Month of Horror 8: The Hellworld Gospel Resurrection Legacy

[noiseredux]

I can handle the hand under the truck thing now. But that bathroom scene... I kind of have to look away.

[prfsnl_gmr]

I can handle the hand under the truck thing now. But that bathroom scene... I kind of have to look away.

I was having so much fun by the end - and saw exactly where the movie was going - so, the hand under the truck part had me cackling with glee. Two parts:

the knife to the tongue and the electric knife to the arm

really made me squirm though.

[Michi]

I can handle the hand under the truck thing now. But that bathroom scene... I kind of have to look away.

I was having so much fun by the end - and saw exactly where the movie was going - so, the hand under the truck part had me cackling with glee. Two parts:

the knife to the tongue and the electric knife to the arm

really made me squirm though.

That second one's the one that always gets me. I got a chill just now by just thinking about it.

[Kuruwin]

Fright Night

Falters at places but still a solid 80's horror comedy with good production values. Chris Sarandon's cocky vampire character and his manservant Jonathan Stark are fun to watch and the other leads do a good job too. The film goes on bit too long but not long enough to get boring. The wolf scene was pretty brutal.

Be sure to watch the remake sometime. It is very, very solid.

Also, Exhuminator, if you liked The Old Dark house, I suspect that you would also enjoy a lot of the old Hammer horror films and a lot of early Mario Bava films. They are all about the atmosphere.

Hmmmm....i did saw comments already calling it shit but i'll give it a chance at somepoint.

I managed to strike down another horror movie yesterday which was American Werewolf In London. and it was interesting. This leans heavily to comedy side but it's not without horror and the first werewolfs introduction scene is simple but effective. After that bodies don't really start to stack up until the finale. This film has some really interesting ideas regarding the curse but it doesn't really take full advantage of them and i think this film should have been longer to bank on them. The ending comes bit too abruptly and the movie cuts poorly to credits but that's minor nitpick.

Anyways. It's definitely something different and not straightforward werewolf film that i expected it to be.

[Ack]

The two things which got me the most in the latest Evil Dead movie were the syringe attack and the nail gun. "Why does my face hurt?" Ooph, nasty bit of business there.

Anyway, I watched a few more films over the weekend:


Hellraiser: Deader

First, that movie poster is shit. It looks like Pinhead is doing a bad "dick in a box" joke. Second, this movie is pretty awful. I expected that though, especially when I read the phrase "tough as nails reporter" in the movie plot description.

The setup is simple: there's a cult in Romania that appears to kill people and then bring them back to life. Investigative journalist Amy Klein is sent by her scuzzy boss to investigate a bootleg VHS about their activities. Klein has literally just finished an in-depth story about being a crack whore and hasn't even had time to change clothes, so...sure. Send her to Romania to investigate a cult. That seems legit. But make it cooler and edgier by interspersing random closeups and exposition with shots of travel and checking into hotels. You know, because it's hip.

Hellseeker had this same editing issue, and ultimately it comes down to the movies sharing the same director, Rick Bota. Also the script for this film originally had nothing to do with the Hellraiser franchise, and it shows. Pinhead occasionally inserts himself, the rest of the cenobites look bland and cheap with no backstory, and the movie mostly falls flat. Yes, there's some playing around with setting to mess with the viewer, but after watching Inferno and Hellseeker, it's not like I wasn't going to spot that a mile away.

All of this criticism aside though, I have to give Deader credit for one particular scene, where our heroine wakes up to discover a knife through her chest in what should be a mortal wound, and she has a massive freak out in the bathroom trying to figure out how to get the knife out while blood gets absolutely EVERYWHERE. It was actually quite painful to watch, and it was really the only scene I found effective in the entire film. It was certainly better than anything I saw in Hellseeker. Now if only the rest of the movie had been that competent.


Hellraiser: Hellworld

Let's get a few things straight. First, evil never actually goes online. Second, the online computer game that ties all the characters to the whole Hellraiser concept is apparently a point-and-click that looks like it came out in the mid-90s. Third, why was Lance Henriksen in this movie? He feels wasted here.

Hellworld is Hellraiser as 100% generic slasher fare. It's dull, it features unlikable characters, the "twist" of the plot is dumb, and the Hellraiser aspect once again feels completely shoehorned in. There are really no redeeming reasons to watch it, as it isn't a good slasher flick, and it's a terrible Hellraiser film. It's just bad. Generic and bad. When you waste Lance Henriksen in a horror movie, well, come on. That guy was in Stone Cold with the Boz!

The only nice thing about this film is that I'm now done with the Doug Bradley era of Hellraiser, and I feel I can step away from the series for a while. A long while. Doug, thank you for your years of work. Yes, you were too often wasted on these films, but you were always a highlight as Pinhead.


Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

You know, Michael Myers never really had much personality for me. Jason had personality just in the wicked ways he'd go about butchering kids and in the actors who portrayed him in different menacing ways. Freddy has loads of personality. Michael Myers...not so much. He's sort of this faceless void, simply moving forward no matter what. Perhaps for some folks that makes him creepier. I don't really find him creepy per say, but he's got an unflinching fortitude that I appreciate. Halloween 4 was a nice return to form for the slasher originator after Halloween 3 deviated in a totally different direction. While yes, I like Halloween 3, I also ended up enjoying Halloween 4 quite a bit. More than I anticipated if I'm honest, though I'm struggling to come up with a particular reason.

