seat lid and turns to his old friend with a weary sigh.

SAM: [whispering, exasperated] Of all the movies to leap into mid-way!

AL: Oh, I can fill you in on what happened before.

SAM: [hissing] That's not the point, Al! That was utterly disgusting!

AL: Hey, it's the mid-80s, teenagers were into that trash back then.

SAM: [sigh] Just fill me in on what I have to do, so I can get out of here.

Al takes a blocky communication device festooned with blinking lights that resembles a Lego-brick experiment gone awry from his pocket. He types away on the keys, producing a series of high-pitched chirps.

AL: Well, it's June 21st of 1985. You're John Romero, seventeen years old, and quite the horror buff.

SAM: obviously...

AL: John's at a 24-hour horror marathon with George Carpenter, his lifelong friend. They've been close ever since kindergarten, and have developed a keen appreciation for horror cinema since junior high.

SAM: So, what am I here to do? [he absentmindedly reaches down into the bag of popcorn and pops a buttery kernel into his mouth]

AL: Well, according to Ziggy... [Al slaps the device on the side a few times, eliciting a squawk of protest] ... George is gonna be...oh, man.

SAM: What?

AL: Well, it looks like George...is gonna be murdered at some point within the next 24 hours.

SAM: [surprised] Who would murder a teen boy? What's the motivation?

AL: All Ziggy can come up with is that he's found in his seat by an usher after the last movie, with a...butter knife? [slaps Ziggy again] BUTCHER knife in his side. He says there's a 92.5% chance you're here to prevent that from happening.

SAM: What's the official time of death?

AL: According to the police reports, the coroner was only able to get an approximate time. It could happen five minutes from now, or five hours.

Sam opens the door to the stall and exits the bathroom with Al in tow.

INT., THEATER LOBBY, NIGHT [day?]:

SAM: So, you're telling me...

AL: ...you're gonna have to stick to George like glue until the killer makes his play.

SAM: [crestfallen] That means...

AL: [smirking] You're gonna have to sit in there and watch the screen when you're not watching out for the killer. And this is a twenty-hour horror marathon, Sam.

Sam opens the door to the auditorium...just in time to witness the ingenue's intestines spilling out onto the bathroom floor. A teenage girl in a seat next to him abruptly turns to the side and vomits...directly onto Sam's red Air Jordan sneakers.

SAM: [disgusted] Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, boy.



This year's horror marathon is dedicated to the memory of William Friedkin.

[AndyDursin]

Oh man I love this.

I promise to get involved...just so hard to have ANYTHING horror around with a very sensitive 4th grader who nearly went into shock after they showed the trailer for NUN II after the PAW PATROL trailer ran before BLUE BEETLE. I tried to shield his eyes but...oh well.

Looking forward to your observations MJ as always.

[Monterey Jack]

I promise to get involved...just so hard to have ANYTHING horror around with a very sensitive 4th grader who nearly went into shock after they showed the trailer for NUN II after the PAW PATROL trailer ran before BLUE BEETLE. I tried to shield his eyes but...oh well.

Ha, the exact same thing happened at my Blue Beetle matinee (which was packed with the twelve-and-under set). I have no idea what they were thinking.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Nun (2018): 7/10



Earliest (chronologically-speaking) entry in the "Conjuringverse" series finds a dark, evil spirit from the past let loose inside of a remote monastery in Romania, which Father Burke (Demian Bichir) - a priest with an unresolved trauma lurking in the past - and Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga, kid sister of Vera Farmiga of the main Conjuring films) - a young nun who has yet to take her final vows - travel to in order to cleanse the unholy grounds upon which the monastery stands and expunge the spirit "Valek" (Bonnie Aarons) before it can overspill the monastery grounds and venture out into the world at large.

