Halloween Horrorfest Mini Reviews Part 2

Back for round two…

(Warning – in some cases there may be some mild spoilers. Nothing too bad, but you’ve been warned!)

1. John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned – You have legendary director John Carpenter at the helm and a stellar cast including Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, and Mark Hamill, and a sizable budget, what could possibly go wrong? The answer is quite a bit actually… I love John Carpenter and some of his other movies are in my list of favorite movies of all times, but this is definitely not one of them. While he had done a great job of remaking “Thing from Another World” as “The Thing” back in 1984, lightning definitely doesn’t strike twice here. After the pulse pounding dread of “the Decent”, this movie seemed about as interesting as a limp dish rag. You did see some small flashes of John Carpenter magic, but generally this movie is a snooze fest, with flat acting and a new twist where they explain the mutant children as aliens. It ends up feeling like a bad extended episode of the X-Files, with Kirstie Alley as your Mulder / Scully amalgamation. Save yourself the pain and just go watch the original 1960 version, which is far superior.
2. Friday the 13th – After the bad taste that Village of the Damned left in my mouth, I needed comfort food to bring me back to my happy place. And I can definitively say Camp Crystal Lake is my happy place. I’ve been a huge fan of the Friday the 13th series most of my adult life, although when I was younger I tended to avoid the first movie because of the lack of a certain hockey mask killer. As I got older and started paying attention to this movie, my appreciation of it grew. It sets a blueprint that slasher movies would go on to replicate over and over. The scenes where they do the kills completely from the killer’s POV are brilliant and do a good job of setting up the shocking twist. Betsy Palmer is great as Pamela Vorhees, as she bounces back and forth between the Jason and Mother personas. Ashleigh Burton pointed out recently in her review of Friday the 13th that it was Norman Bates from Psycho in reverse and she’s right. How have I never caught that? This movie never overstays it’s welcome and doesn’t drag like some films of the slasher genre. The decapitation scene is absolutely brutal and the jump scare at the end may be the best of all times. Pure magic.
3. The Fog – And we’re back with John Carpenter, but this time it’s one of my favorite John Carpenter movies of all times. This movie is like one of those big comfy wool sweaters like you would imagine the inhabitants of Antonio Bay would wear on a cold night. Jamie Lee Curtis is reunited with Carpenter, as well as her Halloween co-star, Nancy Loomis, as well as her real life mother and Psycho star, Janet Leigh. The film also stars Adrienne Barbeau as the lonely owner of the radio station at the top of the local lighthouse. All you need to know is that a very strange fog rolls in and things start going crazy because, there’s something in the fog! This movie is like a warm hug to me. The coastal location, the sultry late night dj music / routine from Adrienne, John Carpenter’s usual killer soundtrack, and the spooky unexplainable acts that occur when the fog first appears make for an interesting watch. I mean how could I not like a movie with ghost pirates in it?? If you haven’t seen this one, take the time to look it up. It’s Carpenter at his best.
4. Us – Jordan Peele’s follow up to the wildly creative “Get Out” is a really strange movie. This was my first time watching the movie and I have to say it was impressive. At first I thought it was going to be about the one family and their doppelgängers. That would have been enough for some moviemakers, but not for Peele. The offbeat tale he tells here is full of twist and turns, including a huge twist that I suspected but wasn’t absolutely sure of until right before it happened. In the end it almost feels like more of a science fiction movie than a horror movie but, when they reveal the scope of what actually happened it serves up the chills nicely. I enjoyed it and unlike some films, it nailed the landing, which can apparently be really difficult. (See multiple other movies on this list…)
5. Sinister 2 – The first Sinister was a pleasant surprise, with Ethan Hawke sitting in a dark room watching very unsettling home movies for most it and a bad guy that only appeared briefly over the runtime of the movie. You know that the sequel is off to a bad start however when you start the film and instantly start asking if you accidentally skipped the first 10 – 15 minutes. Also the villain pulls a “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” when he barely appeared in the first movie but then you completely see him within the first two minutes of the sequel. It’s a terribly impatient movie that can’t be bothered to let things slowly built, but instead has to hammer you over the head with literally everything. There end up being several bad guys, both human and inhuman and honestly, if I had to choose between the Ghoul or either of the human bad guys, I’m picking the Ghoul. In the end, everyone gets what they deserve, except for any audience members who were hoping for a good sequel to the really good first movie…

(Now I will point out at this point we had arrived at Halloween day with the plan being to watch as many movies as we could fit in. That number ended up being four, but we picked some pretty great movies for the all afternoon, evening movie marathon.)

