54.) Piranha 3DD (2012): 3/10



A year after a school of ravening Piranha fish turned a resort at Lake Victoria, Arizona, into an orgy of bloodletting, they've bubbled up into a new lake near an water park run by a duplicitous David Koechner and his stepdaughter (the charming Danielle Panabaker from TV's The Flash, always stuck in genre crap like this and the lousy 2009 Friday The 13th remake), and once again they're chewing off feet, arms and...other appendages, in this utterly rote sequel to Alexandre Aja's entertaining 2010 remake of Joe Dante's 1978 favorite. But, lacking Aja's sicko penchant for imaginative grue, 3DD only lives up to its title with its bevy of unclothed mammaries presented in the eye-popping third dimension that cannot be appreciated on its gimmicky level due to the extinction of 3D-capable TV sets. What's left is a soggy noodle of a horror/comedy, neither frightening or funny, padded out to a scant 82 minutes with an endless end-title crawl full of lame outtakes (with David Hasselhoff cashing a check as Himself, playing the park's celeb lifeguard and giving about as much of a sh!t about his job as the filmmakers did about theirs). Throw this one back and watch the original...uhhhh, remake again.

55.) The Ward (2010): 5/10



A disturbed young woman, Kristen (Amber Heard), is discovered at a remote farmhouse she's set ablaze, circa 1966. She's remanded to the care of Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris), the head administrator at North Bend Psychiatric Hospital, where she meets a disturbed Cuckoo's Nest of fellow inmates (Lyndsy Fonseca, Mamie Gummer, Danielle Panabaker, Laura-Leigh), all of whom are in mortal terror of "Alice Hudson", a ghoulish specter haunting the antiseptic hallways and who seemingly intent on killing them all to make right a terrible injustice of the past. Can Kristen unravel the mystery before she becomes the next victim?

The final (to date, and that's unlikely to change at this point) theatrical feature from John Carpenter, The Ward is a reasonably well-crafted old-school spook show, and Heard makes for a compellingly fractured heroine, but the screenplay (by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen) is one of those that culminates in a Big Twist that seasoned genre fans will probably suss out long before the final reveal...and it doesn't help that its one that's awfully similar to the climax of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, which came out around the same time. It's not Carpenter's worst film (his lousy remake of Village Of The Damned is my pick for that particular booby prize), yet it's a wan coda to a decades-long career as one of our preeminent horror maestros, easy enough to sit through yet leaving little behind to stick in the mind.

56.) Smile 2 (2024): 8.5/10



Fiendishly effective sequel to the unexpectedly successful 2022 hit opens with a superbly staged prologue where Kyle Gallner's cop from the original makes a spectacularly botched attempt to purge himself of the curse that rampaged through the original. We then cut to the story of pop singer Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who's making a career comeback a year after a car accident -- yoked to her alcoholism and drug abuse -- claimed the life of her actor boyfriend Pau; Hudson (Ray Nicholson, Jack's son, who does a neat evocation of his dad's famed Kubrick Glare) and left her nursing scars both physical and emotional. But when she tries to procure painkillers on the sl from an old high school friend, he greets her at the door of his apartment by holding a samurai sword to her throat, gibbering seeming nonsense about being haunted by a terrifying presence...right before he graphically beats his face to a pulp with a barbell weight, never losing the inexplicable grin on his ruined visage. Understandably traumatized by the incident, Skye has to keep her involvement on the down low so as not to endanger her comeback tour, but soon she's being bedeviled by that same sinister leer from her family, friends and fans, and finds her grasp on reality beginning to slide into an abyss.

Finn Parker returns for writing and directing duties on this surprisingly good follow-up, a sequel that never breaks from lore established in its predecessor, yet he has that enviable gift of knowing just how long to hold a shot, when to cut away, and how to orchestrate a soundtrack full of hushed silences and goinging, distorted musical cues to keep the viewer in a state of consistent anxiety. And Scott does as impressive a job as Sosie Bacon did in the original in making her lead characters into a fragile shell of neurosis, ready to crack under the constant strain of never knowing where objective reality ends and subjective terror begins. I'm all for seeing the series continue if Finn continues to direct, especially given the grand ominosity suggested by its final images.

57.) Black Friday (2021): 5/10



On Turkey Day, a gaggle of harried toy store employees (including Devon Sawa, Michael Jai White, former Pan's Labyrinth moppet Ivana Baquero and Bruce Campbell, back in S-Mart territory, as their simpering manager) find themselves harried even further when a meteor shower brings down alien spores that infect the customers, turning them into ravening, goo-spewing monsters. Typical horror/comedy hybrid that have spawned like rabbits in the streaming era (especially around this time of year), Black Friday has some reasonably good practical makeup and creature effects, yet it's never especially scary or funny, and for a movie featuring The Chin, that's downright unacceptable.

