Current Events > ***The 31 Days/31 Horror Movies Challenge 2022 Topic***

(+) Yeah! (+)

1. Evil Dead
2. V/H/S
3. V/H/S/2
4. V/H/S: Viral
5. The Void
6. The VVitch
7. Evil Dead II
8. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
9. Halloween (2018)
10. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
11. Halloween Kills
12. The Guest

I still think Halloween 2018 is a good solid enjoyable movie. Probably still my favorite Halloween sequel, but that is not really saying much. Totally has its problems, especially one character and twist...but it does a lot of stuff right and it gets Michael right. Was less enjoyable rewatching it after seeing Kills last year, but in a bubble? This is a good sequel.

Halloween Kills is one of my most hated movies in the past idk how long. This was my first (and most likely last) time rewatching it. It's shockingly terrible considering how solid and "right" 2018 was. It straight up contradicts shit said in 2018 and then embraces those mistakes to an embarrassing degree. Just horrible. Still ends up being kind of funny bad, but there is almost nothing good about this piece of shit. The list of flaws and stupidity is astonishing.

The Guest on the other hand is fucking great. Another rewatch and it's just as good as before. Love it. Go in blind as can be and just enjoy the awesome ride.

20-22

Target - An Indonesian movie featuring actors as themselves, having all got a 1 day of filming movie gig that turns out to be a scenario that's like half Battle Royale, half Saw. Very campy. Very ridiculous. It's a horror-comedy though. Wasn't bad but it was just weird. One scene featured a really cringey fight between 2 of the actors who both clearly were well-versed in martial arts but as characters were not all that competent, and it started off as literal dick-punch fight. That was kinda amusing. Overall it was weird. Not particularly bad but not good either. Just kinda weird.

Apostle - Felt reminiscent of The Ritual and The Witch. I liked it overall. Dealt with themes like religion and cult behavior. Had supernatural elements but they were not over the top and left a lot for the audience to interpret or speculate about. Solid above average overall imo.

The Last Winter - Had a setting that reminded me of The Thing and started off relatively strong, slow burn. After a certain point though the burn accelerated too much and it got weird. Suffered badly in the end due to bad pacing, horrendous CGI and just all sorts of inconsistency with characters and storytelling. I kinda stopped paying attention. Ron Perlman was in it though. He played a typical Ron Perlman character. That's most of why I watched it in the first place lol.

GameGodOfAll posted...

The Guest on the other hand is fucking great. Another rewatch and it's just as good as before. Love it. Go in blind as can be and just enjoy the awesome ride.

I think I saw that on a service/platform I have but I didn't watch it (and I don't think I have previously). I'll have to go back and check and will definitely watch blind assuming I find it and assuming I indeed haven't seen it (will have to confirm).

Train to Busan (2016)

Classic zombieflim from Korea. Seok-Woo is a business man who works very hard and his young daughter doesn't get to see him as much as she wants to. After missing a bunch of critical life events, Seok-Woo is forced to return his daughter to her mother and takes the train across Korea. Unfortunately, Zombies decide the worst day to attack.

Seok-Woo needs to fight hordes of zombies in a cramped space while learning to not be so selfish and be a good role model for his daughter.

Legit one of the best zombie movies I've ever seen. Likeable characters, crazy zombie shenanigans, its not very scary - but few zombie movies are anymore. Unless you have a heavy aversion to subtitles, definitely watch it. Like a 10/10 zombie movie.

Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula (2020)

4 years after the events of the first movie, Korea has basically been completely quarantined and the many Korean refugees who were able to flee Korea are stuck in Japan. Jung-Seok, a former marine ruined by guilt over not being able to save his family is recruited by Chinese mobsters to get a team together and sneak back into Korea to steal an abandoned bank truck filled with money. If you've seen Army of the Dead, its the same general idea. Except there are a bunch of people still alive in Korea, so Jung-Seok and his new team have to deal with the nightmare hellscape that is trying to live in zombie-infested Korea.

Jung-Seok comes across a family that he abandoned trying to save his own family, and is further racked by guilt because he remembers them, but they don't remember him. Should he tell them?

This one has pretty mixed reviews, but I think its more just trying to follow up such a classic movie. Its definitely not as good as Train to Busan, but definitely has its charms and I would in no way call it a bad movie. Also worth a watch.

Tag

A Quiet Place, dir. John Krasinski, 2020
I wouldn't say this is a bad sequel, but it was a disappointing one. Part 2 decides to stick with the same characters as the previous film, set in fact shortly after its conclusion, and expands on the original without really adding too much thematic weight or even "world building", and not being quite as successful in terms of the characters either, since we already know who most of them are, and very quickly figure out the new ones, who are either thinly written or just not there long enough. It feels like a lot of the same, but less scary since we already know how to stop the monsters, and the stakes and tools are not raised like the were, say, from Alien to Aliens. Not terribly excited for third part.

6/10

All Deceased...Except The Dead, dir. Pupi Avati, 1977
The director of this film is responsible for the atmospheric cult horror film Zeder from 1983, as well as the canonized horror classic The House of the Laughing Windows from 1976 (the one horror movie I most want to see, but haven't), as well as a host of popular Italian comedies and dramas that never really made it overseas. This isn't really a horror movie, but it does have a creepy, raspy-voiced killer slashing up rich people in a gauzily shot, creepy mansion. It's more of a giallo-comedy. And what a comedy it is. I don't think I've ever seen a stupider cast of characters in a who-dunnit, and being bumped off in such absolutely bonkers fashions that only the greatest lunatic among them could be the killer. The comedy is so over-the-top that it may as well be a Looney Tunes cartoon on paper (or a Mel Brooks comedy of the same era) but it's brought to life with such endearing subtlety, in both the comic performances and the filmmaking itself, that you're often caught off guard when the slapstick violence goes exactly where you think it's going - like a lower budget, more artfully made yet even more lowbrow version of Clue. It's no classic, like Zeder, but I like it.