1. Halloween – How could you start a Halloween night movie marathon with anything else? I know some may think we should have waited till last for this, but we had a plan, I’ll explain in a minute. So even though my wife was a horror enthusiast, she actually had never seen this movie in it’s entirety until seven years ago when I took her to the Ayrsley Grand in Charlotte, NC for their Halloween Horror film series. This movie is so good at building up a sense of dread as Michael stalks and toys with his would be prey, including just driving up and hanging around outside their school. Just the thought of Michael driving around in a car is pretty surreal, you would never see Jason Vorhees do that. Then Laurie Stroud, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, MacGyver’s the hell out of it, using a knitting needle and  a wire clothes hanger to take down Michael on two separate occasions. It then takes six shots ( I shot him six times! SIX TIMES!! ) and a fall from the second story to stop Michael. Who then promptly disappears, which leads us to…
2. Halloween 2 – We’ve always wanted to watch them back to back since the second one is essentially just a direct continuation of the first movie. It picks up by reshowing us the end of the first movie and then starting immediately afterwards. I’ve always thought this was a cool approach. Not a year later, not several years later. No this movie starts immediately where the first one ended and to me, I’ve always felt like it could be spliced together with the original and just played as one extra long movie. Your two main characters are kept distracted, with Laurie being mostly sedated in the hospital and Loomis busy trying to figure out if the random guy in a Kirk mask that was accidentally killed in the most out of control accidental vehicular homicide incident of all times, (seriously, that police department is going to get sued!) is Michael or not. While both of those things are going on Michael gets a rebound kill after failing to get Laurie at the end of the last movie. He then literally bumps into a guy with a boombox that is playing the news story explaining that Laurie is being treated at the hospital before seeing a sign that tells him where the hospital is. Is this lazy writing? I don’t care. This movie is awesome, I’ll let them get away with it. My one gripe is it introduces the “Samhain” element to the Michael storyline that would get on my freaking nerves in the sequels. They also mispronounce the shit out of it, but this was the 80s so they didn’t have Google so I’ll give them a break. Anyway, the majority of the movie is set in a hospital where Michael figures out various inventive ways to off people before he and Loomis seemingly go down in a blaze of glory. Personally based on how some of the sequels play out, I think that would have been preferable…
3. Deep Red – Originally we meant to watch the original House of Wax, starring horror great Vincent Price. However, we didn’t want to have to buy it, so we opted instead of the 1975 Italian Horror film, Deep Red by Dario Argento. You may know the director better for his most famous movie, Suspiria, which was remade a few years ago. If you don’t know him at all, trust me, look up either Deep Red (which is on Amazon Prime) or Suspiria and get caught up. I actually saw this movie for the first time last year, as part of Leif Jonker’s Horrorfest in Wichita, KS. The movie starts with a psychic sensing a murderer is in the audience during her exhibition. The murderer follows her home and right off the bat we are treated to an absolute brutal murder scene. Afterwards the story follows her neighbor, a local pianist, who tries to figure out who killed her, while the bodies continue to pile up. I will say this movie didn’t exactly age well. There are references to gender roles and sexual preferences that are absolutely outdated. However, if you can ignore that, the movie itself is a really interesting ride. The sets are gorgeous and the murders escalate in intensity as the movie goes on. The drowning / scalding death scene from Halloween 2 was actually inspired by the drowning / scalding death in this movie. It also features a killer soundtrack by rock band Goblin, who would go on to do the score for Suspiria, a soundtrack so good my wife bought it. All in all it was a great addition to our fest and a good deep cut from an Italian horror master.
4. A Nightmare on Elm Street – At this point we had watched Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees so it was only fitting that we ended our Halloween Horrorfest with the third member of that 80s trifecta of terror, Freddy Krueger. This movie scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. The scene from the trailer where he looks like he is coming out of the wall above the girl always freaked me out so hard. In later films Freddy became known almost more for his one liners, but in this movie he is evil personified. Although I have to say, the one scene where he is walking down the alley way and stretching his arms out to touch both walls looks like straight garbage and not something you would expect to find in a major motion picture. Kids these days would clown it to death. Johnny Depp makes his debut here and ranks right up there with Kevin Bacon as far as horror film debuts. I have to give Depp the edge however because of the way he rocks his half shirt with pride. Once again we find ourselves with a final girl who can MacGyver the hell out of a situation, as she sets up a bunch of Home Alone style traps for Freddy. I could also gripe that she is apparently a time lord because she ask her dad to be at her place in twenty minutes (12:30am) so he can catch Freddy, then sets a bunch of Home Alone style booby traps that would have taken several hours to set, and lays down to go to sleep with her clock reading midnight, a full ten minutes before she spoke with her Dad and started setting up the traps. As a friend of mine once said, “It’s only a movie, don’t think about it too much or you’ll ruin it.” In the end we’re left wondering if the movie was a dream within a dream as Freddy ends up seemingly coming out on top. I know I found some gripes with it, but I do love this movie. It scared the crap out of me as a kid and is still world’s better than the crap remake they did in 2010. 

Well that’s it for my Halloween Horrorfest Mini Reviews. Hope you guys enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed watching the movies. Let me know what you think of the reviews. Did you watch any horror films? I would love to hear you suggestions for films that I should’ve put on the list. Hope you had a happy and safe Halloween! Until next time!