Halloween Horror Marathon 2024

[Monterey Jack]

41.) Terrifier 3 (2024): 8/10



Third entry in writer/director Damien Leone's sicko slasher series finds Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) returning from the grave after five years to once again bedevil Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera), who beheaded him at the end of the previous film before his former victim Victoria Heyes gives birth to his severed noggin (yes, it's that kind of movie) and becomes the Harley Quinn to his Clown Prince Of Murder. She's been trying to recover both mentally and physically from her encounter with the capering supernatural killer, but the clues keep adding up that he's returned, and it's up to her to put Art in the ground once and for all during an eventful Christmas season.

This is the kind of movie that will only appeal to a certain subcowd of horror fans, and the fact that this latest entry is unspooling in a wide theatrical release is gonna run squeamish and easily offended viewers the wrong way, yet Terrifier 3 delivers the goods in concocting one elaborately imaginative kill after another, and realizing them with yucky, gore-gushing panache. And Thornton continues to deliver an engaging lead performance, mugging and grimacing with mute, shameless glee, making the mayhem go down with a winking bad-taste humor. If you've got a strong stomach, it's ghoulish fun.

[Monterey Jack]

42.) Five Nights At Freddy's (2023): 3/10



Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) loses his kid brother as a child when he's abducted by a stranger during a picnic, leading to a major guilt complex that's kept him from keeping a job and endangering his guardianship of his kid half-sister Abby (Piper Rubio). Desperate for employment, he accepts a night watchman position at Freddy Fazbear's, a defunct, cheeseball pizzeria that closed down in the 1980s and that has yet to meet a wrecking ball. Soon, Mike comes to learn that a series of child abductions back then led to the souls of the missing kids inhabiting the hulking animatronic figures that used to caper and sing for the kiddies back in the day, and they now wish to make Abby one of their own.

Adapting a popular video games series (unplayed by me...hell, I had never even heard of them prior to the production of this movie), Five Nights At Freddy's is a movie I'm sure plays well to its core audience of easily impressed 12-year-olds, but to a seasoned, adult horror fan, it's pretty goddamn feeble stuff, an endless series of wan jump scares and characters getting conveniently PG-13'd to death off-screen. The full-scale animatronic suits are well-realized, I suppose (and it's laudable they didn't CGI them in later), but this is the kind of movie that makes one question what The Kids These Days find scary. Yet this somehow made $300 million, so what do I know?

[Monterey Jack]

43.) The Wolfman (2010): 8.5/10



Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro), acclaimed actor on the London stage, is called back to the village of Blackmoor in the year 1891 by the death of his younger brother Ben, his body found ripped to pieces by a savage beast of unknown origin. Returning to his cobweb-festooned boyhood manor home, he's greeted by his father, Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins) and his brother's grieving widow, Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt). Determined to find out who his brother's killer is, he goes to the local Gypsy encampment in search of clues, only to get caught up in a rampage of violence as a mysterious beast tears through the community. Bitten in the melee, Lawrence's wounds -- initially pronounced mortal -- heal with stunning rapidity, causing the superstitious locals to whisper of a legendary curse now passed onto Lawrence. Now Lawrence finds himself suspected of the most terrible crimes imaginable, as London police inspector Francis Abberline (Hugo Weaving) investigates and the full moon grows bright and pregnant in the night sky...

A direct remake of the classic 1941 Wolf Man, the 2010 version is a beautifully-mounted period production by director Joe Johnston, with an unusually literate screenplay by David Self and Se7en's Andrew Kevin Walker (riffing on Curt Siodmak's screenplay) and an ideal tech crew on hand, with contributions from Tim Burton veterans like production designer Rick Heinrichs and composer Danny Elfman (providing an especially lush and propulsive score) and boasting Oscar-winning makeup by the legendary Rick Baker. Too many geeks gnashed their teeth over the usage of CGI for the mid-transformation shots (and, indeed some of them look pretty dodgy), but I prefer to look at the glass as half-full, and the final-stage makeup design is marvelously feral and appropriately frightening.

In addition, the film's cast acquits themselves admirably, with Del Toro digging into Lawrence's encroaching doom with wounded disbelief and his tentative romance with Blunt (with her fine-boned, patrician beauty, she's an ideal modern-day update of an glamorous 1940s screen leading lady) gives the movie a tragic, inevitable gravity. Hopkins hams it up with his usual glee, and Weaving provides his obligatory, charismatic deadpan. And the movie's R-rated spurts of gore will delight horror fans without tipping over into unnecessary explicitness, with several enthusiastically bloody werewolf rampage sequences superbly choreographed by Johnston (with an especially satisfying climactic fight inside the burning manor). The new 4K UHD release from Scream Factory makes this beautiful film sparkle even more, with improved color and definition.

