Halloween

One of my all-time favorite movies.  I end up watching this multiple times a year.  It's a beautifully shot movie, and the soundtrack is incredible.  I love the dialog.  I love how crazed Dr. Loomis is (and the look of joy on his face when he gets in his one good scare).  I love Laurie, Annie and Lynda.  I love Michael Myers dressing up like a ghost and putting on Bob's glasses.  I love everything about this movie.

Nosferatu the Vampyre

Description from Netflix:
This stylistic 1979 retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula follows the bloodthirsty, undead count as he takes over the German village of Virna and then tries to spread his bloodsucking ways throughout the world.  All that stands in his path is the lovely, selfless Lucy Harker.  Iconoclastic German director Werner Herzog blends dreamlike imagery and a languid pace to give the film an ethereal milieu.

Notable actors: Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani

My thoughts:
First of all, let's state two facts about this.
1. Klaus Kinski is terrifying as Nosferatu.  Even worse than his face are his hands.  Those hands freak me out.

2. Isabelle Adjani is gorgeous.  Pictures don't do her justice.  She carried herself so well in this film.  She really was the embodyment of all things beautiful and pure, which is exactly what Herzog was going for.  He could not have cast two better leads for this film.

This was very much a 70s film.  By that I mean, it was slow paced.  It was also very deliberate with each shot, and very deliberate in its setting and surroundings.  It made for a beautiful film, but also one that I kind of zoned out of a handful of times.

Technically speaking, it's a masterpiece.  Between the acting and the directing and the setting, it really is amazing to look at.  But it wasn't the easiest film to watch.  It was late and I was a little tired.  This is a film that demands your full attention, and I wasn't in a place to give that last night.  I plan on watching it again when I am better prepared for it.

If you haven't seen it, it's definitely worth a watch.  But it's not one that you can watch passively and still expect to get full enjoyment out of it.

Rating: 3/5
(I'm sure that rating will increase if I watch it under different circumstances)

One final note: after watching this, it's easy to see where the influence for The Master in Buffy the Vampire Slayer came from.

The Sentinel

Description from Netflix:
Model Alison Parker gets a great deal on a Brooklyn, NY apartment - but there's just one catch: it's also the gateway to Hell, and she's on the invite list.  Universal's answer to The Exorcist features a stellar supporting cast.

Notable actors: Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum, Chris Sarandon, Ava Gardner, Burgess Meredith, Jerry Orbach, Beverly D'Angelo, Tom Berenger

My thoughts:
First of all, that's a lot of famous people.  Granted, they didn't all have large roles (for instance, Jeff Goldblum was barely in it, and Christopher Walken only had 1 or 2 lines), but it's a pretty impressive cast.  That's without even mentioning the main girl, played by Cristina Raines.  I had never seen her in anything before, but she did a great job.  I wish I had seen her in something before.

The description calls it "Universal's answer to The Exorcist", but that doesn't seem quite right.  If anything, the mood felt more like Rosemary's Baby than anything.  Except I enjoyed it more than Rosemary's Baby, because it moved along at a better pace.
It had a really good atmosphere, and there was a sense of mystery that drove the movie.  I could kind of sense where the movie was going, but it took a much different path than I thought it would.

Chris Sarandon and his awesome mustache

I watched this movie because Ricky Butler talks about it in The Burbs, and I realized I had never seen it.  Besides that reference, I didn't know too much about it.  It was well worth a watch.  It really felt more like a mystery than a horror movie, but the last 10 minutes were legitimately creepy.
I had a few problems with the ending, which I will talk about here.  Even though this came out in 1977, I'm still going to throw a "spoiler alert" on it.

