Tag: USA

Directed by Mary Lambert [Other horror films: Pet Sematary (1989), Strange Frequency (2001), Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005), The Attic (2007), Mega Python vs. Gatoroid (2011)]

I wasn’t a big fan of the first Pet Sematary, nor was I a big fan of the book. But boy, Pet Sematary II is even worse, and I cannot overstate just how much I dislike the direction that this one took.

As far as performances go, it was briefly nice to see Clancy Brown (of The Shawshank Redemption) here, but then his character quickly becomes one of the biggest dicks imaginable. Unfortunately, his character is only utilized in worse ways once he’s brought back to life, but I’ll touch on that atrocity a bit later. Anthony Edwards was somewhat enjoyable here, especially toward the end of the film, but he wasn’t anything special.

The two main kids, Edward Furlong and Jason McGuire, were okay. I sort of liked the bond between the two, but much like Edwards’ performance, I don’t think either one was particularly special. McGuire certainly was at his best, though, with his asshole step-father (Brown’s character).

It’s with Brown’s character that I really started losing interest in the film. Once he’s about to strike his step-son and gets killed, the boys decide to bury him in the burial ground to bring him back, and back he comes. How the wife didn’t notice that her husband was essentially a zombie blows my mind, but really, any scene past Clancy’s death was pretty much coming to unwilling eyes, because the whole “My step-father’s a dangerous zombie, help me,” was just so stupid, and I didn’t care whatsoever.

The whole idea of a son desperately wanting his mother back was touching, and I do think some of the finale was perfectly okay. But boy, I could definitely have done without the other portions, and overall, though I didn’t care for the first movie that much, I found this even harder to swallow.

4/10

Directed by William Asher [Other horror films: N/A]

Known also as Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (which isn’t a title I’m that fond of), Night Warning is an interesting movie that I’d not heard much about before throwing it on, which may, to a certain extent, have worked in it’s favor. The story is decent, the characters generally memorable, but I don’t know if I’d go as far as to say I actually enjoyed this one.

Performance-wise, I think both Jimmy McNichol and Susan Tyrrell did a great job (Tyrrell especially as she began losing it throughout the course of the movie). Steve Eastin brings some humanity into the film, playing a closeted gay basketball coach, and to destroy his humanity, enter the police, in the form of Bo Svenson, who played a very, very homophobic piece of shit. Svenson did a good job in his role, as I really hated his character and his bigoted viewpoints. His character had a somewhat unique (and surprising) story arc here, so look out for that. Lastly, though she wasn’t desperately important, Julia Duffy was pretty cute, and gave us a little bit of nudity to keep us going.

Which wasn’t entirely unnecessary, as the movie, while engaging enough, did occasionally feel draggy. It picked up near the finale, when the main character gets his life even more screwed up by his aunt, but it takes a bit of patience to get to that point. It’s here that Susan Tyrrell really gave a solid performance, and her lack of grasp on reality was fun enough to make the whole of the conclusion interesting. Throw in the gay coach and a homophobic cop, along with a few violent deaths and a corpse, and you’re in for a decent time.

This said, I don’t think Night Warning was quite as good as some others say it is. It has enough slasher aspects to belong to the subgenre, but the route this one takes feels quite a bit more subdued. It’s an interestingly psychological story, no doubt, and I can’t point to many positive gay characters before this point in time, but I still would have preferred something else. If anything, though, I’d definitely throw this one at least one watch, because it really deserves that much (even if you can see the ending miles before the signposts).

6/10

Directed by Drew Daywalt [Other horror films: Camera Obscura (2010)]

I’ve seen this movie once before, and seeing it again solidifies my view that it’s a damn fun movie. Worth noting before I get into any of this, Leprechaun’s Revenge was re-named Red Clover for the DVD release, which is a much better title (and less likely to confuse people into thinking it’s related to the Leprechaun series).

Let’s talk about the primary reason the movie’s so fun, being the cast. Billy Zane cracked me up here. I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve seen him in mostly low-budget horror (Memory, Surviving Evil, Vlad, and The Mad), but he doesn’t seem like a great actor. Even so, he has great lines of dialogue (that whole story on his wife), and is fun throughout. William Devane’s character was fun too. Dave Davis and Courtney Halverson’s conversations cracked me up. Halverson, on a side-note, with her red hair and green eyes, was damn attractive.

Azure Parsons’ conversations with Davis cracked me up, along with Karl Herlinger’s conversation with Azure Parsons. These are just fun characters, and they have some ridiculously funny conversations that make it all worth it.

The leprechaun design is okay. It’s a lot different than Warwick Davis’ type of Leprechaun, but that’s for the best. It’s a beast more than anything, using it’s claws and teeth to attack people with gold, which is fun enough (and leads to some okay kills). I did have an issue with the fact it briefly drove a car, but that was just a small scene.