[Monterey Jack]

44.) Invasion Of The Bee Girls (1973): 2.5/10



Men, seemingly the picture of health and vigor, keep popping up all over the small California town of Peckham, all having apparently dropped dead in the midst of (or immediately after) the physical act of love. Seems like they're literally getting fornicated to death by a coven of young women who hide their beady black eyes behind designer Foster Grants, incited to wanton actors of lust by bee-venom injections!

Scripted by a pre-Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan Nicholas Meyer, this is the kind of nutty exploitation idea that should be a lot more fun than it is, but despite loads of gratuitous nudity, it just lays there, flaccid, never erecting much interest from the viewer. It's a real boner-killer of a watch.

[Paul MacLean]

Maximum Overdrive (3/10)

Another 80s popcorn flick I never got around to until now. I guess I didn't miss much skipping it in 1986. "Minimum Entertainment" is more like it. This "horror / thriller" is neither scary nor suspenseful -- but slow-moving and static. I only partly blame Stephen King's direction -- as a first-timer he was too inexperienced to be making a picture of this scope. King would later admit "he was "coked out of my mind all through its production" and didn't know what he was doing. However I will give him points for his direction of the cast; the movie is well-acted.

I do however fault King for the story's implausibilities and his refusal to allow the characters to do the obvious. Pat Hingle has a huge arsenal in the basement of his truck stop, but what do Emilio Esevez and co. do? Waste rocket launchers on the trucks -- instead of firing-off a few bullets at the truck's tires, which would render them immobile.

This film also has what may well be the worst score ever written. True to form, Dino De Laurentiis insisted on a "popular act" -- AC/DC this time -- to create the soundtrack. Unfortunately, unlike Flash Gordon and Dune, there was no classically-trained co-composer helping to prop things up, resulting in music which does not enhance or uplift the drama -- nor more importantly provide any sense of unease, much less terror.

Laura Harrington is very easy on the eyes however (as is Yeardly Smith in her own unique way). Otherwise, this was a huge waste of time.

[Monterey Jack]

Maximum Overdrive isn't even "so bad it's good", like other King follies (Sleepwalkers and Dreamcatcher are far funnier than this), it's just boring.

[AndyDursin]

Theo got traumatized watching THE ADVENTURES OF MILO AND OTIS so the amount of horror movies I'm ever watching these days is limited to weekday/night views by myself.

MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE was one of the first R rated movies I got to see back in the summer of '86. The first 15 minutes of that were fun -- the rest of it is blah like you said Paul. King said he was coked out of his mind making it -- and it shows. This was from my 2018 review: https://andyfilm.com/2018/10/25/10-30-1 ... on-part-2/

Regrettably, “Maximum Overdrive” hasn’t aged into the guilty pleasure one would’ve hoped for, even if it’s still superior to the bulk of King adaptations that followed in the late ‘80s. While the picture does include some fleetingly hilarious moments in its first-half hour as “the machines” first stage their revolt against the world (resulting in the unforgettable moment when a soda machine wipes out an entire little league team!), it soon settles into a tedious, character-driven drama with Emilio Estevez leading an unappealing group of survivors-of-the-comet-apocalypse holed up in a North Carolina gas station. This part of the film is nearly as much fun as hanging out in an actual rest area along I-95.

Some quick comments: THE MANITOU was phenomenal fun, Paul and I watched that together years back, but I disagree about THE SENTINEL. That movie (for me) isn't so bad it's good, it's just wholly unpleasant, right down to the actual deformed people rising out of the depths at the end. Exploitive and gross, one of the worst of the major studio horror efforts of the 70s. BURNT OFFERINGS is another one I hate. lol

THE EXORCIST III I watched in Arrow's UHD the other day. As usual I find that movie fascinating and enjoyably off-kilter, and one of those studio-mandated reshoots that worked for the better (Blatty's LEGION cut just doesn't do the trick, especially in its feeble ending). I'm going backwards in that series this time around (while ignoring the Morgan Creek prequels which I didn't much care for at all the last time).

