Halloween Horror Marathon 2023

[Monterey Jack]

-Deadly Blessing (1981): 7/10



A young couple, Martha and Jim Schmidt (Maren Jensen and Douglas Barr) live on an isolated farm, with Jim having left the fold of the neighboring clan of "Hittites" (a technology-shunning religious sect who "Make the Amish look like swingers") in order to marry. The Hittite community's leader -- and Jim's father -- Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine), slanders Martha as an "Incubus" who seduced Jim away from the true path of their Lord. But when Jim dies in what appears to be a freak plow accident, the bereaved Martha is visited by her two former college roommates, Vicky Anderson (Susan Buckner) and Lana Marcus (a young Sharon Stone, in one of her first significant film roles), who hope to help get get over a rough patch and heal. Soon, however, the death of one of the Hittites -- his body found in Martha's barn -- kicks off a series of increasingly disturbing events, with surreal dreams, a rattlesnake wriggling its way into Martha's bath and a masked killer seemingly on the loose.

Directed by Wes Craven (who co-wrote with Glenn M. Benest and Matthew Barr), Deadly Blessing is one of the better films from the talented but maddeningly uneven horror veteran. Capable of genre classics like A Nightmare On Elm Street and Scream as well as howlingly inept turkeys like Shocker and A Vampire In Brooklyn, you truly never know what you're gonna get with a Craven joint, but Blessing is blessed with a solid sense of rural, sun-baked atmosphere, some good shocks, and a fine, early score by James Horner that mixes rustic string and woodwind flourishes with some dark choral chanting that's heavily, um, "inspired" by Jerry Goldsmith's work on the Omen trilogy. Still it juices up the movie well, even if a poorly set-up last-minute "Gotcha!" ending puts a bit of a damper on what's otherwise one of Craven's better movies outside of his pair of signature franchises.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Revenge Of Frankenstein (1958): 8/10



Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) -- sentenced to death for his ghoulish crimes against nature in Curse Of Frankenstein -- escapes from the guillotine thanks to making a Faustian bargain with a withered, hunchbacked man named Karl. Three years later, Frankenstein -- utilizing the "They'll never see through this one...!" name "Dr. Stein" -- has established a new medical practice in Carlsbruck, where he keeps a low profile...until a new disciple, Hans Kleve (Francis Matthews) sees through his wan attempt at disguising his identity and agrees to assist Victor in the creation of a new creature, one that will rectify the mistakes made with his previous one. The new, physically-fit body is also intended to be the new receptacle for Karl's brain (his payment for literally saving Frankenstein's neck), and at first the procedure seems to be a rousing success. But soon Karl's new body starts to fail him, reverting to the missappen state of his previous one (shades of Flowers For Algernon) and causing him to go on the obligatory rampage as Frankenstein scrambles to keep a lid on his latest experiment gone awry.

Quickie sequel to the 1957 original Hammer production is virtually on a par with the first, with excellent production values, fine performances and effective shocks. The import Blu-Ray from UK's Indicator line (struck from a recent 4K master) looks superb and is loaded with extra content.

[Monterey Jack]

-Idle Hands (1999): 1/10



Atrocious horror/comedy about a teenage slacker, Anton Tobias (Devon Sawa), whose hand gets a curse on it that kicks off a killing spree (starting off with his parents, played by Fred Willard and Connie Ray, and continuing with his stoner buddies played by Seth Green and Daredevil's Elden Henson, both resurrected as rotting yet weirdly nonchalant zombies), culminating with a bloodbath at the local Halloween school dance with Anton's girl-next-door crush, Molly (Jessica Alba) in attendance.

Proof that any piece of sh!t horror movie will generate an inexplicable cult following after it's been out for 25 years, Idle Hands is utterly unwatchable... not scary, not funny, shockingly incoherent (why does Anton's hand get possessed? It's never addressed) and full of painfully unimaginative special effects and gore effects. Were in not for the luminous presence of a young, nubile Jessica Alba (whose probably 90% of the reason why horny teenage boys in the spring of '99 still hold this in baffling high regard), I'd probably slap this with a zero-star/"F" rating. Garbage.