7/10

Halloween Ends - I won't summarize because 101 said enough to cover everything, but I think I'd rate it higher. I can appreciate the angle it took and comeuppance against shitty townie assholes is never a bad thing, even if it's executed in a cliche fashion. What I liked that elevated it beyond the cliches and the tropes was the musical score. At a few points, the Halloween theme played at a lower octave and with powerful bass and that intensified the scene(s) in question which I really liked, because they were impactful, even if brought about by plot silliness. The music elevated the mood and themes of the scenes where it was featured. I liked the shift in Michael's character. I thought it was appropriate, and I thought it was the right conclusion to the trilogy. Reintroduce him in Halloween. Immortalize and deify him in Kills. Knock him down and humanize him in Ends. I found it almost poetic.

Corey... yeah... that didn't work very well. I give them credit for trying that, but yeah... no.

Can't wait to watch Halloween Ends so I can read everyone else's posts on it.

Scare Package (2020)

Horror comedy anthology about a bored video store employee trying to explain horror cliches to the new hire.

Had a lot of fun with the first story of "guy who sets up all the background stuff in horror moves tries to be a real character" to the extent that it probably could've been its own movie. But most of them are either dumb ideas you probably couldn't get more than like 10 minutes out of it, or a cool idea that really doesn't do well in practice (or is just... bad). There are some jokes I did actually laugh at, but they're all the kind of dumb jokes you enjoy if you're like, watching it while drinking with friends or something.

One of them is about an MRA-Werewolf support group...? I don't even know how anyone came to that conclusion.

idk its like a 6/10. I don't think it was a total waste of time to watch, but I wouldn't recommend going out of your way for it

I also watched Nightmare Cinema (2018), which is another anthology movie, except its trying to be serious. Its the worse of the the two, but I mean its fine... I guess? Some hilariously bad CGI, but that's just because they probably spent most of their tiny budget on Mickey Roarke. There's really not much worth saying about it. Its hard to make a Horror Anthology work when you get like, 20 minutes to make you care about what's going on.

GameGodOfAll posted...

Can't wait to watch Halloween Ends so I can read everyone else's posts on it.

lol. I was able to watch it because I managed to spend a half hour trying and failing to remember my login information on a pea COCK account and then somehow successfully resetting it >_>

FigureOfSpeech posted...

Halloween Ends - I won't summarize because 101 said enough to cover everything, but I think I'd rate it higher. I can appreciate the angle it took and comeuppance against shitty townie assholes is never a bad thing, even if it's executed in a cliche fashion. What I liked that elevated it beyond the cliches and the tropes was the musical score. At a few points, the Halloween theme played at a lower octave and with powerful bass and that intensified the scene(s) in question which I really liked, because they were impactful, even if brought about by plot silliness. The music elevated the mood and themes of the scenes where it was featured. I liked the shift in Michael's character. I thought it was appropriate, and I thought it was the right conclusion to the trilogy. Reintroduce him in Halloween. Immortalize and deify him in Kills. Knock him down and humanize him in Ends. I found it almost poetic.

Corey... yeah... that didn't work very well. I give them credit for trying that, but yeah... no.

Fore what it's worth I agree about Michael. I like that he's old and broken, it's just very odd in the way it's presented because of the way the movies time warp. We go from him being literally unstoppable to being broken and feeble in the span of four years and get very little time to dwell on it beyond a line or two from Corey and Laurie. I think they were onto something but the Corey plot just gave it no time to breathe.

Movie 13- House (1977)

I really wanted something to wash the taste of Halloween Ends out of my mouth and I just got the criterion blu ray for this movie which I adore, so I gave it a watch.House is a brilliant, surreal roller coaster ride. If you've never seen it, it's difficult to describe. In fact, I'd say it's almost impossible to describe this movie to someone who has never seen it, but for a very very brief overview: It's a Japanese movie about a group of incredibly stereotypical schoolgirls whose names correspond with their tropey personality (the pretty girl is named Gorgeous, the kind girl is named Sweet, the girl who does insane karate is Kung Fu, etc.) going on summer vacation to the home of one of their Aunts in the countryside. While they're there, bizarre supernatural events start occuring that begin picking them off one by one.

It's a simplistic premise but it's far weirder than that on several levels in a way a plot synopsis could never do justice. The story and its monsters were concocted, at least in part, by the very young daughter of director Nobuhiko Obayashi. Perhaps for this reason, portions of the movie feel like bizarre childhood fantasies, or outright dreams.The way it's shot plays into that too. There are lots of weird visual gags like characters walking against matte painting backdrops that end mid scene, background characters swaying or singing along with the soundtrack (there is a point where a housecat sings part of the movie's main theme!), characters cracking jokes during flashbacks as if they could see them the same as the audience could. When you combine this with the strange artificial looking special effects and the weird camera techniques all throughout the movie you get a real head trip.

But it's not purely a goofy experimental film; there's genuine unnerving stuff in it. I totally believe that parts of this were written by a kid, because there are so many irrational yet genuinely creepy things that happen over the course of Housethat I could totally imagine believing would somehow happen to me at 11 or 12. And while it never quite loses the strange wry humor that it carries with itself, parts of it are genuinely very grim and freaky.

This is a difficult movie to nail down in text because honestly there's nothing really like it. The DVD case struggles to describe it and eventually settles on "an episode of scooby doo directed by Mario Bava." I could see that, or maybe "an episode of Azumanga Daioh directed by Junji Ito". Regardless of how you want to classify it, it's worth experiencing at least once. The plot is not going to blow you away, but going into it without knowing where it's going or what I'm going to see is an experience I desperately wish I could have again.

Also there's a scene where a man gets turned into a pile of bananas. Disregard everything I said before that, that's enough to give it a perfect score. 10/10

House is marvellous. Next year I'm going to be watching a bunch of Obayashi's later films - pretty excited about that - and honestly I'm a little surprised that it took so long for these films to get a western release after House's big revival. As far as I can tell, he remained an innovative and vital filmmaker until his death.