[Monterey Jack]

45.) The Deliverance (2024): 5/10



A financially strapped young mother, Ebony Jackson (Andra Day), is living with her three children Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins), Shante (Demi Singleton) and Nate (Stranger Things' Caleb Mclaughlin) and her cancer-ridden mother Alberta (Glenn Close) in a crumbling fixer-upper home in Philadelphia circa 2011. Her husband is stationed overseas, she has to cover for her mom's chemo treatments when the insurance will no longer pony up, and she has social services (personified by Mo'Nique) sniffing around to assure that her children are not being neglected or worse due to their money woes and Ebony's problems with alcohol. Yet things get much, much worse when young Andre starts speaking to an imaginary friend who "Lives in a hole" in the fly-infested basement. Soon all three kids are acting out in publicly humiliating ways, Nate is attempting to drown Andre in the bathtub, and it becomes obvious that an evil spirit is infesting their home, one that incited a previous family to homicidal violence twenty years previously.

Directed by Lee Daniels (Precious), The Deliverance boasts a strong, emphatic performance by Day, and for the first two thirds, is a reasonably compelling drama about a family stretched to the breaking point by borderline-poverty and Day's struggles between her alcoholism and her mother's newfound religious fervor, yet once it goes full-supernatural, the tension drains away. Let's face it...is there ANY way to make a demonic possession scene seem fresh and new by this point? We've seen it all...the Evil Dead makeup, the filth-coated language by little kids uttered in a corroded rasp (I sometimes think that 90% of the C-Words dropped in cinema have been spoken in Exorcism movies), the religioso mumbo-jumbo used to repel the evil spirits...it's gotten as routine as filing your taxes. And the movie's mediocre visual effects and makeup (along with Daniels' pokey, style-free direction) don't do it any favors, either. Just go watch The Exorcist or The Conjuring again.

[Paul MacLean]

38.) Lucky Bastard (2013) 5/10

I love Lukas, but I don't know what he was on about with this one. The "message" of the film is something of a head-scratcher; the opening title card moralistically condemns adult entertainment -- but the ensuing film treats the viewer to loads of busty naked women, simulated sex, and even a rape early-on (which turns out to be staged -- but is quite twisted and disturbing before it's revealed to be fake). Then we get the big climax where the villain murders a man with a dildo and savagely does away with everyone else. I don't approve of pornography, but staged sexual violence is -- to me -- more offensive (and a potentially more dangerous trigger for antisocial viewers) than scenes of people merely "doing it".

But kudos to Lukas successfully making a feature -- which is a highly difficult task for someone with limited resources (I speak from experience) but I think something more "family-friendly" might have been a better choice.

[Monterey Jack]

46.) Nope (2022): 8/10



Following a mysterious incident when his father, noted horse wrangler Otis Haywood, Sr. (Keith David) is struck in the head and killed by a coin during an inexplicable rain of debris that falls from the sky, his son, "OJ" Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) is struggling to keep the family business, Haywood's Hollywood Horses, afloat in a cinematic era where there's little call for equine performers. Even his brash little sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer) coming home to roost is not helping much. But OJ finds himself having to deal with bigger issues when he continues to catch teasing glimpses of a massive unidentified flying object gliding between the clouds over his homestead ranch nestled in a remote valley. Understandably unnerved, he and Emerald are also seeing dollar signs in their eyes, and work in tandem with a nervous Fry's Electronics employee (Brandon Perea) and gravel-voiced veteran cinematographer (Michael Wincott) in order to get the "Money Shot", incontrovertible evidence of an alien visitation of Earth.

Jordan Peele's third directorial effort, Nope is a movie that indulgently sprawls in the manner that only the director of a buzzy, out-of-nowhere smash that even garnered Oscar attention can be given leeway for (call it the Shyamalan Effect). There are times when some of the subplots seem inexplicable, like flashbacks to a horrific incident during a silly 90s kids' sitcom where one of the young stars witnessed a chimpanzee going...well, apesh!t and savagely mauling a co-star (Steven Yeun plays that same boy, decades later coasting on the notoriety of the incident and acting as M.C. of a cheesy western theme park that borders OJ's ranch), but it all ties together, somewhat, with the film's themes about the exploitation of animals in Hollywood productions and how it can go terribly wrong. The "UFO", when it's finally revealed in full after being hinted at for much of the film, even ties into the western theme park in a way, resembling nothing so much as a giant, helium-filled cowboy hat before flowering to reveal one of the most unique creature designs in recent memory (that evokes something from the deepest trenches of the oceans rather than anything you've seen in a typical "alien invasion" flick). The film isn't terribly "scary" in the manner of Peele's Get Out or the underrated Us (still his strongest effort to date), yet at times it evokes a Spielbergian "Look at that...!" grandeur, ably supported by Michael Abels' percolating score that mixes awestruck orchestral swells with old-timey Copland-esque hoedown themes. Despite its messiness in coalescing its various thematic ideas, Nope is never less than intriguing, and it remains laudable that, like M. Night Shyamalan or Christopher Nolan, Peele remains one of the new "name-brand" filmmakers who can get major studio movies greenlit that don't have to be based on an established "IP".