[Monterey Jack]

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



Victor Frankenstein is at it again, and when his latest experiment in reanimating dead tissue leads to the obligatory destruction of his lab ("Why won't they leave me alone?!" he agonizes), he's forced to return to the small village of Karlstaad with his latest assistant, Karl (Sandor Eles), where it all began, to lick his wounds and rebuild. But he's incensed to find his home ransacked, all of his valuables long since stolen by the local burgomaster (David Hutcheson). But the sting of that is considerably lessened when a local deaf/mute beggar girl (Katy Wild) leads him to the preserved remains of his first creature (Kiwi Kingston), frozen in an ice floe for years. He thaws the beast out, engaging the services of a local carny, Zoltan (Peter Woodthorpe), to help bring his creature's brain functions back utilizing hypnotism(!), but, of course, soon Zoltan sets the creature off into the town in order to settle old scores, and the populace rises up again in agitated outrage at Victor's latest sin against nature.

A soft reboot of the series (the flashback that establishes Frankenstein's original experiment doesn't gibe with the first two movies at all), Evil is functional, but uninspired, with Kingston's monster -- the only one to resemble the famous Jack Pierce makeup design from the Universal films, albeit slathered in paper mache -- being not terribly frightening or interesting.There's a visually exciting climax inside Victor's laboratory set ablaze, but other than that, this is the weakest of the Hammer Frankenstein series, reanimating the same old stitched-together flesh with workaday competence.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Raven (1963): 6.5/10



Roger Corman production -- "inspired" by Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem -- features Vincent Price as Dr. Esasmus Craven, a sorcerer who helps turn fellow magician Dr. Adolphus Bedlo (Peter Lorre) back into a human after he comes rap-rap-rapping at his chamber door as a nattering raven. The two travel to the castle of the wizard Dr Scarabus (Boris Karloff) in order to settle a score, accompanied by Craven's daughter (Hazel Court) and Bedlo's son (Jack Nicholson!), and soon a magical showdown in engaged by all three.

Director Corman -- working from a screenplay by famed sci-fi and fantasy novelist Richard Matheson -- expands Poe's wisp of a poe(m) into a frothy, lightly spooky clash of prestidigitation, with some colorful special effects, great sets and the pleasure of seeing horror icons Price, Lorre and Karloff sharing the screen and trying to out-ham each other. It's very slight, but pleasurable nonetheless.

[Monterey Jack]

Putting the Hammer Frankenstein movies to bed...

-Frankenstein Created Woman (1967): 8/10

-Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969): 7/10

-Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell (1974): 7/10







In Frankenstein Created Woman, Peter Cushing's mad doctor transfers the soul of a recently executed -- and innocent -- young man named Karl (Robert Morris) into the body of his bereaved love named Christina (Susan Denberg), who committed suicide after witnessing Karl's death on the guillotine. In life, Christina was deformed, scarred, hiding her ugliness behind her mousy, limp red hair, but when she awakens from Frankenstein's procedure, she's beautiful, blonde, radiant...and compelled by Karl's restless spirit to go forth and kill the three rich proto-preppies whose shared crime of murder sent Karl to his death.

Arguably the best of the Hammer Frankenstein series, ...Created Woman is full of ripe melodrama (set to an especially rich James Bernard score), compelling moralizing about whether evil lives in the flesh or the soul, and the comeliest "monster" in the history of the franchise.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed takes place at some point after -- earlier? the timeline seems fudged, given the lack of burn scars on Cushing's hands -- the events of Woman, with Victor now lurking around poorly-lit alleyways lopping off heads with a scythe(!) in order to procure fresh meat for his experiments, but needs the knowhow of his former assistant, Dr. Fredrick Brandt (Freddie Jones), but said knowhow is locked inside his diseased mind in a madhouse. He breaks Richter out, but has to transfer his brain to another vessel (Freddie Jones), and when Dr. Brandt wakes up and witnesses the new body he's now inhabiting, he's none too happy.

