31 Days Of Horror Movies (2013 Edition), Part II

9. THE HUNGER (1983): Tony Scott's first feature is a super-stylish, super-weird, ultra-modern (well, in 1983, anyway) riff on vampires. The opening credits sequence has Bauhaus singing "Bela Lugosi's Dead", which is a good way to announce that this isn't going to be your father's bloodsucker film. Catherine Deneuve plays a centuries-old Egyptian succubus, David Bowie is her rapidly-aging stud, and Susan Sarandon stars as a scientist who is in line to be his replacement. There's a lot more style than substance going on here--it's ultimately pretty boring, but every time my attention wandered elsewhere, Scott would come in with the quick cuts and I'd miss something. Doesn't matter, I think the only reason anyone really remembers this movie is the sex scene between Deneuve and Sarandon anyway.

10. THE OMEN (1976): To this day, I've still never seen the 2006 remake of the classic Richard Donner Antichrist movie, and why would I? Everyone says it's a shot-for-shot remake, and I can't imagine a better take on this material--certainly considering the A-list cast of Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, and David Warner (the subject of what might be the greatest decapitation scene in film history), the striking cinematography of Geoffrey Unsworth (who was the DP on 2001: A Space Odyssey), and the pulse-pounding score courtesy of Jerry Goldsmith. The movie is a bit silly and overlong, but it makes for an apocalyptic good time anyway. I've still never seen the two follow-up films--maybe next year?

11. THE MIST (2007): Hands-down my favourite American horror film of the last 10-15 years, and certainly one of my favourite Stephen King adaptations as well. When a mysterious mist drifts into a small town in Maine (where else?) and traps a group of shoppers in a supermarket surrounded by Lovecraftian horrors, the human monsters inside (embodied by religious wacko Marcia Gay Harden, because it wouldn't be a King story without a religious wacko), may be worse the inhuman ones outside. Frank Darabont (who certainly knows his way around adapting King) takes the novella's ambiguous ending and gives it a heart-wrenching twist that qualifies as one of the most bleak conclusions to any movie ever made. Some of the on-the-cheap effects are a bit dodgy, but the icky monster designs (particularly the terrifyingly human-faced giant spiders hanging out in the pharmacy next door) are a gruesome delight.

12. DERANGED (1974): This oddball Canadian take on the murder spree of farmer/cannibal Ed Gein is fairly inept on most levels, but it manages to be an unsettling experience anyway. It plays like a TV special reenactment, narrated by a sober, bespectacled host who sometimes appears in the scenes alongside a creepy hayseed (Roberts Blossom, best known as the old man next door in HOME ALONE, and the "Stop And Be Friendly" guy in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND) who digs up his dead mother and starts stealing corpses to maintain her structural integrity. The super-cheap look of the sets and the gore makeup, combined with Blossom's pathetic character and the creepy organ music that plays throughout makes for a truly unnerving experience.

13. THE PROWLER (1981): I find I usually like the FRIDAY THE 13TH knockoffs better than FRIDAY THE 13TH itself (see: SLEEPAWAY CAMP, THE BURNING), but not this time, not even with the wildly nasty Tom Savini special effects. IN a 1945 prologue, a returning soldier is jilted by his girlfriend back home, and she and her new beau suffer a grisly fate at a homecoming dance. Thirty-five years later, at another dance, a killer in military gear starts bumping off a new crop of partygoers. Mostly, THE PROWLER is just boring--the identity of the murderer is immediately obvious, and his army-guy-with-a-pitchfork motif is just confusing (wouldn't a bayonet have been more appropriate?). Great exploding head at the end, at least.

14. PATRICK (1978): Quentin Tarantino cited this Australian thriller as a favourite in the terrific documentary NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, and it definitely has its charms--mostly courtesy of Robert Thompson's wide-eyed, unibrowed performance in the title role. But this story of a traumatized, comatose teen with psychic powers is pretty slow going. The opening is promising, and the freaked-out payoff is worth the wait, but there is a lot of sludgy middle to get through before you get there. I've heard good things about the recent remake starring YOU'RE NEXT's Sharni Vinson, so maybe the modern filmmakers have smoothed over PATRICK'S rough patches.