[Monterey Jack]

47.) Zombeavers (2014): 6/10



A sextet of oversexed twentysomethings (Rachel Melvin, Hutch Dano, Cortney Palm, Lexi Atkins, Jake Weary, Peter Gilroy) have a weekend retreat at a remote cabin in the woods, but soon come to realize that toxic chemicals have leaked into the nearby lake, turning the local beaver population into a pack of white-eyed, chittering monsters that use their buck teeth to gnash their way through fortified doors and gnaw off stray limbs (one victim totes his severed foot around in a Ziploc baggie).

Directed by Jordan Rubin, who co-wrote it with the inspired musical parodists Jon & Al Kaplan (who have "musicalized" countless classic 80s and 90s genre flicks on YouTube, as well as providing insidiously catchy jingles for the last two Terrifier movies. They also provide film score duties here), Zombeavers is a lightly amusing exercise in dumbbell horror/comedy, filled with the obligatory female genitalia jokes the title would suggest and plenty of cheesy puppetry and makeup effects. It never reaches the anarchic highs of films like Gremlins, Critters or Tremors, but it's an agreeable enough time-waster, with a handful of genuine laughs amidst the stoooooopid puns and gore gags.

[Monterey Jack]

48.) Smile (2022): 8/10



Effectively unnerving tale of Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon, Kevin's daughter, who sports her dad's nose in-between mom Kyra Sedgwick's eyes and mouth), a volunteer therapist at a local mental ward who takes charge of a new patient, brought in ranting and raving about a demonic force that only she can see...one that grins at her with a fixed leer from the faces of those around her. When she graphically slashes her throat in front of Rose's astonished eyes, it sets in motion a transference of a curse afflicting the poor woman to Rose, who is soon beset with her own visions of strangers and even loved ones giving her the same sinister smile as her sanity slowly begins to unravel under the strain. Can she and her cop-ex (Kyle Gallner) get to the bottom of the curse's origins and break the chain before Rose becomes its latest victim?

Smile, skillfully written and directed by Parker Finn (adapted from his own short Laura Hasn't Slept), is a movie that's the latest in a chain of its own of horror films treating a curse being passed along like a virus, or a chain letter from Hell (The Ring, The Grudge), but it earns its slow-burn shivers due to Finn's careful craftsmanship in setting and maintaining a mood of encroaching dread and Bacon's empathetic lead performance. Stuff like this only fully works if the leading actor can convince you that they're convinced they're slowly losing their grasp on sanity, and Bacon modulates her performance so that her descent into "You've gotta believe me...!!!" madness is just gradual enough to be plausible. The movie delivers a handful of genuine jolts along the way, and maintains a sense of inevitable doom throughout. It's also a great example of pushing back against the insidious threat of streaming, with Paramount bumping it to a wide theatrical release due to great test screenings, which lead to this modest $17 million production grossing $217 million worldwide and kicking off a new franchise (part 2 lands in theaters this Friday).

[Monterey Jack]

49.) The Convent (2000): 1/10



In 1960, a teenage girl enters a convent, pours gas everywhere, and lights it up, gleefully blasting away at the nuns and priests inside with a shotgun (set to the spangly beat of Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me"). Forty years later, the legends that have sprung up around the incident cause a generic batch of horror-movie teens (the Good Girl, the Goth Chick, the Jock Douchebag, the Virginal Geek, ect.) to spend the night in the burned-out ruins of said convent, which is swarming with the restless spirits of said nuns and priests who want to take them over and spread evil into the world, or something.

Positively dreadful horror movie is full of terrible acting, mediocre makeup, inept filmmaking and indifferent editing. The only tasty peanut buried in this smelly turd of a flick is 80s scream-queen babe Adrienne Barbeau as that same 60s teen, now a Sarah Connor-esque badass looking to jump back into the fray and slay some religious Deadite ass. Even in a movie as bad as this, Barbeau is a fountain of charisma, and it's a shame it's wasted here.

[Monterey Jack]

Frame-by-frame family frights...!

50.) The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993): 11/10

51.) Frankenweenie (2012): 8.5/10

52.) Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit (2005): 8.5/10







A trio of stop-motion animated delights today. Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (directed by Coraline's Henry Selick) certainly needs no introduction, becoming a staple of two holidays over the three+ decades. The cracked yet sweet fable of Jack Skellington (spoken by Chris Sarandon, sung by Danny Elfman, who also penned the movie's superb song score), the preeminent spookmaster of Halloween town, who nevertheless grows weary of the usual seasonal frights and pines away for something new...and finds it when he takes a tumble through a portal in a tree and lands smack-bad in the middle of Christmastown, where he becomes entranced by the color, cheer and sheer motion of this strange new world. Wanting to possess this feeling for his very own, he arranges to kidnap the "Sandy Claws" who is the world's MC and wants to replace him, not knowing that his brand of ghoulish "presents" are not what the people are quite expecting.

