October Horror Challenge 2023 #101: "Us (2019)"

One year not all that long ago, I was talking with a friend about horror movies, and we got onto the subject of the movie "Tales from the Hood." He said he liked it, but he thought it was racist against white people. I asked him why and he said it was because all the white people in the movie are racist. Now, it's not really true, although most of the people in that movie are despicable people because that's the point of the movie (bad people get what'scoming to them, like in Tales from the Crypt, but with actual black people in it) and i tried to explain this to him, and i told him that besides that point, he shouldn't take the only horror movie that either of us could name that had predominantly black people in it and say it's racist against white people. It's not a good look, bro. As someone who watches a LOT of horror movies, I've always lamented that most of them show a sea of white faces and almost never any black people, because it's annoying. There are black people in the world, so there should be black people in movies. I always tell people it's because black people are too smart to stay in the haunted house or get killed by the slasher (the movie "The Skeleton Key" makes a similar observation) but one thing I've started to appreciate about more recent horrormovies is that they have a more diverse cast of characters and not everyone is lily white anymore. Jordan Peele in particular has made some pretty bomb-ass movies that feature predominantly black characters, abd i must talk about this a lot, because when i bought this movie my friend the cashier told me i would like it because "it has a lot of black people in it." I'm hoping that i DO like it. Ive been looking forward to finally watching it for awhile now.

This movie is about a family who moves back to the same beachfront town where the wife, Adelaide, used to live when she was a little girl. Adelaide had a terrifying experience there when she was younger, and now she's nervous that something terrible is going to happen again. Her husband thinks she's overreacting at first, but soon he begins to realize that something strange is indeed going on when a strange family shows up in their driveway one night and refuses to leave. The masked family are giving serious "The Strangers" vibes, and they literally break into the house and force the family to defend themselves against these strange intruders. The masked people are scary enough on their own, but it's when the masks come off that things start to really get terrifying. Now the family is fighting for more than their lives, they're fighting for their very souls.

If i had an experience like the one Adelaide has in the opening sequence of this movie, there's no way in hell that i would ever go back to that place. Why do people in horrormovies always do stuff like this? At least she's afraid that something bad will happen, she's not totally oblivious like most horror movie moms are for way too long in movies like this. I don't want to give away too much of the plot like every other synopsis of this movie seems to do, but the part I don't want to spoil comes about 20 or 30 minutes into the movie, so it's not the end or anything, and I already knew it was going to happen before I even read the synopsis that spoiled the surprise, because someone told me what was going to happen. I guess they didn't think they were ruining anything because like Isaid, you do find out pretty early in the movie, but I'm still not going to tell you what happens. You'll have to dodge every other description of this movie if you want to keep it a surprise, though.

I'm glad I decided to watch this movie instead of going to bed like i almost did. Originally i was going to watch this movie and three others for my last four movies of the challenge, but this morning "A Haunting in Venice" showed up on Hulu and i just HAD TO watch that one instead of this one, but that one ended up being disappointing for me because it was more about Hercule Poirot's ego than anything else. I needed one more good scary movie this challenge, and this one is it. Lupito Nyong'o is great in this movie. She makes me care about her character even while she's simultaneously scaring the crap out of me. And the use of music is great in this movie too. I'll never be able to look at The Beach Boys the same way again. Or hear "Fuck the Police" without thinking of this movie. That's something "The Strangers" did, too. I'll always think of that movie when I hear the song "Mama Tried" by Merle Haggard, and I'll always think of "The Strangers 2" when i hear Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler. Good horror movies do that, they make you remember them.