58.) American Werewolf In Paris (1997): 1/10



A trio of boorish American tourists (played by Phil Buckman, Vince Vieluf and an excruciatingly gawky Tom Everett Scott) are gunning to get laid in Gay Paree, and when Scott's Andy McDermott bungie-jumps off the Eiffel Tower in order to save a suicidal young woman named Serafine (Julie Delpy), he gets drawn into a gaggle of werewolves to lure unwary Americans into themed parties that turn into orgies of bloodletting and carnal feasting.

Godawful "Sequel" to 1981's An American Werewolf In London (it's more of a remake...despite a "based on original characters" credit for John Landis, it has no connection to it whatsoever aside from doing lame riffs on its signature moments) may be one of the worst follow-ups to a classic horror movies I've seen since...God, Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf perhaps? This is rife with hilariously bad CGI, comedy that never works, scares that never deliver, inept filmmaking, risible acting...it is, how you say...? Quite 'orrible.

59.) Talk To Me (2023): 7/10



A group of Aussie teens get their hands on a...hand, a porcelain one with mysterious inscriptions scrawled across every inch. When they clasp hands with it and intone the words "I let you in", they're suddenly possessed by spirits from the other side, ones that cause their eyes turn jet-black as they gibber and howl and speak of horrible things from before their deaths. Naturally, being dumb horror-movie teens, they treat this supernatural force like the Ice Bucket Challenge, or ingesting Tide Pods, goading each other to hold on longer and longer, to dive deeper into the unknown. When young Riley (Joe Bird) holds on too long, and repeatedly slams his face into a table before trying to excise his own eyeball, his friend Mia (Sophie Wilde), who instigated him to hold on due to hearing the voice of her dead mother issuing from Riley's mouth, is wracked with guilt, and she and Riley's sister Jade (Alexandra Jensen) must find a way to help Riley make out back into his body and expel the self-harming spirit that has taken possession of his body and mind.

Directed and written by brothers Danny & Michael Philippou, Talk To Me is an eerie little number, with excellent use of sound design and some shuddery spasms of self-inflicted violence that will make even seasoned gorehounds wince. Yet it's a tad on the slight side, never really explaining the hand's origins or exactly what the spirits that the teens use the hand to channel are. It basically plays like an extended episode of an anthology TV series, and for all its pleasurable craftsmanship and effective performances, it's never quite as great as it hints it could have been. Still, definitely work a look.

60.) Them! (1954): 8.5/10



All those Atom Bomb tests in the 1940s have borne bitter fruit, and mutated common ants into nine-foot long horrors that are roaming the deserts of New Mexico, attacking the unwary and causing the local police (including stolid James Whitmore) U.S. government (including a pre-Gunsmoke James Arness) and the best scientific minds available (including Edmund Gwenn and Joan Weldon) to band together to find a way to destroy the hive of hideous insects before they can go forth and multiply, turning humanity into second banana on the food chain.

Arguably the apex of the 1950s "Big Bug" sci-fi/horror cycle, Them! is terrific stuff, with efficient direction from B-movie specialist Gordon Douglas and a taut score from Bronislau Kaper that keeps the film's somewhat wooden paper-mache bugs nice and scary. One has to imagine James Cameron had this movie in the back of his head when he was writing the screenplay to Aliens decades later. This also has more Wilhelm Screams in it than probably any other film in history. Look fast for a pre-Spock Leonard Nimoy.

Monterey Jack wrote: ↑Sat Oct 19, 2024 9:32 pm Arguably the apex of the 1950s "Big Bug" sci-fi/horror cycle, Them! is terrific stuff, with efficient direction from B-movie specialist Gordon Douglas and a taut score from Bronislau Kaper that keeps the film's somewhat wooden paper-mache bugs nice and scary.

Them! is the Citizen Kane of giant atomic mutation movies. Agreed on all points. For a Saturday matinee B-picture, the casting is pretty uptown, with Edmund Gwen and James Whitmore on hand (as well as future TV icon James Arness). Kaper's score is also high-class, even exquisite, and his cue for the finale of the film just nails it perfectly.

Caveat Emptor...

