Halloween Horror Marathon 2021

[Monterey Jack]

Crazy '88s...

-Night Of The Demons (1988): 7/10

-The Blob (1988): 8.5/10





A pair of gross-out concoctions from the autumn days of the 80s today. Night Of The Demons is as basic as a horror film gets, a gaggle of stock teens (the Virginal Prom Queen, the Slut, the Jerk, the Slob, the Goth Girl, etc.) converge on a crumbling, abandoned funeral parlor on Halloween night, hoping to party 'til dawn, when they unleash unholy spirits that possesses them, one by one, and turned them into a pack of gibbering, blood-drooling ghouls who turn on the handful of the un-possessed as they scramble for an escape from the walled-in grounds.

Boasting top-notch makeup and gore effects supervised by Steve Johnson, Night Of The Demons offers up many disgusting delights along the way for seasoned horror fans, and yet it never attains the kind of freight-train momentum of something like Sam Raimi's Evil Dead or its sequels. While technically well-made in all respects, it lacks the kind of jackhammer camera ferocity that would have taken this basic premise and (re)animated it with more storytelling elan. Plus, it takes too long to get to the damn funeral parlor and get things rolling, with a moderately tedious setup in the first half hour (even if one element of said setup paid off with a great, gruesome sick joke that punctuates the film in its closing moments). Still, Night Of The Demons is definitely worthwhile for fright fans.

The same year's The Blob (a remake of a 1958 picture best known for being the leading-man debut of "Steven" McQueen) is even more fun, a cheerfully disgusting updating of 1950s sci-fi tropes as a meteor crashes to Earth near a small California town, discharging an ooky, pink mass of shapeless protoplasm from within its core. It attaches itself to the hand of a local bum, and starts to grow..and grow...and GROW...eventually swallowing up dozens of terrified citizens and the military scientists (led by Joe Seneca) tasked with containing the "bioplasmic mass", with the only ones willing or capable of doing anything including a popular cheerleader (Shawnee Smith) and a local bad boy with a heart of gold (a be-mulleted Kevin Dillon), who have to team up to discover a way to repel the advance of the carnivorous Jello-mold from beyond the stars.

Directed by Chuck Russell (just coming off the third -- and best -- of the Nightmare On Elm St. series, The Dream Warriors) and co-scripted by him and Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Mist), The Blob is tight, scary and well-performed by all, and the revolting creature F/X (supervised in part by Lyle Conway, creator of "Audrey II" from Little Shop Of Horrors) stand as some of the best of its pre-digital era. Unlike its 1958 predecessor, where the Blob oozed listlessly across postcards of the small-town backdrops, this Blob has true movement, direction and purpose, shooting out tendrils to ensnare new victims and pull them in to be messily dissolved within its central mass. It's all impressively yucky, and builds to a exciting climax with the Blob talking on an ice truck driven by Dillon's greaser hero that boasts tip-top effects work. The only demerit is the cheap, tinny synth score by Michael Hoenig, where it's obvious the filmmakers had little money left to throw at a music budget after spending so lavishly on their title creature. Still, the rest of the film is just dandy, capping off a previous decades' worth of elaborate, unusually good remakes of 50's B-pictures (Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, The Thing, The Fly).

[jkholm]

MJ, hope you don't mind if I post a review/poem i wrote.

The Raven 7.5/10

You know how people always complain when a movie doesn't resemble the book it's adapted from? I wonder what would happen if Edgar Allen Poe were to watch the 1963 version of The Raven...

Once upon a midnight groovy as I sat to watch a movie
Somewhat scary, mostly goofy, one I had not seen before
As I watched it not rewinding, suddenly I heard behind me
Someone coughing. “Please don’t mind me, but I sneaked in through your door!”
Who’s this visitor I muttered, who had sneaked in through my door?
Why, it’s Edgar Allen Poe!

“Sorry If I made you frightened but I wish to be enlightened.
What’s this film that you are watching, looks like one that you adore.”
Sir, I said it’s called The Raven. Vincent Price plays Dr. Craven.
Boris Karloff’s in it too with Peter Lorre. It’s no bore.
“Hope it’s good he said politely lest I fall into a snore,
Dreaming of my lost Lenore.”

As we watched his mien grew starker, and his face grew much much darker
Darker than an old grave marker, and I feared for what’s in store
What is wrong Poe? What’s the matter? You look angry as a hatter
“‘Course I’m angry at this movie Oh, what do you take me for?
This is far worse than that time I spent on Night’s Plutonian shore.”
Then he shouted with a roar.

“Oh this horrid adaptation gives me fits of consternation
That I need a strong libation ‘ere I puke upon the floor
Poor Lenore, this film would crush her like a fallen house of Usher
Angels then would have to shush her, lest she weep forevermore
I have not been this disheartened since I lost my dear Lenore.”
(She who has been named before.)

Found you not this film amusing? Karloff with such menace oozing
Vincent Price and Peter Lorre, actors who we all adore
“No,” he said, “it frankly bored me, it was nothing like my story.”
Poe, you’re wrong, it’s quite a treat with comedy and laughs galore.
Dueling wizards, talking ravens? Change your mind I do implore.
It’s a movie, nothing more.

