Taste The Blood of My Halloween Movie Repertoire

Last year due to a Halloween cruise I fell a couple movies short of my 31 first time watch horror marathon, so we’ll see if I make the grade this time out. Again, no predetermined list, just watching whatever I can get my hands on.

#1 Belzebuth – Years after a Mexican policeman’s baby becomes one of several infant victims horrifically murdered in a hospital nursery by a crazed attendant, he is teamed with a US federal agent to investigate a series of attacks on school children around the Mexican border.  This started as a really intriguing concept, a murder investigation that gradually uncovers an occult conspiracy, but eventually all but abandoned its unique Mexican-Catholic viewpoint in favor of a staid, by-the-numbers good vs. evil/exorcism plot. One really kind of silly and poorly realized digital effect (please guys, just don’t do ’em) about midway through the movie in an abandoned church and it pretty much lost me. Joaquin Cosio (the odious General Madrano in Quantum of Solace) gives a great performance, and there’s a really interesting political angle that gets briefly touched on but thrown out right away. In the end, it just goes on too long.

#2 Tigers Are Not Afraid (Veulven) – When 11 year old Estrella’s school is caught in the crossfire between rival Mexican drug cartels, her teacher gives her three pieces of chalk, each imbued with a magic wish. After her mother is abducted by the cartel, she wishes to find her, and is inextricably drawn to a group of orphaned boys whose own fates are similarly linked to the violent gang. This was a haunting, lyrical ghost story, a dark fantasy superbly realized, which doubles as a sobering look at the lives of the children left behind in the wake of narco violence in Mexico. It made me think of Dante’s quote; “I found the original of my hell to be in the world which we inhabit.”

#3 Count Dracula (1977) This BBC miniseries does a lot with its 70s television constraints, establishing an appealingly dark mood while eschewing the expected Hammer horror look. It cleaves pretty closely to the novel with a few minor alterations in place and character (Quincey P. Morris and Arthur Holmwood become Quincey P. Holmwood, Mina and Lucy are actual sisters) that don’t upset the story. The camera and practical FX are pretty well done (Dracula’s influence is depicted by a superimposition of his red eyed face in negative. I liked that, and I applaud their daring in not skipping the wall crawling scene – the result is pretty creepy!), but the performances are the biggest draw. Jourdan is a pretty great Dracula, and Frank Finlay is probably one of my top three Van Helsings now, up there with Anthony Hopkins and Peter Cushing. It was neat to see the lovely Judi Bowker of Clash of The Titans again, and Jack Shepherd is a great Renfield. I have to single out Richard Barnes’ Quincey P. Holmwood though; his Texas accent doesn’t fare very well unfortunately.

#4 Are We Not Cats – Hard to talk about this one without giving it away. No spoilers. An aimless, chemical addled young man has a torrid impromptu encounter with a quirky musician whose compulsive fetish endangers her life. Kind of a romantic body horror picture, the central kink of this story elicited in me one of the strongest, repulsed emotional reactions I’ve had watching a movie since that one notorious scene in Pink Flamingos. I literally exclaimed aloud in my empty apartment. And yet, it’s not really a repulsive or exploitative movie. In fact, it’s a very well done slice of life. A fringe life to be sure, but in the end it actually has a pretty tenderhearted, positive message; that there may be someone for even the most isolated of us. As a side note, among a host of fully realized side characters, the excited Dr. Mooney played by Thoedore Bouloukos made me laugh out loud as his reaction to the events probably mirrored my own (and, I suspect some audience members).  The closing stinger image was equally hilarious. This was kind of a fun gem, all in all. Long after seeing it, I can’t stop thinking about it.
#5 Beast – An unbalanced young woman living in a rural English island community under the thumb of her domineering upper class family falls hard for a mysterious poacher who may be responsible for a series of murder/rape abductions occurring in the area. Jessie Buckley does great work here as a woman whose rebelliousness against her miserable family may be getting the better of her common sense. Maybe. Compelling, twisty little thriller, if not overly memorable in the end.
#6 Knife+Heart – A producer of gay porn films in 1979 Paris must deduce the identity of a masked killer stalking and murdering her performers, even as his crimes inspire her work. Yann Gonzalez perfectly captures the 70’s Italian giallo style, from its striking color palettes and compositions, to its excruciating kills and bizarre final reel plot twist. Rather than being a simple homage, the movie still manages to compel, and even at times, move the emotions. Great cast, lots of weirdo humor and memorable characters (A loveable, chubby fluffer named The Mouth of Gold was a crack up). Evocative musical scoring. Worth a watch.