Gorgeously designed, animated and performed by a superb voice cast (including the recently late Ken Page as the charismatically menacing Oogie-Boogie Man), Nightmare has become a classic for good reason, and seeing it on the big screen again (in well-produced 3D, no less) is a treat.

Burton would return to stop-motion twice more in his career, the most recent being 2012's Frankenweenie (an adaptation and expansion of his own 1984 live-action short), which re-configures one of the quintessential of the 1930s Universal Monster cycle to plunk young Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) into the very 1960s-ish suburban enclave of "New Holland", where he loses his beloved dog, Sparky, and utilizes the miracle of electricity to resurrect his pooch from the Pet Sematary ("I don't want him in my heart. I want him here with me"). Soon, his fellow elementary-school science-class students get wind of his achievements, and harness the same power to return their own selected dead things to life, leading to a climax studded with sly cinematic references, everything from old Toho Gamera flicks to Gremlins to The Birds to a hilarious homage to Bambi vs. Godzilla).

As always, Burton adroitly toes the line between creepiness and cuddliness (his animated films are an ideal starting point for younger children who want to watch something "scary" for the Halloween season without anything truly inappropriate or traumatizing), and his animation team renders the inside of his imagination with supple, maddeningly detailed skill and finesse. Anyways, I'm always a sucker for a good "Boy & His Dog" story, and Frankenweenie is a particularly satisfying example.

Finally, the cracked gents at Britain's Aardman Animation Studios finally give their signature characters their own feature-length adventure (their newest, Vengeance Most Fowl, hits Netflix in a few month's time) with Curse Of The Were-Rabbit finding dotty inventor Wallace (Peter Sallis) and his faithful canine companion Gromit (expressively mute as always) running their own animal-control business, Anti-Pesto, where they're tasked with policing the gardens of the local populace in order to save their prize produce from the ravening appetites of a surplus of Alpine intruders. But when Wallace uses his "Mind-Manipulation-O-Matic" in at attempt to brainwash the bunnies out of their cravings for leafy greens, he unleashes the beast within, and soon the "Were-Rabbit" is tearing through cabbages, carrots and cauliflowers with a wanton greed as he tries to hide his new condition from his desirable customer Lady Tottington (a daffy Helena Bonham Carter) as well as Victor Quartermain (Ralph Fiennes), her foppish, would-be paramour, who's itching to put a 24-"carrot" gold bullet into Wallace's furry hide.

Like their previous short adventures, Curse Of The Were-Rabbit offers up all of the dry humor, sly in-jokes, groaner puns and engaging slapstick that have typified the work of W&G creator and director Nick Park over the past 35 years, and the plasticine animation has a funky, retro charm that can never be replaced by the sleek yet anonymous gloss of CGI no matter how many tech advances they make. Kids will laugh and be delighted, and their parents will enjoy just as much while admiring the film's technical polish on an entirely different level. "I'm just crackers for cheese! Monterey Jack, mmmm...!"

[Monterey Jack]

53.) The Ring (2002): 8/10



A cursed videotape -- one purported to kill you seven days after you've watched it -- falls into the orbit of a pair of teenage girls, one who is left dead, the other hopelessly insane. The dead girl's aunt, Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts), who makes a living as a journalist in rain-swept Seattle, Washington, utilizes her skills to investigate the origins of said videotape, and when she views it for herself, received a phone call immediately afterwards, a child's voice whispering over the open line, "Seven days..." Soon, she follows the clues to the remote island of Moesko, where she digs into a tragedy from the past that has laid tendrils into the present that threaten Rachel, her young son Aidan (David Dorfman) and her ex Noah Clay (Martin Henderson), and which looks to spread its evil ever farther.

The official kickoff of the "J-Horror" trend of the early -to-mid 2000s, where Hollywood got into the habit of remaking Japanese horror movies for the American market, The Ring is the best of the bunch, directed with elegant restraint by Gore Verbinski and bathed in Bojan Bazelli's sickly cinematography that give the movie a cumulative creepiness that gets under your skin (assisted by Hans Zimmer's effectively atmospheric, "Tubular Bells"-like soundtrack). Watts also lends the movie screamy conviction as she fights to save her son and her sanity from a restless spirit that burns with thwarted sorrow and rage.