Alligator and Alligator 2

Classic 80's B movies. I remember seeing them on TV all the time as a kid but the only thing I remembered from the second movie is the chiefs car flipping over. They're both pretty much the exact same movie but they're pretty enjoyable. They are exactly what you would expect them to be.

1. Frailty
2. Pennywise: The Story of It (doc)
3. Hocus Pocus 2
4. The Mothman of Point Pleasant (doc)
5. Leatherface
6. Willow Creek
7. Grave Encounters
8. Birth of the Living Dead (doc)
9. In Search of Darkness II (doc)
10. The Found Footage Phenomenon (doc)
11. Troll Hunter
12. Hellbender
13. Mad God
14. The Last Broadcast
15. The Sadness
16. We're All Going to the World's Fair
17. Halloween (2018)
18. Hell House LLC
19. Deep Red
20. House
21. House II: The Second Story
.

24, 25

Immanence - Went in knowing nothing. It is an interesting story that blends themes of religion, belief in aliens, and scientific skepticism, and I think it does it quite well. The ending is abrupt, but overall the story is interesting and it was a good watch for something I had no hype for since I hadn't even heard of it before. Also, one character looks like AOC >_>

The Night House - I difficulty following it and figuring out what was really happening. It's very psychological but it didn't really captivate me. I maybe missed stuff because I was distracted by other things while watching. The best element of it imo were the visuals, especially the use of negative space to visually imply entities. This was done both by the design of the house itself and surreal visual effects that were meant to make the characters in question and audience as well question the nature of what was being shown.

The Deadly Spawn

It was a lot lower budget than I thought it was. I don't remember how I originally heard of this movie but it's been on my list for ages. I could have sworn it was a bigger Cannon or Charles Band movie. It was actually a super low budget nothing movie but the creature design and effects were pretty cool.

Glorious

If you ever wanted to see a movie where JK Simmons is a Lovecraftian glory hole monster, this movie delivers in spades. Pretty much delivered on all my expectations. Great little bottle horror. Can't recommend it enough.

specialkid8 posted...

Glorious

If you ever wanted to see a movie where JK Simmons is a Lovecraftian glory hole monster, this movie delivers in spades. Pretty much delivered on all my expectations. Great little bottle horror. Can't recommend it enough.

Ooo that sounds pretty good.

up

Army of darkness= 5/10 i saw this one a long time ago could of sworn it was better but alas it isnt.

In the mouth of madness= 7/10 still good kinda cheesy on the old effects.

Interview with a vampire= 9/10 Brad Pitt and Tom are amazing great movie

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue

Okay low budget zombie movie. Starts very slow but has a decent enough finale. Loses a lot of points for being Italian.

1st - Horror of Dracula (1958)
2nd - Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
3rd - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
4th - The VVitch: A New England Folktale (2016)
5th - Frankenstein (1931)
6th - A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
7th - The Werewolf (1956)
8th - The Silence of the Lambs (1991) **theater**
9th - An American Werewolf in London (1981)
10th - Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)
11th - Creature With the Atom Brain (1955)
12th - A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
13th - Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
14th - The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
15th A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
16th Pumpkinhead (1988)
17th Halloween (2018)
18th Halloween Kills (2021)
19th Halloween Ends (2022) **theater**
20th White Zombie (1932)

The Dead Pit

Nice little 80's B movie. Fairly unique and interesting but just a little too boring overall. Prime exampe of something that should be remade. Great 80's effects.

Till Death (2021)

Megan Fox is in a loveless marriage with the criminal prosecutor who put away a man who assaulted her, she has an affair with a partner at her husband's firm. On an anniversary getaway, we learn Fox's husband is completely unhinged when he handcuffs himself to her and then shoots her in the head (after making sure to cut all the phone lines, take the gas out of his car, etc...) trapping Fox with her dead husband literally handcuffed to her. Things get hairier when the husband calls the man who assaulted Fox to come in and finish the job!

Came in expecting basically nothing, but its a perfectly serviceable thriller movie and Megan Fox is more than capable of carrying the movie on her back. Like a legit 7/10 movie.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)

A docudrama type film akin to these like, true crime Netflix documentaries? Following a crazy serial killer who taped all of his worst moves. Suffers from some issues where the movie tries to really pile on the melodrama, but other than that has some real chills in there. Leans a lot into old-school stranger danger stuff and has some really deflating parts around the end.

Some crazy twists in this, like The killer framing a police officer, bragging about framing him right after his execution, and the whole story being swept under the rug by 9/11 so the framed cop is still thought of as guilty by everyone.

Might like it more in other circumstances, but I don't really like the melodramatic true crime docs we get now anyways. Still definitely some good parts in here, like a 6/10 IMO.

Watching the Poltergeist movie trilogy this weekend along with Return of the Living Dead and Malignant

Im watching Countdown on Netflix right now.

Had a big health scare with my cat so im super behind on movies, dont think im gonna get 31 in this year. dang. shes fine now though so I'm trying to catch up.

Movie 14- Friday the 13th Part 2

2 and 3 are the two movies I feel don't get talked about, positively or negatively, as much as the other Friday sequels. Being directed by Steve Miner back to back makes them feel like cool sister movies. I think I like 3 more, but I also think 2 is probably the better movie on the whole.

The main draw of Friday 2 is getting to see Jason running around for the first time, and it's a really interesting portrayal that's a long way from what it became, or even what he acts like in the next two movies released in short order after this one. He feels a lot more like a real person in his mannerisms and movements, and it's neat to see what would eventually become basically the modern equivalent of Frankenstein sprinting around, getting beaten up with objects and in general just being kind of vulnerable. He even has a few funny pratfalls throughout the movie. At the same time though, he actually comes off as... Kind of scary? Maybe a little more than he ever has since. There are some really good shots of that one eye peering through the bag mask that are genuinely kind of creepy, and the scene where he sits up and you see him in full for the first time is maybe one of the best jumpscares in the whole series.

The place the movie sort of falters is the kills all being kind of lame. It's forgivable considering the slasher genre proper was only really picking up speed when this movie came out. I am aware that there's a more violent version of the film that was released way later with some lost footage, but the version I've always seen likes to cut to white during the kills and it comes off pretty lame most of the time. Another big problem is the ending; once again, I know that this is the fault of cutting and they originally had another idea for this they deemed didnt work, but the ending they replaced it with kind of just.. makes no sense.

Jason is far and apart the best part of this movie, and I think it's worth it to see his original incarnation if you haven't before for whatever reason. Even apart from all of the baggage of knowing where the series heads after this movie with him, he's an unusually fun to watch slasher villain and I totally get why he took off with people. Just don't expect great characters (lol) or a lot of the gratuity people associate with the series. 7/10

Movie 15- Prince of Darkness

This is another movie that doesn't get talked about as much as it should. Unlike Friday Part 2, though, I kind of get it; this is one of John Carpenter's slowest movies, at least to get started. The setup is a slow, moody ordeal with a ton of science and philosophy mumbo jumbo discussion and that doesn't really fit the popular horror landscape of the late 1980s at all.

But it's a really fascinating, Lovecraftian concept at the end of the day I find really cool: a bunch of scientists are confronted with something that absolutely shouldn't exist in this world, and it starts to pick them off one by one. That's very cool to me, and I think Carpenter makes it suitably unsettling in this. The primary antagonist is incredibly scary in every interaction it has with the cast leading up to being "born," and the way people die in this movie ranges from simplistic to incredibly gratuitous, but it's always very brutal. There's a bunch of haunting scenes in this; Calder's laughter and the guy covered in bugs delivering his message are bonechilling in particular, as is the last shot after the mirror breaks at the end of the movie that has always stuck with me, as brief as it is.

It helps that the movie itself looks really cool. Goddard's Cathedral on the outside is really grimy and horrible looking, and on the inside feels very otherworldly and not like a real place at all, particularly the canister room. It looks kind of Mario Bava-ish, and from what I've read, that would make sense because a big inspiration of this movie is one of my favorite Italian horror movies of all time, Dario Argento's Inferno, which Bava did set design on. While the two movies have different plots, they have a lot of imagery in common, which I find really cool. But I also understand it lends another layer of difficulty in really getting into this movie casually.

I definitely suggest giving this a shot if you've never seen it. As I mentioned earlier, the film is really slow to fire up, but about 30 minutes in or so it stops being just moody and eeiree and starts actively trying to scare you (very effectively IMO). And I guarantee that ending will be in your head for a good while. 9/10

Terrifier 2 (2022)

Generic Gorno with an evil clown. Art is an evil clown that murders people - generic gory BS that very much plays like a 70s slasher. You can very much tell the movie is aiming for gross levels of gore and BS, and it really has to go for it because it doesn't have much else going for it. The guy who plays the evil clown doesn't talk, and you can tell he's really hamming it up, but that's really the only positive I can say.

Supposedly this movie was making people leave the theatre, but I can't tell if it was because it was gross or because it was stupid.

1st - Horror of Dracula (1958)
2nd - Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
3rd - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
4th - The VVitch: A New England Folktale (2016)
5th - Frankenstein (1931)
6th - A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
7th - The Werewolf (1956)
8th - The Silence of the Lambs (1991) *theater*
9th - An American Werewolf in London (1981)
10th - Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)
11th - Creature With the Atom Brain (1955)
12th - A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
13th - Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
14th - The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
15th A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
16th Pumpkinhead (1988)
17th Halloween (2018)
18th Halloween Kills (2021)
19th Halloween Ends (2022) *theater*
20th White Zombie (1932)
21st A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
22nd Ghostbusters (1984) *theater*
23rd The Lost Boys (1987) *theater*

I guess Ghostbusters technically isn't a horror movie. I'm still on track as The Lost Boys would make the 22nd film in that category.

On a side note, this was my third time viewing The Lost Boys and the first time I noticed that Sam is gay. Given that he's also a comic and music fan, he's probably meant as something of a stand-in for a young Joel Schumacher.

I watched five movies in the past week that are horror themed.

Tenebre , dir. Dario Argento, 1982 - 9.5/10

Lady Morgana's Vengeance, dir. Massimo Pupillo, 1965 - 6/10

The Blancheville Monster, dir. Alberto De Martino, 1963 - 6/10

The Third Eye, dir. Mino Guerrini, 1966 - 6.5/10

The Witch, dir. Damiano Damiani, 1966 - 7.5/10

Tenebre, obviously, is a masterpiece, easily a top five giallo film, and a grisly delight from start to finish. The other movies are films from a recently released boxed set of Italian gothic horror films, and they're pretty much okay examples of the form...with The Witch being a real standout. It's my first film from a widely acclaimed, award winning Italian director - his next film, A Bullet For The General, is one of the all-time spaghetti western classics, and he directed multiple classic crime dramas in the 70s (also, the second Amityville film), which is rather exciting, and the movie doesn't disappoint, even though it aims for more psycho-sexual horror than the more overt chills of the other films. Got a bit of a Harold Pinter vibe from it.

1. Evil Dead
2. V/H/S
3. V/H/S/2
4. V/H/S: Viral
5. The Void
6. The VVitch
7. Evil Dead II
8. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
9. Halloween (2018)
10. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
11. Halloween Kills
12. The Guest
13. The Beyond
14. Halloween Ends
15. Bodies Bodies Bodies
16. Scream
17. Scream 2
18. Scream 3
19. Scream 4
20. Scream (2022)

The Beyond not my style. I can respect some of the visuals and stuff it brings to the table, but the lack of a structured plot and the bad acting were just not worth the high points. Can see why some dig it, but not for me.