#7 A Tale of Two Sisters – Inspired by a Korean folktale, a young woman returns from an extended stay in a mental institution to live in a big dark house with her distant father, beloved younger sister, and estranged stepmother. It’s apparent early on that some unspoken family trauma has occurred as the main character begins to experience horrific visions. This drips with commendably executed gothic mood. I guessed early on that the movie was telling one of two ‘twist’ stories. It turned out I was wrong; it was telling them both, and I feel that in doing that, it overextended itself. The result was kind of confusing and unfocused, unfortunately.
#8 One Cut of The Dead – In this comedy, a film crew sets out to make a low budget zombie movie and is set upon by actual zombies. The first twenty five to thirty minutes of this is kind of a sloppy low budget mess full of weird little inexplicable character choices, and had me checking the time (though I do believe it was all shot in one take, which is always an impressive achievement). Be advised that at that thirty minute mark it takes a really unique turn and becomes one of the most enjoyable watches I’ve had this season. I was smiling for the remainder of the run time. If you have any love for indie filmmaking or low budget horror in particular, you’ll get a kick out of it. Just stick with it.

#9 The Curse of La Llorona – A court-ordered social worker recommends the separation of a Mexican woman from her two children and unleashes the wrath of the titular folklore legend, a phantom woman who once drowned her own children and whose arrival is preceded by her ghostly sobbing. It’s pretty by the numbers jump scares. That doesn’t make it a bad movie, necessarily, just not a great one. The biggest surprise for me was that it apparently takes place in the Annabelle horror universe. I did like the curandero character (I’m a sucker for Van Helsing types) and the mythology invented to combat La Llorona (including wind chimes to alert you of her appearance!). It reminded me of Curt Siodmak’s contributions to werewolf lore, and I wonder if they’ll catch on in the oncoming years.

#10  – All The Colors Of The Dark – A woman flees a menacing blue-eyed stranger straight into the arms of a Satanic cult. She begins to question her sanity, as I questioned how I managed to sit through this underwhelming (though admittedly well shot) giallo to the end.

#11 – Ma – A group of teenagers avail themselves of a middle aged woman’s hospitality (and basement) to hold a bevy of underage drinking extravaganzas, blissfully unaware that she has a dark ulterior motive. I’m glad I was never so absolutely desperate to drink before I was eighteen to throw all common sense out the window when I was a kid. Seriously, these are some oblivious kids. This was an interesting, skeevy watch for the first half, but takes a sudden turn that isn’t quite warranted in the script about midway through, and never really rights itself. Most characters continually make inexplicable actions (returning to party again and again in the face of their patroness’ increasingly erratic behavior), while others just kind of drop out of the picture. Octavia Spencer is always watchable and manages to keep this flick afloat, but only just.

#12 – Don’t Leave Home – An artist’s exhibit exploring mysterious disappearances receives a crushing review, but she’s invited by an ex-priest and his wife to stay in their palatial Irish estate while he cuts a check for one of her works, a diorama depicting the vanishing of a young girl he bore witness to decades ago. She starts seeing a hooded figure around the place at night, and weird shenanigans happen. Unique supernatural occurrence, but I was bored by the end.

#13 Brightburn – An awkward, outcast ten year old kid living on a farm in Kansas begins exhibiting superhuman talents, and soon learns the truth of his parentage; that he fell to earth in a spacecraft. With increasingly sociopathic fury, he begins flexing his newfound powers against the peers who have rejected him and eventually the adults who seek to control him. Basically, this is what would happen if Superboy went bad, and the end result is a very watchable horror movie with predictable, but entertaining results. Jackson Dunn really sells the flat affect of a sociopathic kid, and Elizabeth Banks does a great job as his self-delusional adopted mother. My one gripe; as my wife’s a family therapist, I know the aunt would never be assigned as the kid’s school therapist. They’d send him to somebody out of district. Still a fun watch.

