-The Witches (1990): 8.5/10



Splendid children's fare about a coven of English witches -- who disguise their bald, sore-ridden heads with garish wigs -- who hatch a nefarious plot to turn the country's populace of children into mice! Led by the Grand High Witch (Angelica Huston, in elegant Morticia Adams mode while disguised and turned into a hideous, crooked-nosed crone thanks to a remarkable makeup job when in the exclusive company of her fellow witches), they test their new potion on a young boy named Luke (Jasen Fisher), who shrinks down to rodent size and must team with his grandmother (Mai Zetterling) to foil the coven's plot at the posh seaside hotel where they're holding their sinister soiree.

Adapted from a book by that master of macabre kid's lit, Roald Dahl, directed by Nicolas Roeg, the creator of outré, art-house puzzlers like Don't Look Now, and boasting top-notch makeup and puppetry effects by the Jim Henson company (this, sadly, would be the last film done under Jim's personal supervision before his tragically too-early death shortly before the film's release), The Witches is the kind of lite horror kid's film that Little Monsters desperately wanted to be, knowing full well that a fantasy movie has to have a palpable sense of normalcy before you can start introducing the more fantastical elements. Roeg taps into the playfully mordant tone of Dahl's work, shooting Luke's now rodent-sized view of the world from vertiginous camera angles and setting the proceedings to a terrific Stanley Myers score. The only thing preventing this from being an absolute family movie classic is the ending, that softens Dahl's bittersweet coda into a Hollywood Happy Ending that seems obviously tacked-on by nervous studio execs. It's a shame that Dahl's ending (which was shot by Roeg) has never been seen outside of test screenings, and that it has never been restored via a director's cut over the last three decades, but other than that, this is a terrific film for younger children wanting something "scary" for the Halloween season that will raise pleasurable goosepimples without inducing nightmares (or, at least, not too many). A remake, directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Anne Hathaway, recently got shunted off to an imminent premiere on HBO due to Covid cutting off an intended theatrical release, but I doubt it'll match Roeg's delightful take on Dahl's source material.

Just watched the Witches the other week with my son, first time for both of us. I've never read the book. We both thought it was average at best. It had a very creepy start, which we both liked...the part about the girl getting stuck in the painting was great. But that storyline went nowhere! The movie got less scary as it went on.

Angelica Huston was good, the makeup effective, but I don't know if I'd ever rewatch it.

This was my first viewing as well, but I was more pleased by it than you were, Mike. It just reminded me of the days when family movies had some balls, and there was a distinct difference between "G" and "PG". Hell, in the 90's you had G-rated Disney movies featuring regicide with the king's son nuzzling up to his very dead corpse (Lion King) and a villain whose sole motivation is wanting to bone the heroine (Hunchback), but now completely innocuous fluff like Frozen and Zootopia get slapped with a PG rating for...what, exactly? "Rude Humor"? "Thematic Elements"? I still smirk at Tim Burton's Charlie & The Chocolate Factory receiving a PG for "Quirky Situations".

I still like The Witches but when I reviewed it last year, I was surprised how generic the film felt visually. It has a very bland design like it was a cable TV movie, especially considering Roeg's filmography.

Honestly I remember being more impressed when I saw it back in high school. It's "good" and Huston is terrific but it has a reputation amongst some fans that I don't believe it really deserves. Not something I would annually trot out but it's fine for older kids.

https://andyfilm.com/2019/09/23/8085/

-Cat’s Eye (1985): 8/10



Triplet of terror tales from the pen of screenwriter Stephen King, including “Quitters, Inc.” (James Woods as a family man so desperate to quit smoking he’ll hire the services of a sinister, mob-based service fronted by a smarmy Alan King), “The Ledge” (Airplane!’s Robert Hayes as a man goaded into navigating the five-inch ledge that runs the circumference of a high-rise building) and “General” (about the titular kitty cat – who wove his way through the previous two tales – doing fierce battle with a nasty l’il troll to save the breath of a little girl played by an E.T.-era Drew Barrymore). Director Lewis Teague (who previously made the superb adaptation of King’s Cujo) crams his movie full of in-jokes for King obsessives, and three tales – the first two taken from previously-published short stories, the last written specifically for the film – offer a solid blend of suspense and humor. Overall it’s a superior effort to the previous King anthology effort, Creepshow, despite lacking the gore of that earlier film.

