October Horror Movie Marathon

[Frankie Teardrop]

DAWN OF THE DEAD – As well as being full of post-‘Scream’ teen slashers and the first stirrings of the ‘Saw’ saga, the early / mid noughts were a time of franchise reinvigoration. Remakes of ‘Texas Chainsaw’ and ‘Friday the 13th’ landed in the cinemas whether fans wanted them or not – most probably voted ‘no’, making it a surprise when many of them turned out to be pretty good. ‘Dawn Of The Dead’ was one of the earlier ones, and you couldn’t have chosen a more sacred cow to defile (well, apart from TCM, whose remake predated this one by about a year). I remember being full of trepidation when I watched it for the first time at a friend’s house – was it on DVD, or last gasp VHS? Contemplating that makes me shudder, but my view on it hasn’t changed. Zack Snyder’s reimagining of the Romero classic doesn’t top the original, but it’s a powerful blast of politically charged action horror that remains one of the better genre efforts of its decade. I’ll never forget the opening, with its swift spiral into domestic chaos; we follow overstretched nurse Ana (played by the great Sarah Polley) as she stumbles away from a night shift (already the film is sounding ‘off’ notes, with rumblings about all the patients piling up in ICU), only to find an eruption of mayhem in her home and a vision of society in ruin. It’s all there in a shot from just after she flees her zombie household and pauses to look out upon her housing estate, a slow left to right camera pan that reveals a Brueghelian nightmare of suburbia in flames, busy tearing itself to pieces in streets full of neat lawns and ravaged bodies. The energy of that opening segment is carried forward into the rest of the film. I’ll always be of the opinion that the 1978 original has the upper hand as far as edge goes, but it’s a very different movie, and although it too works a broad canvas and is similarly symphonic in its aspirations, its mood is more contemplative. One thing you could say about Synder’s remake is that the tension and the tautness that are actually absent across sections of the Romero film never let up from the start. There’s no melancholy midsection, there’s no dreamy reflection on what has become of the world, there’s only nail-biting unease throughout, and it is in this distillation of narrative momentum that Synder definitely surpasses Romero. The template is the same – survivors locate mall, others come along, schisms develop as the temperature rises, and it all ends up unsustainable when people realise they have nothing to fall back on apart from the promises and dreams of the old social order – but it hurtles along with more ammo and urgency, though with the same ample gore and grot (Snyder may have thought he was getting one up with the gruesome baby scene, but all I could think of was how it might’ve played in a low rent Italian rip off). It was a nice touch to include some of the original cast in bit part roles, but one thing I will just say is that, although the performances and dramatics work really well in the remake, the central quartet from the original to me had a magnetism that is not quite replicated here, and there is no-one to hand who has the presence of Ken Foree. In the end though, in art as in life, history will decide. George Romero’s film is exalted for forging a potent image of the post Nam malaise; Zack Synder’s ‘Dawn Of The Dead’ captures the (ongoing) anxieties of the bleak world ushered in after 9/11 with similar chilling flare.

[MrBarlow]

Vamp. 1986.

Chris Makepeace, Robert Rusler and Gedde Wantanabe are the three Uni guys heading to get a stripper for the new "Frat House" only to go to a strip joint that houses vampires. 80s cheesefest with Grace Jones being the main sultress vampire with Sandy Baron as the protector with Brad Logan and Deedee Pfeiffer as the non vamp and blast from the past lass. This is one that may not be for everyone's tastes, full of daft comments and comebacks, good effects for the transformation and end sequence and black comedy.

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[MrBarlow]

Demon Witch Child. 1975.

A Spanish take on The Exorcist and this one isn't that bad to be honest, while the movie is certainly cheap, it does have a weird, grotesque, macabre atmosphere. This doesn't have a ouija board but the small girl is given a idol by a witch to bring back the superior witch of the coven and we gradually see the girl grow old, inspiration for one of the effects Dick Smith was going to use for the 1973 film. The dubbing is all over the place so there's no denying that, a troubled priest finding his place in life and nice gory deaths involved and this doesn't have a happy ending but certainly entertaining for a non big blockbuster movie.

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[MrBarlow]

One Dark Night. 1982.

Bit of a same story that we have seen before but this one seemed to be a forgotten one that has made a comeback. Meg Tilly plays the social outcast who wants to join a elite of popular girl group who entice her to spend a night in a crypt. A famed alchemist who died discovered a way to bring back the dead is buried in the crypt on the same day our little heroine is doing her initiation...cue a good night locked in. This is one of these films that has a spooky element, dark atmosphere toned but presented in a light...ish sort of way and can be easily viewed during a rainy night with the lights off. Was Meg Tilly the right sort of person for the film...yeah she was as she has that innocent sort of look and shyness about the character. The corpses at the end look rubbery and laughable but still be tolerable and passable to be scary, certainly one that will be viewed again during a dark rainy night for me.

