Halloween Horror Marathon 2024

[Monterey Jack]

12.) Fright (1971): 7.5/10



Effective chiller about a young woman, Amanda (Susan George) who accepts a babysitting gig from a well-to-do couple, Helen & Jim (Honor "Pussy Galore" Blackman and George Cole), who leave her young son with Amanda for the night as they enjoy an evening out. But things start devolving almost immediately, with creaky noises in the night and sinister faces lurking outside the windows. Is it all just Amanda's boorish lout of a boyfriend (Dennis Waterman), who arrives with the prurient intent of relieving Amanda of her virginity, or could it be Helen's ex-husband, Brian (Ian Bannen), recently escaped from a mental institution after a frightening and violent encounter in the recent past?

Directed with screw-tightening efficiency by Peter Collinson, Fright is like a late-70s/early-80s "The calls are coming from inside the house!" stalk & slash feature transported back in time a decade and Across The Pond. the gorgeous George does a good job conveying her character's increasing sense of unease (one felt like any babysitter must when left with a child's well-being in their hands in a secluded, cavernously empty home full of plenty of shadowy nooks and crannies), and Bannen, when he finally reveals his Ill intents (pretending to be a neighbor to gain access to his former homestead), offers up some sweaty, eye-popping menace that generates palpable suspense. Certainly a fascinating precursor to the direction teen-oriented horror cinema would gravitate towards in the years to come (albeit with little of the gratuitous nudity and gore than would become de rigueur in the genre post-Halloween).

[Monterey Jack]

13.) Never Let Go (2024): 7.5/10



Eerie, rustic mood piece starring Halle Berry as "Momma", a survivalist existing in a remote cabin in the woods with her fraternal twin sons, Nolan and Samuel (Percy Daggs IV and Anthony B. Jenkins, both terrific). The three (along with their pooch, Coda) live off the land, skinning squirrels and crunching up toads for sustenance...but never once untying the ropes that literally bind them to their homestead. Momma has taught her sons that an unspecified catastrophe has destroyed the world beyond the woods, and that the three of them are all that remains of humanity. So long as they...well, Never Let Go of their knotted tethers, "The Evil" that consumed everyone else cannot find its way into their hearts and minds, But as a particularly hard winter reduces their stock of food down to virtually nothing (reducing them to noshing on fried wood chips), the boys begin to question whether or not the unseen-by-them "monsters" that haunt the woods are nothing more than a paranoid delusion in Momma's diseased mind, and that she's trapped the pair of them there for no good reason, cut off from a world of people that do exist out there, somewhere.

Directed by blunt-force horror specialist Alexandre Aja, Never Let Go is a film that's, by his standards, fairly restrained in the gore department, acting as more of a psychological pressure-cooker of a suspense melodrama. Berry does a fine job subtly shading her performance so that we can never get a handle on whether she's been traumatized by actual experiences with a terrifying supernatural force she's desperately trying to keep her children safe from, or else she's completely off her rocker, and the two young performers who play her kids do an equally impressive job as their faith that they're being protected by Momma's strict rules begins to fracture under the pressure of rapidly encroaching starvation and an extended case of cabin fever. The movie generates a successful tone of hovering dread, accentuated by a strange, effective score (credited to composer "Rob", aka Robin Coudert), full of distorted, gonging electronics and moody woodwinds that's one of the better horror-movie soundtracks in recent memory. The movie is ultimately a bit slight, playing like a padded episode of a television horror anthology, but it definitely delivers the requisite, autumnal chills as we barrel towards the official start of Scary Season.

[Monterey Jack]

14.) Terrifier (2016): 7/10



A pair of young women, Tara (Jenna Kanell, suggesting a young Eliza Dushku) and Dawn (Catherine Corcoran) are headed home from a Halloween party and stop in a local pizza place for a quick nosh before heading home when a sinister figure clad in a blindingly white clown suit and matching makeup topped with a festively twee little black chapeau (David Howard Thornton) sits at a table across the room and...stares at them. Unblinkingly, unsettlingly. Until his face breaks into a ghastly rictus of a smile and he presents Tara with a ring he pulls out of a toy dispenser at the entrance before being ejected by the owner for befouling his restroom with a revolting BM from hell. The girls are naturally weirded out by the encounter, but things get worse as they discover Dawn's car has a flat. Waiting for Tara's sister to come pick them up, Tara wheedles her way into a decrepit nearby building to use the facilities (speaking of befouled toilets...), but soon "Art" the clown comes around, looking to play some gruesome and cruel holiday pranks with the terrified gals amidst the crumbling hallways and trash-strewn basement areas.