Really, other than the fun characters and the overtly Irish small Massachusetts town, Leprechaun’s Revenge isn’t really that special, but I had a lot of fun with it when seeing it again, so I rate this decently well.

8/10

Directed by Jack Arnold [Other horror films: Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Revenge of the Creature (1955), This Island Earth (1955), Tarantula (1955), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Monster on the Campus (1958)]

I can appreciate a good alien invasion movie from the 1950’s, and It Came from Outer Space is decent, but compared to others I’ve seen (The Thing from Another World, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and hell, The Blob), this falls a bit flat.

The cast is fine, and I’ve no complaints. Richard Carlson (also in The Maze and Creature from the Black Lagoon) is pretty fun as the main character, a bit of an odd-ball who no one in town believes when he spouts off stories of crashing spaceship. Playing his opposite in many ways is Charles Drake, who has a (pardon the pun) more down-to-Earth view of things, and sort of becomes antagonistic and paranoid toward the end (though certainly with reason).

Even so, I wasn’t really taken in by the story. I sort of like the paranoid feeling Drake’s character starts feeling near the end, but It Came from Outer Space doesn’t nearly have as good a vibe as does Invasion of the Body Snatchers a couple of years later. At the same time, I did quite like a setting, being a small Arizona town surrounded (of course) by desert.

This isn’t a movie I take pleasure in shooting down, nor is that exactly what I’m doing. It’s still a decent movie, but it’s not a movie I could see myself watching that often or really going out of my way to recommend to others, especially when there are so many better movies in the same decade. For the time being, I’d say this is worth one watch, and past that, maybe not so much.

7/10

Directed by Christopher Landon [Other horror films: Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014), Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015), Happy Death Day 2U (2019), Freaky (2020)]

When I say that this movie was one of the biggest surprises in the last few years, I totally mean it. This was a pretty big movie when it came out, and beforehand it garnered quite a bit of hype, but after glancing cursorily at the plot, I didn’t find it interesting. Having finally seen the movie, though, I can definitely say that I had quite a fun time with it.

I mean, there was just a lot of hilarious stuff here. The montage of death sequences, concluding with Jessica Rothe’s Tree character stating that Israel Broussard’s Carter’s plan “totally sucked” was funny, but even more amusing was Jessica Rothe’s character turning into Emma Stone’s from Easy A. Strutting around naked just because, or convincing the closeted gay guy to be himself (her reaction when she discovered he was gay was really funny, too), or pushing back on the sorority chick for fat-shaming another girl, or her dialogue while trying to get arrested (“I’m drunk. Wasted. And I’m high, ya know, pills, weed. You name it, man, I’m on it”), Rothe’s character here was fantastic in the latter part of the film, and it’s no stretch to say I had so much fun with this.

Happy Death Day is more than that, though. There’s not a whole lot of great timey wimey based horror films (Timecrimes comes to mind, and maybe Triangle, but really, what else has the genre got?), so that in itself was unique. And starting with a stereotypically terrible sorority girl, and over the course of the same multiple days turning her into a sympathetic character with depth (her conversation with her father on one of her last days before the loop broke was fantastically emotional) was a fantastic idea.

Central among important characters are those played by Jessica Rothe and Israel Broussard. Though it takes something like forty minutes for the two of them to really make a connection, I think it’s definitely sweet when they do, because Israel’s nice-guy attitude is so far removed from Jessica’s crass and loud personality, though at that point, she’s desperate for help wherever she can find. After the karma discussion with Carter, Tree attempts to make amends for the life she’s been leading, and it’s just heart-warming, especially the aforementioned discussion with her father.

A lot of the kills here aren’t that great, but there’s a few ones worth noting, such as the car explosion and taking a baseball bat to the head (which leads to a pretty good scene transition to Tree waking up again, still in the loop). I won’t say many others are amazing, but it’s the story of the film and the characters that make this such a good movie, and it certainly works.

The one weak portion here is the identity of the killer. I do prefer it over Tree’s original idea of it being a random serial killer who happens to be in the area, but the justification behind the killer’s actions strikes me as weak. That said, it could accurately be stated that the killer is somewhat psychotic, so though the reason seems somewhat small, it still makes sense.

Regardless, I enjoyed this movie so much more than I thought I would, and it’s a definite winner in my eyes. It’s just a shame that it took me as long as it did to see this one.

8.5/10

Directed by Joe Johnston [Other horror films: N/A]

Perhaps the very definition of average, The Wolfman has some really cool and memorable scenes, but also peters out almost entirely come the ending with some elements I don’t at all care for.

I won’t pretend that I remember enough about the original to compare to the two, but I will say that this story is decent up until the end. I enjoyed many aspects of the asylum sequences, along with the following breakout and chase through London, but once it was werewolf vs. werewolf (not too dissimilar from the finale of 30 Days of Night, only with vampires), I ceased being impressed. And to be fair, at least I’m consistent, as I didn’t love the finale to 30 Days of Night either.