[SPOILER]
Alison was a model, and a pretty high-profile on at that.  She was in dozens of print ads, and quite a few television ads, including one that seemed to be getting quite a bit of air time recently.  Pretty much everyone she met in the movie recognized her.  Yet, at the end of the movie, she becomes the sentinel to guard against the gates of Hell, and no one missed her?  Surely someone would have been looking for her?  Her best friend?  Her employers?  I just don't believe that a popular model can just drop off the face of the Earth without anyone looking for her.
[END SPOILER]

If you haven't seen this yet, I recommend that you check it out.  It's currently on Netflix Instant.

Rating: 4/5

Christopher Walken: Demon Detective

Night of the Creeps, Dawn of the Dead

The Zombie Prom is this Saturday, so I dubbed this week to be Zombie Week.  I'm only going to watch zombie movies in the days leading up to the prom.

Night of the Creeps

A zombie comedy.  The movie starts in the 50s, on an alien ship.  A vial gets released into space, and eventually ends up on Earth.  The vial contains slug-like creatures who jump into people's mouths, kill them, then reanimate them.  Luckily this only happened with one person in the 50s, and they were able to freeze him before anything happen.
Fast forward to the 80s, and his body is kept near a college.  To try to get into a fraternity, two college kids break into the facility and release the body.  The body's head explodes, releasing the slugs into the unsuspecting world.
They start jumping into college kids, and pretty soon the town is overrun with frat zombies.  A detective, a college kid and his love interest try to stop the horde, armed with guns and a flame thrower.

It's a fun movie.  Good characters.  Funny lines.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Random actor sighting: David Paymer

Rating: 4 stars

Dawn of the Dead

This is, of course, a classic in horror cinema.  Night of the Living Dead may have given birth to the modern zombie movie, but Dawn of the Dead took it to another level.  On many lists, this is considered the greatest zombie movie of all time.
But not on my list.
I can understand it's place in history, and I can understand what it means to the genre as a whole.  I understand it, and I can appreciate it...but I can't rank it at the top of the list.  It spawned a generation of zombie movies, and that's amazing...but a number of those movies are better than this one.
For one, it kind of suffers from the 70s era of filmmaking, when scenes were drawn out longer than they should be, and the movie kind of dragged along as a result.  I also had a problem with the characters.  I didn't really like any of them.  They also didn't really have much of a progression.  It's almost like they completely changed how the characters were supposed to act halfway through the movie, but didn't really have any lead-up to it.  I'm not sure if that makes sense, but that's how it felt.

All of this sounds like I hate it.  I don't hate it.  It's a little long and kind of boring in spots, but I still like the movie as a whole (and I love the theme).  I can also see why it was so influential.  It really did great things for the horror genre, and the zombie subgenre, specifically.

So...I liked it.  I can respect it for what it is, but I can't call it the greatest zombie movie ever made.  In fact, I have it ranked pretty far below Night of the Living Dead.

Rating: 4 stars

Wrong Turn, Phantasm

Wrong Turn

I had seen this before, but it had been a while.  I decided to watch the rest of the series, so I started with this one.
It is what it is: a slasher movie set in West Virginia, with a family inbreds killing and eating people.  Mainly hot people, but people all the same.  Eliza Dushku, Desmond Harrington (Quinn from Dexter) and a handful of other people are hunted down by this family.  Some of them escape, some don't.  It's basically A not-quite-as-interesting version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but the entire family is Leatherface.
It's not exactly a groundbreaking movie, but, taken for what it is, it's actually quite enjoyable.

Rating: 4 stars

Phantasm

This movie is always talked about as a classic in independent horror, often mentioned in the same conversations as Suspiria.  I liked (but didn't love) Suspiria, so I thought I'd give it a shot.  Also, this was supposed to be a quasi-zombie movie, and it had been a while since I've really watched one of those.
For starters, the zombies looked like cloaked Jawas (but without the glowing eyes).  Apparently they killed people and chopped off their legs?  I'm not sure they ever really addressed this.
I started watching this movie, and kind of stopped paying attention at some point.  Basically, there was a funeral home run by an ageless guy (the Tall Man, I believe he was called).  He had an altar-ego (the Lavender Woman) who had sex with men, then killed them, then turned them into zombies.  One kid kind of knew what was going on, and he was able to talk his brother and the local ice cream man into helping him stop those shenanigans.  They confronted the Tall Man or something, and the kid went into a different dimension for a couple seconds or something and saw the Jawas as slaves of the Tall Man.
The movie ended with some kind of "it was a dream...or was it" nonsense, with the ice cream man talking to the kid in front of a fire.  It was all very romantic and extremely uncomfortable.

