Tag: Occult Flick

October Horrorshow: They’re Watching

It just doesn’t feel like the October Horrorshow until the first review of a found footage flick has been posted. This year the honor goes to They’re Watching, the 2016 film from writing and directing duo Jay Lender and Micah Wright.

The film follows the crew of a home improvement reality show. They are going back to Moldova six months after the subject of an episode, Becky Westlake (Brigid Brannagh), bought and began to rehab a dilapidated house in the woods. The place looked like a total lost cause. It had been empty for decades. All the glass had been broken. Walls and floors had been exposed to wind, rain, freezing, thawing, vandalism, and everything else that causes an abandoned building to slowly fall apart. The best thing would have been to knock it down and start over. But, when the crew arrives on site, after a somewhat harrowing journey to the house, they find that Becky appears to have done a top-notch job. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: They’re Watching”

October Hammershow: Taste the Blood of Dracula

What a title. Taste the Blood of Dracula. That’s a pretty good start for today’s horror film, before a single frame even goes by. From 1970, Taste the Blood of Dracula was written by Anthony Hinds, directed by Peter Sasdy, and features Christopher Lee returning to play Dracula. Continue reading “October Hammershow: Taste the Blood of Dracula”

October Horrorshow: Suspiria

Suspiria movie posterA viewer would hard-pressed to find a more beautifully shot, atmospheric horror film than Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Argento’s, and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli’s, vivid production has become legend among horror fans, and for good reason. The film exists within a reality all its own, shifting back and forth between dreamlike and nightmarish, soft and menacing, as the situation requires. No study of horror films, and film in general, is complete without seeing this classic.

From 1977, Suspiria stars Jessica Harper as Suzy Bannion, a dance student who has been invited to study at the prestigious Tanz Dance Academy in Freiburg, Germany. Strange happenings begin immediately upon Suzy’s arrival at the academy (played on the exterior by a real location called The Whale House). She is greeted by a student who is fleeing into the night, and is herself turned away at the door, despite a driving, soaking rain.

Argento didn’t waste any time, packing this first sequence with some of the atmosphere that would come to define the movie. The Whale House is a gaudily painted relic, and the onscreen action is accompanied by an iconic soundtrack by an Italian band called Goblin. Goblin’s music is Mike Oldfield-esque, in that it’s evocative of the opening notes of Tubular Bells, which was used to effect in The Exorcist. Argento liked Goblin’s work for the film so much that he overuses it, pounding the same hook over and over again into the audience’s brains. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Suspiria”

October Hammershow: Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, or, Underboob: The Movie

Blood from the Mummy's Tomb movie posterHammer, in a wise decision, jettisoned much of the tropes they had used in their previous Mummy films. For three consecutive productions, they had made basically the same film. British archaeologists discover ancient Egyptian tomb, said tomb has a curse on it, ancient Egyptian mummy resurrects and kills those who dared desecrate the tomb. It really was the same thing again and again. That was all well and good when they did it the first time, but by the last film, The Mummy’s Shroud, the plot was too familiar, and everyone involved seemed to be just going through the paces.

The fourth film, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, stays true to only some of the core elements, going so far as to ditch the traditional bandages and rags of films past. In this film, written by Christopher Wicking, loosely adapting Bram Stoker’s novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, the mummy is the perfectly preserved corpse of Queen Tera, who died young and buxom, and thus couldn’t be wrapped in bandages, oh no.

Her tomb is discovered by the requisite British Egyptologists, but they bring the dead queen and her artifacts back to England in secret, rather than placing them in a museum or putting on a tour. That’s because, for reasons that are never adequately explained, some of the party wish to resurrect the queen, so she can rule again. Anyway, the resurrection part is kind of on the periphery, because in the meantime, Queen Tera has a doppelganger in Margaret Fuchs (Valerie Leon, who plays both Margaret and Tera), the daughter of the archaeological expedition’s leader, Julian Fuchs (Andrew Keir). She was born in England at the very moment Queen Tera’s sarcophagus was opened, revealing the scantily clad beauty within. Continue reading “October Hammershow: Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, or, Underboob: The Movie”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Psychomania, aka The Death Wheelers

Tom Latham thinks that life could only get better if he just kills himself. Turns out, he’s right! Tom (Nicky Henson) isn’t suffering from depression, nor is he a deluded youth who is incapable of processing the permanence of death. He’s the leader of an outlaw biker gang called The Living Dead. They get their kicks by driving mildly quickly on the roads of rural England and occasionally tipping over vendor’s carts at the local shopping center. How dreadfully frightful. But Tom has an idea that can make his little band of nihilists even more of a public nuisance. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Psychomania, aka The Death Wheelers”

October Horrorshow: Constantine, Rhymes with Tangerine

Back in 1993, DC Comics, under the direction of editor Karen Berger, took six of its mature readers titles and placed them under a new imprint — Vertigo. The Sandman, Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol (after a legendary run by writer Grant Morrison), Animal Man, Shade the Changing Man, and Hellblazer (featuring John Constantine, rhymes with clementine) were titles that had grown beyond the core superhero titles of DC’s lineup. Berger had been responsible for much of this, bringing aboard creative talent which would have been wasted penning yet another year-long superhero crossover designed to simplify DC’s bloated continuity, or spending day after day drawing just the right amount of ripples in Superman’s abs. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Constantine, Rhymes with Tangerine”

October Horrorshow: Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things

My family will attest to the fact that when I am visiting Ohio for Christmas, I always end up watching A Christmas Story at some point. The 24-hour marathon on the Turner cable channels has been a blessing for the holidays, as far as I am concerned. My family recalls the days when broadcast television would play Miracle on 34th Street or It’s a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve. I’ve never held those films in that high regard. For me, Christmas entertainment nostalgia will always rest with Ralphie and crew, and no one else. Not even Frosty the Snowman. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”

October Horrorshow: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers

Woe be to the viewer when a film series becomes tired. At first there was innovation, followed by repetition. Afterwards comes mediocrity, before, finally, the series descends into total and utter garbage. Such is the case with the last film in this year’s Horrorshow, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. From the opening scene through denouement, the sixth entry in the Halloween franchise is a tedious affair. So tedious, in fact, that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to pay enough attention to this movie to write about it. It was a close call. More than once while I was watching a text message would come in or I would want to look up a member of the cast or crew on the internet, and any deviation in my focus threatened to derail my comprehension of on screen events. How could I possibly write a review of this dog if I couldn’t remember what I just saw? I’ve stopped watching films after fifteen or twenty minutes and still written reviews, but the difference between those films and this one is that, although I only spent a short time with those films, I was able to keep my focus. Halloween 6 was a struggle from beginning to end. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers”