Slightly off-topic but I couldn't resist passing along this funny reminiscence by Stephen Fry about his acquaintance with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee...

-The Phantom Of The Opera (1962): 7/10



Solid Hammer take on the venerable literary chestnut is sumptuously produced and well-acted, but lacks a certain "oomph". Maybe because certain expected payoffs kind of trail off unresolved or are handled so abruptly as to leave the viewer unsatisfied. Herbert Lom plays the titular Phantom, haunting a turn-of-the-century London opera house to see that his life's work -- stolen by the uncouth Lord Ambrose, played by Hammer mainstay Michael Gough -- is realized to its fullest extent. This results in him at first sabotaging the forthcoming opera with acts of petty vandalism and even murdering a stagehand before he starts courting a talented ingenue (Heather Sears) with whispered advice from the shadows, before kidnapping her and whisking her away to his watery, subterranean lair. Involving most of the way, the climax fumbles payoffs that should have crackled, like the Phantom's confrontation with the larcenous Lord Ambrose, which is such a "That's it?! moment it deflates everything that comes after (not to mention the Phantom's eventual fate). A good, well-made film that could have been better.

-Deranged (1974): 1.5/10



Awful take on the notorious Ed Gein murders (which also inspired Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) features grizzled character actor Roberts Blossom (who was probably born looking forty-five) as a Mama's Boy who can't accept that his dearly departed mother (Cosette Lee) is really gone, so he digs up her rotting bones a year later and decides to patch her up, using the bodies of several nubile (and not-so-nubile) female victims as material. Aside from an early makeup credit for Tom Savini, this is trash...poorly-made, badly-acted, more dull than anything else.

-Motel Hell (1980): 5/10



Half-baked, almost-effective take on that obligatory horror subgenre, the Creepy Hotel Movie, this feature that fellow who's always standing and walking, Rory Calhoun, as the proprietor of the titular hotel (the "O" of which in the second word of the neon sign constantly flickering on and off) as well as a successful meat-smoking business, but it takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent's fritters, which are tended in a hidden garden that's the movie's one legitimately surreal and unnerving concept, its occupants gargling and croaking in almost-understandable voices as Farmer Vincent and his beastly sister (Nancy Parsons) tend to them with loving care. aside from that memorable visual, the movie is your typical piece of 70's grindhouse schlock, where you're never quite sure if it's supposed to be darkly funny or else just inept filmmaking. It's also about fifteen minutes too long, considering the reveal of that startling garden takes place far too soon in the narrative, leaving the movie with nothing else that comes close to its eerie effect. Not a terrible film, but also not very good.

MJ I really have to say you have outdone yourself with this thread this year. Great reading and suggestions whether we all agree or not on the titles in question. Thanks for contributing! I hope to add a few this week.

AndyDursin wrote:MJ I really have to say you have outdone yourself with this thread this year. Great reading and suggestions whether we all agree or not on the titles in question. Thanks for contributing! I hope to add a few this week.

Thanks...this thread is one of the things I most look forward to every year, and is one of the things writing-wise I'm most proud of. I doubt I'll ever be able to make any sort of living writing about film, but as an obsessive/Asperger's hobby, I find the annual Halloween thread to be enormously cathartic.

-The Awakening (2011): 7.5/10



Classy British chiller about a young, career-minded woman named Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) who -- after losing her lover in WWI -- spends her time debunking the afterlife and those who claim the ability to channel spirits as con-artists and fakers. And yet when a polite yet determined man (Dominic West) comes to her with tales of the ghost of a young boy who has been haunting the sprawling, remote boarding house he teaches at for over twenty years. Florence travels there to once again use up-to-date science and criminal detection techniques worthy of Sherlock Holmes to ferret out what she assumes is yet another elaborate hoax, and yet she finds her disbelief in the afterlife slowly eroding as incidents that defy all possible logical and rational explanation continue to occur and grow steadily more inexplicable and frightening. Shot in wintry, color-deprived tones and set to a sinuously elegant score by Daniel Pemberton, The Awakening builds dread and suspense with a slow and steady hand, but when the narrative cards are finally laid on the table, you might find yourself flipping through them in retrospect and thinking, "Waitaminute..." Yep, it's another Rod Serling Big Twist Special, and while it honestly caught me by surprise, I'm not sure (at least on my first viewing) how much water it holds. That aside, this is a handsome production, and Hall delivers a fine leading performance.