Halloween Ends Ohhhh boy. Does it ever. So yeah, this movie sucked. No surprise there, but it was surprising tat it sucked in a different way from Kills. I am good with trying something different (just gonna spoiler tag the rest from here) and after about 40 minutes I said "Is Michael Myers just not going to even be in this? Cause that'd be awesome.", but the different stuff they tried sucked. The romance was rushed and didn't feel real at all. The dialog in general was garbage. All the Haddonfielders were so one dimensionally dicks. Corey was so uninteresting. Blah! Ending was pretty damn funny at least with the fucking grinder, but god this was a slog.

There was one high point personally where Corey and Michael killed the doctor and nurse. I asked how Michael got there. Did he just ride on the back of the motorcycle? Cut right to a far shot of the motorbike and I nearly flipped my shit. I was so damn excited to see Myers sitting behind Corey, but sadly it was just a poorly done transition to what's her face.

Really tough to tell if this was worse than Kills. Kills was at least more funny bad, but this at least tried something different. So tough call. Either way, both movies are enormous pieces of shit.

Bodies Bodies Bodies was pretty good. Good set up and enjoyed all the interactions with everyone getting paranoid with the big mystery. Did get a tad too cheesy at the end with it feeling too much like a parody of Gen Z attitudes and stuff when a more serious tone could have been more effective. Still, I enjoyed it from start to finish. A good solid watch.

Then I watched the Scream franchise. I had previously seen 1-3 when they came out, but this was my first time seeing 4 and 5. Though I barely remembered anything about 2 & 3 so it was like watching them for the first time too. Scream 1 is a classic for sure. The humor didn't age quite as good in some parts as I had hoped. Matthew Lillard absolutely makes this movie though. I think he's the best part of the entire franchise. Total gem. It's actually pretty amazing that 2-5 are all decent times. None of them are that good, but I don't think any of them are bad. They are extremely consistently okay. The formula does get played out, but the meta humor sticks with it, so it ends up kind of getting a pass.

The Digger You Deep - I was bored with this one. The premise seemed okay but I got distracted and by services fucked me. I got kicked out by a "weekly emergency broadcast test" and it fucked up my progress so much that I could not get back in. I had to give up on it but I was already bored with it. I will count it, but I will admit I didn't finish it. I'm burnt out. I don't know what else to watch. I was ahead and now I am slipping behind...

I am counting it, so I need 5 more. Fuck me I want them all to be new. I don't know if I have the patience at this point. I can't find anything more I want to watch and haven't already seen.

The Deeper You Dig is...okay, but it was also the film that convinced me to largely stop buying Arrow Video releases of contemporary horror films (the other film it is paired with, The Hatred, is easily the worst horror movie I've seen from this century). I appreciate that they're trying to bring lesser noticed horror films into the fold, but sometimes you're just releasing cringe, and bro this is it.

yeah I was not feeling it. I respect the reviews but I could not get into it

Lux Aeterna

A full hour of people yelling at each other while wandering around a film set with a thrilling finale of ten minutes of a fixed shot of a woman tied to a cross while neon lights flash. Completely meaningless French arthouse wank.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)

Margot makes a documentary about her biological family after being put up for adoption, which turns out to be a local amish family. Margot and her friends get to stay on the farm for a few days in order to learn about her biological family and ghostly shenanigans ensue.

Instead of creative camera stuff they're acting in a creative setting, aside from one short section where you we're watching through a police officer's body cam. Its a nice twist on the typical "Paranormal Activity" thing, though otherwise there isn't much to say about this movie. Its fine.

I feel like its similar to the later Cloverfield movies, where someone bought just a completely different movie, slapped the title on it, and maybe suggested one or two little Easter eggs to add in (that I didn't get) to fit it in with the series, because if the movie was just called "Next of Kin" it wouldn't do as well.

The Sadness

Pretty good rage virus movie. Extremely gory. Some slow parts that mess up the pacing but overall enjoyable.

Monstrous - Went in knowing nothing. I always like Christina Ricci performances and she's my celebrity crush lol. It was interesting. I feel like I wanted a bigger reveal at the end than what it gives, but at the same time I feel like there were a lot of contextual clues throughout that I completely missed and would see on a rewatch for a picture as complete as what I had hoped for. There was one character, the wife of the landlord, who felt extremely out of place and the actress was just really not playing a '50s character accurately imo, however... That was the one clue I noticed and it still went over my head. She didn't fit the time period because the time period was not real. The movie is set in the 50s, only it's not, because the main character is in full-on psychotic break. The scene when the cellphone in her purse starts vibrating gave me chills. I had just realized the son had died already and was not real, just before the case worker revealed it, but the big part of the twist was the time period reveal. I should have seen it coming but I didn't. Overall, would recommend. It wasn't amazing, but it was worth watching and the storytelling was done well imo.

1. Frailty
2. Pennywise: The Story of It (doc)
3. Hocus Pocus 2
4. The Mothman of Point Pleasant (doc)
5. Leatherface
6. Willow Creek
7. Grave Encounters
8. Birth of the Living Dead (doc)
9. In Search of Darkness II (doc)
10. The Found Footage Phenomenon (doc)
11. Troll Hunter
12. Hellbender
13. Mad God
14. The Last Broadcast
15. The Sadness
16. We're All Going to the World's Fair
17. Halloween (2018)
18. Hell House LLC
19. Deep Red
20. House
21. House II: The Second Story
22. Halloween Kills
23. Psycho II
24. Pyscho III
25. Man Bites Dog
26. The Legend of Boggy Creek
27. Dementia 13
.

1st - Horror of Dracula (1958)
2nd - Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
3rd - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
4th - The VVitch: A New England Folktale (2016)
5th - Frankenstein (1931)
6th - A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
7th - The Werewolf (1956)
8th - The Silence of the Lambs (1991) *theater*
9th - An American Werewolf in London (1981)
10th - Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)
11th - Creature With the Atom Brain (1955)
12th - A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
13th - Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
14th - The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
15th A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
16th Pumpkinhead (1988)
17th Halloween (2018)
18th Halloween Kills (2021)
19th Halloween Ends (2022) *theater*
20th White Zombie (1932)
21st A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
22nd Ghostbusters (1984) *theater*
23rd The Lost Boys (1987) *theater*
24th - Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) *theater*

"Look! It is the man himself... made, like, totally young again."

