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

[killer must kill again Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close killer must kill again]

a cure for wellness

still as good as when I watched it the first time. it's a nice throwback to gothic horror and the old "american going to europe discovering ancient evil" routine.
I guess it's the real location shooting, that makes it so damn watchable. gore verbinski really knows his stuff!

the mortuary collection

harmless teeny-bopper horror with a killer soundtrack that is way too good for this movie:

felt like a disney movie at times to the point I really had to look it up, to find out if they're okay now with showing an exploding dick on camera.

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

Just finished Antlers. Yet another horror movie as turgid, boring allegory for familial abuse. Yay.

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

Cody covers Come out and Play today
http://codysfilmandtvblog.blogspot.c...-2012.html?m=1

And for me it is

TITLE-Night of the Animated Dead



SOURCE-WB DVD

I remember ,hell has to be a decade ago,when a bunch of animators went and remade the classic Night of the Living Dead. Having never seen this interesting experiment when I saw the above DVD cover at a local store I just assumed the DVD was that animated remake of NOTLD.

NOPE! This is one animation team doing the entire film. Adding a few extended scenes that aren't in the original. Plus getting a fairly decent cast to do the voices.

The one drawback is the animation in some scenes looks a bit odd,not cheap but just odd. The biggest offender is early on when we see the car heading down the road to the graveyard. The car looks like a low level CGI effect and the rest of the scene looks like fairly decent animation.

The voice cast is packed with names and people that should be names. First off doing various voices you got the late Kirk Baily. Best known to people over 30 as Ug Lee on Salute your shorts. He had a decent career doing voice work. Dule Hill,currently the father on the Wonder Years reboot,is Ben and manages to sound a bit like the original actor but not a total clone. Josh Duhamel,best known to me for being on the show Las Vegas,is Harry Cooper. As Barbara the film has horror scream queen Katharine Isabelle. She was Ginger in Ginger Snaps and also been in a pile of horror films.Nancy Travis is perfectly cast as Harry's wife Helen.

Two voices that surprised me,cause I had no clue they did voice work,was Katee Sackhoff as Judy. Now that I know she is voicing Judy I can tell it is her. The other is Will Sasso,yep the MadTV dude,as Sheriff McClelland.

I know of some indie filmmakers that gripe about people remaking stuff like NOTLD,me I don't care if someone remakes it. For me each remake is a new way to view one of my favorite horror movies. Yea at full list price this DVD ain't worth it. But I keep seeing this marked down to 8 bucks or so. Which isn't a bad deal.

As far as extras on the disc all you have is making of. It is shortish. And really feels like one of those EPK you would see on mid 80s HBO between films.

Night of the Animated Dead gets a B.

[Matt H. Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Matt H.]

Just finished Antlers. Yet another horror movie as turgid, boring allegory for familial abuse. Yay.

Hm. Pretty dismissive about one of the best horror films of the year.

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

Got two more in thanks to the holiday, The Color Out of Space, which was really good with some classic Nic Cage scenery chewing, and the classic Alligator!

[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!
011-Whoever Slew Auntie Roo *1/2
012-Curse Of Frankenstein (1:37:1)****
013-Tales Of Frankenstein **1/2
014-War Of The Planets**
015-I Drink Your Blood **
016-Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things ****

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

10/10
Hellraiser: Inferno

It really doesn't feel like a "Hellraiser" movie but I'm glad I revisited it because I think it was a lot more enjoyable this time around.

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

TITLE-Demons 2



SOURCE-Anchor Bay DVD

First off thank you to CodyLL for sending me this DVD. Pretty sure when this release came out a long ass time ago I bought it. But it appears to be one of my DVDs that came up missing when I moved in 2007.

Spring of 1986 in Italy work began on this sequel to the surprise hit film Demons. Demons had done ok at the US box office and became a cult hit on home video and cable. Both films are produced by Dario Argento and directed by Lamberto Bava. Lamberto is the son of famous Italian director Mario Bava, and in the 80s Lamberto got a reputation for making wildly gory films usually with pretty good soundtracks if you are into 80 hard rock and metal.

Speaking of the soundtrack just look at the line up for Demons 2. The Smiths,the Cult,Art of Noise,Dead can Dance and Love&Rockets. That is a good line up of goth rock/alternative rock and just oddball stuff of the era.

