October 25th - DEAD SEA is kind of like Wrong Turn, but with boats at sea. It hasn't been reviewed well, even though I thought it was about as good as these things usually are. The central contrivance of two separate disasters befalling the characters in the middle of an ocean possibly stretches credulity, though the whole point of a horror thriller is that we're watching extraordinary events that aren't entirely usual, so if I had to guess, this has performed poorly with its target audience because it lacks the usual jump scares and dreadful sound mix that typify the modern teen horror, and there's surprisingly little gore considering some of the latter story turns. Lots of low angle rear shots of the central protagonist mean that if you're a butt fetishist, you'll probably have a field day with it, but gorehounds will likely come away disappointed.
October 26th - THE BEAST WITHIN just reminds me that that Invisible Man reimagining was great, wasn't it? Well, imagine someone doing the same thing, but with another of the classic Universal Monsters - and by "doing the same thing" I really mean just doing the same thing and transplanting the same themes and ideas to werewolf lore, and it kind of sort of doesn't actually work at all, mainly because the idea that the character who is a werewolf might not actually be a werewolf and is instead an abusive husband is only introduced in the final leg of the film after one too many red herrings have been introduced that can be explained away by the unreliable narration of a single character who is not the only observer of events. I get that the makers wanted to make something that put a new spin on werewolf lore, but why they went the laziest route possible with something whose pagan roots are rich with acknowledged subtext that is already rarely explored in media is baffling. Ginger Snaps managed to explore lycanthrophy as metaphor for the female reproductive cycle, Wolfen reimagined the enduring fear of wolves in a contemporary setting, Project: Metalbeast explored the pitfalls of making a werewolf an industructible CIA robot - the lore is ripe for reinvention if the will is there, is what I am saying. The Beast Within is a fine project in theory, but something gets lost in the execution and it ultimately disappoints and fails to convince.
October 27th - OUT COME THE WOLVES answers the oft-asked question: what if The Grey was boring and went nowhere? A trio of - I guess you could call them "characters" - hang out in a cabin in the woods over a weekend and old feelings resurface before it becomes overly-literal in the third act when some wolves attack. Why? Good question, and it is not answered. Which sums up the film, really. I get that they were going for thematic resonance, but I don't think they managed it. Another wolfy disappointment.
October 28th - CARVED is a movie about a small town Halloween festival menaced by a murderous pumpkin that has been mutated by a chemical spill. I love the dumb premise, and the film wastes little time getting to the bloody pumpkin rampage, but a big hunk of the second act really drags as the film struggles to fill the minutes now that it's already got the good stuff out of the way. I like the first and third acts, though, which really commit to the premise and treat it seriously enough that it's almost scary, and I liked how the film implemented its stock characters with just enough of a spin that I could actually tell them apart - no mean feat, let me tell you.
October 29th - GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE is a pointless addition to the franchise, but then you can probably say that about every Ghostbusters movie since the original. It feels like two episodes of a tv show stitched together more than it does a major theatrical movie release, and often seems like a toy advertisement. If I could muster some enthusiasm for it, I might try defending this mercenary attitude as being a throwback to the 1980s era of nascent hyper-capitalism that birthed the franchise, and maybe someone who actually enjoyed this already made such a defence, but watching it was a chore for me, as is trying to think of something to say about it after the fact.
VHS: BEYOND reminds me of the early days of fan movies on Youtube, where talented directors and fight choreographers would film a scene where Batman would fight Wolverine or Luke Skywalker would fight Darth Maul, and these were impressive displays of what those individuals could achieve in front of and/or behind a camera, but they weren't stories with a beginning, middle and end, they were showpieces meant to garner attention and clicks, and they could get away with having little substance by looking cool. VHS Beyond is like a bunch of such films strung together with footage from a kind of "Ancient Aliens"-type show, and while the individual segments are impressive on a technical level, as stories they are at best unfinished and incomplete, even by the infamously low standards of the found footage genre, and this film felt like a massive waste of my precious time on this Earth. I understand that these anthologies are essentially showpieces to display to potential financiers to come produce a longform version of the shorts on offer, but nothing here really seems like it could support a full feature.