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[MrBarlow]

Wishmaster. 1997.

There was a time when Wes Craven had his name on some decent horror flicks and then came the time his name became a executive like the Dracula movies, but then he added his name to this. This has a Djinn escaping from it's prison and granting people's wishes with a twist while someone is trying to put a stop to it all and we got Robert Englund as the rich statue collector....another simple tale. Andrew Divoff plays the little wishmaster who helps George "Buck Flower" get his revenge on Reggie Bannister, Ted Raimi pops up as the...god knows what his role was but i'm sure he was happy to be in another horror and Angus Scrimm as the narrator. Aside from early stages of CGI, this wasn't too bad (I haven't seen it in a while), some of the acting is questionable, the ending was a bit quick but atleast we see Kane Hodder and Tony Todd meeting their demise, as well as we get good creative kills.

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[MrBarlow]

Dracula. 1979.

Frank Langella steps into the character created by Bram Stoker after appearing as the character on stage and being noticed by John Badham portraying the character.

Deemed a bit too romantic yet Langella managed to be hypnotic with his choice of playing the character and like Bela Lugosi he never shows his fangs yet his eyes and movement make it creepy. The setting for the interior of Carfax Abbey is what you expect it to be for the Count, dark atmosphere, dusty and cobwebbed and a place you rather want to bail out quickly. Donald Pleasence and Sir Lawrence Olivier play Seward and Van Helsing and make a great team of finding out who the Count is and why only he survived the doomed voyage of the Demeter. I have always had a soft spot for this version, due to the acting, direction style and the background score.

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[Frankie Teardrop]

31 – I can usually find something I like about any given Rob Zombie film, but sometimes I have to work a bit harder than I really want to. I think the only one I’ve ever been close to feeling wholly enthusiastic about is the occasionally eerie ‘Lords Of Salem’, whereas the others have never been anything other than mixed bags in my eyes. Sometimes they float over my head entirely – I really didn’t like what he did with ‘Halloween’. ‘31’ opens in recognisably Zombie-esque territory, with a bunch of longhairs riding through the southern US in their shitty van, where it’s either bongs, shagging or The Tarot. Though they bear a passing resemblance to one of his usual Manson-esque families like the Fireflys, it turns out they’re just regular non-homicidal hippies en route to a gig at a carnival. In a surprising twist of fate, they’re captured by none other than a very highly powdered and bewigged Malcolm McDowell and Judy Geeson, both seemingly posing as Marie Antoinette whilst compering some kind of awful channel 5 post-apocalyptic gameshow. That might’ve made for an amusing alternative to ‘31’, because predictably enough the kids from the van are in Zombie’s underground layer for one reason only, and that’s to get chased around by clowns with chainsaws before being ravaged for the viewer’s delight. There’s some fun stuff – all the nicely filtered lighting, the grotty sets strewn with layers of macabre bric-a-brac, those are pretty cool, it all looks good, I think you only need look at ‘House Of 1000 Corpses’ to understand that set curation is definitely his metier. There’s some vague stabs at slight outrage with the inclusion of a dwarf dressed up as Hitler, and various bits of shopworn decadence and obligatory splatter (although less than I expected), but for the most part what I felt was a vague sense of fatigue; I was watching the bit where Sherrie Moon Zombie fights Nazi Dwarf, both cursing each other in Spanish, thinking “I should feel a lot more into this than I am. I mean, look at that nice blue lighting”, swiftly followed by “I’m just a bit tired now.” Maybe he should slow things down a little, it’s all the rapid editing, I don’t like that. Not that it’s the main problem. Anyway, ‘31’ rapidly improves with the appearance of its greatest asset – the excellent and still relatively undersung Richard Brake. If you’ve seen ‘Barbarian’, you’ll know just how effectively his none-more-gaunt features can utterly haunt out a screen. It’s not just the haggard looks though, he’s also got the stare – there’s a little prologue here with him gazing down through the camera at the viewer, and you can see he’s got a beast in his eyes. Great stuff, he’s not really in it for long enough, but he really enlivened the last half and made me perk up. In the end, what can I say about ‘31’? It has its moments and it’s good for Richard Brake, but frankly it’s a bit of a headache.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Has anyone carved any pumpkins?

Care to show them off?

[Nordicdusk]

I'm going to struggle to catch up on films I have my father's dog for the weekend and he is like looking after a pack of dogs

[Nordicdusk]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Has anyone carved any pumpkins?

Care to show them off?

Haven't had a chance to do any pumkins yet we decorated the outside of the house but we are holding off on the big stuff until Halloween day because we live on a main road and being that it's our first year I'm not sure if the stuff will get robbed or not so I didn't want to chance it while we are in work in the days.