And then just when I was saying I liked the husband, and he figured out that things were going wrong pretty quickly and did something about it, he had to go and be stupid like typical horror movie people always do. But it led to my favorite lines of the movie; "What are micro machines?" "What's Home Alone?" Trust me, when you see the movie, you'll get what I mean. The kids in this movie are great too. They don't waste time like kids in horror movies tend to do, dragging everybody down, they figure out what's going on and come up with some pretty creative ways to fight back. Until they mess up and put everyone back in danger again, but I can't really blame them for that, since this isn't a typical situation they find themselves in and I wouldn't know how to react either. Overall, everyone in the family is pretty likeable, which is a big switch from the majority of movies I've watched today where no one was likeable. Kudos to this movie for getting me to care about the characters and sustaining that through some pretty weird stuff. The movie does falter a bit near the end when it gets just a little too weird and over-explainy, but that's a small quibble when the rest of the movie us so good. Definitely check this one out. It's well worth the watch.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #100: "To Become One (2002)"

I've wanted to see this movie since before it came out. The director did a feature in Fangoria (a horror movie magazine) about guerrilla filmmaking on a shoestring budget with little to no money, and he used his film "To Become One" as an example. He said it was made for like, two thousand dollars, and everyone who saw it couldn'tbelieve it cost less than two million. His story made me want to go out and make a horror movie like whoa (I've had an idea for a horror movie for years, and I always wondered what it would be like to make a horror movie. The director of this movie, Neil Johnson, made it sound, not easy exactly, but doable, and that was a big inspiration for me. I still haven't made my movie, but filmmakers like him, who are willing to share their secrets, are a big help to indie filmmakers who dream of following in their footsteps. Plus the movie just sounded cool. It was a slasher, abd everyone knows how much I love slashers, and the still shots from the movie had creative kills that i really wanted to see. Unfortunately, this movie is notoriously hard to track down. I ended up borrowing the movie from my friend Maddie, who was kind enough to lend me the movie so I could watch it this Halloween and finally see what all the fuss is about. Here we go!

The plot of this movie sounds pretty simple. A year after her mother's death, a young woman and her friends become the victims of a maniacal killer who wears a gas mask. They get slashed in some pretty gnarly ways, and the trailer for the movie is mostly shots of the cast getting offed in increasingly gruesome ways. My kinda trailer! I wish i could link the trailer for you here, but if you go to Youtube and search for "to become one" you can probably watch it. I'll warn you, you might become obsessed like I did with seeing this movie, but then I like low budget slashers. Anyway, the young woman in this movie is forced to face some harsh truths about herself and her life and her family. I hate it when that happens. My family is certainly not perfect, but compared to the family in this movie I think they seem pretty normal, so kudos to this movie for portraying an even more screwed up family than any I've ever seen.

I won spoil this movie for you, like someone did for me. Someone on a message board once said "oh, that's the movie about the girl who..." and then they just dropped a plot twist that you're not supposed to find out until at least halfway through the movie. When I finally got to see the movie myself, i saw how the twist fit in with the rest of the movie, and i also discovered that the twist comes halfway through the movie and not at the end. I like how the movie basically spits on religious fanatics for an hour and a half. I love me a good movie that mocks religious nuts. I do have some complaints about this movie, though. None of the characters are very likeable, so there's really no one to root for. I suppose I wanted the main character to survive, but that's only because I hated the religious fanatic doctor so much that anybody would be better than him. The scenes with the patients in the hospital writhing and screaming with religious fervor are genuinely chilling, but that's mainly because I spent a lot of time in creepy pentecostal churches when I was younger. I still remember those days well and this movie rings truer because of that.For such a short movie, it shouldn't have seemed as long as it did. It's only an hour and thirty minutes, but it seemed much longer to me. Im still glad I finally got to see it, though.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #99: "Bathtub Shark Attack"

I've been impatiently waiting for this movie for years now. I had to wait for it to be shot, then edited, then go through post-production, then finally i got a copy of the DVD from my friend Maddie Deering, the director, in exchange for a review. Im stoked to finally be watching this movie today, and on Halloween too! It's perfect! This is supposed to be the gorriest shark movie of all time, or at least that was the goal upon making the movie, and that movie poster looks pretty gory to me. Now I know what you're probably thinking, "Bathtub shark attack? WTF?" And even before watching it, I can assure you that this movie wont be for everyone. If the title and the low-budgety look of the special effects make you look at me like I'm crazy for being excited to watch this movie, then the movie probably isn't for you. This is one of THOSE movies, like "Spirit Animal" or "Colonel Kill Motherfuckers," low budget shot on video for the fun and joy of making horror movies, these movies will either be a blast for you from start to finish, or you'll think I'm nuts for loving them. There's really no in-between here. I for one am excited to watch this movie and i can't wait to check it out.