Okay entry in the series, with some juicy gore and a climax that's an arsonist's wet dream.Shame about an utterly needless and ugly scene with Cushing sexually assaulting a woman, inserted by Hammer to "spice up" the movie. His Frankenstein is a cold bastard, but "rapist" is a bit too much.

Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell finds Victor now running an asylum of his own, having changed his identity for the umpteenth time and, with the eager assistance of a major Franken-fanboy (Shane Briant), crafting a new, especially hairy beast (played by future Darth Vader David Prowse) out of the stitched-together remnants of the asylum patients he's using as his own private spare parts stash.

Released in the twilight of the Hammer studio in the mid-1970s (The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and other, more contemporary -- and shocking -- horror films were beginning to make the fog-shrouded period horror settings of previous decades seem downright quaint), ...From Hell is a fitting coda to the series, with a creepy setting and a great monster design, plus Cushing's always enjoyable superciliousness.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014): 7/10



Remake of the 1976, um, "classic" (which fictionalized the true-life rash of murders by a sack-headed killer in Texarcana in 1946) starts on Halloween night of 2013, where an annual drive-in showing of the 1976 film is interrupted by a young woman named Andi (Addison Timlin) walking out of the woods, left bloody from multiple stab wounds from a masked killer when she was parking with her not-as-lucky boyfriend (Spencer Treat Clark). Has the dreaded "Phantom Killer" returned after several decades to start a new reign of terror?

A major improvement on the flat-footed, overrated '76 original (which was mainly notable as a pre-Halloween 70's slasher prototype), Sundown '14 is unexpectedly stylish, thanks to slick direction from Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me & Earl & The Dying Girl) utilizing canted, De Palma-esque camera angles and split-diopter shots and generating a solid sense of unease throughout, with some effective stalk & slash setpieces. It also boasts plenty of great character actor faces in the supporting cast, like Veronica Cartwright as Andi's grandmother, Gary Cole and Ed Lauter as laconic Texas lawmen and Edward Herrmann as a local preacher who publicly shuns the 1976 movie's annual showings. Better than I expected from a 2010s horror remake, but the original was nothing special to begin with, so...

[Monterey Jack]

-The Antichrist (1974): 3/10



A young woman, Ippolita (Carla Gravina) -- legs left crippled by a car accident that killed her parents as a child -- becomes possessed by a spirit from a previous life, one which made a pact with Satan. Soon she's spitting green effluvia at priests, speaking in profanity-laced tirades in a corroded voice, and levitating herself and various objects all around the room. Sound familiar? Quickie Italian cash-in on the massive success of the previous year's The Exorcist apes each and every plot turn and ooky makeup effect of William Friedkin's seminal horror classic, but it's all so cloddish, tacky and bereft of tension (not helped by awful special effects). Released in the U.S. under the lousy title The Tempter in 1978, The Antichrist deserves to go straight to hell. I cast you OUT, unclean spirit...!!!

[Paul MacLean]

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.

I saw Patrick way back in high school, and agree on the film's merits. Brian May's score is also one of his best, and at the time I was fairly sure -- after seeing this and The Road Warrior -- that he was on his way to becoming an A-list composer (and I still lament that he did not).

[Monterey Jack]

-ParaNorman (2012): 10/10

"Don't make me throw this hummus! It's spicy...!"



Young Norman (voiced with premature world-weariness by Kodi-Smit McPhee), like Haley Joel Osment before him, been gifted -- or cursed -- with the ability to see and communicate with the spirits of the dead in the small New England town of Blithe Hollow, much to the distress of his worried parents (Jeff Garlin and Leslie Mann) and exasperated disgust of older sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick). But his abilities come in handy when Norman's creepy uncle (John Goodman) comes to him and bequeaths the duty of keeping the spirit of a witch -- who was sentenced and hung by the township three hundred years earlier -- at bay for another year by reading passages from an ancient book.