61.) Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983): 7/10

62.) Needful Things (1993): 7.5/10





Let the buyer beware today's pair of crooked salesmen. Something Wicked This Way Comes tells the tall tale of Green Town, Illinois, where a new carnival has set up stakes in a nearby field. There are rides, games of chance, beautiful gyrating ladies in the adults-only tent...but mostly what's for sale are the deepest desires of the townsfolk, and the carnival's purveyor, Mr. Dark (a silky, charismatic Jonathan Pryce) will give them to the people...in exchange for their immortal souls. It's up to young Will Halloway (Vidal Peterson) and his best friend Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson), as well as Will's elderly father Charles (Jason Robards) to put Mr. Dark's carnival out of commission and save the town.

Adapted by Ray Bradbury from his acclaimed fantasy novel and directed by Jack Clayton (The Innocents), Something Wicked This Way Comes has much to recommend it, with Stephen H. Burum's cinematography giving the proceedings a lovely, autumnal atmosphere and James Horner's spirited score (replacing a beautiful but more morose and static effort from Georges Delerue) giving the movie a needed jolt of energy. That said, for all of its surface pleasures, it can never come close to matching the evocative prose of Bradbury's novel, inserting a lot of fancy special effects that seem tacked on in post. The movie is never less than watchable, but you sense a richer version may have existed before Disney started picking the movie to pieces in post-production.

One of Mr. Bradbury's biggest fans, Stephen King, did his own riff on Something Wicked with his novel Needful Things, adapted to the screen by director Fraser C. Heston (son of Charleton) and screenwriter W.D. Richter. In King's recurring small town of Castle Rock, Maine, the new store Needful Things ("You won't believe your eyes!") is about to open, and soon the populace finds a cornucopia of knickknacks that speak to their greatest desires. But the store's owner, a Mr. Leland Gaunt (Max Von Sydow), doesn't merely want cash for his little trinkets, oh no...he also asks each customer to perform for him...a deed. A "harmless" little prank aimed at another person within Castle Rock, pranks that begin to escalate in frequency and fervor, gradually inciting the townsfolk into a maelstrom of malice against each other as Mr. Gaunt drinks in the unhappiness and violence like it was mother's milk itself. Can Sheriff Alan Pangborn (Ed Harris) get to the bottom of it all before the town tears itself to pieces around him?

Needful Things is a black-comic souffle that showcases man's inherent greed and vanity, how one's grasp of personal property can drive the owner to increasingly irrational extremes in order to keep it, and it's spanked along by Sydow's delightful performance as the perpetrator of all that bad juju. A mischievous twinkle in his eye, he's clearly having the time of his life making this silliness go down with a wink (there aren't many actors who could deliver a line like, "Oh, you wussy...!" like it were penned by The Bard). The rest of the cast has juice, too, with great character turns from the likes of J.T. Walsh as a paranoia-ridden town selectman and Amanda Plummer as the town oddball. The only real flaw is not being able to stuff all of the incidents from King's massive tome into a two-hour timeframe. Richter does as good as a job under the circumstances as he can, but you never get a sense of the sheer enormity of the various cross-cutting pranks that the book delivers. A three-hour cut of the movie assembled for cable TV in the mid-90s rectifies this to a degree, but the edits for basic-cable consumption (as well as an awful, upscaled transfer of it on Kino's 4K release) makes it more of a curiosity than anything else. Still, the movie is consistently fun, with Patrick Doyle's playfully sinister score adding to its nice technical gloss.

63.) Inferno (1980): 7.5/10

64.) Dario Argento's Dracula (2013): 2.5/10





It's-a me, Dario! Two films from the Master Of Terror from his most fruitful 1970s/80s prime and an example of how badly he tailed off after the 90s. Inferno, the second of Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy (preceded by 1977's Suspiria and concluded by the belated 2007 entry The Mother Of Tears), is a typically stylish (and quasi-incoherent) fever dream about three witches, and the houses that all three built in different parts of the world, leading a poet (Irene Miracle) and her musicologist brother (Leigh McCloskey) to investigate their origins, leaving to a spree of murder and mayhem.

Not nearly as accomplished as Suspiria (which, once I had acclimated to its surreal charms, honestly scared the hell out of me), Inferno, like much of Argento's work, makes less sense the more you try to suss out What It All Means, so your best bet is to simply groove to its wavelength of atmospheric dread, with lurid, saturated colors and Keith Emerson's throbbing soundtrack keeping you in a pleasurable state of directionless anxiety. This will probably work better on a second viewing, but even the first time around, there are ample spurts of imaginative gore to keep the viewer happily occupied.