#14 – Return of The Blind Dead – Tombs Of The Blind Dead was one of my top watches last year. The blind undead Templars return in the sequel, with some nifty sequences like an all-out attack on a raucous rural folk festival, the memorable fake out killing of an idiot lookout, and the requisite hunting of a terrified family by sound, but nothing quite tops that train sequence from its predecessor. There’s a bit too much dumb humor in this one too. Feels like a Godzilla movie cutting away to humans nobody really cares about. I did like the bit where the woman tried to escape on the stolen Templar horse. Worth a watch, but not as good as the original.

#15 – In The Tall Grass – A brother and his pregnant sister stop near a roadside chapel and answer the cries for help of a boy coming from a field of surrounding tall grass, only to find themselves lost in a time and space warping purgatory with a few other misplaced souls. An OK time waster, but nothing too memorable.

#16 – Room For Rent – A lonesome, elderly widow opens up a room in her house as a BNB to pay off her late husband’s debts and becomes infatuated with her tenant. This is a low budget endeavor that suffers from a pretty bad, inexplicable secondary character’s moral choice about midway through that really seems to exist solely to move the plot along, and the total abandonment of the tenant’s plot line (I really feel like there has to be a lot of excised footage concerning the contents of his trunk and the nature of his phone calls). And yet, the whole production is buoyed by winsome lead Lin Shaye’s stellar performance. I genuinely felt for the character of Joyce, a lonely hearted woman just out of a loveless marriage and desperate for affection and companionship. Shaye really makes Joyce breathe and that makes this worthwhile viewing.

#17 – The Lift – I occasionally develop an unabashed, inexplicable, unironic love for some inarguably bad movies (Night Of The Lepus, Gymkata, The Green Hornet). This preposterous Dutch film about a murderous elevator and the heroic repairman trying to stop its killing spree played dead serious is now one of them. FOR GOD’S SAKE, TAKE THE STAIRS!

#18 Black Moon – An executive sends his hilariously loyal secretary Fay Wray to accompany his wife Dorothy Burgess and curly headed little daughter back to her family’s old Haiti-adjacent island plantation house, where Burgess’ fixation on the local Voodoo cult which murdered her parents in front of her as a girl start to reawaken with disastrous results. This is an odd one, a pre-code Voodoo horror movie without any mention of zombies. Here, the monsters are basically the local natives, half-wild savages beholden to an unexplained need for regular sacrificial rituals (cause that’s what they do in Voodoo, don’t cha ya know?) and apparently unable to function without the leadership of their high priest or priestess. Twice a character blows away the officiant of a massive congregation of perhaps a hundred fervent worshipers and never once do they react in any way. Blacks have no agency in this movie. They react to the doings of the white characters, and you get the sense (with perhaps the exception of Clarence Muse, playing a ‘loyal’ and a least partially fleshed out black man from Georgia) that they just stand around like dolls waiting to be played with when there are no white people in the room. There is a great deal of white xenophobia and racism obfuscating what could be a decent story about the assumption of cultural identity by outsiders with just a little more effort and research somewhere in here, but it’s difficult to relate to the privileged, pompous main characters, who display all the depth of a patronizing bumper sticker on your racist uncle’s truck for much of the movie. Some surprising twists, good acting, and striking cinematography, but leave the 21^st century at the door if you sit down to watch. We’re talking blackface here.
#19 Seoul Station – Tense follow up to South Korea’s magnificent Train To Busan, the events of this animated feature run concurrently to its predecessor, following a prostitute, her no-good boyfriend, father, and a homeless man fleeing the zombie outbreak. Boasting some pretty nail biting sequences, great sound design and voice acting, it’s relentlessly more depressing than Train To Busan. I do have an issue with the big reveal. Without spoiling anything, I just don’t buy that a character like that would go to the lengths they did for such a mundane reason. Still a great diversion.

#20 – Amsterdamned – After The Lift I had to seek out more of Dick Maas’ oeuvre and watched this thriller I remembered seeing ads for on Cinemax as a kid. It’s a pretty solid murder mystery about a killer frogman (in SCUBA gear, not a Bullywug) stalking the canals of Amsterdam, but the reveal was a bit of a letdown and although competent, it never quite lives up to its memorable opening sequence.