Vainly I had sought to soothe him, wearily I tried to prove him
Wrong about this motion picture which had cut him to the core.
Give this film another chance, sir! But alas I knew his answer.
“Unlike you I cannot bear it, I won’t watch it o’er and o’er.”
Then he stood up, waved goodbye and quit my chamber, slammed the door.
Quoth the poet: “Nevermore!”

[Monterey Jack]

^ That's great...!

[Monterey Jack]

Serial killers, brought to you by the letters F, R, E and Y...!

-Frenzy (1972): 10/10

-Freaky (2020): 8/10





Multiple murderers stalked through today's twofer of terror. 1972's Frenzy was the penultimate effort from director Alfred Hitchcock, making a triumphant return to his native England for the first time in nearly thirty years for a macabre tale of a serial strangler dubbed "The Necktie Killer", who has been leaving the nude corpses of young women littering the streets of London. But -- as frequently happens in hitchcock's ouvre -- the finger of guilt inevitably ends up pointing at Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), a down-on-his-luck divorcee seen leaving the workplace of his ex-wife (Barbara Leigh-Hunt)...shortly after she has met foul play of the actual killer, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster). So, like so many innocent protagonists in previous Hitchcock pictures, Richard is forced to go on the lam in order to stay one step ahead of the law (Alec McCowen is dryly amusing as the Chief Inspector assigned to the case, and none-to-happy at his wife's eccentric culinary experimentation) and find the identity of the dastardly culprit who has put his neck in a noose as surely as he's wrapped a series of neckties around the throats of numerous victims.

Hitch was in the twilight of his career when he made Frenzy in the early 70s, and his post-Psycho/The Birds efforts in the 60s represented the work of an aging Master Of Suspense who was coasting on fumes, still wielding his camera with precision but undone by bloated, uninvolving screenplays and stuffy, stagebound productions (1969's Topaz is an excellent sleep aid). Yet here, galvanized, perhaps, by the return to his native soil and by the more permissive standards of contemporary cinema thanks to the introduction of the MPAA ratings system at the end of the 60s (this would be Hitch's sole R-rated thriller), Sir Alfred found his creative mojo again. Frenzy can stand with some of his best work of the past, mixing strong shocks (including a graphically protracted strangulation sequence, capped with a shuddery shock cut to the victim's bulging, lifeless eyes and grotesquely protruding tongue) with his usual propensity for dark gallows humor (like naughty boy Foster trying to wrest an incriminating piece of evidence -- a monogrammed tie pin -- from the stiffened fingers of a recent victim whilst getting jostled about in the back of a potato truck). The sinister shenanigans are also capped by one of my favorite final lines in a Hitchcock picture. Sadly, the one movie he would make after this -- 1976's dreary Family Plot -- would make for an ignoble swan song to an amazing career, but Frenzy stands as the one last spasm of life in the aging Hitchcock's career as it wound down.

Meanwhile, 2020's horror/comedy Freaky takes the old "body swapping" trope from countless 80s comedies and squeezes some fresh juice out of them. Vince Vaughn plays "The Blissfield Butcher", a serial killer who's been the urban legend boogeyman discussed in hushed tones by teens for decades. But when he steals a ceremonial dagger from a rich man's mansion after his most recent bout of bloodletting, and uses it to stab local school loser Millie Kessler (the appealing Kathryn Newton), both wake up the next day inhabiting the other's body. Millie is, naturally, freaked-out at being stuck inside of Vaughn's 6' 5'' frame (although it comes with certain advantages..."Peeing while standing is kinda rad..."), and has to convince her two best friends (Celeste O'Connor, Misha Osherovich) that it's still her petite, 5' 5'' self inside of Vaughn's body, while The Butcher, finding himself inside of a willowy, teen-girl shell, gives him/herself a "bad girl" makeover that makes all of the boys suddenly swoon as he/she sizes up a virtual smorgasbord of potential high school victims. Oh, and there's a 24-hour deadline before both killer and victim are stuck inside each other's bodies forever...

Director and co-writer Christopher Landon (who made the entertaining Happy Death Day movies) takes a worn-out premise and injects a rude, feisty tone to the proceedings, with some gnarly spurts of R-rated grue (I liked the wine bottle being shoved down one victim's throat) and committed performances by the two leads. Vaughn is mighty funny, playing up Millie's limp-wristed anxiety and engaging in some priceless physical comedy. And Newton hardens her gaze into a steely Kubrick Glare as The Butcher adapts to his more diminutive stature with improvisatory aplomb. Whether you want to laugh or squirm, Freaky has you covered, and it's a shame it found so few takers at the box office, being one of those "sacrificial lamb" releases at the tail end of 2020 when Covid-ravaged theaters had barely re-opened and audiences were still chilling at home w/Netflix. This deserved a bigger audience, and is likely to find a sizable cult following in the years to come.

[AndyDursin]

CAT PEOPLE (1982)
7/10



It's weird, maybe I just never paid THAT much attention to this 1982 remake of the '40s RKO Val Lewton favorite -- probably due to Natassia Kinski being the most exciting component of Paul Schrader's film -- but I gained a little bit of added respect for it this time around. No, there isn't a lot of suspense generated in this offbeat movie -- with Kinski learning about her feline heritage from maniacal New Orleans brother Malcolm McDowell -- much to the chagrin of zoologist John Heard. But what's there is interesting enough: flavorful location filming, effective cinematography, Giorgio Moroder's throbbing score (with David Bowie's boogey-inducing "Putting Out Fire" song) and...well, Kinski. All of her, in fact, which makes the half-baked Alan Orsmby script with its assorted loose ends (I hesitate to call them "ambiguous" -- they're not developed enough for that) more palatable.

A new remastering would also help this film a great deal as the only decent Blu-Ray is the Elephant Films release from France, which presents an old Universal master (the same one released on HD-DVD) without any noise reduction. The Shout US release plasters over that transfer with DNR and makes it worse -- it also drops extras from the old DVD (Schrader's commentary and a half-hour 2000 interview) which you can get on the Elephant disc (the Elephant disc also includes all of Shout's brief exclusive interviews). Until a 4K remaster pops up -- hopefully with the deleted scenes from the TV version -- it will have to suffice.

[Monterey Jack]

-Elizabeth Harvest (2018): 7/10



A wealthy doctor, Henry Kellenberg (Ciaran Hinds), brings his blushing, much-younger new bride, Elizabeth (Abbey Lee), home to his sleek, high-tech -- and remote -- home in the hills. He shows her around her new living quarters, including the art gallery, the luxe kitchen and sprawling bedroom...but tells her never to enter the room hidden behind the ominously-frosted glass in the basement. Before you can say "Bluebeard's Wife", Elizabeth has a peek, is shocked by what she discovers -- and then the events we have just witnessed abruptly start to repeat themselves (with slight variations). What, are we suck in yet another Groundhog/Happy Death Day "time loop" scenario? The reveal is more scientific than that...and more masochistically disturbing.

Stylishly directed by Sebastian Gutierrez (who also scripted), Elizabeth Harvest is a modest, contained suspense piece (the only other characters are a live-in housekeeper played by Carla Gugino, Dr. Kellenberg's blind son -- played by Matthew Beard -- and a police officer played by Dylan Baker who investigates the increasingly strange goings-on) that makes good use of the house's antiseptic nooks and crannies. There's a hint of old-school De Palma in the use of artfully contorted camera angles and one inspired use of split screens. The movie is, ultimately, one that displays its hand a little too early...one wishes it had allowed the scenario to marinate a bit longer before revealing the full breadth of its narrative trickery. Still, even if the individual pieces have been re-assembled from other genre predecessors, those pieces have been given a sharp polish, and the acting from all of the leads help sell the twists and turns.

-Friday The 13th (2009): 1/10



Same shite, different decade. A remake every bit as crude, witless and ugly as the 80s franchise that spawned it (the same way that mold will grow on a damp locker room floor)...only a full fifteen minutes longer than those, which at least had the courtesy to let the audience off the hook after 85 minutes or so. With its generic, CW-ready cast (including Supernatural's Jared Padalecki and The Flashs charming Danielle Panabaker), dank cinematography and bludgeoning, uncreative violence, this is the inbred bastard stepson of the kind of horror series that gave the genre a bad name 40 years ago. But hey, why bother with artful suspense, likeable characters, and a modicum of technical expertise when you just can shove a screwdriver through someone's neck, or suspend a screaming babe over a campfire bound up in her own sleeping bag so she can slowly, painfully roast alive? Utter trash.

[Monterey Jack]

-Maniac (1980): 6/10



Ugly exploitation fare about a deranged New Yorker (Joe Spinell) who is brutally carving his way through a succession of women, and how his tentative new relationship with a fashion photographer (Caroline Munro) causes him to come to a crossroads in his damaged psyche.

Directed by William Lustig, and with gruesome makeup effects by Tom Savini (who also cameos as a "Disco Boy" who gets a shotgun blast to the face whilst necking with his girlfriend in a car), Maniac is repellently vulgar at times, and yet it also favors just as much honest suspense as it does wallowing in excess. There are narrative oddities that make it feel like some scenes were trimmed or else just not scripted (like Spinell showing up at Munro's apartment asking about a picture she shot of him at the park, and how she immediately agrees to go out with him after about a minute's worth of conversation, despite Spinell resembling a more physically imposing Ron Jeremy), yet for those with strong stomachs, it's a shocker with a modicum of psychological depth you might not expect for a low-budget sleaze-fest.

-Terror Train (1980): 6/10



The graduating class of medical college frat Sigma Phi board a train for the ultimate New Year's party -- replete with costumes and a magic show, performed by David Copperfield...! -- unaware that a former pledge (who was the focus point of an astoundingly cruel prank) has also snuck aboard, nursing a grudge and looking to dispense some gruesome justice.

Released smack-dab in the midst of star Jamie Lee Curtis' "Scream Queen" heyday, Terror Train is fairly routine in the broad outlines of the plot, but it's competently made in all respects, with director Roger Spotiswoode (moving behind the camera after spending much of the 70s as a film editor, often for the films of Sam Peckinpah) and cinematographer John Alcott (Stanley Kubrick's DP of choice) making the claustrophobic, dimly-lit corridors of the train cars an excellent arena for suspense, and the screenplay featuring at least one authentically clever bit of misdirection. it's no Murder On The Orient Express, but you could do a lot worse.

-Burn, Witch, Burn (1962): 8/10



Slick suspenser about a college professor, Norman Taylor (stentorian Peter Wyngarde), whose career aspirations seem to be looking up...little aware that wife Tansy (Janet Blair) has been goosing their good fortunes along with a l'il Jamaican witchcraft on the side. When Wyngarde angrily confronts her and forces her to burn all of her witchy doodads, things start turning sour, including accusations of rape from one of his students and the sounds of frightening banging on their door late at night. Is it a curse gone wrong, or are outside forces at play?

Tautly directed by Sidney Hayers and co-scripted by frequent Twilight Zone scribes Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont (along with George Baxt), Burn, Witch, Burn (known under the title Night Of The Eagle in the UK) develops its ideas with steadily mounting tension, leading to a memorable climax with Wyngarde accosted by a terrifying vision that attacks from above. It's crisply-shot (in atmospheric B&W), well-acted, and generates solid suspense, a minor gem.

[Monterey Jack]

-Billy The Kid vs. Dracula (1966): 5/10



In the annals of "versus" movies, this has to be the title that holds the most intrinsic WTF? amusement value. In this low-budget cheapie, Count Dracula (John Carradine) - travelling the Ol' West as "James Underhill" -- becomes fixated on the portrait of a young lovely, Elizabeth Bentley (Melinda Plowman), held inside a locket around the neck of a fellow traveller when he's picked up by a passing stagecoach. After instigating an Indian massacre that takes out his coachmates, he assumes the identity of Elizabeth's never-seen uncle in order to worm his way into her life and make her his new vampire bride...never taking into account that her new beau is none other than William Bonney (Chuck Courtney), looking to put his lawless years behind him and settle down but forced to strap on his six-shooters once again to battle the forces of evil.

This is an irrestably silly concept for a movie, and with so few movies that mix horror with a period western setting, it holds a certain unique place in the drive-in circuit. That said, the movie isn't silly enough to be fun in a "bad movie" sort of way, yet not well-made enough to qualify as authentically good. Carradine, with his penetrating gaze and throat cancer voice, certainly makes for an imposing Count, but Courtney -- a stuntman-turned-actor who certainly no Cliff Booth in the charisma department -- doesn't manage to make much of an impression. Worth a one-time viewing for the novelty factor, and it's not terribly-made in terms of production value, but it could and should have been better...or worse.

-Hannibal (2001): 6/10



Belated sequel to 1991's acclaimed, Best Picture winner Silence Of The Lambs is an opulent yet empty exercise in style over substance. Anthony Hopkins reprises his role as Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant madman who escaped from custody at the end of the earlier film and who now lives under an assumed identity in Florence, Italy. His attempts at keeping a low profile can't last forever, though, and when he's made by rumpled Chief Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi (the charismatic Giancarlo Giannini) -- who's looking to cash in on the considerable reward money for information leading to Lecter's capture -- he's brought to the dual attentions of FBI agent Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore, replacing the previous movie's Jodie Foster) and Mason Verger (an unrecognizable, unbilled Gary Oldman), the only one of "Hannibal the Cannibal"'s former victims to survive, albeit with a face left a mass of lumpy, badly-stitched flesh from which deformed eyes peer with ghoulish dark humor. So all three are looking to bring Hannibal in for their own reasons...Inspector Pazzi for the money, Starling in order to re-incarcerate the Mad Doctor, and Verger in order to enact a gruesome, baroque revenge.

Director Ridley Scott attacks this film (based on the third of Thomas Harris' novels about Lecter) with his customary visual elan. John Mathieson's cinematography is luminous, particularly in the Florence sequences, and the 4K UHD release from Kino Lorber presents it with the maximum clarity and pop available. And Hopkins is in good, squirrely form as Lecter, perhaps playing up the more cartoony affectations of his Oscar-winning turn in the previous film due to a decades' worth of pop culture ubiquity and countless parodies of his chilling work and yet finding new squiggles of perversion in the margins. Moore does a solid job in the unenviable task of replacing Foster (who also copped an Oscar for Silence), yet her natural brittleness lacks the humanistic core of Foster's performance. Mainly, what prevents this from being the equal of the original -- despite the painterly beauty of Scott's images -- is the screenplay (by Steve Zaillian and David Mamet), which splits the narrative between so many protagonists and antagonists that the tension starts to leak away in the second hour.

Moore's Clarice is totally sidelined for the first half of the movie -- following an FBI sting that turns into a bloodbath, leaving her holding the bag -- basically allowed to do little but sit in a basement office listening to tapes of her interviews with Lecter taken from the previous movie (we've heard this before, thanks), and when Giannini's Inspector makes a memorable exit about eighty minutes in, the film is basically rudderless for a while. The film abruptly remembers to have a pulse at it winds down, but whether or not that's a good thing will depend on one's personal tastes, lurching suddenly into the realm of lurid EC horror comics for a pair of shoot-the-works climaxes with Verger's bonkers plan for revenge (which is certainly not kosher) and Hannibal's final "dinner party" for Clarice and her misogynistic Justice Department investigator (Ray Liotta), which is more disgusting than disturbing. Both of these sequences definitely can't be accused of being forgettable, but they clash with the more cerebral, interior chills that director Jonathan Demme brought to SIlence, where a mere closeup of Hopkins' ice-blue eyes could send more chills down one's spine than all of the bloody mayhem Scott and his tech team can concoct for their gruesome pair of finales. I remember hating this film when it first came out (mainly because I had yet to acclimate myself against extreme cinematic gore), but a full two decades later, it plays somewhat better. It's still a far cry from its classic predecessor, but it looks beautiful, has a few taut passages (basically the entirety of the Florence sections), and is not entirely devoid of merit. Still, it's no patch on Silence or even the surprisingly great -- and gory -- NBC TV series Hannibal (with a marvelously dry turn by Mads Mikkelsen as Lecter).


-Death Ship (1980): 4/10



A cruise ship is struck by a mysterious vessel and sunk, with the handful of survivors (including captain George Kennedy, his soon-to-be-replacement Richard Crenna, an officer played by Nick Mancuso and various passengers, including a young Saul Rubinek) left adrift in a small lifeboat...until they cross paths with the decrepit, rusting vessel that ran them down. They come aboard and find it abandoned, apparently for decades (Nazi paraphernalia abounds), and yet the ship's old bones still have some life in them, as the survivors find themselves plagued by vivid hallucinations involving death and mutilation...or are these manifestations real?

Good premise (the Mary Celeste mystery is one that has ample applications for a cracking horror movie), but Death Ship is pokey, dull and devoid of tension, even at a brief 90 minutes. There are a few memorable bits (like a claustrophobic shower that starts spraying blood), but mainly the film does nothing you haven't seen before. Stick with the great X-Files episode "Dod Kalm" instead, which gets things done in half the time of this, and better.

[Monterey Jack]

Goin' viral with Vince, Chuck and Willie...

-The Last Man On Earth (1964): 7/10

-The Omega Man (1971): 7/10

-I Am Legend (2007): 7.5/10







locking oneself inside trying to ward off contamination from a worldwide pandemic whilst distracting oneself with various hobbies and slowly going stir-crazy bonkers? That could never happen, right...?

Took in a triple feature of the three screen adaptations of Richard Matheson's seminal (and sadly prophetic) sci-fi novel I Am Legend today. The first adaptation, 1964's The Last Man On Earth, stars Vincent Price as Matheson's protagonist, Dr. Robert Neville (well, re-christened "Robert Morgan" in this telling of the tale), a virologist who attempts to halt the spread of a deadly contagion that quickly spreads across the globe, killing the majority of the planet's population (including Morgan's wife and young daughter) and turning the rest into mindless zombies who descend upon his fortified domicile each and every night, battering upon the doors and windows and goading Morgan to come out as he works ceaselessly by night to find a cure whilst systematically hunting down the infected as they slumber during the daylight hours and driving wooden stakes through their hearts.

A low-budget feature produced with a mostly-Italian cast and crew, The Last Man On Earth, with its stark B&W photography and depictions of a protagonist shacked up in a reinforced hiding hole while the lumbering infected ceaselessly attempt to gain access can be viewed as an obvious precursor to George A. Romero's Night Of The Living Dead. Of the three versions of the source material, this hews closest to the original text (Matheson co-scripted, but preferred to go credited under the pseudonym "Logan Swanson"). Price brings a nicely weary dignity to Morgan's endless attempts to close the barn door long after the horse has galloped out, and the film has many atmospheric, effective moments (like an eerie sequence where Morgan's deceased wife comes back from the grave, reaching out to her shocked husband with rapacious vacuity), but it can't match the marvelously bitter conclusion of Matheson's book.

It took only seven years for another crack at the book, and 1971's The Omega Man is a more arch, comic book-y take on the material. Charlton Heston, with his barrel-chested, teeth-clenching charisma, plays Robert Neville this time, left alone and rudderless in deserted, post-plague Los Angeles, keeping himself amused with chess games and trips to the local cinema to spin Woodstock over and over. Meanwhile, the infected survivors of the plague have become a "family" (led by Anthony Zerbe) of hooded, monklike figures who wear wraparound, mirrored shades to protect their albino eyes from the light and torment Neville on a nightly basis, viewing him as the last bastion of the evil world that birthed the plague in the first place. But Neville finds a glimmer of hope when he stumbles across Lisa (Rosalind Cash), a fellow uninfected survivor who has acted as a pied piper or sort, collecting orphaned children in order to deliver them to an place of safety outside of the city.

Boasting a wonderful, pop-flavored score by Ron Grainer, The Omega Man benefits from Heston's hammy bravura and some exciting action beats (including a well-staged motorcycle chase through a sporting arena), even if it takes some major liberties with the book. Still, it boasts many memorable touches (and inspired a great SImpsons Halloween episode parody, "The Homega Man").

Lastly, 2007's I Am Legend (the only adaptation to bear the book's moniker) stars Will Smith as Neville, this time the scientist who helped engineer a virus targeted at curing cancer that took a turn for the worse, killing off apparently everyone in the world and leaving Neville as a last line of defense against the armies of the infected (here represented by rubbery CGI, but we'll get to that), his only companion his faithful German Shepherd Samantha. Neville continues to research a cure as he keeps his fraying mind occupied with visits to the video store (arranging mannequins to act as store employees and fellow customers) and hunting the occasional packs of wild deer roaming the deserted, overgrown streets of New York. But the arrival of an uninfected woman (Alice Braga) and young boy (Charlie Tahan) throw his ordered life into chaos, even as the infected -- who are more cunning than Neville could have predicted -- beat a path to the doorway of his reinforced brownstone hideaway to force a final reckoning.