-Carnival Of Souls (1962): 7.5/10



Eerie film about a young woman named Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) who is the lone survivor when the car she's in during a spur-of-the-moment drag race loses control and plunges through the guardrail of a bridge and into the fast-running river below. Shaken by the experience, she accepts a job in Utah as a church organist, but finds herself drawn inexorably to a strange, long-abandoned lakeside pavilion, where strange, dark-eyed figures gather and waltz and frightfully beckon to her. It's not at all surprising where this is all going narratively (if you've seen the classic Twilight Zone episode "The Hitchhiker", or a certain blockbuster Big Twist movie from the late 90's, you'll know), but the film nevertheless exhibits a haunting, surreal tone that sucks you right in, with a cunningly bland, workaday visual style (director Herk Harvey made hundreds of educational and industrial films, the kind that were common fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000) that doesn't need to be gussied up with swooping camerawork or fancy editing tricks in order to keep the audience's attention. It's not quite a great film, but you can see how much striking influence this has had on countless movies since.

Monterey Jack wrote:I doubt I'll ever be able to make any sort of living writing about film, but as an obsessive/Asperger's hobby, I find the annual Halloween thread to be enormously cathartic.

We're all obsessive around here!

I'm sorry I have not contributed more to this thread...but the truth is I just don't own many horror films (and Netflix hardly offers any good films, horror or otherwise)!

YouTube offers up a number of horror movies for free, albeit sometimes in appalling quality. I watched The Final Terror on YouTube a few weeks ago, and it was even the Scream Factory HD version (replete with the title card warning of the multiple sources used to re-create the film). Plus, most cable "on demand" services offer a number of free movies every month, and there can be some okay horror offerings scattered about.

-Kiss Of The Vampire (1963): 6/10



Okay Hammer flick about a turn-of-the-century young couple (Edward de Souza and Jennifer Daniel) on their honeymoon whose motorcar runs out of gas (or "petrol", this being England) near the forbidding abode of a group of vampiric cultists looking to take the wife as their latest inductee. Good-looking film lacks tension and takes too long to get where it's going (despite a sub 90-minute running time), although the climax is a pretty good one worth the occasional bout of tedium.

-Stake Land (2010): 6/10



Sturdy but wholly unoriginal mashup of post-apocalypse survival tale and vampire gore-a-thon, with a mysterious drifter named simply "Mister" (Nick Damici, who also co-wrote the screenplay with director Jim Mickle) who saves a young boy (Connor Paolo) from the same grisly fate as the rest of his family following a worldwide plague of ravenous vampirism. Acting as a new father figure as well as teaching him the tricks of the vampire-slaying trade, "Mister" and the boy make their way steadily North towards the fabled "New Eden", where they hope to find a haven safe from all danger. But along the way, they run afoul of a particularly nasty group of religious survivalists called The Brotherhood (oooo, how original!), led by the charismatic Jebidia (a still-bald Michael Cerveris, who portrayed "The Observer" on TV's Fringe), who continue to dog them throughout their journey. Essentially playing like an episode of The Walking Dead with zombies swapped out for vampires, Stake Land is well-made, well-acted and bracingly gristly, and yet there's little to distinguish it from countless other films of its ilk. Certainly worth a watch, but not very memorable in the end.

-Ouija: Origin Of Evil (2016): 9/10



Talk about making a silk purse out of a sow's ear...I had little desire to see the first Ouija movie two years back, and the horrid reviews and lackluster audience response told me I had been wise not to waste my money and time on a silly cash-in to a silly board game. When I heard about Origin Of Evil, I expected an even more watered-down version of a bad-to-begin-with genre flick, and paid it no heed...until I learned that it was being directed by the gifted Mike Flanagan, who made the superb haunted mirror thriller Oculus a few years back. Having now seen Origin Of Evil, I'm kind of flabbergasted...it's akin to Superman being directed by Sydney J. Furie, and Superman IV: The Quest For Peace being directed by Richard Donner. This new prequel supposedly has barely any connection to the first film, and thus it's easy to just take it as an original effort in and of itself, and it's all the better for it. Elizabeth Reaser plays a widowed, late-1960's woman named Alice Zander who conducts faux-"seances" for clients in order to give them peace of mind about their loved ones' passing...and to make ends meet for her two daughters, Paulina (Oculus alumnus Annalise Basso, and try saying "Oculus Alumnus" three times fast) and Doris (Lulu Wilson). She considers her work to be basically harmless, a way to keep food on the table, but the bills are beginning to pile up, and she despairs to keep the house that was so connected to her late husband. But when she brings a trendy Ouija board home on a whim to add a little spice to her old routines of flickering candles and rattling tables, suddenly young Doris starts to channel spirits for real, causing the initially delighted Alice to eventually get so weirded-out that she reaches out for help to a kindly priest named Father Tom (E.T.'s Henry Thomas!), who begins to suss out what's really trying to communicate through the girl...and more. Flanagan is the Real Deal when it comes to up-and-coming horror directors (he also doubles as editor)...he has an uncanny grace and feel for knowing just how long to hold one of his sinuously elegant tracking shots, of how to elicit a jump scare without the usual, obnoxious banging and clanging and subwoofer shenanigans that make so many contemporary scary movies such an tinnitus-inducing endurance test. There's also a pleasingly retro quality to the technical aspects of the filmmaking, from the period-appropriate late-60's Universal logo that opens the film to the intentional "cigarette burn" reel-change markers that occasionally pop up to old-school visual tricks like some nice, deep-focus split-diopter shots (very vintage De Palma). It's kind of stunning how good what should have been a cheapie knock-off horror sequel actually turned out to be, proof-positive that having a director behind the camera more interested in making a movie than a release date is. Skip the original and dive right into Origin Of Evil...you won't have missed a thing. A truly exceptional movie.

