October 20th
 

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995)

I thought this was pretty darned good when i saw it at the cinema and i still do, so much so that i picked up the 88 Films Blu in the recent 2 for £15 promotion.

I love the New Orleans locations. They have a real sense of unease that anything could go wrong. The gnarly trees, Mardi Gras which is always pretty creepy (Moonraker probably put that idea into my head at an early age...thanks Jaws) and just the general Southern Gothic feel and generally haunted atmosphere the are exudes.

There are some great set pieces. One death is pretty damn gruesome and shocking at it's placing in the movie as is watching Kelly Rowan and boyfriend Timothy Carhart in their chilling exploration of her old house. Whilst Tony Todd as the silky voiced yet merciless Candyman is up there with the great horror villains.

Meanwhile the action on screen is accompanied by Phillip Glass' equally haunting score which reverberates round a 5:1 surround system.

So whilst Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh probably doesn't live up to the first film's classic status i really enjoy it.

Gave up. Life's too short, and a bit came and I realised I had watched it before.
Ahem. :skull:

I don't know what it is but I prefer this one to it's predecessor but hated Candyman: Day Of The Dead.

Gothika. 2003.

A psychiatrist becomes a patient in the hospital where she works with no memory of what happened and is a primary suspect in her husband's death.

I hadn't seen this since it first came out and I'm not a huge Halle Berry fan but this one did work in her favour as the depressed psychiatrist who struggles with her sanity and becoming somewhat possessed and solves the mystery of a girl's murder. Robert Downey Jr plays the co-worker who tries to help his new patient and Charles S. Dutton as the murdered husband and head doctor of the facility.

This can have a dark tone atmosphere at times and Halle with Penelope Cruz sharing a shower (nothing happens) but from being a doctor and now patient the two do have some good on screen chemistry and decent dialogue between them, still not sure what to make of the ending though.

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Up next The Gate

Yeah, i think i prefer it to the original Candyman.

I must do. I own it and Candyman: Day of the Dead on Blu but not the original film. :lol:

The first time i saw Gothika i absolutely loved it. Went back several years on and thought it really run of the mill. Not sure why.

I think it's one of those films that looses it's appeal after the first watch, it is good and well crafted film, same with What Lies Beneath, I found that to be good with the first and second watch but thanks to Scary Movie 2 the makers ruined that film for me.

The Gate. 1987.

Two siblings are left home alone for the weekend and along with the neighbour's son, they unleash a horde of demons from the hole in the back garden.

Director Tibor Takacs and writer Michael Nankin gives the usual graphic gore and cheap nasty scares found in a majority of 80's slasher fare that was trendy at the time and certainly better than today's CGI stuff. Stephen Dorff and his friend Louis Tripp accidentally open a gateway for the supernatural forces to enter their realm and both boys have to figure what to do to send them back. The first half is a good build up and small back story about a workman being killed and buried on the property when the houses were built, the second half does pay off well with the dark...ish atmosphere.

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Up next The Nesting

The Nesting. 1981.

A writer rents a house so she can work on her novel, unaware it was a brothel and the spirits of the dead prostitutes begin to surface.

Not the best 80s haunted house film that's more played out as a psychological chiller rather than a full blown spine tingler. Robin Groves plays the novelist who's book "The Nesting" is due to be out (we never fully known what the title actually means) rents the former "House Of Ill Repute" where the former ladies were murdered and unsettled in the next life.

The house in question is very Victorian and decently used for the atmosphere but never really has the sinister Gothic theme that some of us like to see in a horror flick. The film could have done with more gore and a bit more blood with one or two kill scenes but maybe due to budget reasons. John Carradine's role is at times not his best and does have the tendency to over act a bit. For something that was a blind watch for me a few years back I have warmed upto this film.

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Have a good day everyone

SONNO PROFONDO – Luciano Onetti’s first film pretty much sets out the blueprint for what he did in the likes of ‘Francesca’ and ‘Abrakadabra’, which is really a fetishized take on the stock imagery and symbols of the giallo. What that boils down to cinematically is lots of shots of black gloves stroking shiny knives, close-ups of doll’s faces, old photographs, and bits of sinister architecture… the soundtrack is similarly reverent, containing familiar Italian prog tropes and that all time giallo classic, a haunting nursery rhyme. The focus on objects and the way they look rather than people and what they say / do made me wonder whether it’d been written on the sly by Alain Robbe-Grillet, and this ultra-concrete approach is so fragmenting that it makes SP seem at times more like an experimental film than a genre movie with a narrative. But one of the most surprising things about SP is that there is indeed a story, one we have to piece together as we rake through its fragments and images, leading to the lovely irony that the viewer is essentially cast in the role of one of those bumbling detectives that make gialli such a chore to sit through in the first place (for me). SP is basically giallo-as-filmic-jigsaw-puzzle. I’m sure there must be a market for actual jigsaws based on famous gialli, not that I’m in a rush to patent that one.