Saturday, October 26, 2024

Regretful HalloWatch: Casper (1995)

ugh


Watched:  10/25/2024
Format:  Amazon
Viewing:  Second
Director:  Brad Siberling
selection:  Jamie.  She made me watch this.


@#$%ing Casper (1995).  

I hated this movie in 1995 when I saw it, and, here, nearly 30 years later, I remember exactly why.  This movie is the culmination of so many bad ideas from the 90's, it's almost a wee bit magical.  It's a kid's movie where they made it 35% for adults and 50% for kids and 15% for a peculiar audience of people who want things to suck real bad.

I have no doubt Millennials Space Jam Fallacy the crap out of this movie (ie: believe this movie is good because they liked it when they were young and their brains were spongey and "good" meant mommy would let you play it over and over on the VHS while she drank wine with the pool boy), but this movie is a parade of 90's excess.  It's also proof that you can drop $55 million (> $110 million adjusted) on a movie, pack it with faces, meta references and other 90's tricks - and it's no better than, say, Bailey Saves Christmas.  

I'm old enough that Casper cartoons were still running on TV when I was a very little kid.*  As a young reader, I was given Harvey Comics starring Casper, Hot Stuff, Wendy the Witch, Ritchie Rich, et al... .  Flash forward to the mid-90's, we were exploiting IP in interesting ways at the movies - making live action FlintstonesAddams Family.  I'd also seen Dennis the Menace.  And I am sure other things.  So why not a live action Casper?  

Friday, October 25, 2024

Whoops Hallo-Watch: Legend of the Wolf Woman (1976)

this poster way oversells the movie




Watched:  10/25/2024
Format:  Full Moon on Amazon
Viewing:  First
Director:  Rino Di Silvestro

Well, I accidentally watched an Italian sexploitation movie thinking I was watching a werewolf movie.

This is what Amazon pitched to me/ possibly rolled over into after Castle Freak, and I was like "sure, why not?  I haven't watched much straight-trash yet this year for Halloween.  Let's watch a 1976 Italian werewolf film."

To my credit - it IS called "Legend of the Wolf Woman" (1976) and the first scene had a werewolf in it.

After that, it's about a lady (the lovely Annik Borel) with some serious issues who goes on a killing spree, *thinking* she's a werewolf, getting naked occasionally, and sometimes having sex.  

Major content warning:  It also has a really grim sexual assault scene I wasn't expecting and was super unpleasant and unnecessary.

Is the movie good?  No.  Did I keep thinking maybe she'd turn into a werewolf and redeem my use of time?  Yes.  Was I wrong and zero werewolves appeared after the first scene?  Also: yes. 

The poster says it's based on a true story, and the movie suggests so at the end, but... who knows?

Anyway, I'm calling this one a mulligan.

If anyone knows of anything with Annik Borel that isn't... bad.  Let me know.




Thursday, October 24, 2024

Crampton Hallo-Watch: Castle Freak (1995)


One poster shows the villain, which is a spoiler, and one is a teenager in a bra, so you get Crampton


Watched:  10/24/2024
Format:  Amazon
Viewing:  First
Director:  Stuart Gordon

I am not always in-line with all of the thinking that goes into being a hard-core horror film fan, but I love how much they celebrate the work of their favorite actors - and keep them employed for decades.  One such fave I've been aware of for some time has been Barbara Crampton, and I'm on board.  Sign me up for the Crampton fan club.  

So, we'll be digging a bit more into the Crampton-filmography over time.

When I saw that Castle Freak (1995) re-teamed director Stuart Gordon with actor Jeffrey Combs and Crampton, and I saw some notes about "this is a horror movie with a kind of grown-up storyline" I was curious.  I like a good "whoops, the robots have flipped out at the shopping mall" movie as much as the next guy, but I wanted to know what this team looked like doing a bit more drama and little less in the way of re-animated corpses running about.  

Combs and Crampton play a couple on the rocks following the blinding of their daughter (Jessica Dollarhide) and death of their young son after Combs drove them off the road, drunk.  Clearly Crampton can't forgive and forget, and Combs is maybe too much of an egoist to really accept what he did.  But a mysterious relative has just passed, and when that occurs, Combs learns that he's inherited a castle in Italy.  Apparently he was Italian nobility.

