Halloween Horror Marathon 2016

[Monterey Jack]

^^^ that's quite a review.

MJ, you are writing very good reviews on this thread!

Thank you. My father is always going on about "You should be writing reviews professionally and getting paid!", but I would have no idea on how to go about doing that. Plus, no college education.

Anyways, I write more in-depth reviews for movies I really love, especially if I feel they're under-appreciated for stupid reasons (like The Mist and War Of The Worlds). I do so love this time of year, so I always like to indulge my horror jones.

[BobaMike]

I too have also really enjoyed reading these reviews. I'm not a horror fan for the most part, but it's great to read from the perspective of a fan who would notice things I might not. Keep up the good work!

I did view HORROR EXPRESS on TCM the other night, starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. I thought it was pretty original and had a few scary parts. I didn't like the ending, which doesn't even show the stars or give them any final lines!

[AndyDursin]

My father is always going on about "You should be writing reviews professionally and getting paid!", but I would have no idea on how to go about doing that.

Sadly, we were all born at the wrong time. I mean seriously, people want information free and online today, or they don't want it at all. Look at the death of Leonard Maltin's Guide, or Video Watchdog just this past week, etc...what there is a labor of love for most of us these days. It's sad.

Anyway MJ does a great job and I'm proud to have it running here!

[AndyDursin]

BODY SNATCHERS
6/10



One of the lesser known, if not the single smallest-grossing, film in the “Body Snatchers” series was Abel Ferrara’s 1993 take on the well-worn Jack Finney story. Produced by Warner Bros. but basically sent straight to video, bypassing theaters, this watchable entry benefits from widescreen lensing and several creepy moments as Army brat Gabrielle Anwar watches in horror as not even the armed forces are safe from extraterrestrial invasion.

Screenwriters Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli and Nicholas St. John worked on this little-seen take on the story, with Larry Cohen and Raymond Cistheri credited with “story” development. The result is a flawed film marred by a lousy climax and ending that goes a decent distance to negating some of the movie’s effective thrills that came before it. Producer Robert H. Solo, meanwhile, had worked on the 1978 Philip Kaufman version and carried over several elements from that picture (the inhuman “pod people scream” for one) accordingly.

Though not a great movie, “Body Snatchers” is well worth a look for fans of the series, and Warner’s Archive Blu-Ray boasts a very nicely detailed 1080p transfer (2.35) and 5.1 DTS MA sound.

[Monterey Jack]

I like Body Snatchers, but it might have THE worst greenscreen shot in a major Hollywood production in the last 25 years. The character in question literally HAS NO LEGS as they fall away from the camera!

[Monterey Jack]

Needed something considerably lighter than yesterday's movie today...

-Corpse Bride (2005): 9/10



-Frankenweenie (2012): 9/10



A pair of charmingly creepy stop-motion features from the skewed imagination of Tim Burton. In the former, a meek suitor named Victor (Johnny Depp) finds himself accidentally wed to the titular bride, Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), which throws the planned nuptials to his intended betrothed, Victoria (Emily Watson), into comic chaos. In the latter, a young Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) loses his beloved dog, Sparky, in a car accident, only to be inspired by his cadaverous science teacher (Martin Landau) to harness the power of electricity to resurrect his pooch, much to the consternation of his parents (Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara) and the local populace. As always, Burton's imagination burns the brightest when he turns to his pet technology of animation, and these two films offer up a delightful mixture of light scares and heartfelt sentiment that will charm kids with a swelling interest in horror movies as well as Burton fans soaking up the technical prowess of the animation.

[Monterey Jack]

"Suck on my nose 'til my head caves in."

-The Gate (1987): 7/10



Moderately engaging example of 80's "Lite Horror" (with more than a small tip of the hat to Gremlins) features a young Steven Dorff (in his film debut) as a young boy named Glen who, with the assistance of his friend Terry (Louis Tripp) accidentally opens up a portal into another dimension (Hell?) in his backyard, which spews forth a hoard of nastie l'il beasties as well as horrific visions that torment the two boys as Glen's older sister (Christa Denton). Of the countless ripoffs of Gremlins that replicated like, well, Gremlins in the late 80's (Ghoulies, Munchies, Hobgoblins, what have you), The Gate is something of a cut above, with some notably fine stop-motion work by Randall William Cook and some always-amusing 80's hair and fashions on display. It doesn't have the polish or well-defined characters of the best Amblin productions of the period, but you could do worse.