15. SHOCK WAVES (1977): The cool-as-hell video box art for this story of sea travellers besieged by a lost squadron of Nazi zombies is probably the best thing about this film. Peter Cushing is cool as the mad scientist responsible for the creation of the so-called "Death Corps", as is John Carradine as the crusty captain of the doomed ship, but neither of them is in it for much screen time. Worth watching for frequent scenes of Brooke Adams in a bikini, though.

16. SQUIRM (1976): I've always had a soft spot for this ridiculous tale of bloodworms driven into a frenzy by a freak electrical storm, and I can't really say why. It's not all that scary, it's kinda boring, the performances are largely lame, but...it's got something going for it. The use of a weird kids' song in the opening and closing is the kind of thing that is usually handled badly, but in SQUIRM it definitely adds a strange dimension to things. The secondary characters, backwoods hillbillies under siege by the hordes of carnivorous worms, kind of seem like they're playing themselves. The poster, pictured above, by the great Drew Struzan, is fantastic. And here's a piece of useless trivia--star Don Scardino went on to direct the recent Steve Carell-Jim Carrey dud THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE.

31 Days Of Horror--2013 Edition!

It's one of my favourite times of the year--the run-up to Halloween, which, as always, sees me watching 31 horror movies over the course of the month. At least 16 of them have to be new to me, if for no other reason than it gives me a chance to cross some movies that I should have seen already off some invisible list. My friend (and a fellow horror nut for as long as I can remember) Scott Rogers got me started doing this marathon four years ago now, and I look forward to it every year (check out Scott's Letterboxd page for updates on his progress!). Anyway, I am usually way more diligent about blogging my own progress (blogress?), but this year I started a new side project to this whole endeavour. I've been drawing some of favourite horror monsters and maniacs and posting one a day throughout the week over at my Tumblr, so if you've got a taste for more creeps & critters, go check 'em out. Doing those alongside my usual 31 Days program has slowed things down somewhat on the blogging end of things, but better late than never, I guess. Here are my thoughts on what I've watched so far.

1. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999): People turned on this one pretty quickly in the wake of its initial theatrical success, but I've always defended it. It's a great example of low-budget ingenuity--one where the nonexistent budget and DIY approach are all part and parcel of the concept. It's also a terrific case of horrors that are implied rather than overtly shown, which can be much scarier when done properly. I saw this one on opening night back in '99 and it absolutely terrified me--I'm actually pretty sure I haven't been camping since! This was the first time I'd gone back to BLAIR WITCH in over a decade and, while its impact may have been a bit blunted by all the found-footage knockoffs in its wake, it's still a pretty unnerving film and a very clever exercise in making scares on the cheap.

2. CARRIE (1976): I covered this one last year, but we were showing it at The Thrillema (a cult movie night I help curate with my pals Lauren and Jess) and I figured I could get away with dropping it into my list again. I wanted to revisit it in anticipation of the Kimberly Peirce remake anyway, and now, having watched Brian DePalma's version twice in as many years, I've lost interest in seeing a new filmed adaptation of Stephen King's first novel. I mean, what could a new filmmaking team, no matter how talented, possibly bring to the table? Every time I watch this movie I find myself hoping things will turn out better for poor Carrie White--that she'll make some friends, move out of her crazy mother's house, and go join the X-Men or something. Sadly, it never quite seems to work out that way.

3. IT LIVES AGAIN (1978): Larry Cohen's sequel to his own 1974 killer baby flick IT'S ALIVE picks up where the last movie left off. The mutant Davis baby may have gone done in a hail of bullets last time, but the first movie ended with a report of another killer tyke being born. This sequel ups the ante by letting loose THREE of the monstrous children. John P. Ryan reprises his role as the dad from the first film, while APOCALYPSE NOW's Frederic Forrest plays a not-so-proud papa this time around. This sequel is pretty dull, focusing mostly on the government's efforts to isolate and kill the babies at birth, while Ryan tries to save them and...I dunno, civilize them somehow? Maybe next year I'll get around to Cohen's three-quel, the awkwardly-titled ISLAND OF THE ALIVE.