#21 – Creature From Black Lake – A pair of anthropology students from Chicago head to the Louisiana bayou country to investigate reports of a hairy anthropoid attacking swampers. A likeable, talented cast including Dennis Fimple, Jack Elam, and Dub Taylor make this watchable, but it’s not enough. Pretty rudderless script and the monster is as low budget as it gets.

#22 – The Ghost Galleon – As part of a publicity stunt, a pair of supermodels stage a fake accident at sea at the behest of their boss and wind up lost in a mysterious fog, where they bump into a 16th century ghost ship that contains the coffins of some undead Templars who split off from the main group in this, the third installment of the Blind Dead series. After the models fail to check in, the employer leads a noisy expedition to find them. Chaos ensues. The first half is kind of a misery, but the climax is neat, especially when the ‘cleric’ successfully turns the Templars and the party does the smartest thing they could do….to no avail.

#23 – The Golem (2018) – When The Black Plague strikes a neighboring village of Gentiles, the Jewish inhabitants of an insular Lithuanian hamlet are given an ultimatum; reverse the ‘Hebrew curse’ that has been laid upon the Christian headman’s dying daughter, or be slaughtered. A headstrong woman who has been learning the Kabbalah in secret takes it upon herself to create a golem to defend the village, but the creature soon proves uncontrollably murderous. Readers of my Merkabah Rider series will know what delight I take in Jewish folklore, so I was ready be sold on this little tale of minyans and shofars from the get-go. It’s very well done, and doesn’t disappoint, though it does kind of inexplicably borrow some things from an unexpected source; Pumpkinhead. Bonus points for mentioning the Pulsa di Neura, but half a point off for not exactly depicting it. Good stuff!

#24 Drácula (1931  – Spanish) – The Great Pumpkin smiled on me this year, in the form of Facebook buddy Eric Dietz who caught me lamenting that I’d never been able to see the legendary 1931 Spanish version of Dracula, and suggested I see if the library had it. They did, as a bonus feature on the Lugosi Dracula set from Universal, and I finally managed to sit down and view this nearly lost film (it was only rediscovered in the 1970s in a vault) after years of hunting it up in vain. For those who don’t know, Universal allotted the sets, props, and costumes of its 1931 production to a Spanish speaking cast under director George Melford and the two films were shot simultaneously. As production wrapped each day on the Todd Browning/Lugosi picture, the Spanish cast would come in and reuse everything, shooting long into the night. The result was a movie that, although it reused some of the establishing and FX shots, music, and only altered the script a little, is admittedly superior to its English counterpart in most respects in terms of tone and presentation.  Melford’s Drácula benefits from a longer run time, is more vibrant and robust, with Lupita Tovar oozing sensuality as Eva (Mina), and Pablo Alvarez Rubio (as much as it pains me to say) giving my beloved Dwight Frye a run for his money as an absolutely maniacal Renfield. The comedy works better, the FX are more innovative and explicit, and there is overall more passion to the production. I have to say though, I still prefer Lugosi’s reserved menace to Carlos Villar’s occasionally for-the-back-row theatrics, and Edward Van Sloan is a better Van Helsing than Eduardo Arozamena. A top watch for this marathon.

#25 Dracula’s Daughter – This sequel to Todd Browning’s Dracula picks up immediately where the previous installment left off, with Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan! Yay!) standing over the body of poor Renfield as the London police bust in and arrest him for Dracula’s murder (I guess the lovestruck Harkers don’t stick around to defend him, but apparently go right off on their honeymoon). Van Helsing sticks to his story about vampires and calls up a favor from an old student, a prominent psychiatrist, to come to his defense. As the urbane Dr. Garth and his plucky assistant head to London, a mysterious woman, the Countess Zaleska, drifts into the police station and hypnotizes the coppers, making off with the body of Dracula, which she burns and consigns to the hell that awaits him, thinking her own curse, as his vampiric daughter, has ended. She’s wrong though, and soon returns to the business of bloodsucking, luring men (and memorably, in one scene dripping with homoeroticism, a young woman) all the while coaxing the stricken Dr. Garth further under her power. This was a neat find. Gloria Holden and Irving Pichel (as her grim, wannabe vampire assistant Sandor) are fun to watch, with Holden exuding an austere, tortured self-loathing. Is this the first reluctant vampire on screen? I think so. I even enjoyed the bickering 30’s Thin Man-style rapport between Otto Kruger and the assistant, Marguerite Churchill. I wish Edward Van Sloan had a bigger part, but you can’t have everything.

