Halloween Horror Marathon 2018

[AndyDursin]

MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE
5/10



After producing the likes of “The Dead Zone,” “Firestarter,” “Cat’s Eye” and “Silver Bullet,” Dino DeLaurentiis lured in Stephen King with the promise of directing with MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE for this fledgling DEG studio. Now, I have to confess I have fond memories of seeing this picture in theaters – it was one of the first R-rated films I was allowed to watch, thanks to my friend’s movie-buff dad, George Coombs, who reviewed movies on WKRI-AM in Warwick, RI. Mr. C received free passes to the local theater chains (General Cinema and Showcase), which allowed us to see loads of films together during my formative years, and “Maximum Overdrive” was – along with “Witness” and “Aliens” – one of my earliest R-rating movie-going experiences.

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.

Things do perk up in time for a surprisingly upbeat ending, though “Maximum Overdrive” never quite fulfills its grandiose premise of a comet causing (?) technology to run amok. We can probably attribute the problems to King himself, who later admitted he had no idea what he was doing and was coked up for much of the production, shot on location at DeLaurentiis’ Wilmington, N.C. studios.

Still a movie with a small cult following, “Maximum Overdrive” at last makes its way to Blu-Ray this Halloween as part of Lionsgate’s Vestron Video Collector’s Series. Though a movie Vestron itself had nothing to do with, the picture fits comfortably alongside the likes of past label favorites “Warlock” and “Waxwork.” The 1080p (2.35) AVC encode has more appropriate black levels than prior international releases of the title, while AC/DC’s soundtrack gets a major upgrade in the form of a pleasing 2.0 DTS MA stereo mix (an included 5.1 track is muffled and sends most of the directional activity into the center channel).

Special features are again where Lionsgate’s release shines. Two commentary tracks include discussions from author Tony Magistrale on one channel (providing a broad overview of King-flicks) with actor/comedian Jonah Ray and Blumhouse’s Ryan Turek on another. New interviews include conversations with producer Martha (Schumacher) DeLaurentiis, cast members Laura Harrington, Yeardley Smith and John Short, plus Holter Graham and make-up artist Dean Gates. Additional segments profile AC/DC’s work on the picture with band expert Murray Engleheart as well as the Wilmington locales. Finally, archival extras include behind-the-scenes footage, the trailer and TV spots, all comprising a treat for King and ‘80s genre enthusiasts alike.

[Monterey Jack]

-Cutting Class (1989): 5/10



Mediocre slasher about a teenager names Brian Woods (Donovan Leitch) resuming high school after a stint in the local mental hospital and remaining under suspicion from his classmates, as he nurses a crush on cheerleader Paula Carlson (80’s genre babe Jill Schoelen) with a lunkish jock of a boyfriend, Dwight Ingalls (played by – yes -- Brad Pitt, in one of his earliest lead roles), who used to be Brian’s best friend before the incident that landed him in the nuthouse. But soon, teachers and students are winding up dead. Is Brian off his rocker again? Tepid movie (directed by Exorcist II: The Heretic, Excalibur and The Emerald Forest screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg) can’t decide to go for straight shocks or intentional camp, and is neither fish nor foul, not well-paced or slick enough to be actually scary and with the jokes just kind of dribbling off with weak punchlines. Far from the worst of its ilk, but also not very good, only noteworthy for Pitt’s presence and for the loveliness of Schoelen.

-Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971): 5/10



Forgettable AIP fare about Rosie Forrest (Shelley Winters), a well-to-do benefactor of a local orphanage who treats the local orphans to a Christmas dinner in her luxe mansion. But when she sees little Katie Coombs (Chloe Franks), she’s forcibly reminded of her own daughter, lost years earlier in a terrible accident, and conspires to keep her for herself, much to the chagrin and increasing uneasiness of her older brother, Christopher (Mark Lester from Oliver!). It eventually blossoms into a black-comic riff on Hansel & Gretel, but the horror aspects don’t gel with the camp elements of the screenplay, and it’s all rather toothless.