-Piranha (2010): 7.5/10



Sicko remake of Joe Dante’s enjoyable 1978 Jaws rip-off from blunt-force trauma horror specialist Alexandre Aja features good sport of the year Elisabeth Shue as the comely sheriff of a small lakeside community who has to contest with a pack of ravening, prehistoric piranha fish let loose into nearby Lake Victoria when an earthquake opens up a fissure that connect it to a vast underground lake beneath it. Did I mention it just happens to be spring break, meaning there’s plenty of scantily-clad victims lining up to be fish food?

Arguably one of the top-ten goriest mainstream horror movies ever made, Piranha is repellant, exploitative trash…and that’s what fun about it. There’s no low Aja and screenwriters Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger (wah-WAH-wah!) won’t stoop to, with gratuitous shock effects, endless T&A (including a memorable underwater pas de deux between a pair of buxom, skinny-dipping babes shooting a “Girls Gone Wild”-type for a porno filmmaker played by a leering Jerry O’Connell) and in-joke cameos (like Richard Dreyfuss as a fisherman who becomes the first victim, introduced in his rowboat singing along with “Show Me The Way To Go Home” on the radio, and Christopher Lloyd as an exposition-spouting marine biologist). If you don’t have an affinity for extreme violence, you probably won’t have a good time, but for fans of this sort of thing, it’s consistently amusing, tense and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

-Summer Of Fear, aka Stranger In Our House (1978): 4/10



Flat-footed TV movie from director Wes Craven about a young woman, Julia (Lee Purcell) left orphaned when he parents perished in a car accident, and who is taken in by her grieving aunt (Carol Lawrence) and uncle (Jeremy Slate). She moves in and starts to insidiously take over the place, to the chagrin of her cousin Rachel (Linda Blair), who begins to discover that Julia is a witch looking to kill off anyone who gets a whiff of her true nature. Even by the standards of late-70’s television, this is weak sauce, with no suspense or surprised whatsoever (right down to a groaner of a final twist). Watch this on YouTube if you must, because the version streaming on Amazon Prime has a maddening audio track filled with loud, obnoxious pops that occur several times per minute (and it wasn’t my equipment, either).

Chills by candlelight…

-The Innocents (1961): 10/10

-Crimson Peak (2015): 10/10





Took in a pair of classy ghost stories tonight. In Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, Deborah Kerr delivers a superb performance as Miss Giddens, the new governess of Bly Manor who finds herself looking after Flora (Pamela Franklin) and Miles (Martin Stevens) at the behest of their distant uncle (Michael Redgrave). Miss Giddens are first is charmed by her two young charges, but soon she begins to intimate the children are secretly plotting against her…perhaps goaded on by the restless spirits of the manor’s previous governess and groundsman, both recently deceased under mysterious circumstances. Ravishingly shot in B&W by the great Freddie Francis, The Innocents is a psychologically fascinating depiction of either the gradual possession of the two children…or else the unravelling of Miss Giddens’ mind under a swelling madness.

The screenplay (co-written by William Archibald and Truman Capote, based on the classic Henry James story “The Turn Of The Screw”) thankfully keeps things ambiguous to the last, chilling frames, allowing the audience to interpret the film’s narrative twists and turns to their own satisfaction. It’s one of the greatest supernatural stories ever filmed, and rarely matched for sheer, mounting eeriness. Skip this year’s lousy January horror dump title The Turning, a perfect example of how to dumb down great source material like this (there’s also the new Netflix miniseries The Haunting Of Bly Manor, supervised by the gifted Mike Flanagan, which I hope to start binging soon).