4. ALLIGATOR (1980): Robert Forster's appearance in the penultimate episode of BREAKING BAD inspired me to revisit this monster mash, which logically follows up on those old rumours of kids flushing baby gators down the sewers when they get bored of them. Medical waste from a sinister research corporation causes one such lizard to grow to enormous size under the streets of Chicago. Forster plays a disgraced cop investigating the body parts that are turning up at sewage treatment plants. The movie really gets going when the title beast busts loose, culminating in a wedding massacre that has to be seen to be believed. John Sayles' tongue-in-cheek script keeps it light (an early sewer-worker victim is named Ed Norton in a tip of the hat to The Honeymooners), and the monster effects are a lot of fun (even if the miniature sets built for the regular-sized gator to crawl around in aren't always entirely convincing).

5. THE BURROWERS (2008): In this horror-western, a frontier family is kidnapped--presumably by marauding natives--and a posse goes on the hunt to get them back, only to learn that the real culprits are a nasty breed of pioneer predator that likes to bury its prey alive and feast on them at their leisure. A movie that's kind of a mix of THE SEARCHERS and TREMORS should be more up my alley, but THE BURROWERS lurches along slowly to a deflating, unsatisfying conclusion. Not even a terrific cast that includes Clancy Brown, Doug Hutchison, and HOUSE OF THE DEVIL's Jocelin Donahue could save it for me.

6. EXORCIST III (1990): This is one of my all-time favourite horror movies, an underrated gem that was unfairly dismissed at the time as an inferior sequel. In reality, it's a quietly disturbing slow burn of a supernatural detective story with tangential ties to the 1973 original (although to be fair, the studio did play these connections up as much as possible, even shoehorning in a late-game exorcism--William Peter Blatty's novel was actually titled LEGION, but 20th Century Fox wanted that name recognition in there). EXORCIST III is a body-swapping tale of serial killings in and around a catatonia ward, investigated by the first film's Lieutenant Kinderman (George C. Scott, taking over from the late Lee J. Cobb). Few scenes have ever scared the living crap out of me like the one with a sheet-covered killer, armed with a giant pair of shears, stalking a late-shift nurse). Highest possible recommendation.

7. THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973): This haunted house flick, based on a story by Richard Matheson, is clearly the inspiration for the DON'T trailer, Edgar Wright's contribution to 2007's GRINDHOUSE. A group of paranormal researchers investigates the sinister manifestations at the Belasco estate, which drove a previous research team to madness and death (Roddy MacDowall plays the only survivor of the initial investigation). Everyone in this movie is magnificently sideburned and turtlenecked, and director John Hough (THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS) keeps everything suitably warped with a never-ending array of oddball perspectives and crazy camera angles.

8. GHOSTBUSTERS (1984): Honestly, what can I say about this one that everyone doesn't already know? Like many a Shakespeare play, almost every line in this movie is a classic. Bill Murray is still the quintessential '80s wiseass, Sigourney Weaver is still the quintessential '80s babe, Rick Moranis is still the quintessential '80s dork, and the whole movie is still hilarious from start to finish. The Richard Edlund effects are terrific, Elmer Bernstein's score is perfect (and contains the most romantic use of the theremin in cinema history), and Ray Parker Jr.'s theme song is as catchy as it ever was. Surprisingly, I'm not opposed to the possibility of a GHOSTBUSTERS reboot--I just think whoever does it needs to start fresh with a new cast of the funniest people in Hollywood and go for the same tone Ivan Reitman nailed this time around. Hey, it might work! Maybe...? New to me: IT LIVES AGAIN, THE BURROWERS, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE 31 Days: 2010 Edition 31 Daya: 2011 Edition 31 Days: 2012 Edition