Friday 1 November 2019

We have a nice middle class jury, their dislike for the insurance company is second only to their disdain for working class people


26th OCT - LEPRECHAUN 6: BACK 2 THA HOOD... To be fair, this is no worse than the last one, and if anything feels a little more focused.  I also recognised Trish from the Lethal Weapon tv series, so it's not like the movie is full of complete nobodies.
Originally to be about the Leprechaun visiting a tropical locale to terrorise politically-correct spring breakers while putting on a Jamaican accent which I am sure we would all have been happy to see, the producers didn't fancy paying for outside shooting so instead we get another poverty safari to the inner city that Hollywood only seems to take a passing interest in once in a blue moon despite it being literally a mile from their damn door, and for some reason it's only this time around that we get to see the role of the police in the oppression of the poor, leading to an enjoyable sequence in which the Leprechaun beats two cops to death.
Apart from that, it's not terribly interesting or insightful, and probably a good place to call it a day with these films, just like Warwick Davies did.  Maybe next year I'll get to Leprechaun: Origins, in which the villain is played by a professional wrestler - clearly the people who own this series have not heeded the fable of proud Icarus...



27th OCT - HALLOWEEN 2 which I have somehow not seen before, even though it picks up right where the first one left off.  No John Carpenter this time around, though he co-writes the script, and the movie veers more into the familiar slasher territory of OTT murder scenes than the relatively restrained original, though what's here seems pretty tame compared to the kind of stuff that would follow it not just in this franchise, but in the genre it helped create.
There's still the creepy first person view of events from the eyes of the killer, and tense tracking shots that follow him as he silently closes in on his latest victim, but this is overly-familiar territory to me, really, and while I appreciate the odd bit of craft here and there, I didn't get a lot out of it.

28th OCT - AN HOUR OF TERRIFYING SCI-FI over on the Youtube DUST channel, a content host for sci-fi short movies that to the untrained eye - ie: mine - look suspiciously like scenes from a larger work rather than complete stories in and of themselves, but apart from the sci-fi horror segment DEDALO, these six stories with a horror bent stand on their own pretty well.


29th OCT - INSIDIOUS more like InSHITious, amiright?
This is an odd fish, as it feels like a found footage movie that has instead been shot as a regular multi-camera film.  It's not the best horror ever, but for the first hour or so it's at least passable, even if the characters are remarkably thin even for this genre, but once it gets to the proper paranormal stuff it just becomes funny.
I criticised Halloween 2 for being overly-familiar, but it didn't feel like it was lapsing into parody of the genre in the way that this does as it ticks off the checklist of cliches from jump scares to gross dudes licking a lady's face.  The story is your basic demon possession stuff in which the non-supernatural believerer has to do a supernatural to save his son from Darth Maul and his new legs, who clearly don't have a lot going on in their lives if this and a cameo in SOLO were all they could manage.
It certainly looks like they spent a few bucks on it, but that just means it's expensive rubbish.  I did like that they went with dry ice and a bloke wandering around with a lantern at the end, as it gave it an unashamed sense of old-school melodrama only undone when actual spooks show up.



30th OCT - US is a great example of why Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone is so naff - he's kept all his A-material for projects like this and isn't wasting it on CBS' sad attempts to revive its roster of IP to pad out its ghost town of a streaming service.
US isn't actually that original or inventive, it's just well-made and does its job without lapsing into parody, which is why it's such a great antidote to crap like INSIDIOUS.  Tense, scary, and bursting with potential for allegorical readings of the material, I would recommend it to anyone.

31st OCT - BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY: SPACE VAMPIRE is the crown jewel of any horror marathon and I watch it every Halloween.

The comedy parts are irritating, the acting is hammy, the sets are clearly the same few plastic sheets spray-painted different colours, the fx are terrible, the action scenes are ludicrous, and the story is full of logic holes, but by golly is it entertaining tosh.  A riff on Dracula sets things off as the Starship Demeter crashes into the isolated space station where Buck and Wilma are planning on abandoning their (let's not kid ourselves) sex robot, Twiki, so they can go bone on a pleasure planet, so the station has to be locked down while everyone is checked for Space Fever!  Unknown to everyone but a particularly wooden Buck, a creature who is just like a vampire in every way is feeding on the hapless idiots that cross his path by doing the heavy metal devil horns sign on their necks, which either makes them temporarily dead, or temporarily super-sexy, depending on whether or not it's Wilma who gets the horns.
Do you want to watch Gil Gerard's stunt double fight a hoard of space zombies?  Of course you do, you are a fine and upstanding member of the science fiction horror understanderer's club and this is what we do.

I also watched AN ALIEN AFFAIR and ZOMBIE MASTER, two terror-themed episodes from the daffy CENTURIONS kids' sci-fi show from the mid-80s that has not become a gritty and underrated masterpiece with the passage of time, even with scripting talent like Gerry Conway and Michael Reeves, Jack Kirby and Gil Kane working on visual concepts, and the incomparable Udi Harpaz providing the soundtrack.  This show is capital-B Bad, but so much so that it swings all the way around on the dial and scoots past naffness to "enjoyable" again.

An Alien Affair is a longtime fave, but I gave Zombie Master a go, too, as I figured I could probably stand zombies for 21 minutes in the context of this particular show, and you know what?  Robot zombies I could live with.
But now I am done with zombies.


So what conclusions can I draw at the end of my month of almost exclusively horror-based media consumption?
That I hate horror, mainly.
I mean, I think I realised I didn't have a great deal of interest in sitting down to watch horror movies, but I put that down to most modern horror movies kind of sucking really bad rather than disdain for the genre, but... yep, I think I hate horror as a genre.  I guess the writing was on the wall when I realised how much I'd gone off zombies - which I put down to their omnipresence - and shaky footage of ghosts shot on someone's phone while they scream OH MI GOD.  I love stuff like Quatermass and the old Doctor Whos that have horror elements, but "pure" horror movies that I adore are few and far between - I could totally watch The Fog, Don't Look Now, Tremors or Night Of The Demon anytime, but these are exceptions rather than an indicator of my taste.
Bollocks to it anyway, I'm off to watch a bunch of CW superhero shows for a few hours to get back into my trash groove.

No comments:

Post a Comment