Bite-sized King…

-Creepshow (1982): 7/10

-Cat’s Eye (1985): 8/10





A pair of horror anthologies from the pen of Stephen King were on-tap tonight. 1982’s Creepshow was his first collaboration with director George A. Romero (unless you count his amusing cameo in his underrated 1981 film Knightriders), a macabre riff on the playfully gruesome E.C. horror comics both men grew up on in the 1950s. Opening with a droll wrap-around segment feature Tom Atkins berating his young son (King’s son Joe, who these days is a successful novelist in his own right, writing books under the name Joe Hill) about the “crap” horror comics he favors. We’re then swept along on a series of terror tales inspired by those four-color pages. “Father’s Day” is a rote “revenge from the grave” potboiler known best for its admittedly funny punchline. “The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verrill” stars King himself as the titular, buck-toothed, cross-eyed rube, who witnesses a meteor crash-land in his backyard and dreams of fame and fortune (“I won’t take less than TWO HUNDRED dollars for it!”)…until he gets its “Meteor ****!” on his hands, and suddenly starts sprouting a mossy growth on his hands and anything else he touches, one that just…won’t…stop. Your affection for this VERY broad segment will depend on whether you find King’s cartoonish mugging hilarious, or excruciating. In the best segment, the wonderfully-titled “Something To Tide You Over”, a cuckolded millionaire (a surprisingly threatening Leslie Nielsen) discovers that his much-younger wife (Dawn Of The Dead’s Gaylen Ross) is carrying on with a local tennis stud (Ted Danson) behind his back, so he concocts a cruel punishment for the pair, driving them down to his private, secluded beach and burying them up to their necks in the sand…below the high-tide line. Amidst the campy, comic tone of the other five segments, “Tide” is the most genuinely unnerving one, with the inexorable fate awaiting both young lovers being vividly portrayed and the segment ending on the best comeuppance for its caddish villain of the film. “The Crate” features Fritz Weaver as a professor who discovers a mysterious crate – dated 1834 -- underneath the stairwell of his local college. He and a janitor curiously pry it open, only to discover what’s inside is alive…and fearsomely hungry. Weaver’s colleague (Hal Holbrook) learns of this, and thinks it an ideal way to deal with his boozy harridan of a wife (Adrienne Barbeau). This segment is good fun, and Crate occupant “Fluffy” (created by makeup wiz Tom Savini) is a doozy. Finally, “They’re Creeping Up On You” features E.G. Marshall as a curmudgeonly businessman who lives sealed hermetically into his swank, antiseptic apartment…until it’s overrun with icky cockroaches.

Creepshow is a fun, stylized exercise in anthology horror filmmaking, but at a full two hours and spread across five segments, it’s just too long and unwieldy. I could have lost the first and last segments entirely (“Father’s Day” is one “revenge from the grave” story too many, and “They’re Creeping Up On You” is more gross than genuinely scary), and the others could have used a bit of trimming. Still, flaws and all, Creepshow is good, gory fun, and the new Scream Factory Blu-Ray looks splendid and has a wealth of great new features.

In 1985, there followed Cat’s Eye, a more modest and restrained effort (it’s one of the very few theatrical King features to sport a PG-13 rating, shorn of the usual graphic shocks and foul language that typified his film adaptations in the period) from Cujo director Lewis Teague. This one runs a half-hour shorter than Creepshow, and only boasts three tales (the first two adapted from stories in King’s 1978 collection Night Shift, the third penned specifically for the screen). Winding through all three stories is the titular kitty, a feline driven by odd visions of a young girl (Drew Barrymore) begging him to save her from an unspecified danger. In “Quitters, Inc.”, James Woods delivers a terrific performance from James Woods as a man so desperate to quit smoking that he joins a strange, very exclusive clinic run by Alan King, who will punish any slides back into the nicotine habit with increasing levels of sadism aimed at Woods’ wife and young daughter (Barrymore, in the first of several roles she plays in the film), starting with mild electroshock treatments and growing steadily more sinister. In “The Ledge”, Kenneth McMillan plays another cuckolded millionaire (seems to be a trend in the Kingverse), Cressner who finds his wife is carrying on with another tennis pro, Johnny (played by Robert Hayes from Airplane!), and has him brought to his penthouse apartment, where he proposed a little wager…if Johnny can walk the ledge that winds around the building within a set period, Cressner will let him go with his life, his wife, and a bagful of cash. This segment is visually impressive, with excellent use of forced perspective and miniatures that will give acrophobic viewers a bad case of the sweats. Finally, “General” finds our feline hero finally highlighting a segment, as he finds the little girl (Barrymore) he was intended to protect, and from what…a nasty l’il troll (designed by Carlo Rambaldi, voiced by Frank Welker) the sneaks into her room through a hole in the baseboard and plans to literally steal her breath away. This segment has terrific special effects, and builds to an exciting scale-model showdown between the cat and his snarling foe.