[Paul MacLean]

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters

A watchable, but overly frenetic and formulaic movie, depicting the fairy tale siblings in their adulthood as professional witch hunters. There's little in the film that is original, either in terms of story or style (it mostly repurposes things we've already seen in Van Helsing, The Brothers Grimm, Solomon Kane, Snow White and the Huntsman, etc.). Action sequences are the same old CGI gimmickry (one scene even rips off the slo-mo "bullet dodge" from The Matrix), as the title characters combat witches with a array of machine guns (ho-hum).

That said, this film does have its virtues, however few. Gemma Arterton is particularly likable in the role of Gretel, giving a better and more committed performance that the film really deserves (and addition to being lovely to behold). The movie is also quite appealing in the (one or two) scenes of character introspection -- in particular the sequence where a romance blossoms between Hansel and a local girl, and they go for a swim in a rocky pool in a lush woodland. Similarly the friendship that develops between Gretel and a morally-conflicted troll has a charming sweetness. The film also gets points for using an animatronic troll (at least for some shots), which unsurprisingly comes-off as a more realistic-looking character than a CGI-generated one.

The picture is also very nicely shot, particularly in nighttime village interiors, with their warm, amber "candle"-lit shots. The love scene between Hansel and the peasant girl is also sumptuously photographed (and slightly reminiscent of Legend). Art direction is also first-rate, particularly the village sets.

But ultimately, attractive images (and even a wonderful lead actress) cannot salvage a film that is severely compromised by a formulaic (and frequently predictable) script, the same old action sequences, tasteless attempts at "comic" relief (like the throwaway f-bombs) and the "Zimmer-produced" soundtrack.

Not recommended for anyone over the age of 12.

[Monterey Jack]

-The VVitch (2016): 7.5/10



I appreciated this a little more at home than I did in theaters (of course, seeing this with my father -- who apparently thought he was going to see a straight drama about the Salem Witch Trials! -- didn't help), where I could crank the volume up to suss out the meaning of the often-impenetrable period dialect (not helped by the actors frequently delivering said dialogue is hushed, gravelly whispers). Paced and shot like a Stanley Kubrick movie (the artfully-composed images have a supple, painterly beauty), well-acted by the entire cast (especially a star-making turn by Anya Taylor-Joy), and certainly boasting many eerie and upsetting moments, The VVitch is a film best appreciated at home, by yourself, to allow the film to cast its spell with a minimum of distractions from fellow moviegoers or friends shuffling in their seats, crinkling popcorn bags, or else moaning, "This is boring!" I still don't think it's a new classic like some do -- the film walks a fine line between hypnotic and meandering -- yet the film does attain a gradual, increasing sense of dread that's hard to deny.

[Paul MacLean]

My father is always going on about "You should be writing reviews professionally and getting paid!", but I would have no idea on how to go about doing that.

Sadly, we were all born at the wrong time. I mean seriously, people want information free and online today, or they don't want it at all. Look at the death of Leonard Maltin's Guide, or Video Watchdog just this past week, etc...what there is a labor of love for most of us these days. It's sad.

Anyway MJ does a great job and I'm proud to have it running here!

Agreed! Keep 'em coming MJ!

I was lucky enough to land a reviewer job with Renaissance Magazine in the 90s, a quarterly niche publication aimed at the Renassiance Fair (or rather "faire" ) culture. Owing to its "specialist" audience I was pretty-much limited to period pieces and fantasy films, but fortuitously the DVD format happened to make its debut not long after I started writing my column. So I was able to review a lot of new releases of older films (The Duelists, A Man For All Seasons, Knightriders, Kurosawa Samarai movies, etc.). Then in the early 00s the "fantasy epic" boom (LOTR, Harry Potter, etc.) provided a lot of new pictures to critique.