#26 Son of Dracula – Count Alucard (Lon Chaney Jr – possibly a descendent of Count Dracula, or else Dracula himself under an assumed name) arrives at New Orleans plantation house Dark Oaks, invited by Katherine Caldwell, the supernaturally inclined daughter of the wealthy patriarch. He soon sets out to seize hold of the Caldwell lands and fortune, intent on feasting on the ‘young, virile race’ (Americans?), but, his plans soon go awry when his victim attempts a doublecross! A really fun, twisty, turny plot. The FX of this one are also a big draw. They’re done by John Fulton, who made Claude Rains into The Invisible Man. Here, we see Dracula’s classic powers on full display; he turns to mist, transforms onscreen to and from his bat form, and in one memorable scene, bullets pass through him, killing a character hiding behind him!

#27 St. Agatha – A young expectant mother in the 1950s submits herself to the care of an isolated convent for wayward girls officially divorced from the Catholic Church, who follow a strict regimen of self-denial and servitude with daily doses of excruciating physical and psychological torture from the mother superior and her nuns. All is not as it seems. A compelling thriller horror with an odious antagonist played by Carolyn Hennesy. Worth watching, but not really a must-watch.

#28 House of Dracula – Count Dracula arrives in the night and requests a cure for vampirism from the brilliant Dr. Edelmann. Soon Larry Talbot shows up wanting a remedy for lycanthropy and Frankenstein’s Monster is discovered in a cave beneath the doctor’s estate. Practically a sanitarium for monsters now, Edelmann sets out to cure Dracula with blood transfusions and the Wolfman with some kind of spore found in the cave. Things go awry when Dracula takes a hankering to Edelmann’s assistant Milizia and tries to nip her. Dracula pulls a switcheroo during one of his transfusion treatments and pumps Edelmann full of his corrupt blood. Edelmann destroys the vampire, but it’s too late….Dracula’s blood infects him, influencing him to do evil (and of course, to wake up Frakenstein’s Monster). This was a passable monster-buffet legitimized by John Carradine, Lionel Atwill, and Lon Chaney Jr returning as Larry Talbot, and the interesting casting of the lovely Jane Adams as a sympathetic hunchback. Plus, I LOVED the concept of Dracula’s blood corrupting the doctor. A fun time.

#29 3 From Hell – It turns out Otis, Baby, and Captain Spaulding, the three unrepentant sadistic psychopaths who rampaged through The Devil’s Rejects, managed to survive that movie’s bullet-riddled climax (which is kind of a ‘they never got out of the COCK-A-DOODIE CAR’ moment, but OK, we didn’t actually see them die, so fair enough) and have been incarcerated since. Captain Spaulding is executed by lethal injection (and we bid a heartfelt adieu to the great Sid Haig here and in a later reminiscence), but before the same can happen to the brother and sister duo, a heretofore unseen Firefly family member, namely Otis’ younger half-brother, Winslow ‘Foxy’ Coltrane, busts them out and they flee for Mexico. The Devil’s Reject was a masterful recreation of amoral 70’s exploitation horror whose main characters repelled and fascinated me. In this sequel, I find myself liking the killers a little more. They show some heart and sentimentality towards each other and some of the people they meet (like Pancho Moller’s appealing, diminutive Sebastian), and they’re more akin to outlaw anti-heroes here than how they were portrayed before, as if the testimonials of the obsessed fans in the beginning have bled over into the reality of the movie. I guess near death mellowed them a little? I mean, yes, they still slaughter a couple innocent people, but in the main their victims themselves display moral failings (a corrupt warden who cheats on his wife and/or sexually harasses a guard for example), making their deaths almost cathartic. There’s a playfulness in this one that the previous movie didn’t have too, with an army of masked Mexican killers making a show. It’s fine, but mainly for Zombie completists. Rob Zombie still clearly loves his wife Sheri Moon-Z, a fact I find charming in all his movies.