A young couple, named Chad and Cindy, are down on their luck and looking for a place to live that's in their budget, which isn't much. One night, in a drunken stupor, Chad finds a flyer for an apartment that only costs $100 a week. It seems to be too good to be true, but they decide to go and check the place out anyway. As we savvy viewers have learned, a place that seems to be too good to be true usually is and will likely cost you your soul. Haven't these people ever seen a horror movie before? In the cold (and sober) light of day, Chad has doubts about whether he wants to take the apartment, but Cindy is tired of couch surfing among their friends and she insists that they rent the apartment, much to the delight of their new landlady Serena, who is excited about having some fresh new blood in the place. Soon they begin to regret their decision, however, when strange things start happening. Cindy seems to be obsessed with the bathtub in their new apartment (and we the viewers have already seen someone get attacked by a shark in the bathtub in the opening scene of the movie, so we know that it's dangerous). What will happen to Chad and Cindy? Will they be able to figure out the evil plot before it destroys them? Or will they fall victim to the shark creature that apparently lives in their pipes?

The plot of this movie makes me think of another movie called "The Sentinel" which is about a woman who moves into an apartment that seems too good to be true, and it turns out to be a portal to hell. Whoops. I think there are some people who would look at me crossways for saying this movie even has a plot, since it's ultra low-budget and mostly made as an homage to other horror movies. People made fun of me for saying "Spirit Animal" had a plot too, but it does. In this movie, the plot is mostly about being too poor to afford a good place to stay in this housing market, and how that affects people's decision making skills. i mean, do you think Chad and Cindy would have chosen to live in that creepy apartment if they could afford a better place? I remember not being able to afford an apartment and being homeless. It's more common than people think. Life is terrifying being poor, and that's what this movie is about, as much as it's about an evil shark creature that lives in the pipes and attacks people. One of my favorite quotes from the movie is:

Being pissed on makes me pissed off!

I had a blast with this movie, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to watch a fun little horror flick that doesn't take itself too seriously.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #98: "No One Will Save You"

I knew nothing about this movie before i watched it, except that everyone seemed to love it and think it was great, which of course made me want to watch it (I need to be more careful with that, has "Midsommar" taught me nothing?) I even saved this movie for the last day of the challenge, wanting to end on a high note. I do that a lot, and it's like diving headfirst into an empty swimming pool when i finally do get to see the movie and then i don't like it as much as everyone else did. Poo.

So this movie is about a young woman named Brynn who lives in a small town. She still resides in her childhood home, which is the first sign that she hasn't really moved on in her life. She leads a solitary existence because the people in the town don't seem to like her and thus they shun her. She is still mourning the loss of her mother, Sarah, and her best friend, Maude, and she copes with her difficult and solitary life by constructing and maintaining a model town in her living room. One night, she discovers an intruder in her home, and she finds out that it isn't a human being but is rathet an alien, and she fights with the alien and kills it with a broken piece of one of the buildings in her little model town. She duscovers that there's no electricity and her car doesn't work, so she escapes to town by bicycle. Upon finding that most of the people in town appear to be under alien control, she returns to her home and starts planning to try and fend off the aliens. Will she be able to save herself, or will the aliens take over?

That synopsis makes this movie sound really interesting, I know. And it should have been interesting. Unfortunately for me, it's too caught up in reveling in how clever it is for it to actually be clever. The movie is almost a sulent film. it only has five spoken words in its 93 minute runtume, and the rest of the time it's just us watching Brynn ne hated by the townspeople, living her solitary life, being attacked by aliens, trying to fend off the aliens, trying to gove her life meaning, that kind of thing. It's never clear why the people in the town hate her so much, since there's no dialogue, but eventually the movie shows us why the townspeople hate Brynn, and it just leaves me with more questions than answers. The aliens are supposed to be scary, but they kinda look like E.T. so i couldn't find myself being afraid of them. I was mostly possed wanting someone to talk and explain what was going on. Amd WTF is up with that ending?! What were they trying to accomplish with that? I think it's supposed to be a happy ending of sorts, but it's just weird and awkward, like the rest of the movie. If you want to check it out go ahead, most people seem to have liked it more than I did, but I was just bored and frustrated and disappointed.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #97: "A Haunting in Venice"

