31 Days of Horror 2022 edition can't think of a catchy subtitle

[BW Haggar Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close BW Haggar]

#5
Hasta El Viento Tiene Miedo ['Even The Wind is Afraid']
(Carlos Enrique Taboada, 1968)

Anyone who thinks '60s Mexican horror was all about preening luchadores, aztec mummies and bloody apes would do well to check out this sombre, slow-burn ghost story whose gradual accumulation of dread initially seems to owe as much to the Val Lewton school as anything else.

The claustrophobic girl's school setting strongly anticipates later Spanish films like 'La Residencia' / 'The House That Screamed' or 'School of Fear', but rather than a mystery thriller, this is a full blown supernatural affair, with pupils and teachers falling prey to the ghost of a former pupil driven to her death by the tyrannical headmistress.

Unfortunately, the simple, slow-moving story and flat characterisations here are unlikely to really enthall anyone, and it's fair to say that very little actually happens through most of the run-time... but this one is all about the atmos.

In fact, with constant howling wind, mewling cats, rich primary colours, deep, dark shadows, pale-skinned ghosts peering through dirty windows, a lush, wall-to-wall orchestral score and (on occasion) some groovy, mod-ish fashions, it's almost impossible not to describe the film as "Bava-esque". And, whilst it's nowhere near his level of accomplishment (and far less shocking/eventful than any of his '60s classics), it's still a reasonably proficient attempt to mount a production in a similar vein, which fans of that very particular over-heated '60s colour gothic aesthetic should definitely get a kick out of.

By far the best bit is the scene in which one of the girls performs a striptease in sexy blue lingerie before getting spooked by the ghost; not exactly revolutionising the horror genre, you'd have to admit, but hey - it works.

B+

[Darcy Parker Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Darcy Parker]

Second movie today: Inferno - It's a classic, not much more to say.

[Gary Banks Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Gary Banks]

OCTOBER 2022

001-Castle Of Blood ****
002-In Search Of Dracula **
003-Dawn Of The Dead(78) ****
004-Carnival Of Sinners *
005-The Whip and The Body ***1/2
006-Panic In Year Zero! **

[f.ramses Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close f.ramses]

10/4
The Uninvited (1944)
The Uninvited (2009)
Uninvited (1987)

The Uninvited (1944) was in the pile for October but then after I wasn't sure what to do next so I let the title decide for me and I gotta say it worked out pretty well!

[Newt Cox Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Newt Cox]

Cody covers Eyes without a face

http://codysfilmandtvblog.blogspot.c...isage.html?m=1

And now on my 5th day

TITLE-Leatherface 2017
SOURCE-Digital Copy

First off thanks to Bat32 of Exploited Cinema and Weird World Publishing for hooking me up with the digital copy code for this film many years ago. I redeemed the code and then didn't bother watching the film for at least 2 years.

Now I love the original TCM film from 1974. And usually I end up enjoying the sequels to that film. Leatherface,and I hate how this has an almost indentical name to the third film in the franchise,is an odd piece of film from this franchise. It serves as a prequel to the original film. And it is in continuity with that film and Texas Chainsaw 3d.

After Texas Chainsaw 3d did fairly well in theaters Lionsgate quickly wanted to make another film. This prequel was supposed to be filmed in Louisiana,lots of films are made there cause the state provides film tv shows lots of tax breaks,and was gonna be an origin story for Leatherface. Instead for various reasons the film was made in Bulgaria. And cause of how long it took to be made the studio lost the rights to make future films in the series.

So how is the movie? Imagine if Natural Born Killers and the original TCM had a kid. But this kid got mostly the bad shit from each parent. After a start where we see Leatherface's family fighting off some people we skip to a mental hospital. Where we know that the teen that will become Leatherface is. All the patients at this hospital are renamed. A young nurse is falling in love with a patient. Leatherface's mother shows up and is denied the right to see her son. She starts a riot and in this a few of the patients escape.

You go the young nurse,who is held hostage. A tall silent hulking guy. Who you look at and think that has to be Leatherface. And Jackson the guy the nurse was falling for. A fairly nice looking dude. Along with others from the hospital they all go on the run.