Like the first film we get a group of people stuck in a building while they slowly one by one get turned into Demons,usually in bloody gory ways. I love how the pimp from the first film,he was a favorite of mine and my friends back in the day watching that old rental vhs of the first film,is back in this film playing pretty much the same character. Also you get a young,has to be 10 or so,Asia Argento in what I think is her first acting role.This time instead of being stuck in a theater while a demonic film plays,the cast is stuck in a huge apartment building while this demonic film plays on TV. Causing the demons to come out of the TV screens,I wonder if Ringu was inspired by this.

Yea I know there is blu ray releases of this. But honestly while I do enjoy the first Demons film enough that I will one day get one of the Blus of it,part 2....it isn't bad. But nothing about it screams "HEY GO DROP 30 BUCKS TO HAVE THIS ON BLU RAY!" I will be happy with this DVD.

The DVD looks nice and the dubbed dialogue ain't bad. Pretty sure this is the same dub I saw a long time ago on VHS. Anchor Bay has a commentary on the film. It is OK. One draw back is Lamberto Bava either isn't fluent in English or isn't comfortable talking in English for long periods. So there is parts where Bava says something in Italian and somene else translates for him. Besides that tiny thing the commentary is worth checking out. It has so few blank spaces and gives a decent amount of info.

So if you want to see a above average mid 80s Italian gore flick track down a copy of Demons 2. I bet it is streamiing on some service.

Demons 2 gets a C+

And Cody covered
Hausu

http://codysfilmandtvblog.blogspot.c...-1977.html?m=1

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

WOLF MAN does have a fantastic fairy tale kinda vibe to it, but it doesn't quite work for me. I think Lon's a bit too whiny for me.

I get what you're saying - he's a pretty off-putting presence, but for some reason I've always had a soft spot for the big lug, so I don't mind him.

And there's so mich else that always blows my mind in 'The Wolf Man' - genuinely haunted performances from Bela and Maria Ouspenska, and the way that Siodmak's script draws so heavily on the persecution of Jews (and real life Gypsies) which was happening in Europe at the time of the film's production, give it a real depth and tragic quality. And I love the father/son relationship between Lon and Claude Rains, it's so complex and unusual, and again, Siodmak's dialogue is so rich and full of interesting bits and pieces... and the way he just plain made up all that shit about silver and full moons, and yet made it seem so authentic that we're all still falling back on it 80 years later - wow.

And I love the Wolf Man's bizarro, tippy-toes kind of walk, and the way that backlot drenched in fog and gnarled tree branches becomes such a nebulous, dream-like space.... and, well, I could go on for pages here.

I like ‘Werewolf of London’ an awful lot too though, just for the record.

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

#13
Hammer House of Horror:
The House That Bled To Death
(Tom Clegg, TV, 1980)

Episode # 5. Pretty cool title, eh?

Yes, this is 'the haunted house one', but, in keeping with all preceding episode of this series, it forgoes gothic/period atmos, instead telling the dour, workaday tale of a young family who have the misfortune to move into a pebble-dashed suburban semi previously occupied by an old codger who cut up his missus with a pair of gurkha knives nailed up on the kitchen wall.

I confess I was pretty enthralled by all the authentic detals and textures of everyday, lower middle class British life circa 1980 which fill every second of this episode. That's where I came from, but my memories are sketchy, so I couldn't help just drinking it all in, thinking about the life lived by my parents and their neighbours and friends around the time of my birth.

Of course, unlike Nicholas Ball here, my old dad didn't look and act like an attempt to genetically cross-breed Mel Gibson and David Hemmings. Really didn't trust that guy right from the start, although the double denim outfit he wears to his hospital porter's job is pretty awesome.

Horror-wise, most of this is pretty excruciating and/or boring, but it's hard to resist the show-stopping chaos of the children's party drenched in blood set-piece, and the final act brings a splendidly cynical twist which I really enjoyed.

B-

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

Today's pick is he Stendhal Syndrome. Not the best Argento, but it is well above Dracula 3-D!

[Dom D Spoon! Find all posts View Profile Close Dom D]

DEMONOID: I had been led to expect great things from Demonoid. It has a great beginning. One of the best breast reveals of all time in that scene. But it feels pretty disjointed and episodic. The hand doesn't really cut it as a menacing villian. Not sure I'm a fan of the heroine who weirdly affectless throughout. There's some absolutely bizarre behaviour by the humans in this film as well. In a film I like that would be a selling point for me but in one that I'm not enjoying it just adds to my aggravation.