Deviating even more from the book, I Am Legend is, nevertheless, the most satisfying film of the troika...with some major reservations. Smith is flat-out great as Neville. With his wary, wounded eyes, Smith suggests a man haunted by mistakes of the past and trying desperately to keep his mind occupied by work even while being crippled by acute melancholia and loneliness (the scene where, after suffering a particularly devastating personal loss, he goes back to the video store and tearfully asks one of the mannequins to, please, talk to him, is wrenching). And director Francis Lawrence (who went on to make three of the four Hunger Games movies and the underrated Jennifer Lawrence vehicle Red Sparrow) crafts one of the quieter F/X blockbusters of the last twenty years. It's refreshing to watch a sci-fi movie that takes the time to breathe, to not flood the soundtrack with cacophonous noise or incessant music (there's probably less than a half-hour of James Newton Howard's effectively mournful underscoring), and to keep the running time manageable (100 efficient minutes).

That said...the CGI is bloody AWFUL. Oh, the film's vistas of an abandoned, crumbling NYC are disquietingly effective, but the infected human characters -- intended to be scary, howling demons -- end up looking like wads of weightless silly putty, looking barely more advanced than anything in the Stephen Sommers Mummy movies. There's zero reason they couldn't have just hired real actors to portray them, and thus sequences that are supposed to seethe with tension and excitement flop and stumble, because we can't believe what we're seeing for a second. The F/X looked like garbage almost fifteen years ago, and look even worse by today's standards, and you have to wonder what the film's $150 million budget went to, other than lining Smith's pockets. It's a crying shame, as it's a blight on an otherwise involving, well-acted science fiction thriller. If you can overlook the elephant in the room, this is otherwise the best film adapted from Matheson's book, even if the "definitive" version has yet to be filmed.

[Monterey Jack]

Hey, remake this...!

-Sorority Row (2009): 2/10

-Night Of The Demons (2010): 7/10





The right and wrong ways to update 80s horror. In Sorority Row, a quintet of sorority sisters (including Rumer Willis, Jamie Chung and Audrina Patridge) are linked by a prank gone horribly wrong, leading to the death of a friend. They bury the evidence of their crime down a remote well, but eight months later, during graduation week, they start getting texts inferring that the body may no longer be interred, and they start dying off in various gruesome ways. Yet another garbage remake of an 80s horror movie (The House On Sorority Row) that was pretty awful to begin with. Aside from the novelty of seeing Carrie Fisher (as the sorority house's den mother) going all Sarah Connor with a shotgun at the climax, this is as bland as it gets, with indifferent cinematography, unimaginative kills and a total dearth of suspense.

Meanwhile, the 2020 update of the 1988 favorite Night of The Demons actually turns out to be surprisingly good, pretty much on-par with the original. A sprawling, abandoned manse in New Orleans is the sight for a lavish Halloween night party (hosted by a gothed-out Shannon Elizabeth), but when the cops descend and shoo away the majority of the party guests due to a lack of proper permits for the shindig, Elizabeth and a handful of stragglers (including Monica Keena and a bloated Edward Furlong) find themselves locked in and accosted by the vengeful spirits of demons so badass they were cast out of Hell itself, and now have a second chance at possessing seven human hosts in order to escape their incarceration inside the walls of the house after a first attempt during a Halloween gathering in 1925 was thwarted.

Boasting some terrific makeup and gore effects (with a laudable minimum of CGI touch-ups), Night Of The Demons '10 is surprisingly fun and involving, with a lean pace (it gets down to the Good Stuff far quicker than the original) and characters who are at least somewhat likable before they start getting put through the meat grinder.

-Blood & Chocolate (2007): 5/10



A young American woman named Vivian (Agnes Bruckner), living in Bucharest with her aunt after the murder of her entire family as a child, meets cute with a dreamboat fellow Yank named Aiden (Hugh Dancy) whilst he's filling his sketchbook in a local church with visual research for his latest graphic novel...one to be inspired by the legends of the "Loup Garou", men who could assume the form of wolves at will. Gee, wanna guess the secret that Vivian is hiding as she begins a secret romance with her new paramour..?

This hunk of pre-Twilight YA romantic twaddle is extremely wan and forgettable, but at least this is better-acted than any of those movies, the location footage is flavorful, and there's some beautiful footage of wolves throughout (real ones, too...no rubbery CGI beasties here, and the animal action is well-choreographed). Bruckner and Dancy generate some lite romantic sparks, but the film is otherwise undistinguished aside from some random bouts of parkour (a surefire way to date the movie to its mid-2000s release date).

[AndyDursin]

You are literally going through remakes I had forgot existed, much less received for review at one point in time!

[Monterey Jack]

You are literally going through remakes I had forgot existed, much less received for review at one point in time!

Amazon Prime is a gold mine for mediocre genre stuff from the 90s and 2000s, often available to watch for free. Glad I haven't had to pay for most of it. It's a streaming service I use far more than Netflix at this point, which is far more concerned with making "original" mediocre stuff rather than getting anything theatrical made before 2003 on there.

[Monterey Jack]

They see dead people...