The cops are after them. And the cops quickly learn that Leatherface is one of the patients that escaped. Of course we are all thinking that Bud,the tall silent guy,is Leatherface. NOPE. There's a twist. Bud dies and Jackson gets a nasty face injury. Which isn't taken proper care of. And boom this is who becomes Leatherface.

Now until this movie I had always been able to see each TCM movie in a theater. Saw the original at a drive in when I was young in the mid 70s. Saw the unrated 2nd film at a theater thanks to one of my favorite uncles. I even saw the horrid part 4 ,sure I had to drive from near Houston TX to Austin to do this. Sadly Leatherface got such a limited theatrical release there was no way I could see it in a theater.

While the gore in this is pretty good,the story is shit. I feels more like a cops chasing the evil killers movie than a TCM film. And if Texas Chainsaw Massacre The Next Generation didn't exist this would be the worst film in the franchise.

From what I can find this film was a huge bomb. And so disliked that it cause the next film in the series,which came out years later,to be another reboot of the series continutity.

Leatherface gets a D-

[Gary Banks Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Gary Banks]

OCTOBER 2022

001-Castle Of Blood ****
002-In Search Of Dracula **
003-Dawn Of The Dead(78) ****
004-Carnival Of Sinners *
005-The Whip and The Body ***1/2
006-Panic In Year Zero! **
007-Doctor Blood's Coffin *1/2

I have no set choice of movies for this month. Whatever catches my eye usually gets tossed in. There are a few staples (Castle Of Blood) but usually this is done on the fly.

[BW Haggar Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close BW Haggar]

#6
Corridors of Blood
(Robert Day, 1958)

Not really a horror movie in any sense that a modern audience would recognise, this one starts off more like a medical biopic, set in 1840, as Karloff (in 'doddering yet driven humanitarian scientist' mode) portrays fictional anesthesia pioneer Dr Thomas Bolton as he struggles to develop the means to perform surgery without inflicting pain upon his patients.

Things take a much darker turn however as, overworked and disspirited by the scorn of his doubting colleagues, Dr Bolton begins getting blasted out of mind of tincture of opium and falls in with supremely shady cockney ne'erdowells Black Ben (Francis de Wolff) and Resurrection Joe (Christopher Lee), whose blackhearted skullduggery drags the good doctor into a spiral of moral and physical degradation from which he will never recover.

Imaginatively directed, snappily edited and beautifully shot in claustrophobic 4:3 black & white, 'Corridors of Blood' plays more than anything like a kind of early Victorian film noir, complete with suffocating vistas of Hogarthian squalor, eye-watering scenes of medical malpractice, woozy, super-imposition heavy flashback/dream sequences and a general sense of a world gone very wrong indeed.

Although he's basically playing the kind of role he could do in his sleep by this point, Karloff seems to be pushing for something rather more intense here than he usually managed in his '50s mad scientist movies, and it's great to see him sharing screen time with a veritable bus load of British character talent. (Amongst others, Nigel Green, Charles Lloyd Pack and Adrienne Corri are all on hand doing their finest.)

It's Lee though who really steals the show, looking more lumbering and scrawny than ever here in a three-sizes-too-small suit and top hat as he essentially cops the mannerisms of a soft-spoken East End gangster born a century too early. A great, unconventional performance from him.

Oddly similar to the same year's 'Revenge of Frankenstein' in both narrative and tonal terms, 'Corridors of Blood' eventually earns its horror stripes to a certain extent by building up a good, grand guignal head of steam in its final reel, but regardless of genre designation, it's absolutely splendid stuff, second only to John Gilling's 'The Flesh & The Fiends' in my personal ranking of horror-adjacent British movies about morally equivocal Victorian doctors.

A-

[f.ramses Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close f.ramses]

10/5

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Meyers
Without Warning
Invaders from Mars (1986)

I’ve only seen Without Warning once before and I remember thinking it was OK but wow, I was so bored this time around! As an adult Invaders from Mars is still fun but it also seems a bit more corny every time I see it. lol

[Newt Cox Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Newt Cox]

TITLE-Just Before Dawn



SOURCE-Shudder Streaming Service

Over the past 30+ years I would hear about this film. How it is a forgotten slasher and this great film that so few had seen. Somehow I have missed the multiple DVD releases of it.

A group of 5 young adults head up to the top of a mountain. One of these 5 has inherited some land at the top of the mountain. They get warned by George Kennedy to not got up there. Then we get the camp owner from Sleepaway Camp,in a Crazy Ralph role,telling these 5 to turn around and go home.