Written and directed by Damien Leone (adapting the Art character from a pair of shorts included in the 2013 anthology All Hallows' Eve), Terrifier is as blunt-witted and crude as a dead baby joke, and -- if viewed in that snickering, adolescent mindset -- as amusingly disreputable. Leone, despite making the movie on a pittance of a budget, delivers a slick, good-looking package, and Thornton's dialogue-free leering makes Art into a memorably malicious imp of an antagonist as he toys with the girls and various other victims with sick good cheer. This is the kind of movie that you have to enjoy a good deal of sicko gore to appreciate, but get on the right wavelength, and it's ugly midnight-movie fun.

[Monterey Jack]

15.) Terrifier 2 (2022): 7.5/10



Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) returns from the dead, resurrected for...reasons (he plucks an eye from the coroner working on him to replace the one lost in the original before offing him), and one year after his original reign of terror, he's back to play gruesome games with a new crop of victims, primarily Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera, who has the eyes and nose of a young Aubrey Plaza), high school student who recently lost her father to mental illness and who's been suppressing her sorrow with art projects, including an elaborate Halloween costume to turn her into the Valkyrie warrior inspired by her dad's old sketchbooks. But now she has to woman up and become the warrior she's only cosplaying at in order to end Art's reign of terror, here supported by The Little Pale Girl (Amelie McLain), a figment of Art's imagination (or is she?) who acts as his own mixture of Harley Quinn and Kick-Ass' Hit Girl.

More disgusting and baroque than the first (and more more...insanely over 50 minutes longer!), Terrifier 2 will appeal to fans of the original who wanted even more extreme and revolting, uh, "pleasures" in Art's sicko, prankish mayhem, and returning writer/director/makeup designer Damien Leone once again takes a tiny whisper of a budget and delivers a movie that feels much larger and more elaborate than the modest production is. It's yucky fun, yet the extreme length does wear you down after a while. This should have been capped at 100 minutes or so. But if you like this sort of thing, it delivers the gross goods.

[Monterey Jack]

16.) Tarot (2024): 2.5/10



Six college students, renting a crumbling mansion in the boonies for a birthday and, while exploring the locked basement in search of booze to supplant their depleted beer supply, come across an ornate wooden box, full of elaborately illustrated tarot cards. Haley (Harriet Sater) reads the fortunes of the group, and soon -- whaddya know? -- they start dying off in ways that mimic her reading of the cards. The spooked, rapidly dwindling group (including Jacob "Man In The Chair" Batalon from the Spider-Man movies as the obligatory, obnoxious comic-relief fat guy, put there so there's at least one member of the cast who doesn't look like a flawless magazine model) investigate the cards' origins, leading them to an old woman (Olwen Fouere) who survived the cards' malign influence in 1988, and who warns them of the terrible curse put upon them by telling their fortunes with another's deck.

Typically wan, PG-13 horror trash that will only raise the pulses of undemanding 'tweens who want to watch something "Wicked Scary" for a sleepover, but will only raise any adult horror fan's desire to click it off and see what else is on Netflix. No good scares, no good atmosphere, leaden performances and a paucity of interesting death scenarios are the order of the day in this logy stinker. It's...tarot'ble. [rimshot]

[Monterey Jack]

It's officially October...!



17.) Fear In The Night (1972): 7/10



Peggy Heller (Judy Geeson), a young caretaker, is violently assaulted in her London flat by an assailant with a prosthetic arm (who does she think she is, Richard Kimble?). Traumatized by the event, her husband Robert (Ralph Bates) takes her away from the big city to his new job as caretaker for a secluded, abandoned boys' school, where the stern headmaster Michael Carmichael (Peter Cushing) and his much-younger wife Molly (a pre-Dynasty Joan Collins) live. But soon Peggy finds herself in the strangling grip of her unseen assailant once again. Is it all just paranoid delusion, or has her attacker trailed her to the boonies for unexplained reasons?