Now that I think about it, perhaps it's that Myers has transformed from a person into simply walking evil. He slaughters an entire police station off screen. He's even more unrelenting than Jason, a walking wall of menace, and here he does exactly that. He's also smarter than Jason, cutting phone lines, cutting power, posing as victims to lure more victims, so on and so forth. Yes, some of his kills make no sense, like why he can burrow his thumb through someone's skull. But that's not really the point. Jason is a trapped kid who is afraid of water inside the body of a killer super strong zombie. Myers is now the manifestation of evil, not human in any way anymore. He's walking death. And he's indomitable in Halloween 4. I think that's why I enjoyed it. I liked watching him stalk his prey and wipe it out without so much as even a sly nod to the camera or the look of a craftsman. He's mechanical, and this is what he does.

I look forward to watching Halloween 5.

15/31

1.Poltergeist II: The Other Side
2. Ring
3. Ring 2
4. Rasen
5. We Are Still Here
6. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
7. Hellraiser: Bloodline
8. Hellraiser: Inferno
9. Pulgasari
10. I Walked with a Zombie
11. Hellraiser: Hellseeker
12. The Leopard Man
13. Hellraiser: Deader
14. Hellraiser: Hellworld
15. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

[Exhuminator]

I watched more spooky films of the 1890s!

A Terrible Night (1896)
-A man is trying to sleep, but a giant spider starts crawling up his bed. He kills the beast, but upon going back to sleep, he finds it has released spiderlings under his covers.

The Bewitched Inn (1897)
-A weary traveler comes to his room for rest, only to find out its haunted by a poltergeist. The ghost does everything it can to give him a hard time, moving objects, making things disappear, even igniting flames from his candle. Finally the man has had enough and runs away, I'm pretty sure that was the ghost's goal.

The Accursed Cavern (1898)
-In a foul cave a magician casts spells on a skeleton, making it do all sorts of things. He turns into a woman for a bit, then back to a skeleton and makes it dance. Later he summons more spirits and they prance around. Afterwards he starts using levitation to move furniture around, then finally reveals himself to be a carnival huckster.

The Sign of the Cross (1899)
-Satan has infiltrated a Catholic church (by using the bowl of holy water as a portal), and pretends to be a priest. He begins turning the church into a lair of evil, filling it with demonic imagery and actual demons. Soon he's riding a giant frog while his underlings dance. Eventually the church figures out what's going on, and the real priest saves the day by invoking the Archangel.

Summoning the Spirits (1899)
-A man uses a scrying wreath to bring forth dead souls for the audiences amusement. Eventually the spirits themselves decide to play a clever trick on the conjurer. This film has really cool special effects for its age, I'm guessing double exposure.

[Kuruwin]

Pandorum

So was it the better Event Horizon? Well no because it wasn't even really like the Event Horizon. Both of them take place in spaceship and Pandorum does have psychological aspect to it but they really are not the same sort of horror films. Pandorum is more of a survival movie against annoyingly loud monsters. Event Horizon at least had great ideas but this one doesn't really have anything expect set design (but Event Horizon had much more interesting sets)

But i didn't hate Pandorum. It was loud and the script was bad but at least it wasn't boring.

[noiseredux]

After the second Hellraiser weren't they all just random scripts that they just added Cenobites to and called Hellraiser? They're like horror Die Hards.

[prfsnl_gmr]

After the second Hellraiser weren't they all just random scripts that they just added Cenobites to and called Hellraiser? They're like horror Die Hards.

Just for the record, Hellraiser II is pretty great. I think is better than the original.

Tonight, like right now, my wife and are watching Pumpkinhead. So far, so good!

[Nemoide]

^Pumpkinhead is a total classic!

Tonight's movie: The Mummy's Tomb
Unfortunately, this one's pretty bland. It's a straight-up sequel to The Mummy's Hand, set 30 years later, it's revealed that the mummy and high priest survived being burned and shot. The priest appoints a successor who brings the mummy to America to get revenge on the survivors from Mummy's Hand as well as their children. It's only an hour long and a good portion of the film is footage from the previous film. Lon Chaney Jr. takes over as the mummy in this one, but this movie doesn't give him much of a chance to showcase his talent. Also, this movie doesn't even HAVE a mummy's tomb in it, except in flashback for the previous movie. It's OKAY, but nothing too special.
I've heard that these Mummy sequels get pretty nuts with their timeline, and it's easy to see why. The Mummy's Hand was seemingly set in the present (1940) and The Mummy's Tomb is set 30 years later... so 1970 and it still looks like the early 1940s. And there are still two more in this timeline, we'll see when we end up!

Like last year, I've also been reading some horror comics in my backlog, finally getting around to Richard Corben's Shadows on the Grave. Oh man, this comic is FANTASTIC. If you're a fan of horror comics, this is a must-read series. I've really got to pick up the Creepy & Eerie Archive Editions on of these days.