Keanu Reeves is struggling not to go full Bill & Ted. It makes me wonder why they didn't just cast Cary Elwes as Jonathan instead. I'm not really qualified to measure this subject, but he strikes me as being more handsome than Keanu and he certainly could have pulled off the British accent better.

The Mortuary Collection

Couldn't finish it. Clancy Brown is a delight as always but I just can never get into anthology movies. They're just boring. If you're into them this is very serviceable. The framing story is very charming.

Movie 16- Shocking Dark

Also known as Terminator 2, also known as Alien 2. That seems like a bizarre pair of titles to have but somehow this shoestring budget Bruno Mattei movie lives up to both of them in one way or another. Set in Venice just before the year 2000, an ecological disaster has left people living in underground complexes. One of them sends out an SOS and a bunch of guys called the Megaforce to to rescue them.

Functionally what all that means is the movie is set in a warehouse covered in pipes with the lights turned off for about 95% of its runtime, and people are wandering around with motion sensors pretending to be in Aliens. It's amazingly shameless; there's even a Newt standin who looks roughly the same age as the Ripley stand in. They wander around, occasionally shooting at bog men or something that are never quite adequately explained. It would be very dull if not for the acting, which is incredibly hilariously bottom of the barrel bad. Constant line flubs, people staring directly at the camera, miscued scenes.. It's all in here because I assume they had no money for reshoots.

The best parts of the movie are the first 30 minutes or so, and the last 10. Everything between it is sadly kind of boring and doesn't capture the insane nonsense of the start and finish. If you're a fan of true shlock I would take a look at at the beginning at the very least and stick around if you're invested, but this is very much a "we are gonna drink beers and watch a bad movie" movie. 5/10

King Kong, dir. Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper, 1933
I guess people don't really consider this a horror movie now, but come on, In 1933, people were probably running out of the theater screaming after this movie, or during this movie, and then going back in to see the movie again, and part of the movie's success is definitely that it was trying to get you to freak the fuck out about enormous prehistoric abominations eviscerating, masticating, crushing, tossing, dropping and fondling normal sized people, and they DO. It's the coolest, and its late-coming competitors only occasionally match its mayhem.

9.5/10

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, dir. Wallace Worsley, 1923
This isn't really a horror movie, but it's certainly horror adjacent, as Lon Chaney's make up and performance was basically the blueprint for all the great monster roles that would come out of the following decades. It's still a marvel to behold. What else can one say? The movie itself is well made, if mostly functional, with its best aspect besides that great performance being its incredibly high production values. It's a handsome movie to look at. And it never gets annoying. It's the pinnacle of a truly classic movie that isn't really a great one. Compare it to Der Golem, a similar film made three years ago and with a much smaller budget, and not based on one of the literary classics of all time, and there's no question which is the more interesting and entertaining and thoughtful and fantastic film (it's Der Golem). But this one, it's more than all right.

7.5/10

I think the other horror movies I'm going to watch until Halloween are unambiguously horror movies, so there.

Movie 17- Evil Dead (2013)

I didn't like this movie very much when it came out. In fact, I pretty actively disliked it I would say. Rewatching it, I'm not entirely sure why except that maybe I was a jaded college student who liked cult blood and guts and didn't like someone trying to modernize it.. Just 'cause? I dunno.

It's a pretty good film all things considered. It's definitely got a really grisly tone to it, well above and beyond even the original. A lot of times when people try to remake genre camp that abrupt shift in tone undoes it, but I was interested in the fucked up effects they gave the deadites and the way stuff continued to get worse and worse and worse as the movie went on. I think it benefits a lot from not being a remake, which it very easily could have been, but being a new thing that just kind of focuses on the same monsters allows me to digest the edge a little more efficiently. Your mileae may vary a bit though, because this is an incredibly violent movie that has almost no goofiness in it.

The ending of the movie is a little confused; the main bad guys' plan doesn't make a whole lot of sense and the math behind it doesn't seem to add up (watch it and you'll see what i mean, I'm being literal lol) but I think the final string of confrontations against the deadites are entertaining enough for me to be okay with that. All in all, it's fun and has a unique identity. I don't like it as much as either of the original three, or even as much as Ash vs Evil Dead, but I definitely gave it a raw deal when it came out. 7/10

Movie 18- Amityville Mt. Misery Road

There's something about modern low-budget horror shlock that generally makes it less fun to me. I think part of it was when you found some piece of trash sci fi or horror movie as a kid that someone made for pennies, they still usually went through the trouble of shooting on film and at least renting out a house or a dockyard building or some shit to run around in for an hour and a half.

This is the perfect encapsulation of how easy it is to make a crappy movie in modern times if you just have enough money and craziness to get a foot in the door. It features an incredibly scuzzy man named Charlie and his porn star looking wife named.. Bougie? Boogie? I have no idea. They decide to go to the woods of Mt Misery Road, a haunted place in New York, and predictably get attacked by ghosts. You might be questioning what makes this an "Amityville" movie if it takes place in the woods, but that's honestly pretty standard practice for the modern entries into this franchise. It's basically shot like a youtube video. It has the visual fidelity of a found footage film, but it's generally not shot in a way trying to invoke that, so instead it just comes off as looking so cheap that at any moment you expect them to turn the corner and find the Angry Video Game Nerd talking to Shitpickle.