Typically handsome Hammer production is full of the studio's usual production values and is well-acted, presented as a more psychological, less gory riff on an old EC Horror Comics sort of devious plotter's idea. It's a minor entry in the studio's massive output of horror and suspense pictures, but it has its atmospheric charms.

[Monterey Jack]

18.) Fear No Evil (1981): 3/10



In 1963, a newborn infant starts spewing blood as his baptism (also inciting other churchgoers to spontaneously bleed), casing his horrified parents to flee the church. His mom and dad raise him to young adulthood in their gradually decaying homestead, and, eighteen years later, Andrew Williams (Stefan Arngrim) -- the physical personification of fallen archangel Lucifer himself -- is enrolled in high school and causing all sorts of mayhem amongst his classmates and teachers (the gym teacher memorably crushes a student to the wall during a heated bout of dodgeball). Is he set to make a return to Heaven, by any means possible...?

Tacky religious horror nonsense is, sadly, the work of writer/director Frank LaLoggia, who later in the 80s would make the splendid, emotive spook story The Lady In White. This, however, is pure drive-in schlock, full of convoluted plot nonsense (one of Andrew's chief bully antagonists starts growing breasts for no reason after they have a nude make out session in the boys' locker room shower!), lousy makeup effects (including shambling zombies so cheesy you half expect them to start moaning, "Peanut Butter Crunnnnnnnnncccccccchhhh...!") and a dearth of suspense. On the plus side is LaLoggia's nice orchestral score (he shares co-composing credit with the great orchestrator/conductor David Spear) and a handful of goofy laughs, but overall it's a mess. Look for Joel Coen in the end titles credited as an assistant editor!

[Monterey Jack]

19.) Werewolves On Wheels (1971): 2.5/10



Roving motorcycle gang the Devil's Advocates finds themselves tangling with Ol' Scratch himself when they bed down for the night near a remote church, get roofied by the sacramental wine offered by the monks who come out to greet them, and find themselves cursed to turn into slavering, hairy beasts when the moon grows full.

How could a movie with a title and plot description like that turn out so monumentally boring? This could have been a cool, lycanthropic version of something like Near Dark, and the idea of werewolves roaming the countryside as a pack of motorcycle toughs sounds like it could be silly grindhouse fun, but Werewolves On Wheels takes forever to go nowhere, falling into a deadening rhythm of "They drive, they bed down for the night, one wolfs out and kills a member of the group". Lather, rinse, repeat. And the actual werewolf makeup (what little you can make out amidst the darkness and wobbly camerawork) is certainly no high point for the genre. Don't let the hair of this dog of a horror flick bite you and just accept the hangover. Woof!

[AndyDursin]

A QUIET PLACE DAY ONE
6.5/10



John Krasinski’s apocalyptic sci-fi series switches up the settings and characters — but otherwise retains its predecessors’ narrative structure and dramatic beats — in the serviceable prequel “A Quiet Place: Day One.” The expressive Lupita Nyong’o is perfectly cast here as a hospice patient out for a day trip to New York City when the aliens first arrive — calamity ensues before she and her service cat, along with other survivors (including Joseph Quinn), attempt to stay alive.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with “Day One” in terms of its performances. Nyong’o’s eyes convey a wide expression of emotions and with so little dialogue on-hand, she makes for an ideal heroine while Quinn, best known as Eddie from “Stranger Things,” is likewise sympathetic as a fellow British survivor, in NYC to attend law school. What there is, though, is a feeling of deja vu that hangs over all of this movie: the set-pieces are standard in their design and execution and by now predictable in their dramatic power (or lack thereof). The sombre arc of the story is expected, the surprises are few, and the film is content to evoke the same feel of the first two movies without adding anything fresh except for its urban surroundings — yet even there, the movie’s thrifty budget ($67 million) means the shots of a dilapidated New York mostly come off as soft-looking digital gloss.