It might be blasphemous to admit, but I prefer Cat’s Eye to Creepshow. Yeah, it lacks the usual gore that typified King movies in the 80’s, but it doesn’t really need it, and the more compact running time and fewer segments makes for a film that’s punchier, funnier and more entertaining, boasting superb cinematography by Hollywood legend Jack Cardiff and a great performance by our feline host. The only disappointment is Alan Silvestri’s cheesy electronic score, which does the movie no favors. Had he been allowed to go full Back To The Future orchestral, it would have opened the film up a little more, particularly in the last segment, where his “heroic” fanfare adds nothing to an otherwise terrific final showdown. Still, Cat’s Eye is an ideal film to introduce younger viewers to King’s cinema with.

[Monterey Jack]

Git down with the sickness…!

-The Crazies (1973): 7/10

-Dawn Of The Dead (2004): 9.5/10





Contagion spreads in today’s infectious twofer. In 1973’s The Crazies (an early effort from writer/director George A. Romero), a small Pennsylvania town becomes ground zero for a pandemic of insanity as a biological weapon unleashed from a crashed military plane seeps into the local reservoir and slowly turns the inhabitants into a pack of irrational, violent lunatics, as the military tries desperately to establish a quarantine zone around the town and find a cure. Basically a rough draft for his later Dawn Of The Dead (in its depiction of a rational slice of American citizenry slowly becoming unraveled as an ineffectual government tries to keep a lid on an inexorable spread of disease), Romero’s film is a bit on the crude side, and the acting is fairly amateurish, and yet you can already see his growing confidence as a filmmaker. The 2010 remake (from director Breck Eisner) is actually superior – there’s a better sense of harrowing, out-of-control madness and a more impressive sense of scale – and yet this film is certainly worth a view for fans of the late, great Romero, despite a very weak, anticlimactic finale.

Speaking of Romero remakes, Zack Snyder’s turbocharged 2004 version of Dawn Of The Dead is one of the top-five horror remakes ever done, and remains Snyder’s best film by a fairly wide margin. Keeping the skeleton outline of Romero’s original (survivors of a zombie outbreak hole in in a local shopping mall and await rescue) and peppering the resulting film with enough cameos and Easter Eggs to sate fans of the earlier film, Dawn ’04 nevertheless breaks fresh ground, with all-new characters and situations that make this an excellent action/horror piece in and of itself. It also boasts an impressive cast, headlined by Sarah Polley as a strong-willed nurse, Ving Rhames as a cool-under-pressure cop and Jake Webber as a rational Best Buy salesman who comes into his own as a level-headed leader. Snyder generates plenty of pulse-pounding action and suspense setpieces, and the screenplay (by future Slither and Guardians Of The Galaxy writer/director James Gunn, with uncredited punch-ups by Michael Tolkin and Scott Frank) gives us likable characters who engage in a minimum of aggravatingly stupid decision-making (going after the dog is the biggest one, and the film was going in that direction eventually). It’s a shame that Snyder hasn’t made a movie as good as this since. He’s a gifted visualist who has been allowed to slowly disappear up his own ass the more greenscreen F/X and full creative control he’s been allowed of future projects like 300, Watchmen, the wretched Sucker Punch and his deeply-misconceived take on Superman in Man Of Steel. He always gives Great Surface, but there’s usually nothing underneath that glossy sheen, with Dawn remaining the sole, shining exception. Now that the DCU is in irreparable disarray, it’d be nice to see Snyder step away from blockbuster filmmaking and try something small and modest again like Dawn. He’s got the tools and the talent, all he requires at this point is someone to tell him NO on his most florid stylistic and storytelling excesses.

[Monterey Jack]

Family-friendly frights...

-Hotel Transylvania 3 (2018): 7/10

-Monster House (2006): 8/10

-Coraline (2009): 10/10







Had a rough day, so I wanted some lighter Halloween fare. Hotel Transylvania 3 takes Dracula (Adam Sander), his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) and their various friends and family members on a relaxing monster cruise, where Drac “zings” with the comely captain Erika (Kathryn Hahn), who has a connection to his past. Like the middle seasons of a well-oiled sitcom, the Hotel Transylvania movies have, at this point, settled into a pleasurably comfortable rhythm that revolves more around familiarity than freshness. That’s not to say that this latest installment isn’t any less than entertaining…it’s ideal Halloween fare for tots and parents who groove to the film’s zingy, Tex Avery-on-crack timing (these are movies that are ALL Squash & Stretch), with plenty of great visual gags and enough heart to give them proper context, and yet, like the later Shrek and Ice Age sequels, there’s a definite sense of Deja Vu at this point. Still, it’s fun fare for kiddies and adults with a fondness for these bracingly broad Universal Monster archetypes.

