HalloWatch: Night of the Demons (1988)

Watched:  10/15/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Kevin Tenney

This is usually the kind of movie I take in after Jamie's gone to bed, but she was, like "whatever you want to watch, man", and... ha ha.  

An intentionally trashy horror flick, I think they spent more time worrying about the opening animation than they did the content of the actual movie.  It's... fine?  It's just very in love with not being good, but isn't quite trashy enough to be as entertaining in that regard as it imagines.  It also becomes critic proof if you keep saying "it's supposed to be bad!  It's supposed to be trashy!"  

And yet.  

No, really, the movie is in on it's own joke of just being what it is.  I'm not sure if that's enough for me in 2024 at age 49, but I also know that was not the intention in 1988 when they were essentially making a party movie for teens and 20-somethings.  I just don't think there's enough here and don't quite get why the movie seems to be a thing (which is why I watched it).  

It had about four good things in a 90 minute movie, and that's not nothing!  But I also couldn't tell if some of the acting was just bad or a brilliant portrayal of bad acting.  That only Linnea Quigley really kept working after this for any length of time may be the tell.  That said - I liked Amelia Kinkade in a horro-movie Patricia Morrison kind of way.*  

It's just a very thin movie, and that's okay, but won't go down as the great discovery of 2024 for me.  This is several years after Evil Dead 1 and 2 at this point, and I think this movie could have been a lot more fun.  And given literally anyone a motivation.

*Kinkade went on to be a sort of animal psychic, and I salute anyone who makes a living chilling with animals, from zooloogist to psychic

Superman 2025: Krypto, The Superdog

You can follow our posts on Superman at this link, and our posts on the new movie, Superman (2025) at this link.

Today, James Gunn announced that, yes - after a year of playing hide-the-ball with the issue - Superman's canine companion, Krypto, will appear in 2025's Superman.  

Full disclosure - a full subset of my Super comics and paraphernalia collection is Krypto-related.  My house is littered with white dogs in capes.  There's like 7 of them in the room I'm in right now.  I am also a grown man who spends 45% of his waking time talking to a 128 pound dog with zero manners.

If you think a Super Dog is a dumb thing and superheroes can't have pets... I would like to introduce you to DC Comics' longstanding tradition of Super-Pets and related animals.  Krypto was a mid-1950's addition to the Superman canon, showing up less than twenty years after Superman first showed up in 1938.  But after the insertion of Rex the Wonder-Dog into DC's world of action-adventure, sometimes in military comics.  Batman has Ace the Bathound.  Wonder Woman has had a variety of pals, but Jumpa, her kangaroo, is probably most famous for nerds.  Robin has a Batcow.  Here's an encyclopedia of them.

It's important to remember that one of the biggest stars in movies through the late 1920's was Rin-Tin-Tin, a German Shepard. Rin-Tin-Tin and Lassie enjoyed stardom in movies and television through the 1990's.  Dogs as characters just wasn't a weird idea to people in media.  And especially when you're trying to rope in a younger audience, as comics were intended through the 1980's.

Late-80's Hallo-Watch: Pumpkinhead (1988)

Watched:  10/13/2024

Format:  Amazon 

Viewing:  First

Director:  Stan Winston

I wasn't expecting Pumpkinhead (1988) to be good.  

Yet, I'd always meant to watch this movie.  I remember being 13 and the ad came on for "Pumpkinhead" and my brother and I looked at each other and laughed and laughed and laughed.  To this day, it sounds like naming a horror movie "Taters n' Gravy" to me.*

Pumpkinhead  looks good, but for Stan Winston's directorial debut, it's an awkward, tedious slog through flat characters and half-cooked ideas.  It's an 84 minute movie that has you looking at your watch and wondering when all of these people will be dispatched by the creature so you can finish the film.

The basic plot:  Lance Henriksen plays a guy in what I guess is maybe Appalachia? but is clearly the ranches outside of LA.  Some 20-somethings planning a weekend of riding dirtbikes(?) stop off at a fruit stand(?) and then go riding.  There's an accident and Henriksen's kid is killed by one of the bikers who jumps right into him.  

