2011 October Horror Movie Challenge Movie 63:Master's of Horror: Sounds Like

This is a pretty sad movie. There's a lot going on here. A man has a strange auditory gift (he has a very heightened sense of hearing) but it's more of a curse, because he can hear often muffled or faint noises as though they are very loud, and it makes his life difficult, to say the least. He's also coping with grief from a recent loss, a wife who is pushing him to move on, a boss who is pushing him to increase productivity at his job under threat of getting fired, and all these stressors combine to slowly chip away at the poor guy's sanity. The guy's auditory enhancements start to grate on me after awhile of watching this movie, and suddenly the enhanced, LOUD noises he has to endure start to get to me, so I can't imagine how he lives with these noises without totally losing it...and then his predicament become oven sadder for me to watch. This movie is very effective and does what it does a little too well, but I admire it for that. It got under my skin and disturbed me like horror is supposed to do.

2011 October Horror Movie Challenge Movie 62: Master's of Horror: The Screwfly Solution

This movie really pissed me off. At first, it's intriguing and disturbing and pretty damn cool. The movie details that bad things are starting to happen in the world. suddenly and inexplicably, men are starting to snap and violently beat then kill women. while this event is nothing new in the world, it's starting to happen at an alarming rate, with men unable to differentiate between sexual desire and the desire to kill. Bad things ensue and women start dying off in record numbers and needing to go into hiding to protect themselves from men, and as everything starts going down, it's pretty hard to watch. So like I said, everything is disturbing and creepy and effective...and then suddenly it's like the filmmakers said "Wait, we were supposed to make a BAD movie! Shit, quick, do something really really stupid!" and then they made the ending, and it was really stupid, and it made me want to punch the filmmakers in the face, and that annoys me because up to that point, they had a pretty cool movies on their hands, and I hate when that happens.

2011 October Horror Movie Challenge Movie 61: The Black Cat

This is a movie that combines Poe's titular story "The Black Cat," about a man being tormented by a feline that seems to refuse to die (but he's a jerk, so we don't necessarily root for him in his battle with the cat) and it combines that story with elements from Poe's own life (his difficulty in writing during his later years, his drinking problem, and the illness of his wife). The movie combines these elements and weaves them together into something pretty cool (but then I'm a huge Poe geek, so I've read everything he's written, even his essays, and will watch/read anything even tangentially related to him, so I'm pretty much the ideal target audience for this kind of thing). It's a little disorienting, but Jeffrey Combs does a great job here as Poe, and his performance ties everything together into one creepy and weird little movie, so I liked it a lot.

2011 October Horror Movie Challenge Movie 60: Masters of Horror: Dream Cruise

This is one of those movies that I was skeptical about, but also intrigued, because as a rule, Asian horror movies tend to creep me out a lot. US ghosts jump out from behind doors and yell "Boo!" but Asian ghosts, they crawl out from under your covers when you're in bed, they turn your TV on and crawl out of wells and then step out of the TV screen and come after you, they step out of security camera footage and come after you...basically, they kick ass and take names and then drag you to hell. That's really creepy. This movie manages to combine two of my biggest fears, ghosts and drowning, and combine them into one hugely creepy mix to haunt my dreams for awhile after watching it. I dug it. It's also a love story, though the two people who fall in love are causing all kinds of trouble, because she is married and he is her husband's lawyer, so bad things are going to happen when all three of these people decide to go on a cruise together. Ghostly things and drama and near-drowning ensues and gives Lillian nightmares. All in a day's work.

2011 October Horror Movie Challenge Movie 59: Masters of Horror: Pro Life

This would be my OTHER favorite episode of "Masters of Horror." The idea behind that show was to gather directors who were responsible for great horror movies of the past, and give them free reign to create an hour-long horror movie on any subject they desire. Truth be told, I have seen very few of these movies in the past (I'm trying to rectify that now by watching the entire series this year if I can) but this is one of the movies that I bought without seeing it first, both because I love the director, John Carpenter, and because the subject matter was abortion, which intrigued me because of its potential to be horrific. This movie certainly IS horrific, and I forget that every time I watch this movie, and then I watch it again and get all upset all over again, but though this movie is sick and nasty and gory and disturbing and angry-making, I still appreciate how it manages to get under my skin every time.

2011 October Horror Movie Challenge Movie 58: Right to Die

This is probably my favorite of the limited Master's of Horror episodes I've seen, and truthfully, knowing it was about the "right to die" movement, I bought it without checking it out first when it hit DVD, because I was pretty sure I'd like it. I'm glad Rob Schmidt didn't disappoint me here. The movie is gory, nasty, and subversive, and I love it for that. It's about a man who gets into a car accident that leaves him without a scratch but puts his wife into a coma with terrible burns covering almost all of her body. He insists that she wouldn't want to live as a vegetable, her mother insists that he just wants to kill her, and the fight begins. the man isn't telling us everything, and we find out lots of things along the way, like how his wife is PISSED at him and she is lying in her coma plotting how she will soon take her revenge against him from beyond the grave. I've seen this movie several times, and I like it more every time. Highly recommended.

2011 October Horror Movie Challenge Movie 57: Harvest of Fear

This is the kind of movie that it's a little sad for me to watch. I really enjoy low-budget horror most of the time, and the people who made this movie clearly *think* they're making a good, scary movie. There's opening and closing narration that tries to tie the story together, there are pretty shots of the autumn leaves in the small town, the setup really seems to be that of a good scary movie...and it just doesn't pan out. The acting is a mixed bag. Some of it is good, some of it is terrible, some of it is just passable. The gore is kind of hokey, the story tries to be scary but it's mostly silly, and it just doesn't work. I wanted to like this movie, but I just couldn't, and that makes me sad as a fan of schlocky horror. I hope the filmmakers get a chance to try their hand at making a movie that works someday, but I can't recommend this one.