One of the few films, in my humble estimation, to come close to The Innocents in recent years was Guillermo Del Toro’s tremendously underrated 2015 feature Crimson Peak. In this original screenplay (by Del Toro and his frequent collaborator Matthew Robbins), Mia Wasikowska played Edith Cushing, a forward-thinking lady living in turn-of-the-century New York who finds herself swept off her feet by a dashing suitor, Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), who, along with his severe older sister, Lucile (a brunette Jessica Chastain), whisks her away to his lavish but crumbling mansion of Allerdale Hall in Cornwall, England. After the initial glow of married life begins to fade, Edith finds herself haunted by vision of ghoulish, rotting specters, who reach towards her with gnarled fingers and pleading eyes. What terrible things occurred in Allerdale Hall’s history, and do these restless spirits carry a threat to Edith…or a warning?

One of the most beautiful horror movies in recent memory, Dan Laustsen’s cinematography is painted with bright, canary yellows, dark, mottled greens and – yes – vivid, crimson shades of red, and the atmospherically rotting hallways of Allerdale Hall are a production designer’s wet dream. Del Toro also manages the neat feat of crafting a movie every bit as romantic as it is spooky, with Wasikowska and Hiddleston striking off true sparks in a film that is gloriously, unashamedly, gushingly melodramatic (and set to a gorgeous score by Fernando Velazquez). Del Toro’s backlog of cinematic influences range wide and deep, from classic B&W haunted house chillers like The Innocents and The Haunting to those swooning Alfred Hitchcock thrillers of the 1940’s he directed for David O. Selznick (notably Rebecca and Notorious) to classic period Hammer productions (Edith Cushing’s surname is not randomly chosen) to the color-saturated work of Italian horror filmmakers like Mario Bava and Dario Argento. I can understand why the film failed to find an audience five years back – it was probably too genteel and old-fashioned for modern horror fans, and the sporadic spurts of blunt-force violence likely turned off the Merchant/Ivory crowd – but it’s a magnificent experience for those who allow themselves to get swept up in its passionate embrace.

Time for my annual response to your love of Crimson Peak: BLEEEEEEEEEEEECH

I will defend that movie for years and years. It's gorgeous.

I'm sure you will. I certainly agree it's gorgeous, it totally failed for me in terms of story and characters. And was more lurid than remotely scary.

Toro, Toro…!

-Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark (2011): 7.5/10

-Mama (2013): 8/10





Surrogate mothers find themselves fighting for their adopted children in this pair of chillers from producer Guillermo Del Toro. In Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark (adapted by Del Toro and Matthew Robbins from an unseen-by-me television movie from the early 70’s), Katie Holmes plays Kim Raphael, the younger girlfriend of Alex Hurst (Guy Pearce), who left his wife to be with her. They’re busy restoring the crumbling Blackwood Manor house in Rhode Island when Alex’s ex-wife dumps their eight-year-old daughter, Sally (adorable, chipmunk-cheeked Bailee Madison, in an emphatic performance), on the pair out of the blue. Sally is hurt, confused, and resentful of the “usurping” presence of Kim. But the wary dance between the three is pushed aside then they discover the manor house’s secret, walled-in basement, including a locked grate in the wall. After prying it open, young Sally soon starts to hear eerie, insinuating whispers emanating from inside, ones that cajole her to “play with us”. Soon, the source of those insistent voices become clear to Sally, nasty l’il hunchbacked creatures with baleful white eyes who want to sprit her away into their subterranean domain forever. Her father dismisses her wild claims as the product of a distressed child’s fancy, but Kim finds herself gradually believing her stories, and fighting to protect her from an army of skittering, malign beasties.

Directed by comic book writer and artist Troy Nixey, Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark has been burnished to an effective, high-gloss emulation of Del Toro’s floating, dreamy visual style, with lustrously atmospheric photography by Oliver Stapleton and a marvelously corrupt score by Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders that stands as some of Beltrami’s best work (sadly, it has yet to be properly preserved on CD). Little Bailee Madison makes for a sympathetic protagonist, the world of adults refusing to believe her wild stories about monsters, and the film builds to a terse climax with said monsters dragging her towards their basement domain as Holmes fights for her every step of the way. It’s not a perfect film, but it nevertheless delivers many solid chills along the way.