The guy who does the killing makes his group of 6 take-off where they have a sort of confrontation, and Jeff East - the guy who played young Clark Kent in Superman: The Movie! - and he squabble because the guy seems like he's going to kill everyone here to cover up the fact he killed the kid...  So the group more or less splinters.

Henriksen makes contact with a witch-type lady who has him bring forth Pumpkinhead, so he can get revenge.  And revenge it gets, generically picking people off, while the real idea is to slowly reveal more and more of the suit Stan Winston's team made, that is, in fact, pretty good.  By the last 1/5th of the film, we're seeing the suit in full glory, and it looks neat!

By this point, Jeff East and his girlfriend are obviously going to make it, and we've come to understand the cost of raising a Pumpkinhead is that you and it will be sort of symbiotic when it's convenient to the scene.

I don't know.  It's a slog and I didn't care for it.  But it's also not a movie people love - and yet, several sequels happened.  Stan Winston kept making cool effects but went on to direct A Gnome Named Gnorm, making children everywhere understand that sometimes God abandons you, and the evidence is everything about Gnorm the Gnome.  

*But the lasting legacy of the movie's title in my head is that...  my poor dad was in the room for the commercial at some point, and being shitty kids, we said "hey, that's your new name, Dad!  Pumpkinhead!"  And, lo, that lasted about a year before I became aware that deploying the name "Pumpkinhead" one more time guaranteed a foot connecting with my ass.

Hamilton HalloWatch: Children of the Corn (1984)

Watched:  10/13/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Fritz Kiersh

This movie is boring.  

That's my memory of Children of the Corn (1984) from watching it in high school, and it's how I feel now.  And so I watched it again thinking - hey, I barely remember it and it seems like it should be exciting.  People love this movie!  

It's based on a short story by King - that I never read - and I guess they needed a lot of filler.  It's mostly just Peter Horton and Hamilton wandering around so the characters can see what we already know.  Hamilton existing so Horton can explain what is happening.

That's terrible structure.  There's no suspense - we don't piece things together with the characters.  Instead, we're supposed to feel anxiety that they might get killed, which we know they won't until the last minute, if it's that kind of movie that decides we see the protagonists die at the end (it is not.  That's other folk-horror movies like Wicker Man).

The big twist is that there's a Lovecraftian horror living in the fields of corn, and - to be honest - that feels like a let-down rather than just insane Bible-thumping kids, while also feeling like a Disney Halloween movie gone off the rails.

People love this movie, but I think that's Gen-X Space Jam Fallacy.  As a kid - this is a pretty decent "my first Rated-R movie" horror as it's not exactly shocking, particularly bloody or scary.  But it does contain the idea that you, a powerless kid, could get wrapped up in a scary new dynamic under the Isaac's and Malachi's you know are out there.  As an adult, you can only think "these stupid kids would be dead inside a week when they realized they don't know how to eat on their own, what to do when they're sick, or when the snow comes down and there's no fuel.".

Also - surely someone would notice an entire town of people just stopped showing up.

Which is why Children of the Corn probably works as a short story, but not as a movie that gives you time to think about these things.

What it does have is Linda Hamilton.

the very corniness of this movie may be her undoing

Unfortunately, this is pre-James Cameron Linda Hamilton, so she's playing "lady/ girl" in this movie, and just has "victim/ hostage" written all over her as soon as the story really kicks in.  If I praised M3GAN for not shying away from a woman who is a childless robot-lady, then this movie is the opposite.  Hamilton is basically spending the whole movie convincing her already locked-in doctor boyfriend that he should be *more* her boyfriend.  And when she meets kids, you can hear the warming of her ovaries as she leaps into action being there for potentially murderous children.

Still, we're never mad about Linda Hamilton showing up.

The one line that made my ears perk up was Peter Horton rightfully pointing out that religion isn't bunk, but any religion that's devoid of love is a terrible idea.  Like... deep thoughts in the middle of a pretty silly movie.

Whether I like this movie or not, the legacy of this movie is probably pretty deep.  Us city-folk do not like driving through big empty places with the occasional human dotting the landscape, and this movie does not help (nor does getting stink-eye at the gas station in the middle of nowhere).  But it also maybe helped set the table not just for the ten sequels of this movie, but a lot of "city people are terrified of the country" movies that litter our horror movie landscape.