From Laika studios, who, in recent years, have all but surpassed Pixar when it comes to technically spectacular, incredibly smart and emotionally resonant animated features, ParaNorman is an absolutely gorgeous film, brimming over with stunning character and production design, fluid movement that, at times, almost make you think you're looking at CGI, lite creepiness that evokes the pleasurable "80s PG" tone of vintage Amblin productions (this is the kind of movie where "Parental Guidance" is actually warranted, whereas most PG movies aimed at kids these days are more watered-down and toothless than G-rated Disney films from thirty years ago) and a story that progresses from humor to kid-friendly scares to a wonderful ending that earns authentic tears. If you've got kids who want a "scary movie" this October, this is pretty much as good as it gets.

[Monterey Jack]

-Suspiria (1977): 9/10



Jessica Harper plays a young American girl named Suzy who travels to Germany to enroll in the Tanz Akademie, a prestigious ballet school. But when she arrives, things start going a little coocoo, with portents of encroaching doom like a rain of maggots, the school's blind piano teacher having his throat torn out by his guide dog, and a fellow student getting brutally butchered in a spectacular opening murder setpiece. Could the school be the gateway to hell, overlooked by a coven of ancient witches...?

Co-written and directed by Italian horror master Dario Argento, Suspiria is a film I, frankly, hated the first time I watched it nearly a decade ago. I found it bizarre, scattershot and incoherent. But that first viewing was on a godawful, fuzzy, non-anamorphic DVD I got from Netflix. Seeing it again recently in the spectacular 4K disc release from Synapse, the film's abundant pleasures finally became evident to me. It's still barely coherent on a pure narrative level, but the movie works almost entirely on an audiovisual level, and with Luciano Tovoli's spectacular, color-drenched cinematography and the overpoweringly eerie score by "The Goblins", the movie sustains a spell of non-stop dread and mystery that handily bulldozes over its thin plotting and characterization. If you can get on this movie's surreal wavelength, it'll scare the living crap out of you.

[Monterey Jack]

-Phantom Of The Paradise (1974): 9/10



Overheated, melodramatic tale of Winslow Leach (William Finley), a songwriter working on an elaborate rock cantata who has his life's work stolen by Swan (singer/songwriter Paul Williams) and his face ruined when he falls into a record pressing plant(!). Left hideously scarred, he swaths himself in a leather bodysuit, flowing cape and birdlike face mask and haunts Swan's new music venue, The Paradise, looking to mete out a little vengeance, but Swan makes a pact with him to finish his cantata, and allow his beautiful young ingenue Phoenix (Suspiria's Jessica Harper) to perform it.

Writer/director Brian De Palma's gimmicky crossbreeding of Phantom Of The Opera and Faust is at a crossroads between his early, scruffy counterculture comedies from the late 1960s and the more lush, elaborate suspense thrillers that would become his bread & butter in the 70s and 80s, yet it's still great fun, with Williams' catchy songs (ranging from 50s rock & roll and 60s beach bum pastiches to 70s glam rock to aching romantic ballads) butted up against the director's usual stylistic visual flourishes (including a trademark split-screen sequence playing homage to the opening shot of Orson Welles' Touch Of Evil) and eccentric comic touches. It's tasty, Winslow, tasty...!

[Monterey Jack]

-Disturbing Behavior (1998): 4/10



A pre-X-Men James Marsden plays moody teen Steve Clark, whose parents move him and his kid sister (Ginger Snaps' Katharine Isabelle) to the small island community of Cradle Bay following the suicide of his older brother. He's quickly befriended by slacker Gavin Strick (Nick Stahl) and his hottie goth bestie Racher Wagner (a Dawson's Creek-era Katie Holmes), who steer him away from the "Blue Ribbons", the preppie power movies at the local high school. They're beautiful, they're ideal students...and they're also being literally programmed by the school's psychologist (Bruce Greenwood), who's engineering a new generation of children to be perfect little automatons. Yet when these re-programmed teens lets their hormones get out of control, they turn into violent, murderous sociopaths.