Well, wouldn't you know it - there's a freak living chained up in the basement of the castle.  And by freak, we mean a hideously deformed, savage human, that for some reason, someone decided it was best they keep in a cage in the basement.  

The arrival of the fractured family leads to the "freak" flipping out and escaping, where he hides in the many hidey-holes of the castle and occasionally popping out to harass and then murder.  There is a housekeeper, who is aware of the freak (who is named Giorgio, so I can stop calling a fictional disabled person a "freak") but has been complicit in Giorgio's horrible life.

The family fractures all the more, and Combs goes out where he picks up a bottle again and accidentally picks up a hooker.  Things go sideways as the hooker leaves - and it brings things to a head, as police want to look into the castle.

As a stand-alone story about a family trying to move past trauma, you do get the idea that Combs and Crampton would have been interesting in a straight drama about loss.  The Crossing Guard, which is @#$%ing great but depressing, comes to mind.  We're nowhere near that - after all, we have a dude running around murdering people with his bare hands to contend with - but we do get to use that as a sort of investigation of the secrets families keep, our own weaknesses and what we can do to make amends.  

There's a 2020 version of this film for reasons I cannot fathom, which sounds like it's much more Lovecraftian in nature and changes all the major details that make this one different and/ or interesting.  What it does do is say "maybe we shouldn't make a wretched human an actual monster" which plays very oddly now, as I know it probably did in 1995 - but which arrived in a period full of serial killer movies, so who knows?

I find it interesting that this was poster-girl Jessica Dollarhide's last movie.  Maybe she went to college and was done.  I can't say.  She's certainly not bad in the movie.

Anyway, I don't want to oversell it, but it *is* different.  The same sort of lived-in, real-world problems, like, say, in The Shining, are an interesting refraction against the part that makes the film "horror".  



1930's HalloWatch: Vampyr (1932)



Watched:  10/23/2024
Format:  Max
Viewing:  First
Director:  Carl Theodor Dreyer

Apparently when this movie came out, people were just *mad* at it.  Like when you read that people freaked out about Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and rioted*, when Vampyr (1932) was shown, it seems the good people of Vienna wanted their money back and subsequently rioted. Berlin just boo'd the picture.  And it kind of went from city to city, earning a terrible reputation.

But imagine just dumping David Lynch or Tarkovsky on people who think they came to see Universal's very palatable Dracula.  

That said, this movie is *great*.  And that's with the viewing I did which was of a stitched together restoration of a film no one really wanted to see again after 1932 and was more or less lost.  

In theory, based on the work of Sheridan le Fanu, it's really it's own thing, nodding to bits of his collection of works entitled In a Glass Darkly, which contains the novella Carmilla - upon which my fave rave, The Vampire Lovers, takes inspiration.

The film is creepy enough, just based on the concepts.  A young man comes to a small French town and is visited by an older gentleman in the middle of the night (in the film's first real tell about how weird it will be), who leaves him with a package marked "open in the case of my death".  Soon, he's seeing disembodied shadows running around, a mysterious doctor, a mysterious older woman... and then witnesses the murder of the older gentleman through his window.  And then it gets weird.

Monday, October 21, 2024

Hallo-Re-Re-Re-Re-Watch: Ghostbusters (1984)



Watched:  10/21/2024
Format:  Alamo
Viewing: hahahahahaha
Director:  Ivan Reitman

Si invited me out to a Ghostbusters Party at The Alamo.  It was a good time!  They gave us a marshmallow, a tub of slime, a glow-in-the-dark thing to wave around for proton beams...  

I also realized I've seen Ghostbusters (1984) more than the average bear when I p-shaw-ed the guy who went up to the front as a "super fan" saying he'd seen the movie twenty times.  I also told the host I'd seen the movie opening day at age 9, and that apparently earned me some street cred.

It was a bit of a quote-along, jam-out to the songs thing, and super fun.  

A few years back, Si, Jamie and I did this as a podcast, so rather than me rehashing the movie in text, you can listen to that.


I guess my only real note is that Sigourney Weaver is a stone cold fox in this movie, and I'm not sure we're supposed to talk about that.

Weaver judges me for bringing it up