  

HalloWatch: Death Becomes Her (1992)

Watched:  10/12/2024

Format:  Peacock

Viewing: First

Director:  Robert Zemeckis

Selection:  Jamie

No, I'd never seen Death Becomes Her (1992).  My guess is that I didn't think this would be actually funny, and - as it turns out - I was wrong about that.  This movie is funny as hell.

I guess maybe 1992 me couldn't process that Meryl Streep is funny, too, on top of everything else.  I also used to avoid movies where I thought people were working outside their lane in general, and that's a dumb, dumb thing to do.  But, give me a break, I was 17.  I thought this was going to be one of those movies polite adults in the 1980's and 90's laughed at, but wasn't actually laugh-out-loud good.  But - I admit I laughed a lot finally seeing it.

The movie has a long, but terrific set-up that lets the leads all play it to the hilt - and that's really what's so fun about the movie.  It's a small cast, but getting to see Goldie Hawn at the height of her comedic powers play the many versions of her character, and Meryl Streep playing the hot platinum blonde terrified of aging is a delight.  And while I read Kevin Kline was considered for Bruce Willis' part (and I can imagine him in it, very easily), Willis was good.

The plot is windy, involves actual magic, and Isabella Rossellini as a sort of mystic who can provide people with a potion to make them young and beautiful forever.  Half of the movie is about setting up a scenario in which we understand how and why Streep would do this - a plastic surgery addict terrified of what's happening to her.  And Hawn as a woman bent on romantic revenge for Streep stealing all of her men - leading up to stealing and marrying her fiance, Willis.

The gag, then, is that this potion doesn't just grant eternal youth and beauty, it makes you the undead, essentially.  You can't feel pain.  You can't die, no matter what happens to your body.  

It's a wicked critique of Hollywood/ society's obsession with youthful appearances - especially in women, and the insanity that many people in the public eye will go through in order to delay the time when they can't play the young sex bomb and move into other roles.  But, also, familiar to all of us (I say as I near 50, looking like 10 miles of bad road).  Still - I know the pinch is harder for women, and can't imagine the pressure on women in the spotlight.  

What I thought was going to just be a goofy movie about people physically abusing each other because they can't die becomes something else entirely, about how we're tied together, what it means to age gracefully, and the insanity of trying to remain relevant, and the inevitable self-destruction we do trying to fight nature.  

Would I have gotten the gags at 17?  I mean, on paper... yes.  In reality, it lands a whole lot better now.  It's not an abstraction.  And, the actresses I crushed on as a youth are now in their 60's and 70's and watching that curve is.. curious.  Let alone watching actresses more in line with my own generation occasionally just defy youth, Lisa Kudrow.

At the time the movie came out, the FX were considered mind-boggling, and - you know what?  They hold up really, really well for 1992.  There's bits I really don't know how they did them in the era - and because they were done with such care and to fit in with the look of movies of the time, they hold up just shockingly well, not hidden behind darkness or anything, and with no obvious matte-ing or anything.  Today's FX folks could stand to look at this wonder from the era - including how they use practical make-up for lots of bits.

As a Halloween movie, it works as it does involve the undead and horror of what they've done to themselves, but played for laughs.  It's hard not to look at Streep and Hawn in the last scene and think of some Golden Age actresses and their final years in film - and that they really did depend on each other even as they were ready to start slugging each other.

not for nothing, but I will never get how Isabella Rossellini was not a major sex symbol of the 80's and 90's

Hallo-ReWatch: M3GAN (2022)

Watched:  10/11/2024

Format: Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director: Gerard Johnstone

So, this is my second viewing.  I picked it because I thought K would like it (The Dug's better half), and I believe that was a slam dunk.

It was fun to see with people, especially two folks who work at high-end IT companies losing their minds about the badly portrayed technology development process of the film.  Which, of course, would have ruined the film if anyone did their job correctly, so we can't have that.  Also - I hate to tell people working for real companies how things work everywhere else.*

Anyway, the idea for this viewing was:  a fun horror movie with folks who do not want to watch a current Rated-R horror movie because everyone needs to be able to sleep.  And M3GAN is PG-13 and fun, but I don't think anyone is going to get freaked out - one to watch with your middle-school-aged kids.