A teenage riff on Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives, Disturbing Behavior is a movie I found pretty lame 25 years ago, and the passage of time hasn't changed my initial opinion any. There's the germ of an amusing satirical idea here -- what parent of an unruly teen hasn't wanted to resort to extreme means to get their kid to just...behave? -- but it's given plodding treatment by hack screenwriter Scott Rosenberg and director David Nutter (who helmed many episodes of The X-Files back in the 90s), barely making it to a 75-minute running time subtracting the opening and ending credits! The presence of the always-enjoyable William Sadler (as the school's Kurt Vonnegut-reading janitor who discovers the Blue Ribbons' weakness) offers the only bright spot of a pretty mediocre and incredibly dated slice of late 90s sci-fi/horror. You want a better high-school set Body Snatchers riff from the very same year? Check out Robert Rodriguez's far more stylish and amusing The Faculty.

[Monterey Jack]

AWHOOOOOOOOOOO! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWHHHHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! [werewolves of London...]

-The Wolf Man (1941): 8/10

-The Wolfman (2010): 8/5/10





A pair of lycanthropic delights today, with the Universal Monster classic The Wolf Man and its terrific remake. The 1941 movie stars Lon Chaney, Jr. as Larry Talbot, who returns home to his small town of Llanwelly in Wales in order to be with his father (Claude Rains) following the recent death of his brother. While there, he starts wooing local girl Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers), but their courtship is cut short when Larry witnesses a local woman being savagely mauled by a gigantic wolf on the moors. He bludgeons the beast to death with his silver-headed walking stick, but not before receiving a nasty bite...one that inexplicably heals overnight, leaving behind not a hint of a scar. Soon, Larry is informed by a local gypsy woman (Maria Ouspenskaya) that he's been cursed by the mark of the werewolf, and when the moon rises, he'll turn into a slavering monster who will prey on the townspeople in order to slake his ceaseless hunger.

Directed by George Waggner and scripted by Curt Siodmak, The Wolf Man is a prime example of the classic Universal Monster cycle of the 1930s and 40s. With its eerie, fog-shrouded sets, chiaroscuro lighting and compact, 69-minute running time, it delivers plenty of tidy, atmospheric chills, and Jack Pierce's memorable makeup effects on Chaney (he of the sad, basset hound visage) makes the Wolf Man one of the most enduring movie monsters of them all. The simple lap dissolve transformation effects would be rendered obsolete by the makeup wizards who cracked the business wide open in the 1980s and beyond, but The Wolf Man is still a perennial October treat.

The lavish 2010 remake The Wolfman (with Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self adapting Siodmak's screenplay from the 1941 production) features Benicio Del Toro as Lawrence Talbot, who, like Chaney before him, is enticed to return to his childhood home by the brutal murder of his brother, his body found torn to shreds. Investigating his brother's whereabouts before his death at a nearby gypsy camp, Lawrence is bitten by a mysterious beast (who turns the camp into a smorgasbord of death in the process), and is put under the care of his aging father (Anthony Hopkins) and his late brother's comely finance, Gwen (Emily Blunt). Soon, Lawrence is growing hairy, baying at the moon, and bringing death to the populace of period London, while a local police inspector (Hugo Weaving) starts handing out silver bullets to his men with grim resolve, hoping to curb the swath of destruction and bring the curse to an end.

Directed by Joe Johnston, The Wolfman is one of the very few modern productions to get the right tone of those vintage Universal Monster movies right, taking great care to develop a sense of mood and atmosphere (even moreso in the extended director's cut on Blu-Ray) even as it engages in enthusiastic spurts of gore that more recall the output of the Hammer studios in the 60s and 70s. It's a gorgeously gloomy film, with excellent tech support from Tim Burton faves like production designer Rick Heinrichs and composer Danny Elfman (one of his best efforts from the last 15 years or so). And Rick Baker's Oscar-winning makeup effects are a fitting update to the classic Jack Pierce design from the 40s, even if there are a handful of dodgy mid-transformation CGI shots. Capped with a rousing climatic fight sequence inside of a burning manor house, The Wolfman is ideal Halloween-time fun, full of scares, grue and fine acting across the board, and it's a shame Universal has flopped and stumbled every time they've dipped back into their classic monster characters since (with the exception of the smart, scary 2020 Invisible Man reboot).