There’s some solid werewolf action in the film, to be sure. I always loved that Romani attack near the beginning, which had a decent amount of brutal claw damage, and plenty of attacks throughout the movie are worth it, and filmed well too, but that doesn’t really make up for what I see as failings with how the movie concludes.

Also, I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t love Benicio Del Toro as Talbot. I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but I just didn’t buy it. Anthony Hopkins was, as always, a pleasure to see, though again, some character aspects turn me away from him. I was lukewarm toward Emily Blunt’s character, but on the upside, I did rather like Hugo Weaving (and his demands of a pint of bitter).

The Wolfman’s a fine film, but it’s not a great film. It’s action-packed, sure, and like I said, some parts are pretty solid, but much of the time, it just feels like a glossy Hollywood period piece, and I contend The Woman in Black remake did it better, and with more atmosphere to boot.

Still, a good werewolf movie is hard to come by, and I’d say that The Wolfman certainly counts. It didn’t blow me away, and having seen it twice, it really does strike me as ultimately average, but it’s a decent movie still despite my misgivings.

7/10

Directed by Paul Landres [Other horror films: The Vampire (1957), Destination Nightmare (1958), The Flame Barrier (1958)]

This is a film that I had little interest in, and while I admit that it surprised me a bit in elements of it’s approach, I don’t think The Return of Dracula will end up being that memorable. It’s not a bad movie, but is it noteworthy? Likely not.

It’s the plot here that makes things a bit better then one might think at first. Instead of focusing on some Eastern European country, or the Transylvanian region, the story takes place in sunny California, which was an interesting change of pace. The shift in setting doesn’t really help the basic story any, but it does give the movie a fresher feel.

Only two names really stood out here, being Francis Lederer (from Terror Is a Man the following year) and Norma Eberhardt. Eberhardt had that young, innocent look that made her perfect for a vampire to lust after, and as for Lederer, while his portrayal was nothing special (and Christopher Lee blew him out of the water the same year), it was perfectly competent.

For a slight surprise, there was a small scene in this black-and-white film that utilized color. It wasn’t near as unique as The Tingler’s approach, but when a vampire gets staked through the heart, the scene moves to color and we see the red blood spurt out. It wasn’t a big addition, but it was sort of cool in an otherwise mostly pedestrian film.

From my understanding, this came out before the aforementioned Horror of Dracula, but once Hammer’s second hit came out, this movie, with it’s low budget and black-and-white execution, was largely forgotten. And even had Horror of Dracula not hit the theaters until ‘59, I have a hard time imagining this would be heralded as a lost classic.

Like I said at the beginning, it’s not as though The Return of Dracula is bad. It’s competently-made, and has a few decent scenes. But overall, is the film memorable? Not whatsoever. I’d probably watch it again in the future, but I’d probably have forgotten I’d seen it before. It’s good for a single view, but past that, not so much, and it ultimately strikes me as a little below average.

6.5/10

Directed by Tod Browning [Other horror films: The Unknown (1927), London After Midnight (1927), Dracula (1931), Mark of the Vampire (1935), The Devil-Doll (1936)]

This film may have a long and sometimes uncomfortable set-up, but I think the ending more than makes up for it, and allows it the status of a deserving classic that is has.

Focusing on a failed love between a dwarf and an acrobat, Freaks takes it’s sweet time setting the finale up, which might bother some fans of the genre. Watching a black-and-white love story featuring carnival sideshow attractions might not be everyone’s idea of a fun time.

Still, the fact the film used real performers in their roles really adds a little something special to Freaks. Obviously, some of the people here just look naturally unsettling (through no fault of their own, to be sure), and I can imagine that audiences in the 1930’s could easily be turned away by this (and I’ve also heard that the ‘deformed’ cast members ate separately from the ‘normal’ cast members during the filming of this, which is pretty damn awful).

The ‘freaks,’ though, aren’t the enemies here, despite what some might at first believe. Their actions toward the end of the film aren’t necessarily great, but really, who could blame them? Their revenge here is fantastic, and leads to possibly one of the most shocking scenes in a 1930’s horror film.

A few names warrant a mention here. Wallace Ford (a somewhat well-known name who was in other, mostly low-budget, horror films from the period) did pretty well playing the clown, and seemed to possess the most feeling. Angelo Rossitto was also fantastic, especially during the intimidation sequence. Also, playing the main dwarf, Harry Earles put a lot of emotion into this one, and he certainly stood out. Others very much worth mentioning are Johnny Eck (the guy with no legs, who walked on his hands), Henry Victor (Hercules), and Leila Hyams (Venus, also of Island of Lost Souls).

Freaks isn’t a long movie, being just over an hour long, and I was never bored despite the bulk of the movie being a romantic drama. Truth be told, though I’ve seen this once or twice before, it’s never really been a favorite, but seeing it again did hit the right spot, and I can certainly imagine this shocking the audiences of the time.

8/10