Dario Argento's Dracula (also known as Dracula 3D...yes, this did come out in the early 2010s), in comparison to Inferno, is narratively coherent but utterly bereft of anything to distinguish itself from the hundred or so other movies that have been adapted from Bram Stoker's novel. This is, simply put, embarrassingly bad, with lousy acting (with a strikingly uncharismatic turn as Drac by Thomas Kretschmann and even the great Rutger Hauer left with nothing interesting to play as Drac's nemesis Van Helsing), logy pacing and ridiculously poor special effects. The F/X are so bad and low-rent you half-expect to see Stephen Sommers' name attached as director. Was there no money left after a wan 3D conversion that gives you no good pop-out effects whatsoever? Even that lame version of Phantom Of The Opera that Argento made in 1998 had more to recommend than this, and that one sucked. While it's nice that Argento has kept working into his 80s, he has barely any good credits since the 80s, and Dracula 3D makes you want to take off your polarized specs and throw them at the screen.

65.) Stagefright (1987): 4.5/10



A serial killer escapes from the boobyhatch and hitches a ride to a nearby soundstage, where a stage play about a rape victim turning the tables on her attacker(!) is currently under stressful dress rehearsal. Soon, the cast and crew members find themselves fighting for their lives for real as they're picked off one by one by the killer (who disguises himself with a giant owl head!). Workable enough premise for a meat & potatoes slasher flick, but this Italian production is given plodding treatment by director Michele Soavi, with off-the-rack gore effects and a lack of tension. Go watch 1991's Popcorn instead of a much more enjoyable riff on the idea of a killer run amok in a theater setting.

Indy Jones' worst nightmare...!

66.) Venom (1981): 7/10



A trio of would-be kidnappers (maid Susan George, chauffeur Oliver Reed, ringleader Klaus Kinski) target the grandson (Lance Holcomb) of a wealthy hotel owner (Sterling Hayden), but -- wouldn't you know it...? -- find themselves trapped inside the flat of their hostages first by the impulse killing of a police officer, and then by a black mamba snake(!) that accidentally got swapped for the kids' harmless pet reptile, which terrorizes them within while the cops (led by a taciturn Nicol Williamson) fortify their positions outside and negotiate for the release of the innocents inside. A remarkably dumb premise for a thriller, with the snake worming its way through the heating ducts like a scaly Bruce Willis ("Now I know what a TV dinner feels-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s like...") to strike out unexpectedly with his virulently venomous bite (ask Elle Driver to relate just how long the average person has once bitten), but it's directed with efficient skill by Piers Haggard and Kinski and Reed (working himself into his typical sweaty apoplexy) treat it with as much overwrought enthusiasm as they can muster, assisted by an excellent, early score by Michael Kamen that juices up the proceedings nicely. It's Die Hard meets Snakes On A Plane, and it's silly but fun, with a handful of genuine squirmy jumps along the way,

67.) Maniac Cop (1988): 7.5/10



Random, innocent people in New York City start getting brutally murdered by a killer clad in police uniform. The populace is driven into a frenzy of fear against the Boys in Blue (one woman, approached by an officer when her car overheats, pulls a gun from her purse and puts a bullet in his head with little provocation), so it's up to Lieutenant Frank McRae (Tom Atkins) and under-suspicion beat cop Jack Forrest, Jr. (Bruce Campbell, baby), to investigate the killings, which may be tied into a cop (Robert Z'Dar, he of the brick wall jawline) sent to prison and left for dead after getting shivved in the shower. Was he only mostly dead, and is expressing his rage at the little people before working his way up to the Mayor (Richard Roundtree), or is he a supernatural force, hiding behind his dress blues and shield as he metes out bloody frontier Justice on the streets?

Scripted and produced by B-movie schlockmeister Larry Cohen and directed by William Lustig, Maniac Cop is a good example of how cop movies in the 1980s became so sleazy, violent and sensationalistic that they were only a step removed from outright horror flicks, and is good, scuzzy fun, with enthusiastic spurts of brutality and committed performances from genre stalwarts Atkins and Campbell (playing a rare "straight-man" role), plus efficiently slick direction from Lustig. Look for Sam Raimi as a reporter.

68.) A Nightmare On Elm St. (1984): 8/10



Took in a 40th(!) anniversary screening of the kick-off to New Line Cinema's biggest franchise until the Hobbits came along tonight. Wes Craven's original film remains one of the best of the series. The teens that live on Elm St. are experiencing vivid nightmares, all haunted by the specter of a horribly burned man clad in a ratty striped sweater, a jaunty fedora, and a right hand with fingers that end in razor-sharp talons. But this is no placid Edward Scissorhands of the dreamscape...he's the spirit of "Fred" Krueger (Robert Englund), a child molester let off the line by slipshod police work who was hunted down by the enraged parents of the area and burned alive. Now he's back to meet out some supernatural revenge against the children of those responsible, with Nancy Thompson (the ripely beautiful Heather Langenkamp) as the film's designated Final Girl who has to bring his reign of somnambulant terror to an end.