Handsome production has a great, eerie setting and fine performances from the two leads (although Jonas Bloquet as "Frenchie" - a young man from the neighboring village who assists them in their journey - has a few too many bits of silly comedy), and it certainly delivers the requisite amount of fun-house shocks, but it lacks the careful, measured craftsmanship that James Wan brought to the first two Conjuring movies, his ability of knowing just how long to hold a pregnant pause, or sinuous camera move. That said, it's still a movie that delivers all of the autumnal dread this franchise, at its best, is known for, and is a fine way to kick off the pre-show appetizers before the October main course begins.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Nun II (2023): 4.5/10



Tepid follow-up to the 2018 film finds Taissa Farmiga's Sister Irene from the original film working at a remote monastery in Italy when she's asked to investigate a recent spate of gruesome deaths in churches across Europe (everything from stabbings to immolation). She quickly surmises the one common element linking all of the deaths is the presence of handiman Maurice aka "Frenchy" (Jonas Bloquet), who has become the new vessel for the evil spirit Valak who, as always, chooses to appear in the blasphemous form of a sinister nun. So now she has to locate the requisite, hidden historical artifact (in this case, "The Eyes Of St. Lucy", which would make a great horror movie title...) to arm herself against the forces of evil and expunge the parasitic spirit from Maurice's body before it's too late.

Directed with faceless efficiency by Michael Chaves (who made the previous "Conjuringverse" movies The Curse Of La Llorona and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It), The Nun II serves up a steady stream of reheated scare tactics (demonic faces hidden in ordinary objects, bone-cracking acts of extreme contortionism by possessed bodies) with little of the spooky elan that series originator James Wan brought to the first two Conjuring movies. At least the first film had an eerie, remote Romanian setting that was dripping with atmosphere, but Nun II is Nun II scary, with routine shocks that won't raise the pulse of anyone over the age of twelve and a lack of the empathetic characterizations that made the scares in the first two Conjuring movies feel truly earned. Maybe it's time to let this particular cinematic universe get sucked into a black hole, because it's clearing running out of creative frisson.

[AndyDursin]

Nun II is Nun II scary

I feel like the franchise has played itself out too, especially because the last Conjuring wasn't so hot, though I admit I find Taissa Farmiga appealing. In another time, I could've seen her as a teen movie lead before graduating to rom coms lol. In 2023 most of her career's been spent in horror movies like this, which seems like a waste.

[Monterey Jack]

I feel like the franchise has played itself out too, especially because the last Conjuring wasn't so hot

It was James Wan's visual craftsmanship (and the emphasis on empathetic family units) that made the first two Conjuring movies crackle. Take those away, and all that's left are very well-worn haunting/possession-movie cliches. I liked the second and third Annabelle movies for what they were, and the first Nun just for the atmosphere, but the franchise is running on fumes.

[Monterey Jack]

-Christine (1983): 8/10



Got an opportunity to get in a big-screen viewing of John Carpenter's Christine to celebrate its (almost) fortieth(!) anniversary tonight. The woeful tale of nebbishy high school punching bag Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon), and how his love affair with Christine, the sleek beauty who steals his heart, drives him to madness and murder. Oh yeah, and the lady in question is a 1958 Plymouth Fury that Arnie first spies rusting away in the yard of George LeBay (the cadaverous Roberts Blossom), who sells the junker to the instantly-smitten teen, who has a mad, inexplicable desire to make her cherry again (when his best friend, Dennis Guilder - played by John Stockwell - asks why, he muses, "I've finally found something uglier than I am. And I can fix her up"). As he meticulously restores Christine to her showroom luster, so too does Arnie undergo a transformation, ditching his nerdy specs, dressing like a 50's hep cat and starting to date Leigh Cabot (the lovely but wooden Alexandra Paul), the beautiful new girl in school. But Arnie's run-ins with a pack of sneering bullies (led by John Travolta doppelganger William Ostrander) leads to a string of gruesome vehicular deaths. Is Arnie getting even with his high school tormentors and anyone else who gets in his way, or is Christine jealous of her new man, and looking to eliminate anything that will stand between them?

Efficiently adapted from a Stephen King novel by Bill Phillips, Christine is another variation on the author's pet theme of the painfully awkward social pariah getting even with those who did them wrong (it's basically Carrie with a gender swap for the protagonist and a different method of supernatural vengeance), and director Carpenter - working at the peak of his powers - takes this pulpy, potentially silly idea (uh-oh, better get Maaco...!) and generates a solid sense of mood and has great fun concocting various ways to make his titular villain into a palpable threat. There's some great special effects featuring Christine remolding herself after getting trashed in a variety of ways, and a rousing, climactic King Kong vs. Godzilla showdown between her and a hulking bulldozer (manned by Stockwell and Paul) inside of a garage offers up some satisfying, metal-crunching vehicular combat. And Gordon vacillates his performance between cowering dork and 50's menace with skillful aplomb. It's not truly a great film - it could have delved deeper into Arnie's slow descent into the car's bad influence - but it's tremendously fun and rewatchable and will make you leery of walking down a deserted road late at night, hoping not to see a pair of baleful round headlights open up in the darkness, searching...