-ParaNorman (2012): 10/10

-The Sixth Sense (1999): 9/10





A pair of precocious tots have to act as conduits for the Dead in today's spooky double feature. In the animated feature ParaNorman, Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), an eleven-year-old living in the small Massachusetts haven of Blithe Hollow, currently embroiled in celebrating the 300th anniversary of its founding. Norman enjoys your typical kid stuff like cheesy monster movies and model kits...but his family (mom and dad Sandra and Perry, voiced by Leslie Mann and Jeff Garlin, older sister Courtney voiced by Anna Kendrick) find themselves alternately worried and exasperated by Norman's insistence that he can see and talk to the dead spirits of those who have passed on (his late grandma, voiced by Elaine Stritch, takes up residence on the couch and complains about the thermostat). But Norman really can commune with ghosts, and when his eccentric, estranged uncle (John Goodman) passes on a placating ritual that has been handed down through three centuries' worth of history, it's up to Norman, and a group of his friends and enemies, to suppress a curse that was birthed from one of the darkest secrets hidden in the town's past.

From the geniuses at Laika animation studios, ParaNorman is amongst the best "lite kids horror" films made in the last decade. the animation is brilliantly designed and realized, the voice cast (including Casey Affleck as a dimwitted local football stud and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as a piggish school bully) is excellent, there are countless clever homages to classic horror films ranging from Halloween to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the plot, while revolving around such kid-friendly concepts as goofy zombies and witches' curses, manages to build to an unexpected Ugly Cry catharsis by the climax. If you have tots who want a "scary movie" this season you won't feel too guilty about showing them, this is as good as it gets.

Meanwhile, 1999's The Sixth Sense (one of the highest-grossing scary movies of all time) mines a similar mix of supernatural frights and surprisingly emotive dramatic storytelling. Bruce Willis plays Dr. Malcolm Crowe, a prestigious child psychologist who finds his practice and sense of self-worth shattered when a former, now-grown patient (Donnie Wahlberg, in a memorable cameo) invades his home and commits suicide. A year later, he seeks a modicum of personal redemption by counseling a young boy named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), who has been ostracized by his school peers by his "freakish" claims that he can see dead people, walking around like normal people unaware that they have passed on. Cole's single mother (an excellent Toni Collette) is at her wit's end, and Dr. Crowe gradually coaxes young Cole's secrets from him and helps to guide the boy, to channel his innate talents into a way to both heal his lonely, tortured soul and allow absolution for those frightening-yet-mournful spirits that plague him on a daily basis.

The breakout feature from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense erupted from out of nowhere to become one of the most buzzed-about surprise box office phenomenons of the late 90s, and with good reason. It's an exceptionally well-crafted and confident feature from such a green filmmaker, with Shyamalan (aided by ace cinematographer Tak Fujimoto and composer James Newton Howard) teasing out a maximum of tension out of mundane, everyday settings. Willis and the Oscar-nominated Osment play beautifully off of each other. It's easy to forget, after a decades' worth of logy sleepwalking through one terrible direct-to-Redbox cheapie after another, what a fine actor WIllis was in his prime, one willing to put aside star vanity (and the fat paychecks that came with such) for a chance to work with exciting new directorial talent. He's at his best here, subtly shading his performance between nurturing Cole's wounded soul and his own increasingly distant relationship with his wife (Olivia WIlliams). Osment is a marvel, in one of the finest child performances on record, convincingly charting the mental deterioration of a young boy thrust into depths of sadness and terror no one his age should have to face alone.

Despite all of the film's effectively chilling interludes, it's these human relations that gives the movie it's beating heart, building to a connected pair of emotional crescendos that earn authentic tears...and gasps. Even if you go into this movie not knowing the secret eddies of its plot (hard to imagine at this point, considering how ubiquitous the discussion of those eddies was at the time of release, fuelling multiple viewings of the film in order to connect the pieces as well as countless pop culture parodies), it hardly matters, as its just "gravy" on the real meat of the production.

[Monterey Jack]

-Shaun Of The Dead (2004): 10/10

-Zombieland (2009): 8/10

-Zombieland: Double Tap (2019): 7/10







Zomcoms were up today today's triple-feature. 2004's Shaun Of The Dead (the inaugural entry in director Edgar Wright's "Cornetto Trilogy") is about a twentysomething slacker named Shaun (SImon Pegg) with a slovenly flatmate, Ed (Nick Frost), an increasingly exasperated girlfriend (Kate Ashfield), his mum's hateful second husband (Bill Nighy) breathing down his neck...and on top of all that, having to deal with a sudden influx of the Walking Dead swarming the streets of London. Bollocks...!

Director Wright (who co-scripted with Pegg) has crafted arguably the best comedic zombie movie of all time, one jam-packed with jokes that detonate like strings of firecrackers (and that often require multiple viewings to fully take in) and that functions as a bloody brilliant example of the genre it's lovingly needling. Pegg and Frost make for one of the best comedy duos in recent cinematic history (one forged in the fires of Wright's terrific UK sitcom Spaced and carried over into Shaun's two Cornetto follow-ups, the buddy cop actioner Hot Fuzz and the soused sci-fi apocalypse send-up The World's End), and Wright directs the film with whiplash editing and excellent use of sound design and choice music cuts. There's not an ounce of fat on this one, one of those comedies that can stand up to dozens of viewings without ever seeming stale of used-up. It's a real slice of fried gold...!