Monster House, meanwhile, is a definite throwback to 80’s Amblin productions (produced by Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis and directed by Gil Kenan), where a trio of small-town kids (voiced winningly by Mitchell Musso, Sam Lerner and Spencer Locke) find out that the crumbling abode inhabited by curmudgeonly, kid-hating neighbor Mr. Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi) is not only alive, but fearsomely hungry, and that the forthcoming wave of Trick-or-Treaters will make a fine buffet unless they can put a stop to it. An early effort in the “mocap” wave of animated features, Monster House takes a bit of acclimation to adjust to the odd, “bobblehead” look of the characters and their floaty movements, but at least their stylized features lack the dead-eyed, neither-fish-nor-foul creepiness of producer Zemeckis’ other forays into the technology, and the rest of the film is dandy, with a witty screenplay (“That must be its uvula!” ~ “Ohhhhh….so it’s a girl house”), appropriately-pitched kid-friendly scares and a lively score by Trick R Treat composer Douglas Pipes.

Finally, Coraline (from Nightmare Before Christmas and James & The Giant Peach director Henry Selick, who also penned the screenplay based on the novel by fantasy specialist Neil Gaiman), is a stop-motion delight, brimming with gorgeously surreal imagery, a complex, multi-tiered story and a terrific voice cast, led by Dakota Fanning as our plucky, resourceful heroine, Coraline Jones, who tumbles, like Alice, down the rabbit-hole into a fantastic world where her literally button-eyed “Other Mother” (Teri Hatcher) beguiles her with all of the yummy food and toys and games she can stomach...but hides a feral hunger underneath. Like all of the work of Selick and production company Laika, Coraline is a film where every shot could be framed upon one’s wall, the maddening levels of carefully-sculpted detail a wonder to behold. And it’s not just eye candy, it’s also a marvelously-well-constructed fantasy that will offer up pleasurable shivers for kids and gasps of admiration from their charmed parents. A truly marvelous work of Art.

[Paul MacLean]

Dracula (1979) -- in glorious DVD!

I actually began the evening trying to watch Kurosawa's Dodeskaden on Filmstruck, but (once again) their stream cut-out, and I decided to forget it.

So, I pulled-out Dracula for another viewing ('tis the season after-all). I could have sworn I owned this on Blu-ray, but I guess not. In any case, the film holds-up very well after nearly 40 years -- and after repeated viewings. Dracula is sumptuous to behold -- especially by today's standards, from Peter Murton's sets to Gil Taylor's photography, and the beautiful English locations. Casting and performances are first-rate -- and there has never been a better Dracula than Frank Langella, who perfectly embodies the character's (often-contradictory) facets of suave charm, and cold, diabolical menace. John Williams' score is wonderfully Gothic and romantic, and boasts some of his most passionate writing.

Dracula never quite achieves "true greatness", which is odd (and a little disappointing) considering the high pedigree of all talents involved. But it remains a very watchable, engaging film, with a genuinely creepy atmosphere, and is certainly the best big screen adaptation of the story to date.

Looking forward to that expanded CD too!

[Monterey Jack]

Just a shame we'll probably never see the movie with its proper theatrical color scheme on Blu.

[AndyDursin]

Now that TT is licensing from Universal one never knows...I mean who really cares what John Badham has to say? Its not like offending Lucas, Coppola or Spielberg lol

[Monterey Jack]

It really is a confoundingly bad creative decision. Yeah, I know Badham wanted to shoot it in B&W initially, but this isn't nearly as artful as the B&W version of The Mist...and at least that film's Blu-Ray allows you to watch it in color!

[AndyDursin]

It's insulting because Badham isn't the sole "author" of the film, and artists like Gil Taylor shot the movie IN COLOR. It wasn't shot in B&W no matter what he wanted. Unless you subscribe to the auteur theory for every work of cinema, the real injustice is that you can't see what the people who made the movie intended, and what was intended wasn't some feeble "color drained" transfer that nobody likes.