Sadly the founder sold the magazine to a bigger publisher, who removed her as editor and hired a "professional" editor, who proved impossible to work with. He requested I review certain titles and then then never printed the reviews. He then rejected my column one month because my reviews were "negative" (well, the movies I reviewed all sucked, what was I supposed to write?). He also asked my advice about where to find movie stills, and what did he need to do to secure publishing rights to use them? (And I'm thinking, "You're a magazine editor and you don't know this? You've never heard of press kits?")

He finally said he he couldn't use my reviews because by the time the magazine went to print they were no longer in theaters (I guess it didn't dawn on him that those same movies were usually being released on video right around the time the mag was appearing on shelves).

Sometimes I'd have to endure complaints from the readership as well, as with one guy who opened his objection to my review of Merlin with "As a mage in good standing with the American Society of Wizards..."

In any case, I quit in exasperation. Too bad, I was just about to write a glowing review of Role Models when I did (though a positive review of that movie might not have gone over well with the readership)!

Sorry, to rant, but your comments brought back some of these memories. I agree it is a shame there is no place for paid and / or print reviewers anymore. As it is, I only got about $80 per issue of Renaissance.

[Monterey Jack]

"How can I 'andcuff a bloomin' shirt?!"

-The Invisible Man (1933): 9/10



A film that must have seemed the work of sorcery to Depression-era audiences, The Invisible Man (adapted from the H.G. Wells novel) remains the one genuinely great film to be made around the darkly irresistible concept of invisibility, and all of the naughty and downright disturbing implications therein. Claude Rains delivers a superb performance as Jack Griffin, a brilliant scientist who has discovered the secret of rendering a living creature invisible to the naked eye. Using himself as guinea pig, Griffin finds the effects liberating, intoxicating...but then the rage starts to build as he finds it far more difficult to reverse the process. Driven utterly mad, he's soon terrorizing the populace, leaving the police baffled and his ex-fiancee Flora (a young and beautiful Gloria Stewart, over sixty years before her Oscar-nominated turn as "Old Rose" from Titanic. "Wasn't I a dish?") grief-stricken. Reduced to nothing more than a disembodied voice, Rains plays the role up with a melodramatic fervor that must have seemed hammy even then, and yet stands as one of THE definitive "Mad Scientist" performances (only matched by Colin Clive in Frankenstein), his gravelly delivery laced with a devious cackle as he blithely sets his id loose to indulge in his sickest, anti-social whims. And the visual effects (by John P. Fulton) retain their ability to astonish, even over eight decades later...I can't imagine what it must have been like to see this film at the time, to a cinema audience who had yet to be numbed to the dazzle of technology through sheer overkill. There are moments here that seem to anticipate films made decades later, and even the more basic in-camera tricks (with ingenious manipulation of props) are handled with the utmost care...despite the excellent HD transfer on the Blu-Ray version, you'd be hard-pressed to see any wires. Directed by the gifted James Whale, this is one of the greatest of the classic Universal Monster films.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Evil Of Frankenstein (1964): 5.5/10



Middling later entry in the Hammer Frankenstein series, with the mad Doctor (Peter Cushing as always) resurrecting a failed experiment from a decade earlier, using a hypnotist(!) in order to control his lumbering Monster (Kiwi Kingston, resembling the Boris Karloff Universal design slathered in paper mache). Despite direction by the great cinematographer Freddie Francis (The Innocents), Evil has little to distinguish it from other, better installments in this particular Hammer series, with too much routine exposition and too few monster rampages.

[Monterey Jack]

My father is always going on about "You should be writing reviews professionally and getting paid!", but I would have no idea on how to go about doing that.

Sadly, we were all born at the wrong time. I mean seriously, people want information free and online today, or they don't want it at all. Look at the death of Leonard Maltin's Guide, or Video Watchdog just this past week, etc...what there is a labor of love for most of us these days. It's sad.