October 30th - RIPPY is what happens when someone thinks of the phrase "Skippy the undead kangaroo" and decides that's enough to base a whole movie on, and you know what? It's hard to argue, as they went ahead and made the damn thing - look, here it is. It's clearly aiming to make you think it's a horror comedy, but there's little in the way of comedy, even if you watch it with a charitable attitude towards some of its less original moments and view them as knowing winks to a savvy and media-literate audience - Rippy is a deadly serious horror movie whose monster just happens to be a zombie kangaroo, and it's a pretty decent creature feature if you don't mind the lack of jokes.
October 31st - WOLFCOP is pure trash, but knowingly so, being a crowdfunded action/horror mashup about alcoholic smalltown sheriff Lou Garou, who inherits his family curse and uses his new powers of graphic dismemberment to battle the twin evils of immortal reptilian shapeshifters and meth-dealing biker gangs. Unlike other examples of self-aware trash, it actually delivers on its stupid premise and has some memorable one-liners and at least one scene where we get to see a man's schlong turn into a wolf's schlong onscreen - something I certainly didn't know I needed to see, but is now, going forward, my barometer for whether a werewolf movie is good or not. It's cheap-looking, though given the high definition of modern digital cameras and televisions, this is unavoidable - but watch this in 4:3 with a CRT filter over it, the contrast turned way down and the colour saturation just a little too high, and you'd be fooled into thinking you're watching a mid-90s straight-to-video gem.
THE LIGHTHOUSE is a category-defying 2019 film described as horror by some, so that's why I gave it a go, and to be honest, I can see why its flourishes threw some people off, but there's a linear story in here for those who want it, and it can easily fit into any number of boxes if that's important to you. Me, I viewed it as comedy, raised as I was on the classic British comedy trope of "a sane man trapped with a monster (but which is the sane man and which is the monster?)" - the basis of everything from Red Dwarf to Steptoe And Son. I gather that some people value films that can reward repeat viewings, but The Lighthouse doesn't strike me as one of those, as it seems like it wears everything on its sleeve and you won't miss much on your first viewing - especially if you have the subtitles turned on.
I did enjoy it, but it's hard to think of anything to offer about it other than it seemes to have been a big inspiration to the game No-One LIves Under The Lighthouse.
BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25th CENTURY: SPACE VAMPIRE is the chicken soup of the soul for my Halloween viewing habits, an analogy I started writing before I remembered I hate chicken - but I looooooooove this episode of this infamously cheesey sci-fi adventure series. Every time I watch it I focus on something new to me, like the score often veering into electronic tonalaties similar to Bebe and Louis Barron's score for the seminal Forbidden Planet, or - as noticed this year - the rather terrible government response to a potential contagion that threatens to ravage the workers at a remote space factory. Dozens are dead and the government response is little more than a shoulder shrug, even though they are literally in space and could just seal some compartments or something to stop contaminated air circulating - I'm pretty sure they're in a post-capitalist society at this point, too, making the sanctity of production all the more baffling, even before you remember that all they make at this factory is spare parts for those weird little sex robots (there's no point pretending Twiki is anything else). Looks like dipshit anti-lockdown sentiment is the one thing to survive the nuclear holocaust of 1987. Great.
So, that was Halloween 2024. I made an effort to consume horror media outside my usual milieu of decades-old werewolf movies and straight-to-video Alien knock-offs and it doesn't feel like it paid off, or at least I can't bring anything particularly memorable to mind apart from In A Violent Nature and the general post-apocalyptic nihilism of the Saw series.
I did capitulate to the inevitable and watch Alien: Romulus, though, which was actually quite good, though its cassete futurism aesthetic seemed at odds with the last two Alien movies, which it makes a point of acknowledging, and it felt suspiciously like the touchstone for the director was the Alien: Isolation videogame - I even spotted the "save game telephone" from it during the original trailer for the movie.
I have learned nothing, is what I am saying. I am as numb as ever to the charms of the horror genre, but the list of films I didn't manage to get to this Halloween still seems like it contains a few potential gems, so who knows? I might keep going, but it seems like no longer being able to post images on Blogger has brought me to the end of my time here and it might be best to move on to something more amenable like Instagram, or perhaps just make the jump to the Facebook with all the other geriatrics.
Now that's scary.