Anyway, this movie was pretty terrible.  There were a couple of kind of cool moments, including one where a flying sphere latched onto a guy's face and this happened:

Shortly thereafter a bunch of blood came pouring out of the front, like some kind of deranged spout.

That scene alone made it impossible to give this a 1 star rating...but not by much.

Rating: 2 stars

Prom Night, Dog Soldiers, Halloween

Prom Night

Yet another one of those movies that I had heard about, but had never seen.  This was as good a time as any to check it out.

It came out 2 years after Halloween, but it seemed much more dated.  Maybe it was the clothes.  Maybe it was the hair.  Or maybe - just maybe - it was the insanely long prom scene with a ton of loud disco.  Yeah, that was probably it.

I could see what they were going for, and I can see how a lot of modern movies were influenced by this.  As opposed to Halloween, you weren't sure who the killer was (although it was fairly easy to figure it out).  

It was fairly entertaining, but not a great movie.  Nowhere near on the level of Halloween.  However, there are bonus points for the guy who played Lou...the "bad boy" in the movies, and one of the more hideous people I've ever seen.  

Rating: 3 stars

Dog Soldiers

I tend to like monster movies, which means I also tend to like werewolf movies.  I had heard good things about this movie, so I thought I'd check it out.  There were werewolves.  There was blood.  There was a man with his guts held in by hot glue.  There was lots of shooting.  Honestly, this is a problem I have with werewolf movies.  Even after the characters realize that nothing short of silver bullets will kill the werewolf, they still keep shooting them.  I realize that it kind of knocks them back a little, but it does no real damage, and it most cases it does little in the way of slowing them down.  It's not just this movie...it's a lot of werewolf movies.

Anyway, this movie was violent and bloody, and ended with a bunch of guys in an old house, shooting at werewolves.  

I liked it, but I didn't love it.  From everything that I had heard about it, I was expecting to love it.  It was enjoyable, but it didn't blow me away.  Maybe I needed to be in the right mood for it, but, for now, I'll give it a "Liked It".

Rating: 3 stars

Halloween

It's really not fair to review this along with Prom Night and Dog Soldiers.  Those movies were decent.  This movie is amazing.  I've seen it a handful of times, and it only gets better with each viewing.  I would have to rank this movie among my top 5 horror movies of all time (somewhere behind Psycho and Night of the Living Dead).  First of all, it just looks amazing.  The cinematography is terrific.  The soundtrack is perfect.  The character of Michael Myers is terrifying in that he has no back story.  We don't know exactly why he kills...we don't know how or why he got to that point.  We just know that he kills, and that he's relentless in his pursuit, and brutal in his murders.  There's the supernatural aspect to the end (how is he still alive?).  There's the camera itself: sometimes acting as the eyes of Myers...but not always, so it keeps you on your toes.
It's hard to describe all the reasons why I love this movie.  I just know that I do, and I love it more every time.

Rating: 5 stars

After watching Halloween, I realized I had not yet watched the entire series.  So I'm doing that now.  I'm skipping 2 (which I had recently watched) and 3 (because Michael Myers is not in it, and because it's awful). I doubt my reviews of these will be much past, "Stabbing stabbing stabbing," but we'll see.

Zombie Prom Update: The prom will be taking place at the Danville Community Arts Center on May 21, starting at 8pm.  You can visit the page (and buy tickets) here, and you can request songs through the Facebook page.