#30 The Monolith Monsters – A strange, black glass meteor crashes in the California desert and shatters, spreading out radioactive shards which induce a slow, black petrification in any living thing that touches it. When a rare rainfall occurs, the H2O makes the shards grow to gigantic proportions, which then waver, topple, and fall, smashing into yet more fragments, which then repeat the process. Soon a mass of deadly black crystal monoliths is drawing up the accumulated moisture from the rain soaked soil and advancing over the mountains toward a sleepy town. The inhabitants rush to find a way to stop it as another round of precipitation looms. The absolutely bonkers and unique concept combined with the truly unsettling sight of tottering black spires wavering over the mountaintops in a thundering rainstorm made this a really welcome find this Halloween. There’s some sharp writing in it as well. Recommended!

#31 Crawl – A young competitive swimmer drives to a rural Florida town to check on her estranged and recently divorced father in the face of a category five hurricane. She finds him hurt and bleeding in the crawl space cellar, and is soon trapped by a gaggle of ravenous alligators blown in by the storm. Father and daughter must make their escape as the water level begins to rise. A deceptively simple setup allows for some nice character moments in a lean, mean script that reminded me somehow of Die Hard. There’s no fat on this. Everything feels entirely logical and every setup leads nicely to the next payoff. Genuinely thrilling in points. Easily one of my favorite watches this month.

BONUS:

Now, since, as I said above, I fell three movies short of my thirty one first time watch goal last year, I decided to push through and watch a few extra:

#32  Orphan – A troubled married couple, having suffered the loss of an infant, decide to add to their family by adopting a precocious young Russian girl, who soon turns out to be not at all what she appears. What seems at first like an evil child movie in the vein of The Bad Seed or The Good Son soon escalates into something unexpected (well, if you’ve never heard of it. It’s been out awhile and I already knew the big reveal – I actually watched this because of a recent court case in Indiana that was close to the movie’s events). Worth watching, with believable, mainly grounded characters and an out of the park performance by Isabelle Fuhrman as the titular orphan.

#33 Wounds – A New Orleans bartender finds a cell phone left behind by a group of college kids after closing. On the phone are horrific images and videos which slowly begin to affect his mind and seemingly, the behavior of those around him. Armie Hammer does a fine job descending into obsessive, paranoid madness in this compelling bit of Lovecraftian occult body horror, which nonetheless, might leave you a little bit wanting in the very end.

#34 Count Yorga, Vampire – Bulgarian mystic Count Yorga preys upon the daughter of his ex-girlfriend and her yuppie friends, in a pretty straightforward, but well done modern (well, in 1970) vampire tale. The strength of this is in the dialogue and the performances of the cast of unknowns, who play everything completely straight. Good flick, believable characters. Some genuinely chilling sequences and a good shock ending.

#35 Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers – Angela (played with charming glee by Pamela Springsteen), the killer of Sleepaway Camp is at it again, this time on the counseling side of things, setting her sights on correcting the naughty behavior of a bevy of swearing, smoking, fornicating campers. This doesn’t have the stinger of its predecessor, and goes the tongue-in-cheek route. Fine as a schlocky time waster, but not as enjoyable as the original.

#36 The Trollenberg Terror (AKA The Crawling Eye) – A Swiss mountaintop is consistently shrouded by a mysterious cloud into which mountain climbers enter but don’t come out. A psychic has bad feelings about the cloud and a group of scientists detect an alarming amount of latent radioactive activity. Then one of the climbers wanders down from the mountain, and things swiftly get really hairy. This was a real gem; a very Lovecraftian mystery with some ingenious effects, and a surprising amount of violence for movie from 1958.

And there we have it! A happy and rewarding Halloween season was had. My top ten horror watches for October 2019 (in no particular order):

Tigers Are Not Afraid, The Lift, The Monolith Monsters, Are We Not Cats, The Trollenberg Terror, Crawl, Knife+Heart, Dracula (Spanish), House Of Dracula, One Cut Of The Dead.