2013’s Mama (from It Chapters 1 & 2 director Andy Muschietti, who co-scripted with sister Barbara based on an earlier short by the two) opens with a distraught stockbroker, Jeffrey Desange (Game Of Thrones’ Nicolaj Coster-Waldau), who, at the height of the 2008 financial crash, murders a colleague at his law firm as well as his wife, spiriting away his two young daughters, Victoria and Lily, in the aftermath. Crashing his car deep in the woods during his panicked escape, Jeffrey finds a deserted cabin and is prepared to do the unthinkable when he’s taken by…something, leaving his daughters behind to fend for themselves. Five years later a pair of trackers hired by Jeffrey’s twin bother, Lucas (Coster-Waldau again) stumble across the cabin and find the two girls (played by the remarkable Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nelisse) in a near-feral state. After being discharged from the hospital, the two girls are taken in by Uncle Lucas and his rock-band girlfriend, Annabel (a gothed-out Jessica Chastain, her trademark strawberry tresses chopped and dyed into a Joan Jett ‘do), who attempt to raise them as their own…but the restless spirit of “Mama”, the spectral personification of a horrible tragedy from the past, refuses to let the children go, causing Annabel’s motherly instincts to kick in as she fights for their bodies and souls against her frightening yet mournful opponent.

Mama, like Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark, is a film that evokes producer Del Toro’s lush visual style and thematic obsessions (tragic ghosts, fluttery insects) to such a strong degree that both films have that queer Poltergeist feel, like Del Toro might have directed large swaths of them himself. This is not to denigrate the contributions of talented filmmakers like Troy Nixey or the Muschiettis, but Del Toro is one of the few “brand name” auteurs who can lend his name to a project either as a writer or producer, and have the finished project fit with Lego-brick snugness into his overall filmography instead of coming across as a crass case of cashing an easy check so a move can glom onto his street cred. Like …Dark, it’s not without its narrative shortcomings (a scene where the girls’ psychiatrist, played by Daniel Kash, visits the remote cabin where they were discovered and meets a frightening fate seems like it was inserted just to pad out the running time, and to just have someone die), and yet the tremendous. lump-in-the-throat climax is bound to leave the viewer more teary-eyed than terrified, and ends the film on such a high emotional note that it elevates everything that came before. It’s a film I’ve enjoyed more with each viewing, and while not a classic, still offers a compelling blend of scares and emotive character drama that’s very effective.

Running hot and cold…

-The Shining (1980): 8/10

-Carrie (1976): 10/10





A pair of gifted auteurs adapt the early work of horror author Stephen King, and despite sharing similarly luxe surface pleasures, both films are as far apart in emotional temperature as…well, fire and ice. The latter is represented by Stanley Kubrick’s chilly take on The Shining, the tale of a former alcoholic, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), who takes on the responsibility of being the winter caretaker of the scenic, remote Colorado hotel the Overlook as it shuts down for the season. For the winter months, he’ll be snowbound there with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their five-year-old son, Danny (Danny Lloyd) as he uses the solitude as an excuse to exorcise some personal demons and get a leg up on a new writing project he hopes to kick-start a literary career and turn his life around. But the family unit discovers that the empty, seemingly endless rooms and corridors are also home to restless spirits, ones that wish to glom onto little Danny’s “Shine” (a latest psychic gift that allows him to see traumatic events from the future or past and hear the thoughts of others inside his head as clearly as his own), using his father’s weakened, broken emotional state to bend him to their will, driving Jack over the edge into murderous psychosis.

Kubrick remains one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, a gifted visual stylist (and the new UHD has a spectacular transfer that is, in the very essence of the word, "shining")…yet he fails to probe the wounded psychological depths of King’s source material (one of the finest novels he ever penned). The book gets us into Jack Torrance’s headspace, showing a fundamentally decent man’s sanity being slowly eroded by the caustic effects of drink and the spirits that exploit that weakness to drive the already-resentful man into a full-blown killer, but Kubrick’s film remains stubbornly on the surface. The key mistake was allowing Jack Nicholson to go so wildly over-the-top in his portrayal of Torrance’s inner torments. This was the specific movie where Nicholson – one of the greatest actors of the 1970’s – went Full Jack, arching his wiggy eyebrows with audience-pleasing relish and attacking each line with an arch, spiteful venom that’s tremendously entertaining to watch, but turns his character into a one-note cartoon. Lost is Torrance’s gradual loss of identity and decency over the course of a season, here instead we get Nicholson hamming it up with method-actor furor that rarely suggests his inner turmoil. Oh to be, the film’s surface pleasures are very pleasurable…The Shining is one of the best-looking horror films ever made, and the clammy, antiseptic sheen of the visuals and the disorienting soundtrack choices make for an experience that is constantly eerie and unnerving. Yet I’ve never been able to penetrate the film to the level that Kubrick cultists have and proclaim it one of the best scary movies ever. “Sacrilege” as it might be to admit, Mike Flanagan did a better job yoking Kubrick’s technical acumen with the beating heart of King’s text in last year’s belated sequel, Doctor Sleep. The Shining is an “iconic” film that’s never less than fascinating to watch, but, as King once put it, is akin to “A big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it”.

On the other side of the coin in Brian De Palma’s adaptation of King’s first published novel, Carrie. The story of another child with a psychic gift, this time high school student Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), whose latent telekinetic abilities become enhanced with the onset of her first period…one that, mortifyingly, coincides with a post-gym class shower. Her disgusted classmates – who have always treated the shy, awkward Carrie as the school punching bag -- treat her horrified reaction to her first menstrual cycle as a joke, pelting her with sanitary napkins and cruel cries to “Plug it up!!!” Her religious harridan of a mother, Margaret (Piper Laurie), has a more violent reaction, equating her daughter’s becoming a woman with filthy, sinful disgrace. But when Carrie’s chagrined classmate, Sue Snell (Amy Irving) tries to atone for her shameful treatment of her by cajoling her boyfriend, Tommy Ross (poofy-haired William Katt), to ask Carrie to the prom, she sets the first link in a chain of events that will lead to a ghoulish “prank” that will spark off an orgy of violence and tragedy.

De Palma, like Kubrick, is a filmmaker in love with sleek, gorgeous surfaces, and his film – as always indebted to the techniques of Alfred Hitchcock – is a machine-tooled exercise in inexorable suspense, a quite literal sword of Damocles hanging over the characters until it must, inevitably, fall. And yet he digs into the masochistic woe of King’s text in a manner that Kubrick, for all his icy, cerebral brilliance, could not. Both Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie received accolades rarely bestowed upon a lowly genre like the horror movies…Oscar nominations for Best Actress and Supporting Actress. And both performers plays their roles brilliantly. Spacek makes poor, downtrodden Carrie into a figure that anyone who went through a self-loathing period in their formative teen years – no matter one’s gender, race or sexual orientation – will relate to with a deep well of empathy. And Laurie shoots the works in a grand guignol turn as Carrie’s mother, Margaret, a looming parental figure at once frightening, pitiable, and darkly funny. The scenes the two actresses share have a pungent theatrical flavor, and this, more than De Palma’s sinuous camerawork or Pino Donaggio’s haunting lullaby of a score, is what gives the film its operatic grandeur. Not just a great horror film, or a great high school film…Carrie is great CINEMA, full-stop, and is the rare “scary movie” that can movie the viewer to tears and easily as it can scare them silly. A number of wan sequels and remakes have reared their ugly heads over the last 20+ years, but De Palma’s film still burns with emotion, passion and spry filmmaking that hasn’t lost its ability to wound the viewer.

-Shivers (1975): 7/10



Parasitic slugs infest host bodies inside a luxe new Toronto apartment complex, turning the tenants into ravening sexual fiends, in this shudderingly icky early effort from Canadian horror auteur David Cronenberg. While crude by his later, more polished studio standards, Shivers (also released as They Came From Within) still offers up his trademark cerebral dissection of social mores in the guise of a gross-out B-movie, and delivers many memorable jolts, some of which pre-date later yucky genre favorites like Night Of The Creeps and Slither.

-One Cut Of The Dead (2017): 9/10



Uproarious zomcom about a Japanese film crew – tasked with a live, one-take zombie short for a new television program – who find themselves having to deal with the living dead foh realz. To reveal more would spoil much of the fun of writer/director Shinichiro Ueda’s ingeniously-structured film, so I’ll keep this short and sweet and suggest that you just rent or buy it and hit “play” with a hearty cry of “ACK-SHAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!”