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

#14
The Cat Creature
(Curtis Harrington, TV, 1973)

I think this TV movie is one of the few things the indefatigable Curtis Harrington directed post-'Night Tide' which doesn't feature an aging Hollywood starlet in the leading role, although we do get Gale Sondergaard performing a major arcana-only tarot reading as the proprietor of a magickal equipment store, which is close enough I suppose.

Robert Bloch wrote the 'teleplay' for this one, but I can only assume he banged it out in a few hours for rent money, because it's pure scooby-doo. An extremely unconvincing looking emerald-eyed cat amulet is stolen from a mummy in the secret collection of a recently deceased Egyptology nut who lives in the cool clifftop villa/castle previously seen in Robert Quarry/Ray Danton joint 'The Deathmaster'. Subsequently, a killer, supernatural black cat is on the prowl, hap-hazardly murdering those who have come into contact with the amulet.

Plot-wise, that's about yr lot, but there's plenty more to enjoy along the way. Moodily-lit interior sets (feel the green and brown!), packed to bursting with every esoteric relic, antique carving, weird painting and jewelled skull Harrington's crew could drag out of the vaults, plus lots of great, rather spooky L.A. exteriors, and an endless parade of little-known weirdo cult actors, most of whom were also probably dragged out of the vaults in one form or another. (Seriously, clicking through to check these guys out on IMDB is a bottomless pit of wonders.)

Amongst other highlights, Peter Lorre Jr gets to say, "aaarg" as a pwnbroker with a knife in his back, Milton Parsons camps it up as the coroner, and there's a really freaky scene with John Carradine as the desk clerk at a flophouse hotel. There's a female dwarf sitting next to him on the desk, swigging from a bottle... only she's a GIANT dwarf; I can't quite explain it, but due to a trick of perspective or something, she just looks huge, towering over Carradine and the other regularly proportioned people in the scene. Darnedest thing I ever saw.

Elsewhere, the slightly more normal scenes with Stuart Whitman as the grizzled detective leading the investigation and so forth have a pleasant Kolchak / Dan Curtis kind of vibe to them, much as you'd hope.

There are lots of great shots with the silhouette of the cat creeping across paper-covered windows like in some Japanese bakeneko movie, and some truly whacked out imagery during the finale, including leading lady Meredith Baxter done up as a high priestess of Bast, and a bandaged up, Universal style mummy being attacked by a pack of 'vicious' cats.

Probably best experienced in some liminal state between waking and sleep, this whole thing basically feels like spending 73 minutes trapped inside David Del Valle's head - which is a-ok by me.

B+

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

10/11
Scars of Dracula
Dracula (1958)
Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Meyers (theatrical cut)

Hadn't seen the theatrical Halloween 6 in a while and really enjoyed it plus it was great to see that cool strobe light kill scene again; the last bunch of times I watched this it was the producer's cut.

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

Cody covers the 70s Nosferatu remake
http://codysfilmandtvblog.blogspot.c...mpyre.html?m=1

TITLE-The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976)



SOURCE-Shudder

This is a film I had heard about for years. Never saw it for rent back when I was in a video store every week renting movies. Never saw it airing on TV. Then during my decade in Southeast Texas I finally saw it. A buddy's mother was an extra in the film. And she happened to have a VHS copy of the movie. I watched it and found the film to be a bit slow.

Skip ahead 22 years and I was flipping through all the streaming services I have. Trying to find something to watch. Saw Shudder had this movie and put it on. This viewing I was glued to the screen.

Based on true events,this is set in the Texarkana area in the mid 40s. A person wearing what looks like a flour sack over his head is going to the various places teens would go park and make out.

This killer ,who still hasn't been caught,killed 8 people over the span of a few months. I'm betting whoever the killer was is dead by now. And I doubt we will ever learn who the killer was.

Now the cast of the film is mostly unknowns,with lots of local people making up the non-major parts. The only person in the film I knew was Dawn Wells,best known for being Mary Ann on Gilligan's Island.

The film has a very documentary style feel. There is a narrator,Vern Steirman,and the scenes of the attacks feel like the re-enactmonts from all the true crime shows that flood the cable tv channels currently.

I've always wondered if Jason's look in Friday the 13th part 2 is inspired by this film. From what I can find The Town that Dreaded Sundown was a cult hit. One of those films that most horror fans had heard of,but one that very few had scene.

Overall the film isn't bad. Sure it is a bit slow paced. And it doesn't contain the over the top violence you expect now from a slasher film. But if you go into the movie with all that in mind and aren't some ADHD kid you should enjoy it.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown gets a C+