I still like Allison Williams in this.  Horror seems to be able to have main characters, or characters in general, that are not all sunshine and roses.  It's a subconscious tell that maybe our lead *could* get killed by movie's end, but, here, I think it gives her a viable arc from workaholic to seeing what she will need to do to be close to Cady (her niece) , but, also...  she's not unlikeable.  Do I find a person who mostly worries about their niche interest and doesn't want kids touching their stuff to be relatable?  MAYBE.  But... She just seems like someone who is way into their work, not a bad person. But...  (goofy voice) a woman? Who likes work over babies????

We wouldn't think twice about a male engineer being solely focused on their technology job in a movie - we'd expect it.  Here, it clashes with expectations of women to automagically be maternal, which is both a movie trope and something society sure thinks is real.  And Williams' character does not naturally have those tendencies, and, boy howdy, is there some low key judging of her by certain characters.  Not that she doesn't suddenly need those tendencies when life throws her a child to raise, but - as a childless cat-lady, I am deeply sympathetic to Williams' desire to outsource the child-rearing to a lifeless droid so I can do my thing.  Also, Williams' character has an objectively cool toy collection.

If you *did* watch this movie with your kids, I think some of this is worth unpacking.  Why is the social-worker in the movie such a B to Williams?  Why is Cady going so nuts at the 2/3rd mark?  Do you need a mishap with a killer android to figure out the power of family?

Maybe! 

But I also really appreciated the stuff in the film, like M3GAN singing to calm Cady, sort of weird, saccharine songs.  The goofy, horrifying fake, annoying-as-hell Furbies, and all the ways kids toys actually do work in someone's household - and the things people seem to want to do with them.  

Toys these days absolutely have the capacity to learn from as well as manipulate our kids.  The tots want screentime more than sugar, to disappear into oddball worlds of skibidi toilets and crafting of mines, and we're shocked they can't sit through a 90 minute movie.

As the toys are getting smarter, whose to say they won't "know" our kids as well or better than ourselves as parents.  When they can freestyle a convincing song about their particular trauma?  While also not understanding how kids grow and change thanks to non-comforting stimuli?

As Ian Malcolm would say:

and this is in real life, not the movie.

Dug rightly pointed out the movie raises a host of questions about AI and then leaves them all on the table.  And, there's a very interesting, grown up version of M3GAN (where James Wan is not allowed anywhere near it) and we get a chance to explore the ideas around AI in our lives, and our lives in AI's lives, and we should have that movie.  

Recently, I've been monkeying with CharacterAI and NotebookLM, and - we aren't ready for what we're making out there.  We're at the "peasants diving under tables because they're watching a film of a train coming" stage with this technology, and it's not just coming - it's here.  Right now humanoid robots are being made, while we're also improving AI on a minute-by-minute basis.  Someone is going to realize they can bluetooth their OmniBot to a thousand turks and we're all going to have a weirdo friend we didn't expect to have.  Let's see that film.

Anyway - M3GAN is not a great movie, but it does have things I like in it, and is a dire warning about ignoring your QA process. 

Sequel comes out next year.  We'll see what we get.

*they mostly get by on a wing and a prayer

Hallo-Watch: The Ghoul (1933)

Watched:  10/10/2024

Format:   Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  T. Hayes Hunter

Well, they can't all be winners.

The movie is probably more interesting for it's goofy history than the movie itself, which is disappointing on almost every level if you're looking for good old-fashioned Halloween fun, but I suppose it's a great movie if you think cousins should hook up by a film's ending.

The story is unnecessarily convoluted, but the spaghetti mess doesn't reveal itself until the very end, and up til that point, it's mostly skulking.  So much skulking.  Sometimes someone skulking after someone who is, in turn, skulking after someone else.  It's crazy.  And a waste.  We have Karloff, who only did the movie because he and Universal were in a spat, and all they gave him to do was wander around dressed like a grandpa after church and wear some iffy make-up. 

The plot is:   there's a supposedly mystic artifact that will allow the Egyptian god Set to take you to Egyptian Heaven?  And Karloff spent his fortune on it just before passing.  Now, everyone wants the amulet, and so a manservant has it for a minute, he gives it to Karloff's estranged niece, who runs into her estranged other cousin, Rafe.  There's Egyptians looking for the thing.  A comedy lady.  A pastor.  And skulking.