For something that's only just over 70 minutes long, it feels like this thing lasts forever. Nothing happens until literally around the last ten minutes. Leading up to that it's them talking to people who are visibly either reading their lines off camera or just doing bad horror movie improv. Then it ends, and it ends exactly how you would expect. Why was this thing made? A weird passion project? Money laundering? Entirely for that scene where its just the main guy grabbing Bougie's ass for like 10 minutes? I dunno. All I do know is that it's by far the worst thing I've seen this month 1/10

28

The Boy - I would probably recommend it more than I actually enjoyed it >_> because while I thought it was quite good objectively, it had long ago been spoiled for me in many Top 10 youtube videos, so yeah \_()_/. I would have enjoyed it more had I been able to watch it spoiler-free, but it was still good and I would still recommend it. I also found it interesting that it takes place in the UK, but Lauren Cohen, a British actress, plays an American character. She does the accent well too. Just a vanilla American accent. It was as convincing as her Southern American accent on The Walking Dead.

Plan to watch the sequel tomorrow, then gotta find 2 more to complete the list.

Movie 19- Meat Cleaver Massacre

I went into this movie expecting a few things. One, perhaps first and foremost, was a meat cleaver doing some masscare-ing. As it turns out, there is none of that. In point of fact there is not a single meat cleaver in the movie.

Another thing I expected was sleaze, and damn, did that ever deliver. This is an ugly movie. It's short poorly, in ugly locals and sets, and stars more or less exclusively ugly people who are so terrible and fucked up that you don't feel bad when they die. Meat Cleaver Massacre starts in such a grim fucked up way that I didn't want to turn it off because I wanted to see the main cast get their just desserts. That was what held my attention from beginning to end, because unfortunately the kills are pretty unspectacular. The story, which kind of reminded me of Lucio Fulci's Aenigma, is also nothing special.

I feel like this movie could have been more than what it was if it was made competently. There is almost no intentional camp in it, it's very dark and dreary from beginning to end with these greasy 70s dudes walking around dingy sets and getting killed mercilessly. The start that sets up the revenge plot is also really good. I even kind of liked the ending. The middle part really drives the movie down, though, so it's difficult to recommend. 5/10

Movie 20- Uninvited

A cat who has a tiny cat that lives in his mouth which kills people is a wonderfully stupid idea for a horror movie; dumb enough to be charming. Thankfully, on top of that, the sheer ineptitude with which this thing was earnestly created is quite charming all on its own even if its not a good movie.

Uninvited is a slasher that takes place on a boat, which is a setting that I've always liked. Starring an array of shitty teens and besuited goons (and George Kennedy for some reason?), an evil mutant super housecat picks them off one by one. It's all very silly; it's got very rudimentary special effects in pretty much every kill, with the evil cat puppet randomly changing size and appearance. At the end of the movie they are even using an entirely different *normal cat* and pretending it's the same one you'd been seeing throughout the entireity of the film. All of this sounds bad, and.. Well, it is, but it's charmingly so. It's that level of bad acting that makes you smile instead of roll your eyes, and every time the cat killed yet another dope it had me laughing and grinning.

This movie reminded me of Nightbeast, another movie I watched earlier this year, in that the creators of it were clearly all in on their stupid idea. The result was very very fun and it'll probably be added to my B movie rewatch rotation at some point. 7/10

Movie 21- And Now The Screaming Starts!

I really like period piece ghost stories. Old castles, manors, dumb aristocrats and screaming ladies in frilly costumes, etc. This was maybe not the best example of that but it has a few neat things going for it.

The main cast for the majority of the movie is very weak, which is unfortunate because the story itself is a cool little mystery that has a lot more action than you would think to find in a movie like this from this time period. Most of the first portion of the film revolves around Catherine, the new hieress of the manor attempting to figure out why she keeps seeing the ghost of an eyeless man and his severed hand, while the ghost bumps people off. She, her husband, and the other initial focus characters during the first half of the movie are not exactly wonderful actors and while it's cool to watch the ghost do ghost stuff and murder people, they really drag the movie down and it honestly feels like its going nowhere for a long time.

At the halfway point, Peter Cushing shows up playing a doctor character and just kind of starts acting victory laps around people. He really makes the second half of this movie more serious and gripping rather than an arrangement of blood and spooks and kind of rights the ship for me. I was getting a little sleepy till he showed up but my attention was very rapt until the end once he takes charge of the story. The ending is a little predictable, but it was suitable for a story like this.

Overall, a very middle of the road movie that picks up in the second half. I usually prefer these kinds of movies to be more atmospheric and spooky instead of in your face (and even rather brutal at parts), but the second half begins to approach that at least. I dunno if I'll ever go out of my way to watch it again, but I didn't feel like I wasted my time. 6/10

Movie 22- Chopping Mall

I wanted a quick movie to blast through so I could do a bit of catching up and get more on track for 31 movie today, so I went with a big B-movie favorite, Chopping Mall. Maybe that's cheating, but I was going to watch it at some point like I do every Halloween.

Chopping Mall is an incredibly bare bones sci-fi shlock horror that is kind of remarkably well paced? It spends very very little time messing around; it gets some meaningless exposition out of the way in the first 5 minutes, immediately goes about setting up the victims as well as the killer robots that serve as the villains of the movie for about another 10, and then the rest of the movie is solely dedicated to people getting hilariously killed. And before the dumb premise stops being fun and starts being a drag, it wraps things up and gets the hell out of there. It's barely over an hour! Ideal for when you just have a bit of time to kill and want to see some quick zaniness

This movie lives and dies by that idea of "locked in a mall with killer robots". There's basically no character development. There's barely even character arcs. It's just very dumb fun with the occasional hilariously stupid line ("Let's give these fuckers a Rambo-gram!"), over the top violence (that lady's head popping near the start of the chaos is one of my favorite horror movie deaths ever), and just bewildering plot contrivance. If you're looking for something serious or actually scary you'll hate it. If you can turn off your brain and just enjoy the splatter, you'll love it. 8/10

Movie 23- Manhattan Baby

Lucio Fulci is the world's most interesting thief. A lot of his movies are in my opinion at least mostly crap, which might not be a popular opinion, but at the same time I generally find them fascinating because he loves to pull concepts, imagery and even wholesale situations from other stuff and present it himself with a surreal nonsensical twist. This movie is weird because it's one of the few he has made which seem wholly original in concept. I had seen this once before this year and always had it in the back of my mind as cribbing imagery and atmosphere from Poltergeist, but the timeline of that doesn't add up. And even if it did, all the crazy Egypt shit in this moive would make it a thing of its own.