Like a lot of 80s horror movies that kicked off a franchise, Nightmare has yet to be laden down with the corny, rimshot jokes that would become a trademark of the sequels to come, as Freddy transmogrified from figure of fear to prankish clown, and Craven delivers some shivery, surreal imagery that lingers in the mind even decades later (like Freddy's face and hands bulging out of the wall behind the headboard of Nancy's bed as she slumbers). And while the acting is fairly stilted at best (Langenkamp given a memorable howler, staring at her sleep-deprived face in the mirror and flatly intoning, "Oh God, I look twenty!"), the film generates a palpable sense of dread and some great death scenes (baby-faced Johnny Depp, receiving an "And introducing..." credit, gets an extremely spectacular exit). While it's not the absolute best of the series (Chuck Russell's third entry, Dream Warriors, is the apex), it's still one of the imaginative high points of the 80s slasher-movie cycle.

Mike's a FlanaFan of both...

#69 The Haunting (1963): 9/10

#70 The Innocents (1961): 10/10





A pair of classy B&W chillers -- that would later inspire a pair of recent Netflix miniseries adaptations of their respective source materials by director Mike Flanagan -- were on deck for today. The Haunting is about an investigation into the legendary Hill House, and the spirits that supposedly lurk within the canted maze of corridors that make up the interior -- led by Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson), who assembles a pair of women with psychic abilities, brashly flirtatious Theodora (Claire Bloom) and skittish wallflower Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris), along with the heir to the house, Luke Sannerson (Russ Tamblyn). Dr. Markway wants to scientifically prove the existence of life after death, Theodora ("Theo" to her friends) is there for kicks, Luke just wants to look over his inheritance and estimate the value of the house and the contents, while Eleanor finds herself frightened by the portentous rumblings, bangings and moanings within yet feeling oddly like she's come home. Can this quartet of questing people stave off madness while proving the tall tales that have sprung up around the house's sad history are not just superstitious folklore?

Directed by Robert Wise and adapted from Shirley Jackson's superb novel The Haunting Of Hill House by screenwriter Nelson Giddings, The Haunting utilizes every trick in the book to suggest the presence of hovering spirits and psychic turbulence while showing the audience virtually nothing aside from an ominously bulging door and a few strategic puffs of frozen breath. There's an expert usage of odd, distorted camera angles, creative lighting (like how the floral pattern on a wall slowly transforms into a slack, leering face) and Humphrey Searle's evocative score to keep the viewer in a state of elegantly sustained unease throughout. There's also a strikingly blatant lesbian subtext in the "sisterly" bond that forms between Theo and Eleanor that's particularly noteworthy given the restrictive social mores of the era in which the film was produced (1999's cloddish, F/X-crammed remake, directed by Jan De Bont, was far more upfront about it, with a vampy Catherine Zeta-Jones taking on the Claire Bloom role). For those who prefer their Halloween chills on the subtle, atmospheric side, this is about as good as it gets.

The Innocents, however, is even better, a superb adaptation of Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw (by screenwriters William Archibald, John Mortimer and Truman Capote) that follows young Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), who accepts a position as governess at the remote Bly Manor by Michael Redgrave, the uncle of a pair of young wards, Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin), left orphans after the recent deaths of their parents. She's to oversee their care and education after the death of the previous governess, and, at first, the job seems idyllic, the children perfectly charming and the grounds around the manor house teeming with rural beauty. But Miss Giddens soon is beset with visions of the former valet, Peter Quint (Peter Wyngarde) and governess, Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop), hauntingly mute figures that only she can see. Are these spectral visions looking to override the spirits of the two children and take over their bodies for themselves, or is Miss Giddens simply in the midst of a break with reality?

Directed by Jack Clayton, The Innocents is a brilliant psychological pressure-cooker, with magnificent cinematography by the great Freddie Francis and a spooky score by Georges Auric (which includes the unforgettable lullaby "O Willow Waly" that recurs throughout), but it's Kerr's performance that really makes the film work, carefully shading her characterization so that the audience is never quite sure if she's seeing actual ghosts, or else it's all in her head. And the performances by the two children are equally up to the task, with Stephens (who portrayed the ringleader of the terrifying tots in the horror/sci-fi classic Village Of The Damned) especially good at suggesting a teasingly adult personality trying to hide inside of a child's body (with a scandalously less-than-chaste kiss between him and Miss Giddens that's startling even today).

While the pair of recent Netflix miniseries that were born of both movies are great in their own rights, both of these films remain tight, concise creepfests that retain their power to generate dread over sixty years later.