And I shouldn't have to say, look, your cousin has great hair, and that's how a wave was supposed to look in 1933, but you still should stop touching her.

The big let down is that it's a movie that has been about mysticism and dark magic, and then at the end, they explain everything away as a series of coincidences, misdiagnosed maladies, scam artists, etc... that all *happened* to line up to make it seem like Karloff came back from the dead and was lumbering around.  Which, I do not need to tell you, absolutely sucks.  Don't do this.

What is good:  

Well, the set and lighting and visuals are all amazing.  No notes.  Loved that.  I liked the funny lady swooning over the Egyptian who is, in turn, absolutely bullshitting her.  And..  yeah.  That's about it.  I liked that it had Ernest Thesiger, because he's one of my favorite parts in one of my favorite films in The Bride of Frankenstein, and I'd never seen him in anything else.  And I don't feel guilty pointing out star Dorothy Hyson is cute since Rodgers and Hart wrote The Most Beautiful Girl in the World about her.  

I don't really know why I've seen this movie cited as "see The Ghoul sometime" but now I wonder if they meant the much later movie called The Ghoul, and I just clicked on the wrong one.

Just watch The Old Dark House.  It's a better movie.

 

Hallo-Watch: Nosferatu - a Symphony of Horror (1922)

Watched:  10/10/2024

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  first straight thru

Director:  FW Murnau

I've seen this film in bits and pieces, but never in one shot.  So, technically, this is either my first view or not, and I'm calling it my first as I spend this Halloween watching films I should have already seen and have not.  

Yes, I've seen Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) - or most of it - before, here and there.  

Structurally, Nosferatu is more or less a very watered down Dracula - infamously so as the movie was immediately sued into oblivion by Bram Stoker's widow (yes, Dracula came out so recently that Stoker's widow was around in 1922).  

Briefly - A Transylvanian fellow entertains a young solicitor come to sell him property in his hometown.  He sees Count Orlock doing weird things, lusting for blood, etc...  And the Count runs off to his hometown with crates of soil, murdering a transport ship along the way.  But in London Wilborg, instead it focuses on a plague of rats, and our Mina stand in doesn't fall ill, she realizes she must sacrifice herself as a sinless woman to the Count so he'll have overplayed his hand.

Unshockingly, this movie is mostly here for the spooky vibes and to tell everyone else how to do this for the next 100 years.  It's not the first horror movie by a long shot, but it is a highly influential one.  And - in my opinion - is maybe more in the spirit of the novel than all the romantic versions made since Lugosi made women swoon in 1930.  Orlok is a straight up weirdo, and our leads know it.  He's bringing illness and plague with him, he's a soulless killing machine.  

But what folks remember, rightfully, are the visuals of the film.  Flexing some Expressionistic bona fides, Murnau leans into strange and eerie sequences of shadow moving, some in-camera tricks of the day, and long, oddball takes to build tension in a single shot.  Our vampire is a homely bastard - not as described in the novel, but his own, unique look that echoes some of what's there - the grasping, claw-like hands.  But you know all this.  It's a gorgeous film, and worth a look for spooky season, even if you just put it on during your Halloween party.  That's the power of the Nosferatu vibes.

There's little question in my mind that Orlok and Dracula both represent some fear that folks living in times of less exposure to other people held when it came to foreigners or even their own neighbors who were different from them.  Ie: The Other.  Whether that's intentional or the casual racism of Grandpa thinking "that's how things are", I suspect the latter case.

What's odd is the lore around this movie - from the notes in Wikipedia about it being made by German occultists who wanted to, like, employ the dark arts.  To the lawsuits and upsetting Mrs. Dracula, to the film almost being lost, to the 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire.

But, look... here's what Bacall has to say.

So, be like Lauren Bacall, people.  Refrain from shoe-based violence and check out the OG vamp feature.

I should mention, the Werner Herzog version is really good, and we're looking at a remake coming this Christmas from Robert Eggers, who I think is maybe the right dude to do this justice with modern cameras, etc...  

Hallo-Watch: Christine (1983)

Watched:  10/09/2024

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  Third?  Fourth?