[Monterey Jack]

It's insulting because Badham isn't the sole "author" of the film, and artists like Gil Taylor shot the movie IN COLOR. It wasn't shot in B&W no matter what he wanted. Unless you subscribe to the auteur theory for every work of cinema, the real injustice is that you can't see what the people who made the movie intended, and what was intended wasn't some feeble "color drained" transfer that nobody likes.

It's the old George Lucas argument again, that the Star Wars movies were "his" before the Disney buyout and that he could do anything he wanted with them to satiate his "disappointment" about how the F/X had dated and looked embarrassing in the early-CGI era. Well, considering that countless F/X artists worked themselves to the bone to achieve the visual wonderments of the OT (several earning Oscars for their efforts), it's pretty appalling that the say of ONE MAN (even the creator of the franchise) caused all of their work to get covered up with rubbery, hey-lookit-me! CGI effects which are now every bit as dated as the OT effects looked back in 1997.


I'm a strong believer that EVERY movie should be preserved in the version that originally played in theaters across the country, even if a later director's cut turns out to be technically "better". There are numerous films that are only on Blu in bastardized, inferior versions despite many fans clamoring for the original cuts (The Warriors, JFK, etc.), and even for films where the alternate edit is superior, I'm all for the theatrical version being included for the sake of historical preservation. That's what made the deep-dish releases of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Kingdom Of Heaven so truly definitive...they offered up multiple cuts of the films, to allow the viewer the choice to customize their favorite experience.

[Edmund Kattak]

Just a shame we'll probably never see the movie with its proper theatrical color scheme on Blu.

At least officially. I see that the "Silver Screen Edition" from the folks who brought the STAR WARS silver screen edition have posted some work that they've done from a 35mm print that they scanned. The clips look FANTASTIC so far. They cite the 90's Laserdisc as they're video release comparison.

[AndyDursin]

Wow. When's he "releasing" it??

I think I'm going to hold off on watching this again until that trickles out...

[Monterey Jack]

Anyways, back to our scheduled mayhem, hitting the home stretch...

Dropping the Hammer…

-Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969): 7.5/10

-Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968): 6/10

-Taste The Blood Of Dracula (1970): 7/10







Plenty of cleavage, ketchupy blood and stiff-upper-lip British melodrama in today’s trio of terror from the biggest name in British horror, Hammer.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is one of the later and better entries in the Hammer series, with the obligatory appearance by Peter Cushing as Victor Frankenstein, working, as ever, to unravel the mysteries of the mind and body, this time looking to place the brain of a former scientist compatriot (George Pravda) now imprisoned in a madhouse into the body of the Asylum’s head doctor (Freddie Jones) in order to cure his insanity. It’s a bracingly bloody affair, with a notably memorable opening (Frankenstein lopping off heads with a scythe!) and a firey conflagration of a climax.

Dracula Has Risen From The Grave features Christopher Lee (in his third turn as the Count), resurrected when blood from a priest’s head wound drips into his mouth in a (successful) attempt to drive evil from his moldering castle by placing a giant crucifix on the doorway and reciting an incantation. Incensed, Drac swears vengeance upon the Monsignor (Rupert Davies) who performed the ceremony, eliciting the help of the cowed priest (Ewan Hooper) as his familiar to worm his way into the orbit of the Monsignor’s sister-in-law (Veronica Carlson) and make her into one of his vampiric brides. It’s a resolutely…okay entry in the series, not as atmospheric as the earlier films, not as memorably insane as the later installments from the 1970s.

Taste The Blood Of Dracula picks up right where the previous entry ended, with a wandering businessman (Rory Kinnear) chancing upon Drac’s gruesome impalement upon a crucifix and his dissolving into a puddle of blood the businessman collects and socks away for a rainy day. He finds a group interested in purchasing it soon after, a young Lord (Ralph Bates) who has a keen interest in the dark arts, and a trio of well-to-do but bored sophisticates (Geoffrey Keen, John Carson and Peter Sallis...the voice of Wallace in the Wallace & Gromit shorts!) who are intrigued enough to mix the powered remains of Drac with drops of the young Lord’s blood, resulting in a frothy red milkshake that only the Lord has the courage to quaff. He falls down, gagging, begging for assistance, only to have the terrified sophisticate trio beat him to death with their canes and fists and feet. They leave his body in a panic, only to have the now-empty vessel crack open to reveal Drac himself (Lee, as always), who swears to kill the three men by turning their most trusted loved ones against them. This is a superior piece of schlock compared to Grave, with more colorful photography, better death scenes and even flashes of nudity that prove the then-nascent MPAA was becoming more lenient in what Hammer was allowed to show as opposed to tell.