I was lucky enough to land a reviewer job with Renaissance Magazine in the 90s, a quarterly niche publication aimed at the Renassiance Fair (or rather "faire" ) culture. [SNIP]

For an engrossing look at the (de)volution of print criticism, check out the wonderful recent book Movie Freak: My Life Watching Movies by former Entertainment Weekly head critic Owen Gleiberman.



Gleiberman goes into detail about falling in love with cinema at a young age, gradually chancing into professional criticism towards the end of the 70's, his formative years writing for the Boston Phoenix in the 80's, and his quarter-century run at EW, where he goes into sad detail about how print criticism has become increasingly marginalized over the last 15+ years as newspapers have folded left and right. His discussion about how he was finally fired from EW back in 2014 is especially galling (when he suggested he could host an online video review series, he was told bluntly that "But you're not known!"...i.e., he was too old). It's a shame...I've always enjoyed reading Gleiberman's reviews (even when I didn't agree with them, they were always punchy, witty and well-reasoned), and the fact that I didn't even know he was let go until about two months after the fact was particularly unfair...he was never even given a token "We'll miss you!" send-off within the pages of the magazine! Thankfully, he's found a regular gig writing for Variety now, but it's still pretty lousy that he gave almost 25 years of his life to EW, and they kicked him to the curb so callously.

[AndyDursin]

I know I'm repeating myself but film criticism is basically dead.

Most people don't care about critics today. "Millennials" don't read reviews, they look at the Tomato Meter score and move along. I don't know how many people only pay attention to that, and that alone, and never even read a full review. I actually laugh when people spend 1000 words on reciting a plot summary online -- I bet 90% of the audience you even get today skips through the whole thing to the end. It's why I try and shorten reviews (unless the title truly demands it) because the audience for long form film criticism is no longer there.

This isn't like 30 years ago when guys like Siskel & Ebert could host a nationally syndicated TV show for decades, and whose opinion carried a lot of weight...especially when it came to shedding light on little known or initially unsuccessful films. They could really buoy a little movie. (I don't believe they could hurt a massive blockbuster -- certain movies were and are critic proof, to a degree).

But those gatekeepers are gone...there's no Leonard Maltin, no Video Guide, no Siskel & Ebert, no Pauline Kael. What there are is an infinite chorus of bloggers and "critics" nobody ever reads but whose opinion gets counted in a stream of Rotten Tomatoes data reports. That's about it. I truly don't believe there is one single critic in this country today who people read enough that their opinion alone could really influence a film's popularity. There used to be, but not any more...

[Monterey Jack]

Always check your candy...

-Trick 'r Treat (2007): 8.5/10



Delightful horror anthology captures the ambiance and visual trappings of the Halloween season better than perhaps any other movie, and does so with a wink that makes the gruesomeness go down as easy as a Reese's Cup. A quartet of terror tales with ingeniously overlapped narratives (this is the Pulp Fiction of scary anthology features), we follow several sets of characters in a small Ohio town celebrating the night of Halloween with a wild degree of enthusiasm. In one, a naughty school principal (Dylan Baker) lets his indulgences in the holiday's darker traditions get way out of hand. In another, a group of mean kids use a bogus legend about a school bus tragedy from decades earlier to play a mean prank on a local "retard" (Samm Todd), only to meet a gruesome form of poetic justice. In the third, a virginal young woman (Anna Paquin) dressed as Little Red Riding Hood has a surprise for her own personal Big Bad Wolf. And in the final segment, a local curmudgeon (Brian Cox) is besieged in his home by a nasty l'il imp named Sam, with a burlap sack over his head and a serrated lollipop he's looking to use for a little holiday slicing & dicing. Written and directed by Michael Dougherty (Krampus), Trick 'r Treat is in the grand tradition of EC comics, where the nasty types receive their just desserts, and the film strikes just the right balance between scares and laughs. Brisk and to the point, it's perfect Halloween-time viewing.

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



Jack's back for another capper for a month's worth of frights, shocks and screams. See you all again next year!