DOMINION: PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST
3/10



Hadn't seen this notoriously shelved film since it premiered on DVD years ago, and my reaction to it was that I was probably too charitable in my original review. This movie isn't just "not good," it flat out stinks.

Paul Schrader was, completely, the wrong choice to helm this project -- the film is a leaden, NON-SCARY bore. He has no concept of suspense, either creating it or sustaining it. He has no sense of what makes a horror movie work -- there's zero ATMOSPHERE in this film, no sense of mounting dread or dramatic consequence. The film literally just sits there for two entire hours, shapeless and dull.

The performances aren't particularly "urgent" (Stellan Skarsgard is much better in the Harlin version) but they're passable, and Vittorio Storaro's cinematography is fine -- even if it's drenched in warm, reddish sunset hues that seem to completely play against the tone and subject matter. The problem is Schrader's total inability to bring a point-of-view and understanding of the story that made this the infamous, unsalvageable waste of time that it is.

Sure, Renny Harlin's reworked, entirely reshot "Exorcist: The Beginning" is problematic in its own way -- but it's a lot more entertaining and certainly more aligned with the film that follows it than this picture.

Ultimately, the big mistake by Morgan Creek wasn't scrapping what was here -- it was not shutting the picture down a few weeks into production and stopping Schrader before he had the chance to complete it. How they didn't see the writing on the wall until they put his final cut together is baffling.

-Jeepers Creepers (2001): 5/10



Halfway-interesting shocker about a pair of siblings (portrayed by Gina Philips and Justin Long, face frozen in Maximum Derp throughout) who, during a long car trip home following spring break, nearly get run off the road by a sinister van...only to later witness the driver dumping some ominously sheet-draped parcels down a nearby storm drain. Being Good Samaritan types, they investigate, and discover the driver has been stashing something quite nasty and incriminating down there for a long time. Suspense thrillers set on the highway always have a good sense of lonely isolation (see The Hitcher, Road Games, and the masterpiece of this particular subgenre, Steven Spielberg's television movie Duel), and Jeepers Creepers has a good, Hitchcockian buildup in the first half. But once "The Creeper" is finally revealed, despite being impressively designed and articulated, the film's suspense ebbs away. Maybe it was because I viewed this while fairly tired, but it seems like the movie barely acknowledges what the Creeper IS, or what it is pursuing the protagonists relentlessly for (aside from icing a pair of witnesses), of the "lore" behind the creature. Thus, the movie just sort of ends with little explanation as to what transpired. Maybe that was the intent, but it reminded me of a quote from Mystery Science Theater 3000, where Crow T. Robot quipped, "It is more suspenseful when you don't know what's going on".

-Gretel & Hansel (2020): 6/10



Visually-stunning take on the well-worn children's tale with the titular tots (played, respectfully, by It: Chapter One & Two's Sophia Lillis and Sam Leaky) turned out of their home by their cruel mother because of "too many mouths", and who wander in the woods for a while (including a memorable scene with the two tripping out on ill-chosen mushrooms) before coming across the domicile of a wizened old crone (horror and sci-fi favorite Alice Krige), who tempts them with all manner of enticing foodstuffs before revealing her true intent and visage. Director Osgood Perkins (son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins) takes this slim wisp of a narrative and crafts a film that's positively dripping with gorgeously-photographed imagery of fog-enshrouded trees and light slanting through tinted windows turning the inside of the crone's home into a candy-apple funhouse. That said, even at a scant 87-minute running time, Gretel & Hansel struggles to fill that time with enough narrative meat on the bones of this ancient story outline. Not helping is some dreadful, hand-holding narration delivered by Lillis in a flat monotone that pops up pretty much every second the characters aren't speaking. It reeks of studio interference, and one wishes for a version that allowed you to strip it out and let the movie's dankly-evocative visuals speak for themselves. As far as "art-house horror" goes, this PG-13 film is a fine introduction to more adventurous, patient younger viewers (think of it as "Baby's First A24 Movie"), but one wishes the painterly visuals had been yoked to a more compelling story.