[Monterey Jack]

-A Haunting In Venice (2023): 8/10



Famed detective Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh, who also directs), living in retirement from his life's work in Venice circa 1947, is enticed back into the fold by Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a formerly successful mystery novelist whose work has been heavily inspired by their long-time friendship. Seems like there's a seance scheduled in the crumbling, gothic abode of Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), whose young daughter tragically drowned the previous year. Now, the services of a famed psychic, Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), have been hired on Halloween night in order to commune with her daughter's restless spirit. But soon a string of deaths start to sweep through the other guests (including Jamie Dornan and wee Jude Hill, from Branagh's Belfast), and Poirot must put his rusty deductive skills to the test once again in order to suss out whether a killer lurks amongst the guests, or a more supernatural vengeance from the past is to blame.

Adapted from Agatha Christie's novel "Hallowe'en Party" by screenwriter Michael Green, A Haunting In Venice marks a striking difference to the two previous films featuring Branagh as Christie's famed detective. Shot in a narrower aspect ratio (and a notably less star-studded cast), Venice also skews away from the lush, color-drenched glamour of Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile and plumbs into the kind of tasty genre pulp that Branagh's had an affinity for since the days of Dead Again and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Shot in looming, wide-angle closeups by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, the dank, shadowy confines of the film's setting makes for an ideal setting for murder and tension, with Branagh's use of contorted camera angles adding to the film's sense of off-kilter eeriness. And while some of the Poirot's OCD humor from the previous movies is somewhat muted here, the movie offers up plenty of twists, dark revelations and spooky, rain-swept atmosphere. The only real disappointment lies in Hildur Guonadottir's blah soundtrack. This is the kind of film Branagh's usual music maestro, Patrick Doyle (who worked on the previous two movies) would have knocked out of the park, and one wonders why his services were not retained here, unless it was a matter of scheduling or budgetary issues (this is clearly a less-expensive movie than its pair of predecessors). Other that that, it's ideal for the lead-up to next month's horror bacchanal, delivering shivery chills without a surplus of extraneous gore.

[Monterey Jack]

-It Lives Inside (2023): 7/10



Formulaic - but effective - horror film about an Indian teenager, Sam (Megan Suri), who finds her former friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan) acting very...odd lately, carrying around a glass jar full of what appears to be nothing but common dirt and monotonously repeating a Hindi chant over and over. When Sam, in a fit of adolescent pique, smashes said jar on the floor of the girls' locker room, Tamira is terror-stricken...and suddenly vanishes. Has she run away, been abducted...or is her absence connected to the mysterious death of another Hindu student from the previous year?

Directed and co-written by Bishal Dutta, It Lives Inside trods down some familiar paths when it comes to these kind of "evil curse" genre exercises, but it's also alert and tense and stylish, generating a palpable sense of accelerating unease that thankfully doesn't overdose on the usual cheap shock effects you tend to see in these kind of PG-13 fright flicks. There are moments of dangling eeriness (like the guidance counsellor being stalked through the school's antiseptic, empty after-hours hallways) and more overt moments of terror (like Sam's teenage crush finding himself viciously mauled and strangled on a child's swing set by a ravenous invisible force). The movie also gets bonus points for a pretty cool eventual monster reveal, one done with old-school man-in-suit effects that's a relief in these days of CGI overkill. It's not wildly original, but It Lives Inside offers up some tidy chills for horror fans as we rocket towards October...

[Monterey Jack]

