My Personal Horror Film Festival, Part Three: The Reckoning
October 31st is just about a week away, which means it's really time for everybody to stock up on fun size candy bars, hang fake cobwebs from every available surface, and sit back and watch some horror films. To that end, I'm here with some recommendations for what you should (or shouldn't) check out.
The great thing about horror movies is that they're often good, even when they're bad - and sometimes especially so. Often the unintentional comedy of a misguided horror film provides as much or more entertainment as a genuinely well crafted one. However, this isn't always the case. None of this week's picks are particularly scary, some are so bad they're good, and some are such pieces of dog shit that I can't in good conscience say anything about them that might be misinterpreted as an endorsement for watching them.
A fun game to play while watching a horror movie is to, at key points throughout the course of watching it, to sit back and consider: That a writer wrote this shit down, and thought it was good. Then he submitted it to a producer who agreed, and put down money on it being good. Then a director and crew signed on to be a part of it. Then the script went through table reads, revisions, and filming, and at no point during any of these levels did anyone speak up and say, "Wait....this is really shitty, isn't it?"
Anyway, here are this week's selections.
The People Under The Stairs: A Wes Craven film about an attempted heist, in which the would-be burglars attempt to rob what turns out to be a pretty fucked up household and end up stumbling on more than they bargained for. An over-the-top thriller that doesn't take itself seriously, but instead delights in how over the top it is. An entertaining enough movie, and a fun one to have on in the background of a Halloween party if you're looking for something a little more obscure than, say, a "Friday the 13th" movie. I'll give it 5/10 basement dungeons.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010): A pitiful remake of the 1984 classic, which starts off bumblingly and fails to right it's course at any point. It doesn't even have the decency to be entertaining, with a pathetically low body count and a plot that forces you to accept that about twenty kids all FORGOT that they were sexually abused as children...which is to say, this movie REALLY fixates on the "Freddy was a child molester" angle. Jackie Earle Haley - arguably the best part of the film, although that's not saying much - is a poor replacement for Robert Englund. The most unsettling thing about the movie is watching a bunch of people who are clearly in their mid-twenties playing teenage high school students, whose parents treat them like they're 12-year olds. 1/10 ugly sweaters.
Harbinger Down: An independent, Kickstarter-funded movie that tries so hard to be John Carpenter's "The Thing" that it's painful to watch. A small group of academics join a commercial fishing crew to look for Beluga whales and study effects of global warming, when they find something they weren't expecting. It does showcase mostly practical effects, which are often impressive, but every other aspect - from the script to the acting to most of the cinematography - is lacking. I appreciate what the filmmakers wanted to do, but their execution is underwhelming. 3/10 frozen Soviet cosmonauts.
Child's Play: I so wanted for this movie to hold up, for nostalgia's sake. The Child's Play series was a staple of my childhood, and I've seen most of them more times than I'd really care to know. It's been a good fifteen years or so, so I refreshed my memory and saw the first one earlier this week. I don't know why I thought it might be amazing - it might not be as campy and schlocky as the sequels, but is still, at the end of the day, a movie about a serial killer who uses a Voodoo ritual to inhabit a doll, who then goes on to terrorize the family that ends up owning said doll. Brad Dourif's voice acting is menacing in an amusing way, even if the rest of the acting leaves something to be desired. As I've said, it plays it a bit more straight than subsequent films (but only a bit), and still manages to be a fun watch. 5/10 Good Guy dolls.
Don't Breathe: A team of three burglars break into a retired veteran's house expecting to find a large amount of cash, but they instead find that the homeowner has lost his sight and therefore basically has the abilities of Marvel's Daredevil. Not only is he capable of terrorizing people that should basically just be able to walk out the door and get away from him, he's got a torture basement complete with a prisoner that he somehow managed to catch and get down there without the benefit of eyesight. Everything about the movie takes a ridiculous amount of suspension of disbelief (including the age of the blind homeowner, who is established to be a veteran of Iraq but who is clearly old enough to have fought in Vietnam). A bit of a stretch, but I can't say it didn't entertain me. I'd give it 6/10 turkey basters.
Lights Out: A single mom and her children are haunted by the...ghost, I guess, of a woman the mother met during a stay in a mental institution. Suffering from some kind of light sensitivity, the woman was given an experimental treatment that apparently amounted to vaporizing her, and now is able to appear only in darkness, as a shadow. About half of the movie is composed of scenes wherein characters turn lights on and off repeatedly, culminating in jump scares as the ghost appears. The other half of the movie is composed of incompetent actors reciting lines written by a more incompetent screenwriter. There's actually a halfway decent idea buried somewhere in there, but it's buried under a frustrating amount of poor execution. 2/10 blacklights.
That's gonna be it for this week. Time permitting, I'm gonna be spending every available hour over the next week getting into the Halloween spirit by watching the bloodiest, scariest, spookiest cinematic offerings I can find, so check back in next week for my thoughts on another batch of movies.