[Monterey Jack]

Later, rinse, repeat...

-Happy Death Day (2017): 7.5/10

-Happy Death Day 2U (2019): 8/10





Tomorrow ALWAYS Dies in today's pair of loopers. In Happy Death Day, Jessica Rothe plays Theresa "Tree" Gelbman, a college student who, following a blackout drunk session at a frat party, wakes up in the room of Carter Davis (Israel Broussard), nursing a raging headache and not entirely sure if they did the deed or not. She guts her way through her day, only to end up stalked and murdered by a killer wearing the plastic visage of the school's team mascot (a leering, cherubic baby that sort of resembles a sinister Baby Herman). She then wakes up in the same bed, assuming she just had one hell of a booze-induced nightmare, but has a major case of deja vu as events she witnessed "yesterday" (the same smooching students interrupted by the sprinklers going off, the same soused frat member collapsing on the lawn, the same guy she went on one date with emerging from behind a column to ask why she never texted him back). Then, following a few adjustments to her daily routine finds herself murdered in a slightly different way...only to end up in Carter's room yet again. Soon Tree realizes she's been caught in a loop, stuck repeating the same day over and over, and struggling to find out the identity of her killer and hopefully break the chain and see a new day dawn. Oh yeah, and it's her birthday, too.

Director Christopher Landon (working from a clever screenplay by Scott Lobdell) takes as basic a slasher premise imaginable and wrings a great deal of scares and laughs out of the premise, with Tree -- knowing she'll wake up the next day no matter what -- dying over and over in increasingly baroque and elaborate ways as she winnows the suspect pool down. But does she possess an unlimited lives code, or is she rapidly running out of quarters, not knowing if the next death will be Game Over? Rothe is tremendously charming as she progresses from puzzlement to acceptance to take-charge ass-kicker, and she generates good chemistry with Broussard as the gentlemanly Carter. I do wish the film were a bit bloodier -- a PG-13 slasher, even a comedic one, is not firing on all cylinders -- but it generates a lot of time-displaced fun along the way.

It takes a certain amount of balls to sequelize a movie entirely based around the idea of a series of events on endless repeat, but Happy Death Day 2U is a happy exception, and even more clever. Landon returns (working from his own screenplay) to direct, and he manages the task of making a sequel that successfully skews into a new genre while still retaining the aspects of the first that worked. After escaping her endless temporal purgatory at the end of the first, Tree is flabbergasted when Carter's roommate Ryan Phan (Phi Vu) -- who kept obnoxiously entering their dorm room to congratulate Carter on the "Fine vagine" he went home with the previous night -- starts complaining he's stuck in his own time loop...one related to a science experiment he's been tinkering with. When his quantum reactor goes haywire, Tree finds herself not projected back in time, but into another universe entirely, one where she's no longer romantically involved with Carter (he's hooked up with her snooty sorority sister instead)...but her dead mother is still alive. So now Tree is faced with a dilemma...stay in a universe where her still has her mom, or find a way back to the one where she's still with Carter? Oh yeah, and she has to figure out who the masked killer in THIS universe is at the same time. No pressure...!

While the last few years may have sated our collective desire to see movies set inside of "multiverses", Happy Death Day 2U is even more enjoyable that the first, even if it hews more close to the sci-fi than horror genre (the "masked slasher" aspect seems grafted on, like it had to be there in order to sell the movie as a sequel). Again Landon has fun staging a variety of humorous death scenarios for Rothe (like power-chugging detergent in a supermarket and doing her best Fargo impression with a woodchipper). It's also more emotionally resonant than the first, Tree forced to choose between having the mother she lost back or her new boyfriend. Live in the past, or look forward to the future? It's a lot of fun, and it's a shame the film's underperformance at the box office (although it still grossed over seven times what it cost to make) scuppered a planned third movie. Still, these two offer up plenty of frights and laughs for those who prefer their slasher cinema on the sillier side.