So it begins! The yearly horror movie binge is upon us. Here's what I've watched so far:
We're starting off on rocky shores this year, as Truth or Dare was a steaming pile of garbage. It's funny, last year we accidentally watched a different horror movie called Truth or Dare mistakenly thinking it was this one. It turns out that the off-brand Truth or Dare was the superior movie. A game of truth or dare played in an accursed convent in Mexico makes dead, grinning fools of the participants in what is essentially a poorly conceived iteration of The Ring.
Death Warmed Up is a horror movie dating from before New Zealand's makeover as idyllic Hobbitland. It's definitely the other scuzzy Australia in this. Death Warmed Up plays like a weird combination of Mad Max and Return of the Living Dead, but with added oedipal anxieties. That feels like a premise aimed at a very specific audience, which I am not a part of.
Just...avoid this one. Trust me.
Okay, if you need a better reason to stay away, try this on for size: this is an "erotic thriller" in which Bill Mosley's character reads pick-up lines from his phone to a young coed to try to get her into bed.
Erotic...as a hangnail.
Now this movie is fascinating. Based on the real-life Texarkana Phantom murders, The Town That Dreaded Sundown veers wildly between gritty, grindhouse-style scenes of murder and comedic Keystone Cops-style inept antics. Did you know that they screen this movie every year in the town where the murders happened? Wild, right?
An architect left home alone when his wife and kids head to the beach without him is seduced by two "lost" women who show up on his doorstep during a rainstorm. They then tell him the morning after that they are underage, he's a pedophile, and they're going to ruin his life over it. Look, if you believe Ana de Armis's character's claim that she's only fifteen years old, you deserve what you get, buddy. That's clearly a full-grown woman and you should be able to tell the god-damn difference. Anyway, not sure why I gave Eli Roth another try; this one ends like so many of his films do: a meandering search for an absent moral center that collapses into a lame joke.
Piranha comes from the era where b-movies were fun. I've seen it called a parody of Jaws, but I'm not sure that's an accurate assessment. Part of my uncertainty lies in that some of the funnier bits aren't easily recognizable as comedy. When a guy says "I swear on my honor as a Texan" in a Bronx accent, is that intentionally humorous? Who can say? Either way, what you get is a batch of piranha who have been altered by the government getting into the water supply and wrecking havoc.
My feelings about Shirley are a little complicated. On one hand, it's a really well done movie, with excellent performances and a strong aesthetic sense. But on the other, it felt a bit like a character assassination of Shirley Jackson and her husband. Though they may have had their fair share of problems, they didn't work to disrupt the lives of a young couple living with them for their own entertainment or as grist for the mill of Jackson's next novel.
Demon Seed is strangely prescient; even though it's from 1977, it imagines a world in which an Alexa achieves sentience and begins to terrorize a woman. It then goes full "what if?" when that terrorizing turns into the artificial intelligence proposing to impregnate her to create the first of a new race of beings.
Trick or Treats is a fairly run-of-the-mill iteration of Halloween's premise, but it is enlivened somewhat by how bizarre some of the plot choices are. For example, the sequence where the future killer is chased by orderlies who want to take him to the asylum goes on for a surprisingly long time; it ends up involving wrestling, tree-climbing, and cops being thrown into a swimming pool by the "maniac," who may just be a guy trying to enjoy his breakfast.
The Hitcher was a much weirder movie than I remembered. It's an unsettling mix of action movie and stalker nightmare. A young man delivering a car to a client in California picks up a hitch-hiker who just happens to be a serial murderer. But instead of killing the kid, the killer marks him out for torment, framing him for the killings and generally putting his resolve to the test. Odd that the most disturbing scene essentially happens off-camera. Also, is it just me or is there something inexpressibly threatening about Rutger Hauer sweating profusely?
An expert in experimental brain surgery is hired to extract corporate secrets from the mind of a brilliant man who has, apparently, gone insane. But, in the end, nothing is what it seems and everything resides in a state of insanity. It's rare to find small budget films like this packed with talent, but this was produced by Julie Corman (wife of Roger Corman), based on a script by Charles Beaumont (writer of several classic Twilight Zone episodes), starring the two Bills (Pullman and Paxton). Oh, also, Bud Cort of Harold & Maude fame is in the mix.
An insurance fraud investigator is hired to track down horror author Sutter Cane, who has disappeared with the manuscript of his long-awaited next novel. The investigator believes that all of this is an elaborate hoax to promote the book, until reality starts warping around him. In the Mouth of Madness is still possibly the best Lovecraftian movie ever made, precisely because it avoids the most cliche, surface-level appeal elements of Lovecraft's fiction.
You already know the premise: a young FBI trainee leverages her connection with a cannibal serial killer to catch a trophy-collecting serial killer. The Silence of the Lambs is still a stunning film, even after years of repeated viewings. Nothing else to say about it. Either you see it or you don't.
A rock band struggling to write their next hit song buy a score of unpublished music by Paganini and decide to film the music video for their song that will be based on it in a supposedly haunted house. Bad move, all around. All of this unleashes an undead Paganini, and all many of accompanying supernatural tomfoolery, which means the band, their manager, and the video director get picked off one by one. Not much in this movie adds up and, frankly, the poster is way better than the actual film.