So why are they being told to leave....well that is cause there is a pair of killer twin inbred hillbillies on the mountain. And our gang of 5 is slowly killed off until all we have left is one couple. After the final girl kills the last of the killers by shoving her fist down his throat the film ends.

There isn't much gore,the kills are ok at best and none of the characters are that fleshed out. But the film looks good. The setting of the deep woods is well used.

If you just have to see every 80s slasher track this down. Hell sign up for a free trial of Shudder and watch it. Cause I doubt many people would like this enough to buy a copy.

Just Before Dawn gets a C.


Cody covered

http://codysfilmandtvblog.blogspot.c...-1960.html?m=1

Peeping Tom

[Newt Cox Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Newt Cox]

OCTOBER 2022

001-Castle Of Blood ****
002-In Search Of Dracula **
003-Dawn Of The Dead(78) ****
004-Carnival Of Sinners *
005-The Whip and The Body ***1/2
006-Panic In Year Zero! **
007-Doctor Blood's Coffin *1/2

I have no set choice of movies for this month. Whatever catches my eye usually gets tossed in. There are a few staples (Castle Of Blood) but usually this is done on the fly.

Normally by early Sept I got my main 31 movies/whatevers picked out. But every year I end up watching whhatever catches my eye besides the ones planned out. LIke the other night watched that Night of Anubis cut of NOTLD68. Then the next night she wanted to watch the new Bring it On,which is a slasher,,,,...,.,,.

[Darcy Parker Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Darcy Parker]

Yesterday I watched the first 3 episodes of Made in Abyss, an anime series with cute characters that gets pretty horrific and disturbing. Does that count?

Today I watched Tombs of the Blind Dead on Shudder. Classic movie.

[f.ramses Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close f.ramses]

I pick out a bunch of movies before October and then usually wind up watching about 1/2 of them but the total number of movies watched for the month is often a lot higher than the number of movies initially picked.

[Darcy Parker Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Darcy Parker]

Just finished All Hallow's Eve 2. Whereas the first one was excessive and unnecessarily mean-spirited, the second is just a boring slog.

[BW Haggar Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close BW Haggar]

#7
The Halfway House
(Kenneth J. Hall, 2004)

Three things caused me to note this as something which might be worth watching when Severin put it out earlier this year: Mary Woronov, Lovecraftian monsters and gratuitous nudity.

Thankfully, all of these elements are present in heroic quantities.... which is just as well, as, initially at least, this movie doesn't seem to have much else to offer.

Basically it falls into that dead-zone where it's far too camp and tongue-in-cheek to carry any weight as a horror movie, but at the same time, the script's attempts at humour are all pretty 'cringe' (as the kids would say) and nothing happens which is sufficiently bizarre or outrageous to raise any laughs.

As a result, it's about as bland as a movie featuring Woronov as a priestess of Cthulhu, practical monster effects and a constant turnover of tits and softcore sex could possibly be.

Just as I was starting to feel bad about the necessity of talking shit about an ambitious indie movie obviously made with love and enthusiasm though... well, call me crazy, but at around the halfway mark, there's a pretty great sex/gore gag, a few lines which are actually funny and well-delivered, and... I kind of started to get into it to some extent, and subsequently quite enjoyed it on an ambient kind of level (although a lot more beer would probably still have helped in that regard).

I mean, it's still probably not something I would recommend deliberately choosing to watch or paying money for (even though I did so on both counts), but if I'd encountered this one whilst flicking through channels bored out of my mind in some hotel room (which is probably more it's natural environment), I'd definitely have found my groove for the evening.

C+

[Gary Banks Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Gary Banks]

OCTOBER 2022

001-Castle Of Blood ****
002-In Search Of Dracula **
003-Dawn Of The Dead(78) ****
004-Carnival Of Sinners *
005-The Whip and The Body ***1/2
006-Panic In Year Zero! **
007-Doctor Blood's Coffin *1/2
008-Ladron De Cadaveres **
009-Castle Of Evil **1/2
010-From Dusk To Dawn Season One ack!

I had to bail out on FDTD. I hated the characters and felt that spending another minute with them was a waste of my time. Then again, I had a hard time sitting through the movie.