^ Forgot to add that Ouija has a marvelous score by the Newton Brothers, old-school and orchestral all the way, with a memorable main theme (there's even a waterphone listed in the "instrumental solos" in the end credits!).

-A Horrible Way To Die (2010): 7/10



Early effort from the talented writer/director team of Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard (You're Next, The Guest), intercuts the narratives of a recently escaped serial killer (A.J. Bowen) and the ex-girlfriend (Amy Seimetz) who discovered his awful deeds and is trying to put her life together again with the help of a fellow member of her A.A. group (Joe Swanberg). Shot in a dreamy, handheld style, with frequent fuzzy cross-cutting between the two narrative strands that make the story sometimes hard to follow, Die is a slow-burn, and will probably be somewhat trying for seasoned horror fans left waiting for the Good Parts, but it's well-acted and builds to a payoff as surreal as it is unexpected. Worth a look for fans of the filmmakers.

"Welcome to Sesame Street. Today's word is 'Expiation'."

-The Mist (2007): 9.5/10



The movie that essentially killed writer/director Frank Darabont's promising big-screen career (and, considering that that his debut feature, The Shawshank Redemption, runs neck & neck with The Godfather as one of the most beloved films of ALL TIME on the IMDB, that's saying something), The Mist is adapted from an excellent novella by Stephen King about a mysterious mist that sweeps down off a mountaintop and engulfs a small Maine town (small Maine town? In a Stephen King story? Get outta here!), trapping a small group of people inside a local grocery store. Protagonist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) is looking only to watch after his young son (Nathan Gamble) and get back to his wife at home, but there are...things in the mist, things that snap and snarl and carry off those who venture outside the locked grocery doors while still screaming. Is it some natural phenomenon? A military science experiment run amok? Or, if you believe the word of the local spinster religious nutcase (a terrific Marcia Gay Harden), is it the work of Almighty God Himself, delivering a harsh judgment upon humanity...one that can only be cleansed by blood sacrifice? King and Darabont here are riffing on that classic Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street", where the breaking down of traditional society and all of our technological devices reduces a rational small-town populace into a pack of frightened sheep so desperate to lay blame and protect themselves that they'll grasp at any straw...even if it devolves into outright mob-mentality murder. The resulting film is raw and lacerating, filled with ugly, howling despair and pessimism, and as such, it's not hard to see just why mainstream audiences rejected this so utterly when it was first released a decade ago. But I think the film might have been afforded a measure of grudging respect...had Darabont kept to the ambiguous, Birds-like ending of King's novella (which protagonist Drayton grouses as an "Alfred Hitchcock ending" in the book). The ending he did come up with -- one that so impressed King that he claims he wishes he had thought it up himself -- is one SO shocking, so bitterly ironic, that even Rod Serling might have winced. To quote Burgess Meredith at the end of another classic TZ episode, "Time Enough At Last", one can only plaintively declare "That's not fair...it's not fair!" Indeed, it is NOT fair...but then, why do people watch horror movies to begin with? When do the traditional fairy-tale ghouls & goblins give way to a point where the story goes Too Far? Darabont, here, basically staked his career (and accepted a much-smaller budget than he would have wanted) just to keep this ending, and he paid for it, dearly. But...I respect the HELL out of him for seeing this pitch-black depiction of the worst of mankind through to it's horribly inevitable conclusion, one that ranks with Night Of The Living Dead and the 70's Invasion Of The Body Snatchers as one of the most ghoulishly effective horror movie wrap-ups in history. The Mist is hard to shake off, and is horror at its most unforgiving and bleak. If that's not your cup of tea, I can totally understand, but I wouldn't give this film up for the world.

^^^ that's quite a review.

MJ, you are writing very good reviews on this thread!