[Monterey Jack]

20.) Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker (1981): 6.5/10



Half-interesting horror outing about how the parents of a young toddler get Final Destination'ed by a logging truck on a winding mountain road and plunge over the side to their deaths. Fourteen years later, he grows into strapping Billy Lynch (Jimmy McNichol), having been raised by his doting, bordering-on-smothering Aunt Cheryl Roberts (Susan Tyrrell). Billy's a star athlete on the basketball court (look fast for a young "William" Paxton as a sneering bully) and ready to set out for college, but when Aunt Cheryl has a spasm of unrequited lust aimed at the repairman that results in his bloody death, the virulently homophobic detective investigating the case, Joe Carlson (Bo Svenson), questions why a gay handyman would have come onto and tried to sexually assault Aunt Cheryl (as she claims). Soon unsavory facts from the past come to light as the film barrels towards a violent climax.

Also released under the title Night Warning, Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker (cool title!) is a bit more psychologically probing than your typical early-80s teen-oriented meat grinder, but it's all tossed away by an arch, campy (if reasonably well-staged) "psycho-biddy" climax that takes some of the edge off the proceedings. Still, not bad.

[Monterey Jack]

21.) Screams Of A Winter Night (1979): 4/10



Yet another middling horror anthology, as a gaggle of young people gather at a remote cabin in the woods to spin various spooky campfire yarns, none of which are noteworthy in any particular way. Even the wraparound segments devolve into a confused shug of a conclusion. Only noteworthy for one of the tales getting excised in the original theatrical cut (two victims stalked through a graveyard by glowing-eyed specters), getting restored into the Code Red Blu-Ray which sports a extremely ragged transfer. The film isn't terrible or wildly amateurish, merely routine in the extreme (and, at almost two full hours in the full cut, far too long).

[Monterey Jack]

22.) The Last Horror Film (1982): 6/10



Skeevy Joe Spinell plays NYC cabbie Vinny Durand, who has aspirations to become a great filmmaker, so he hops a plane across the pond to the Cannes Film Festival to realize his dream of netting horror star Jana Bates (Caroline Munro) to headline his hoped-for cinematic opus, devolving into a crazed, increasingly violent stalker as he finds his dreams being thwarted left and right.

This Troma production (also released as Fanatic) works reasonably okay as a competent suspense thriller (from that run of early-80s "crazed fanboy" stalker thrillers like The Seduction and The Fan, probably goaded on by the real-life celeb stalking cases of the era including the murder of John Lennon and attempted assassination of President Reagan, which are both mentioned in the film), but what really distinguishes it is the mouth-watering capturing of the 1981 Cannes lineup. Film fanatics will want to freeze the frame constantly in order to catch the bevy of promotional posters (including a massive display bracketing a doorway for that year's 007 opus For Your Eyes Only). Something like this happening in this day and age would be almost unthinkable, so how this low-budget Troma movie managed to clear the rights for all of these featured movies is beyond me. It also features a reasonably clever wrap-up that concludes the proceedings on a wryly amusing note.

[Monterey Jack]

23.) ParaNorman (2012): 10/10



Splendid spooky fare for the whole family finds as our protagonist one Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), an introverted youngster who's gifted with the ability to see and commune with souls that have yet to pass over to the other side (the late Grandma Babcock, played by Elaine Stritch, hangs out on the living room couch and clucks her tongue at the horror trash Norman eats up like candy corn). This ability naturally estranges him from his disbelieving family (worried mom Leslie Mann, apoplectic dad Jeff Garlin, and exasperated big sis Anna Kendrick) and the students at his middle school in the small haven of Blithe Hollow (currently celebrating its 300th centenary), who look at Norman as some sort of a freak. But when Norman's dirty hobo of an uncle (John Goodman) comes to him with the task of taking on the mantle of the one who recites a yearly incantation in order to starve off a curse that has plagued the town for the past three hundred years, he and his gaggle of Goonies-esque kids and teens (including Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the obligatory dumbbell bully) have to band together to suppress a zombie uprising and dig into the town's unsavory history in order to set right an injustice from the past.

From Laika, the inspired animation studio that gave us Coraline, ParaNorman is another madly detailed stop-motion opus full of gorgeous visuals, compellingly skewed and/or asymmetrical production and character designs, a spirited voice cast (Casey Affleck gets plenty of laughs as a dunderheaded jock) and a story that gives us the obligatory nostalgic Spielberg/King vibes (crammed with sly homages to horror classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween) that deepens and enriches into a surprisingly emotional climax that earns its ugly-cry catharsis. As good as it gets for kid-friendly Halloween tricks and treats.