Meanwhile, on our side of the pond, 2009's Zombieland finds a quartet of survivors of a global zombie epidemic (Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin) banding together to form a fractious family unit as they fend off the advances of the slavering undead on a road trip to find possible sanctuary at an abandoned amusement park. Director Ruben Fleischer directs the material with a slick visual hand, and co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (later the architects of the Deadpool movies) give the talented cast a lot of great lines to chew on as drooling zombies attempt to chew on them in a series of amusingly-staged encounters. Harrelson, in particular, is terrific as "Tallahassee" (none of the characters like giving out their given names), a good ol' boy who has finally found his niche as an enthusiastic zombie slayer in the new world order. There's also a killer extended star cameo I won't give away for those who have yet to discover the film ("Who's "BM"? ~ "It ain't Bob Marley"). The movie never attains the daisy-chain of hilarity or tight plot construction of Shaun Of The Dead, but it's consistently funny, enthusiastically gory and boasts great chemistry amongst the cast.

Zombieland's ridiculously belated sequel, 2019's Double Tap, is one one those follow-ups that came so late one marvels at the fact that it even exists so far down the line, but, while a tad past its pop culture expiration date, it's still pretty tasty. Our four leads from the previous movie have settled into the abandoned, overgrown grounds of the White House to set up house, but when Breslin's "Little Rock" sets out to find a cute boy her own age and gets drawn towards a hippie-dippy colony of peaceniks who take a firm stance of non-violent avoidance of the living dead, the rest of the group have to set out to find her and bring her home, collecting an airheaded blonde survivor named Madison (a very funny turn by Zoey Deutch) along the way.

Like most comedy sequels, Double Tap falls prey, at times, to repeating jokes and lampshading itself to stave off criticisms of same, and coming so late after the original (and after a decade's worth of zombie cinema and television) it can't help but seem a tad stale. Yet it still offers up plenty of laughs along the way (including a hilarious treatment of a beloved studio logo), the benefit of a larger cast (Rosario Dawson plays a sexy, self-sufficient mama named "Nevada" who catches Tallahassee's eye), and some slick touches from returning director Fleischer (including an impressive one-take fight with Harrelson and Eisenberg taking on their zombified doppelgangers at the same instance). Mainly, it's just nice to spend time with these characters again so far down the line, and the cast retains their snappy comic patter even if the jokes aren't quite as sharp or rapid-fire as before. Still, compared to how dire most comedy sequels are, Double Tap is a more-than-respectable follow up.

-Addams Family 2 (2021): 8/10



Now this is more like it. Like 1993's Addams Family Values, this follow-up to its animated 2019 predecessor is a sequel that's creepier, kookier, and funnier all around. A family road trip for the Addams clan turns into a journey of discovery for young daughter Wednesday (Chloe Grace Moretz), who is given evidence that her branch of the family tree may have been pruned from another source, and having to come to terms with the possibility that she may not be a full-blooded Addams at all.

The 2019 Addams Family movie was one that coasted along on a series of smiles and polite chuckles that rarely developed into genuine laughs (at least, for adult viewers), but this follow-up has a more rich vein of macabre wit that percolates throughout. The voice cast also settles into their roles with more seasoned confidence (although being given wittier lines helps a lot), with Moretz a particular standout. With her bowling pin-shaped noggin and eyes constantly at disinterested half-mast, Wednesday is a priceless pill throughout (for example, referring disdainfully to family dinner as "Ritual mastication"). the movie also has a more compelling dramatic arc, testing whether or not blood truly is thicker than water as Wednesday is drawn into the orbit of a mad scientist (Bill Hader) who claims to be her biological father. A feister sequel all around, Addams Family 2 is finger-snapping fun for family audiences and adult fans of Charles Addams' creations in general.

[Paul MacLean]

Damien: Omen II (8/10)

Personally, I consider this the best of the trilogy. The original film -- while often visually striking -- wasn't much more than a series of gruesome deaths. The third film has some good things, but the whole "Second Coming" aspect is too ambiguous (and the ending makes no sense).

This second film however is far-more layered, since, at its core, it is a character study -- that of a young man who comes to learn he he has an evil destiny (whereas in the original film Damien doesn't really do anything).

The Performances are all first-rate, even that of the relatively inexperienced Jonathan Scott-Taylor as Damien, who is initially likable, but takes-on a cold, amoral character as the film goes-on (Damien's "Hitler" hairstyle is also a nicely subtle touch). The protagonist (or, rather, antagonist) takes to his diabolical calling, but not without some hesitation -- and even expresses severe remorse when his beloved cousin Mark has to die.

Lance Henriksen and Robert Foxworth give terrifically understated performances as two of Damien's mentors / servants who wait in the wings, biding their time. The sub-plot of Foxworth's plan to buy-up the land of starving people in exchange for food is likewise an effectively subtle depiction of the beginnings of the antichrist's global agenda. The various death scenes are imaginatively grisly, and pulled-off well -- particularly the demise of Lew Ayres, which is filmed on a real frozen lake with Ayres himself (an elderly man at that point) immersed in freezing water, and an actual stuntman performing beneath the layer of ice. The twist in the final scene (where Lee Grant betrays William Holden) is also quite arresting.

Jerry Goldsmith's score is one of his best -- and musically far-more interesting his work for the original film, and generally more propulsive and introspective. It is a shame though that Mike Hodges was fired the production. Don Taylor's direction is serviceable, but unceremonious and very much that of a "journeyman". The limited number of locations and obviously brief shooting schedule (notice it is always October in the scenes at the military academy, and always January at the lake house) give the film a smaller sense of scope than the original Omen (with its London and Italian settings). Nevertheless Damien: Omen II remains an effective thriller, which (despite its its more limited scale) trumps the film which preceded it.