-Godzilla (2014): 7.5/10



With his new sci-fi effort The Creator hitting cinemas tomorrow, I felt it was time to finally give the recent 4K disc release of Gareth Edwards' 2014 update of Godzilla a spin. A respectful riff on the classic Toho franchise (previously "Americanized" in a heavily-hyped but ultimately dreadful 1998 feature from Roland Emmerich). Godzilla '14 finds the titular towering lizard awakened after a sixty-year under-the-sea slumber (after the U.S. tried to kill him with the Hydrogen Bomb in 1954) to hunt down and eradicate his ancient foes, a pair of "Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms" (aka "MUTO"s) who have recently hatched and have made their way to San Francisco in order to breed and sire a new generation of radiation-sucking monsters. In-between monster skirmishes, the movie fills time with the usual cross-section of thinly-drawn human characters, like a nuclear technician, Joe Brody (a wildly over-the-top Bryan Cranston) who lost his wife (Juliette Binoche) during a tower collapse in 1999 and who has been obsessively trying to uncover the truth about the hushed-up incident ever since, his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who thinks his dad's off his rocker...until the MUTOs start their destructive march, Ford's wife Elle (Taylor-Johnson's future MCU sibling Elizabeth Olsen), left behind to fret as Ford enters the military's futile stand against the MUTOs' wrath, and Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), whose only advice to deal with the encroaching monster threat is simply to "Let them fight!"

Godzilla '14 is a well-crafted film that attempts to generate a Spielbergian sense of anticipatory dread and wonder (the surname "Brody" was chosen for a reason) in the lead-up to the monsters making their on-screen appearances, and that's fair...Godzilla's first appearance making landfall in Hawaii is beautifully paced (preceded by a spectacular tsunami) and leads to a killer full reveal. But then, Edwards starts to play coy, crafting a maddening Lucy-yanking-the-football-away-from-Charlie Brown structure where the movie keeps cutting away from the actual monster-on-monster slugfests to TV broadcasts or crowd reaction shots. The first time he does this with the Hawaii sequence, it's an intentional joke, and a pretty funny one, but he just...keeps...doing it, over and over, and after a while it starts to frustrate the viewer (a guy sitting near me when I saw it in theaters let out a loud, exasperated sigh during one bit with Olsen rushing into an underground shelter just as the doors shut, cutting off the audience's view of the ensuing battle). Yeah, when we hit the last half-hour, he finally deigns to give the viewer what they want, as the Big G and the MUTOs slug it out against the toppling skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco, but even here, he swaths the images in a caul of nighttime darkness, clouds of billowing smoke, and other "atmospheric" effects that detract from what we paid to see, dammit. Spielberg gave us dinosaurs in full, clear daylight Jurassic Park thirty years ago (when photorealistic CGI was still in its infancy), so there's really no excuse for modern-day F/X blockbusters to obscure said F/X.

Yet, for all its flaws (human characters you don't give a damn about, monster fights it keeps teasing you over not being able to see properly), Godzilla does deliver big-time heading into the home stretch, and monster fans will definitely thrill to seeing their scaly hero scale new heights of satisfyingly crunchy property destruction. Go-Go-Godzilla...!

[Monterey Jack]

Tomorrow...!

[Monterey Jack]

October 1st has rolled around again, and you know what that means...



-Sleepy Hollow (1999): 8.5/10



Just reissued on a dandy new 4K UHD disc that finally presents the film in a watchable home transfer, Tim Burton's take on Washington Irving's classic tale The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow remains one of the director's most purely entertaining films. Johnny Depp portrays Ichabod Crane, here reinvisioned as a police constable in 1799 New York whose adherence to "up-to-date, scientific techniques" for the detection of crime has him labeled a "heathen" by his compatriots. A judge (Christopher Lee, in a robust cameo) dispatches Crane to the nearby small community of Sleepy Hollow, where a rash of murders have occured, all with the victims' heads lopped off ("Clean as dandelion heads, apparently" Lee intones dryly) and carried away by the unknown assailant. Crane arrives toting a bagful of his hand-crafted tools and potions for detecting the killer's modus operandi and identity...and also finds himself falling for the beautiful Katrina Van Tassel (a ravishing Christina Ricci), the daughter of a local, prosperous farmer (the late Michael Gambon). Soon Crane sniffs out a dark secret held amongst the community's head citizens (a fantastic collection of memorable character actor faces, including Burton faves like Jeffrey Jones and Michael Gough), and finds his faith in science put to the test as he learns of the rampage of a Hessian mercenary (an unbilled, even-more-terrifying-than-usual Christopher Walken, sporting a mouthful of pointy, filed-down choppers and communicating in a series of feral snarls), who was killed twenty years earlier and apparently has returned from beyond the grave as a vengeful demon, lopping off the townsfolk's noggins until his own, stolen one is restored to him.