[Monterey Jack]

“We have plenty of murder in New York without benefit of Ghouls n’ Goblins!”

“You’re a long way from New York, Constable.”

-Sleepy Hollow (1999): 9/10

-The Wolfman (2010): 8.5/10





Still on a Hammer kick with a pair of modernized takes on the celebrated British horror studio. Tim Burton’s 1999 take on Washington Irving’s classic tale (more recently the subject of a solid Fox television series) re-imagines timid schoolteacher Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) as a police constable in 1799 New York, whose wholesale beliefs in the new sciences of detection are put to the test when he’s assigned to investigate a rash of murders in the remote village of Sleepy Hollow, where the victims have been found decapitated (“Clean as dandelion heads, apparently”, remarks the Judge who sends Ichabod on his quest, played in a great cameo by Hammer vet Christopher Lee). Ichabod arrives with his self-made instruments and books of up-to-date science and anatomy, to become embroiled in a tangled web of deceit and conspiracy amongst the township’s untrustworthy members, as well as becoming fond of Katrina Van Tassel (a ravishing Christina Ricci), daughter of the town’s most prosperous member (Michael Gambon). Sleepy Hollow is a marvel of visual design, with Rich Henrich’s Oscar-winning sets and Emmanuel Lubezki’s luminous, Oscar-nominated cinematography perfectly matched with Danny Elfman’s surging, passionate score to carry the viewer away into a gorgeously gloomy atmosphere of autumnal dread. It’s also brimming with Burton’s trademark humor, making the R-rated gore go down easy. Depp anchors the film with his impeccable comic timing, and his courtship of Ricci gives the film an aching human dimension that give the funhouse frights a solid framework to prop them up. It’s one of Burton’s most enjoyable films, and a must for Halloween-time viewing.

In a related vein, the criminally underrated 2010 remake of the classic 1941 Universal version of The Wolfman retains a lot of the same technicians that worked on that earlier film, like production designer Heinrichs, composer Elfman, and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker. Director Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, Captain America) might not be an “auteur” on the same level of Burton, but he is an impeccable craftsman, and with such a terrific tech team on his side (with the addition of Oscar-winning makeup effects by the great Rick Baker), he creates a rock-solid take on the material, bracingly bloody without ever tipping over into becoming needlessly disgusting. Benicio Del Toro is ideal casting as the cursed Lawrence Talbot, with great support from Anthony Hopkins as his grandiloquent father, a particularly lovely Emily Blunt as his ex-brother’s fiancé (and new love interest) and Hugo Weaving as a jaded police detective investigating the rash of gruesome murders that have swept the countryside near Dartmoor, England. It’s a film full of enthusiastically R-rated violence that nevertheless has a certain classicism about it, recalling a bygone age of cinematic shivers with a Shakespearian grandeur. Too many people at the time of the release groused about the usage of CGI to augment Baker’s makeup work, and, to be fair, a few of the mid-transformation shots look a bit dodgy. And yet, to dismiss the film as a whole for these handful of subpar F/X shots is truly missing the forest for the trees. Scary, romantic and atmospheric, The Wolfman is one of the best horror remakes done, and, in a just world, this would have been the leadoff film for the hoped-for cinematic “Dark Universe” that crashed and burned on the runway last summer with the release of the cluttered, charmless Tom Cruise take on The Mummy.

[esteban miranda]

I decided to start my serious Halloween season viewing with a few Dracula movies I hadn't seen within memory...

Dracula (1979) 2/5
I thought this would be my first viewing but after watching it I believe that I may have seen it before (or maybe it was just the familiar story elements?) Langella made a pretty ho-hum Dracula and it seems like I was just watching everyone going through the expected motions. The infamous re-imagined color palette only bothered me to the extent that it looked like the movie had been filmed using a day-for-night filter.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) 3/5
I hadn't seen this in close to 20 years. I tend to like the very stylized and theatrical production but this definitely has it's flaws, one of which is the attempt to make Dracula seem a sympathetic character at the end which doesn't really sit well...

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) 2/5
The only aspect of this I recall from a previous viewing (which must have been nearly 40 years ago) is the

[***SPOILER***]

Count's final impaling on the cross. This is how a Dracula movie should end.
Dracula's total screen time is only about 20-25 minutes in this average Hammer production and Christopher Lee's toupee has grown unto a full-fledged wig, or at least it seemed so to me.