Manhattan Baby is very hard to follow; even harder in my opinion than some of his more infamously nonsensical films like The Beyond and City of the Living Dead. It feels like there's three movies going on at once in this thing, and none of the characters are entirely sure which one they're in at any given moment. I do have to complement a lot of the surreal sequences in it, just.. They mostly seem meaningless. Characters will disappear in one scene and reappear in another, see crazy visions one second and then seemingly forget they saw them the next. I'm not entirely sure that the problem really is it being hard to follow so much as it being unfollowable.

Speaking of The Beyond, the score has stuff taken from that movie and just reinserted into this one. It does, however, have a ridiculously cool and unfitting main theme. That's worth a listen at least. As for the rest of this... It's not the worst Fulci movie I've ever seen (that's probably Demonia) but you can safely skip this one. I'm all for weirdness, but outside of a few laugh out loud moments, this weirdness is not worthwhile. 5/10

1st - Horror of Dracula (1958)
2nd - Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
3rd - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
4th - The VVitch: A New England Folktale (2016)
5th - Frankenstein (1931)
6th - A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
7th - The Werewolf (1956)
8th - The Silence of the Lambs (1991) *theater*
9th - An American Werewolf in London (1981)
10th - Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)
11th - Creature With the Atom Brain (1955)
12th - A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
13th - Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
14th - The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
15th A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
16th Pumpkinhead (1988)
17th Halloween (2018)
18th Halloween Kills (2021)
19th Halloween Ends (2022) *theater*
20th White Zombie (1932)
21st A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
22nd Ghostbusters (1984) *theater*
23rd The Lost Boys (1987) *theater*
24th - Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) *theater*
25th - Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
26th - Silver Bullet (1985)
27th - Trick 'r Treat (2007) *theater*

Unless I get fired from my job in the next few days, Trick 'r Treat marks the last film of the season that I'll be watching on a theater screen. I've seen it a couple of times before, but this is the first time that I noticed Sam is actually a demon. At the beginning of the film, the news reporter quips that werewolves, zombies, and demons have descended upon the small Ohio town. Over the course of the film, all three monster types show up. The women looking for dates are werewolves, the murdered kids on the bus come back as zombies, and that leaves Sam as the demon.

29

The Boy 2 - Again, I had the plot of the first one all spoiled for me including "a sequel didn't need to happen tbh" and I agree with that. It didn't. I liked seeing Katie Holmes in a post-Scientology role but this movie was silly and I don't see how any sort of continuity could be claimed. It wasn't terrible, but I was told no one asked for it and I agree. It is what it is.

Movie 24- Contamination (1980)

This weird, bad movie recently got added to Rifftrax's subscription service selection so I gave it a look after seeing its cover floating around for a few years.

Something between a horror movie and a spy movie, it focuses around a government agent and her two goofball friends trying to thwart an evil cult that wants to spread Martian eggs all over the planet. Probably the coolest and most memorable part of the film is that when anyone gets exposed to the gas in the egg, they bloat up and pop like they just got sucker punched by Kenshiro. It's a really cool looking, brutal special effect that makes up the majority of kills in the movie but looks neat enough that it never really gets old to see.

In contrast, the rest of the movie gets old very fast. For a movie about aliens exploding people to death, there's an enormous amount of screentime devoted to people standing around and talking. A reviewer on Wikipedia compares this to a James Bond movie, but honestly it's more like the first act of one of those movies stretched to the majority of its run time. There's so much snoozy dialogue and cheap scares that even with the riffing I was getting bored pretty fast. Goblin does the soundtrack and even they sound barely into it.

If you want to see some cool special effects, maybe there's a kill compilation for this movie somewhere on Youtube. But definitely don't bother trying to watch the full thing. 4/10

Movie 25- The Chill Factor

Never heard of this movie before tonight. The description on Midnight Pulp sounded kind of cool so I figured I could watch it while doing something else, but... Something about it grabbed me. I ended up giving it undivided attention.

The setup is pretty simple but effective; a group of snowmobilers get stuck with a wounded member of their group in a creepy abandoned hunting lodge full of religious stuff. They find a talking board and accidentally revive a demon, and what follows is a kind-of-slasher-kind-of-ghost-movie as they're picked off one by one. It reminds me of the made for TV Amityville films like It's About Time or Dollhouse both in plot and in style. It's got that really strong direct to video 90s vibe I love where it doesn't quite feel like either a film or a tv show, and that's very nostalgiac for me. There wasn't a lot of budget but they did their best, and I think it works because the lodge manages to be very creepy and the kills, while never showing much, are surprisingly gruesome. To top it all off it's got a very cheesy synth soundtrack which I really dig, enough so that I looked to see if you could find it anywhere. Tragically it doesn't seem like it.

It's not without its problems. The acting is very hammy, in some scenes distractingly so; I thought I was in for something on the level of Birdemic for the first scene. There's also some really weird plot points, including a guy that really really wants to fuck his sister (even before anything supernatural begins to happen) which kept cracking me up, especially because the movie begins to actively lean into it later like it's supposed to be unusual for him. It's also got one of the worst "final girl finds all the corpses" scenes where the actress is bad enough that it seems like she's more annoyed at finding all her dead friends than anything.

But none of that can really stop this movie from being a hidden gem. A rough gem, and definitely one I enjoyed more because of my proclivities towards weird direct to video stuff from this era, but it's entertaining even if it doesn't excel. It ends with a snowmobile chase with a demon while music that sounds like it's out of Megaman X plays! I totally think this thing deserves more attention. 7/10