[Monterey Jack]

24.) Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956): 9.5/10



The sleepy, benign town of Santa Mira, California, is the setting for this masterpiece of science fiction and terror, as Dr. Miles Bennell (an excellent Kevin McCarthy) relates the hair-raising tale of how the town's populace became swept by a wave of paranoia about their friends and loved-ones not seeming completely...themselves, retaining their familiar appearances and memories while lacking the beat of human emotions. Dr. Bennell is nonplussed by this spate of hallucinogenic fervor, but soon comes to learn the frightening truth that these townfolk truly aren't who they originally were, having their bodies and minds replaced by seeds that have drifted down from outer space and have started replicating the dominant species on the planet Earth, Man, and now have cast their suspicious eyes on Dr, Bennell and his old sweetie Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), and want to make them conform to their new, highly ordered way of life...or else.

Adapted from the classic sci-fi tale by Jack Finney and tautly directed by Don Siegel, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers remains a potent pop metaphor that still has the ability to grip and disturb the viewer almost seventy years down the line. Seen as a take on the Senator McCarthy better-dead-than-Red witch-hunts of the 1950s, it's a resonant idea that's been remade officially three times (the best being Philip Kaufman's chilling 1978 take, the weakest 2007's badly compromised The Invasion) and ripped-off in countless productions, but Siegel's film is still a corker, with McCarthy's tightly wound lead performance doing a great job in selling the existential terror of becoming a mindless, emotionless cog in an endlessly grinding machine that only exists to propagate and spread like a malign disease, leaving no room for love, affection, humor...all those pesky emotions that make us truly human. Sporting a terrific score by Carmen Dragon, this remains the cream of the crop of 50s paranoia.

[Monterey Jack]

Comely cadavers...

25.) The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935): 10/10

26.) Corpse Bride (2005): 10/10





Marriages that cross the boundaries of grave fill today's terrorific twofer. The Bride Of Frankenstein picks up right where director James Whale's 1931 classic Frankenstein left off, with Boris Karloff's woeful Monster emerging from the charred wreckage of the flaming windmill where he supposedly met his fate still smoking and none too happy. Wandering the countryside as a persecuted wretch, he learns the vestiges of human speech from a blind hermit in the woods, and a chance encounter with Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) in a freshly raided crypt leads to a reckoning with his creator, Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive), who is working with Pretorius to create a mate for the Monster and alleviate his terrible loneliness.

Arguably the earliest sequel to top it's already great predecessor, Bride is the apex of the "Universal Monster" cycle of the 1930s and 40s, full of gorgeously gloomy and atmospheric B&W imagery, a marvelous Franz Waxman score and Karloff's alternately frightening and achingly emphatic turn as the oddly childlike Monster. And despite having barely two minutes of screentime, Elsa Lanchester's performance as the titular Bride remains iconic, with her electric, two-toned bouffant and darting, birdlike movements (her first look at her intended beau elicits one of the most piercing shrieks in horror history). It doesn't get any better than this.

Meanwhile, Tim Burton's charming 2005 stop-motion animated feature concerns the betrothal between Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp) and Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson), whose looming nuptials is hoped will rescue their families from financial destitution. Fleeing from their wedding rehearsal in a panic, Victor practices his vows by placing the ring on the gnarled branch of a tree...but then said "branch" reaches out of the ground to grasp his wrist with a forceful tug. He finds it's actually a hand attached to Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), a perversely alluring corpse buried in a shallow grave who spirits away Victor to the Land Of The Dead, where she shows off her freshly-minted husband to her fellow deadites. Now, Victor finds himself literally tugged between Heaven & Hell, not wishing to break the unbeating heart of Emily yet still knowing he belongs to the Land Of The Living, where he intends to return and keep his martial promise to Victoria.

Gorgeously animated, sporting a spirited song score by Danny Elfman (who also provides the raspy vocals of Bonejangles, proprietor of the Ball & Socket Lounge, where he performs the jazzy showstopper "Remains Of The Day") and an impeccable voice cast, Corpse Bride is one of Burton's most purely entertaining films, brimming with ghoulishly witty visual gags and a story that generates true sympathy for both of its leading ladies and the hard decision Victor must make between them (with a genuinely affecting conclusion). Delightful spooky season fare for the whole family