An eye-popping period mystery chiller, Sleepy Hollow is a film brimming with luminous, autumnal visuals (captured by Oscar nominated cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, with production designer Rick Henrichs taking home a statue) and set to a churning, atmospheric Danny Elfman score that ranks amongst his finest. Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (aided by uncredited, literate dialogue polishes by Tom Stoppard) crafts a story full of dark intrigue and gnarled conspiracy, and Depp and Ricci's blossoming romance lends the proceedings enough of a beating heart to keep the audience's attention in-between spurts of enthusiastic, Hammer-inspired gore (I especially liked when the Horseman -- played sans head by stuntman Ray Park -- skewers a freshly-lopped head like a giant martini olive on his sword, and one character's spectacularly violent exit from a besieged church). The grim proceedings are enlivened by Burton's trademark kooky comic asides, with Depp's nervously plummy diction providing much wry humor. One wishes the film had been fleshed out a bit more -- the trailer is full of scene fragments that suggest the movie was much longer at one point -- but the propulsive drive of the narrative goes down like a tonic compared to the ungodly runtime bloat that weighs down so much of today's genre cinema. Spooky, engrossing, visually stunning and just plain fun, Sleepy Hollow is an ideal way to kick off another season's worth of cinematic chills.

[Monterey Jack]

-Curse Of The Undead (1959): 6/10



A scuffle over land rights between a pair of ranchers in the old west coincides with a rash of deaths of young women seemingly in the prime of health...except for mysterious bite marks on their necks. Does the mysterious stranger Drake Robey (Michael Pate), who drifts into town to act as a hired gun to settle the property disputes, have something to do with the deaths, and does he have sinister plans for the lovely daughter (Kathleen Crowley) of one of the ranchers, who seeks frontier justice for her slain father and younger brother?

A rare crossbreeding of the horror and western genres, Curse Of The Undead is kind of pokey on both frontiers, with the reveal of Robey's supernatural past being of little surprise to even casual horror fans and the sagebrush stuff coming across as fairly routine. It's a mite better than the likes of Billy The Kid vs. Dracula, but the mix of sanguinary sinisterness and cowboy showdowns never gels into anything noteworthy for fans of either genre, and the rules of what Robey is eventually revealed to be hold little logic (he professes to be somewhat allergic to sunlight, yet has an obligatory high noon showdown with the local preacher...).

[Monterey Jack]

Spongebath, or enema...?

-Patrick (1978): 8/10

-Patrick (2014): 3/10





A pair of bedbound shockers today, In 1978's Patrick, Susan Penhaligon portrays Kathie Jacquard, a young woman who takes a job as a nurse in a small, private hospital, where she's put in charge of young Patrick (Robert Thompson), who's existed in a vegetative state for over four years, following a violent incident involving his mother and her crude lover. She tends to his needs as he stares with apparent blankness out into the world. But odd little things keep occuring around Patrick, like windows that refuse to stay shut, Kathie's estranged husband (Rod Mullinar) inexplicably grabbing a red-hot casserole dish sans oven glove, and her new romantic interest (Bruce Barry) finds himself tugged towards the bottom of his swimming pool by an invisible force. Are these manifestations birthed from Patrick's purportedly comatose mind, and are they spurred by his jealousy over any person who stands in the way of him and Kathie's affections?

An early effort from Aussie filmmaker Richard Franklin (Road Games, Psycho II), Patrick takes a gimmicky, apparently limited idea and wrings a good deal of suspenseful juice out of it, with Hitchcockian camerawork and effective performances giving the claustrophobic settings a sense of palpable menace. It's also a very good-looking movie given its modest budget, with great photography by Donald M. McAlpine and a solid score by a pre-Mad Max Brian May.

Like any really good horror film with a modest cult following from the 70s and 80s, however, it inspired the usual slick, empty post-2000s remake, and 2014's Patrick redux is a redud. Sharni Vinson portrays Kathy Jacquar, blank pretty-boy Jackson Gallagher plays Patrick, and Charles Dance tries to class up the proceedings as the mad doctor performing sadistic shock treatment "therapy" on his comatose guinea pig. But it's all a frightfully boring retread of the original, taking Franklin's measured, suspenseful build and substituting the usual modern-day generic shock effects (fake-out dream sequences, ghostly manifestations sporting awful CGI, rote gore). Aside from a fine soundtrack by horror maestro Pino Donaggio, it's a bloody mess, pointless to watch if you've seen the original.