Director:  John Carpenter

This spooky season, I'm mostly trying to check off movies I should have already watched - also movies I haven't seen since I was a kid, so I don't remember the films well at all.  This isn't that - but Jamie had not seen Christine (1983), and I kind of consider it worth a viewing.  So it's her version of that, I suppose.

I read the Stephen King novel when I was in 6th grade.  But I didn't see the movie until some time later - maybe when I was fifteen.  I've seen it a couple of times since, including in a hotel room during a  conference over a decade ago.  It's a bizarre movie - how compelling should a movie about a haunted car be?  And yet.

Christine is a John Carpenter movie, and - I think - should be included in consideration of his run of solid work there in the 1980's.  I know Carpenter seems grumpy about all of the movies he did as a work-for-hire director, but the pairing of his sensibilities with King really does work.  I'd love to see someone re-do Christine without having to strip it down for a movie audience and make it as weird as the book, but as a movie - separate from the book but using the core of it - I think this movie works as a kind of horror, just not the horror of "oh no!  A car will get me!" that you might guess on first blush.

To me, the horror of the movie is not so much about a killer, possessed car - which, fair enough (that is a problem!).  Instead, it's about helplessly watching a friend go down due to a change in their life, be it addiction, a toxic partner, or some other obsession.  This is two lifelong pals who went two different directions, and one of them goes off the deep end, and the other has to deal with the fallout as that person hurts other people.  

Hallo-Watch: Phantasm (1979)

Watched:  10/08/2024

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Don Coscarelli

I didn't know anything about Phantasm (1979) coming in, despite the fact it's a horror staple and much beloved.  And that's a bit odd.  Generally you get the idea.  There's a chainsaw massacre in Texas.  A Freddy.  A Jason.  All I knew about this one was "there's a gangly older gentleman and a flying sphere with knives on it".  How those two things were employed, I could not guess.

Perhaps taking a page from the semi-psychedelic horror of the preceding decade and the impact of European horror making its way to the US - think Suspiria - it opened the doors for horror to show that part of horror could be the confusion of the audience - that the audience is also in a place of confusion, just as much as the protagonist, as the movie runs its course.

The approach gives the movie an odd, dreamy feeling - where the edges never quite match-up and attempts to force the narrative into a sensible pattern are a bit useless.  It's sort of about a teen/ tweenage boy who has lost his parents and whose older brother is now saddled with his care, just as the brother is set to go out into the world.  While the brother and his friends seek female companionship and go about the business of young adults, the younger brother, terrified of being alone, follows at a distance.  

It seems the mortuary in town (Dunsmuir House, famous from this, A View to a Kill, Burnt Offerings and other films...) is where a tall man and a bunch of cloaked dwarves live, and are maybe murdering people?  Or weirder?

They involve their friend, Reggie - an ice cream man with a terrible look - and try to unravel the mystery, especially as their parents were sent to the same mortuary, and as they discover what the mortuary is doing with the dead bodies... * they decide to take it all down, as one does.  Because this is a horror movie where the heroes are well armed, including the under-16 kid.

I was surprised how much of the dialog and reactions of the characters in the movie felt... natural.  Like, this isn't canned dialog or reactions to just push the movie along.  People do things that make sense in a movie that is defying sense and logic, and it really helps.  Like - if you're going to break into a place with potentially murderous beings - do bring a gun if you can get it.  Don't just go creeping around hoping for the best.  And, the kid is oddly sensible - they don't make him an idiot just because he's under 20 years old.

That said - I did spend the first hour of the film waiting for the plot to kick in before realizing what kind of movie I was watching,  when my brain said "oh... this is one of those movies".  And while I enjoyed it up to that point, once I realized "yeah, this thing is just not caring if there's any internal logic" it was even better.

I'm too old for this to be my favorite thing, but if I'd seen it as a kid or teen, I think I would have really dug it for going all-out to be a weird movie and not bother with any answers.  Scenes that don't go anywhere, characters who make no sense... it's all good in dream-land.  I don't know if I ever felt anything was scary beyond being frightened I had no idea what was happening, but it still had a nice creep-factor from the very start.

I was a bit surprised they wholesale stole the gom jabbar, and that the end of Nightmare on Elm Street is essentially the same as this movie.  But, whatevs.  

*turning them into slave dwarves?