Racketyboy Month of Horror 9: The Axis of Sorta Evil

[Ack]

Yes. Very strong movie. The sequel has a great premise (“These children need a place to hide while London’s being fire-bombed!” “I know a remote house where they’ll be safe...”), but apparently it’s pretty bad.

Also, have you seen The Orphanage? It sounds like your sort of movie too...

Funny enough, that's also the premise for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And I have seen The Orphanage. More kids should walk around with bags over their heads.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Yes. Very strong movie. The sequel has a great premise (“These children need a place to hide while London’s being fire-bombed!” “I know a remote house where they’ll be safe...”), but apparently it’s pretty bad.

Also, have you seen The Orphanage? It sounds like your sort of movie too...

Funny enough, that's also the premise for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And I have seen The Orphanage. More kids should walk around with bags over their heads.

[Ziggy]

Trick 'r Treat



What a fun movie. Think Creepshow, only it all takes place on Halloween and the four stories cross paths now and then. And I really enjoyed all of the practical effects.

[noiseredux]

Had you not seen it before? Totally a modern classic Halloween anthology. Glad you enjoyed.

[Nemoide]

Trick 'r Treat is definitely a modern Halloween classic and captures what I'd consider the real spirit of the holiday: fun and scary at the same time! Mixing feelings of childhood nostalgia with menace and fright!

For me, tonight's movie was Dario Argento's Deep Red. I've been a fan of Suspiria and Inferno for many many years but never really delved too deep into Argento's oeuvre and have never seen this movie before! It's... pretty good. But it didn't entirely blow me away. It definitely has that recognizable Argento style, the famed "first-person perspective of the black-leather-gloved killer" and an excellent Goblin soundtrack. I can't say exactly why this movie didn't grab me as much as I feel like it should have, but I feel like it took too long for the "solving the mystery" ball to get rolling.
But it was still good and I wouldn't mind rewatching it sometime in the future! Glad to cross that one off the Argento "list of shame!"

[noiseredux]

Argento's "list of shame" is much longer than his list of awesome. Don't get me wrong, the awesome is awesome. But he's made a lot of movies that go against the 'master of horror' title he's been given.

[GSZX1337]

I've been playing a few Point and Click Adventure games recently, and October just started recently. That means I should play some horror P&C Adventures.
I'm gonna start with Dark Seed, the P&C with artwork from H.R. Giger. I haven't actually played any of the game yet, but I've gotten it to work on my iMac G5.
After several minutes of getting the game to work, I start the game to test it and this is the first thing I see:

NSFW

Holy shit, this game doesn't even give you time to strap yourself in.

I'm gonna just play the game on my main PC with DOSBox since for some reason it's monochrome on my iMac. I don't know if it's my settings or if that's just what the Mac version looks like.

[noiseredux]

^nice banner haha.

I wrote a pretty long thing about Rampage, Splatterhouse and Ghosts N Goblins - all of which we played last night, and then the forum glitched and lost it all when I hit submit. Sigh. I'll rewrite when I find the time.

[Ack]

25. Ghoulies IV

While watching Ghoulies IV, I had a mental breakthrough: I believe I hate myself.

Ghoulies IV is not a good movie. It's not even a good Ghoulies movie, and that's an incredibly low bar. The budget on this was so tiny, they couldn't even afford to bring back the Ghoulies puppets from previous films; the producer instead brought in two actors wearing costumes to play the little demons, and they look nothing like the original monsters. To top it off, footage from the first film is spliced in, so it just keeps getting more and more obvious how painfully bad this all is.

Basically, the guy from the first film is now a narcoleptic LA cop whose psycho ex-girlfriend breaks out of a mental institution to get a jewel and summon first film guy's evil alternate self from Hell, only he both lacks a goatee and a shirt. To do this, she needs a magic jewel that he wears around his neck, so to get it, she'll go after him, his partner, his boss/other ex-girlfriend, and a hooker/his current girlfriend. Oh, and two demons manage to escape Hell in the process; these are the "ghoulies" of this film. Why they're here, I don't know. They mainly run around, goof off, and do just about nothing important, nor do they ever give a truly concrete reason as to what they're motivations are, despite the near-constant banter they have whenever they're on screen.

In the meantime, a bunch of people get sacrificed, and one woman dies in a car accident that I had seen before. I don't mean I had watched that part of this movie before, either. I mean that I had actually seen it IN A DIFFERENT MOVIE. Ghoulies IV took the car accident scene from 976-EVIL II and reused the footage in this film; they actually got a look-alike actress to wear a similar costume to the woman in the other film, and then they re-edited it. So while the first time I saw this scene, I could obviously see the stunt driver behind the wheel while the stunt woman for the actress was moving around beside him, now you get things like headlights being out and then suddenly working again, dents appearing and disappearing, and a lot of spliced in footage of the actress from this film screaming in what is obviously a car that isn't moving. God, Ghoulies IV is terrible.

None of what I have mentioned so far includes the absurd shotgun-blast damage to the car, the awkward behavior of sewer workers, the explanation about why the psycho ex-girlfriend is running around dressed as a dominatrix and uses throwing stars, a double-barreled shotgun with infinite ammo, or the used condom that's thrown into the cop boss/ex-girlfriend's lap with almost no repercussion by a fat old guy who just picked up a hooker.

I have had fever dreams with a more substantial plot than Ghoulies IV. Hell, Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College is a better movie, and that one involved comic books and a demon toilet in a frat house. I do give Ghoulies IV credit for getting the actor from the first film to come back, but the tie in of having some crazy ex-girlfriend who was never mentioned in the first film yet is how he ended up getting into demon summoning...it doesn't work in the established Ghoulies timeline. And that's a phrase I never thought I would ever hear myself say. I actually read it out loud to ensure I wasn't going crazy.

And that is how I came to the conclusion that I am full of self-loathing and must continue seeing my therapist. Because I just wrote around 600 words about Ghoulies IV. That is a definite cry for help.

Pre-Gaming
1. Deep Star Six
2. Harbinger Down
3. Island Claws
4. Rabid
5. Attack of the Killer Donuts
6. Demon Wind
7. The Flying Serpent
8. Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings
9. Galaxy of Terror
10. The Dead Pit
11. It Follows
12. Don't Breathe
13. The Alien Factor
14. Howling III: The Marsupials
15. Mutant
16. Final Exam

October
17. Larva
18. Body Melt
19. Voices from Beyond
20. The Mutilator
21. Killer Workout
22. Slime City
23. The Other Hell
24. The Woman in Black
25. Ghoulies IV

[GSZX1337]

I thought that frame of Lizzie encapsulated my gawkish interest in this thread. I've had a long post about the differences between Truxton on the Genesis and the PC-Engine. It's been over half a decade and I still haven't forgotten. Now whenever I make a long post on anything, (eg. forums, Reddit, etc.) I copy the post before hitting submit.