I saw so many ads for this movie while it was in theaters and i was obsessed with seeing it! I love Ghost stories, horror movies, and Agatha Christie, so this seemed to be the perfect combo of all 3 of those things! Agatha Christie mysteries are still great to read even now, years after her death. I'vebeen obsessed with her books ever since I read "And Then There Were None" when i was 10 years old. i saw the movie back then too, and it was great. It had that perfect twist ending that Agatha Christie was known for, and 10 year old me ate it up. I still remember my excitement when I got to the end of that book and read the twist. I really hope this movie lives up to the hype built for me by the commercials. The trailer was full of jump scares, which are crude but effective (I'm easily startled so it's not hard to make me jump) but I hope this movie has more to offer than just jump scares. I guess we'll see what happens.

In this movie, famous detective Hercule Poirot is retired and living in self-imposed exile in Venice, Italy. I suppose if you have to live in exile, Venice is the place to do it. A colleague of his comes to him one day asking for his help. You see, she is a mystery novelist, and she is also a skeptic, but she has seen something she can't explain; a woman who claims to be able to speak to ghosts, and while typically such a person would be labeled a charlatan or a fake, this one appears to be the real deal. Such a thing cannot be in Poirot's easily ordered world, so his friend Ariadne Oliver (played by Tina Fey) enlists his help to either discredit the woman or announce that what she says is true, she really can communicate with the dead. Poirot initially demurres, of course, but eventually he relents and agrees to go, expecting only to discredit the woman (played by Michelle Yeoh). Things get complicated, however, when a very real murder occurs during the supposedly fake seance. Poirot must investigate the murder and figure out what is going on and who has committed the murder before it's too late.

The problem with the great Hercule Poirot, as summed up well by Ariadne Oliver in this very movie, is that he's not just a man, he's an ego, and a big, giant one at that. He has stunning powers of observation, which he uses to solve mysteries in a way that no one else can quite do, and this power makes him arrogant. He's so sure of his superior intellect that when something happens, as it does in this movie, to shake his belief in his own genius, it throws him for a loop. He spends a lot of time fumbling throughout this movie, trying to find his footing and solve the mystery in front of him. Once it becomes clear WHY he's struggling so much, he's on firmer ground and he can use his great powers of observation to solve the mystery, but it takes him awhile to get there. This movie isn't bad, per se, it's just that Poirot tends to act as though other people are simply pawns in his game, and the same thing happens here that happens in all his movies: he solves the murder and gives a big speech explaining how smart he is. It would seem that he's wrong about the existence of ghosts; he's sure they don't exist but it certainly seems like one shows up in the end of the movie, and the little boy never wavers in his belief in ghosts, just as he insists that the fortune teller is indeed a fake, but not because ghosts don't exist, just because she lies about being able to see them. It's Poiro's ego that stands out most plainly in this movie, and that takes a lot of fun out of trying to figure out the mystery. Which is a shame, because this movie could have been a lot of fun if it featured someone like Miss Marple, who is just as observant and intelligent as Poirot is, without the huge ego the size of Rhode Island. Alas, we have to put up with Poirot in this movie, and that sucks all the fun out of it for me.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #96: "Stephen King's It (1990)"

Ive been a Stephen King fan for most of my life, but i only read the novel "It" when i was in college. waited a long time. And it was too bad, because I decided to watch the TV adaptation of Stephen King's "It" a year or so later. There's no way a movie, let alone a movie edited for TV, could live up to the gory spectacle of that book. So of course I compared the TV adaptation to the book and found it seriously lacking. It's really not fair to compare a movie directly with the book like that. It's never going to be able to live up to whatever you can imagine in your head while reading the book. Back then i was notoriously hard on movie adaptations of books. I watched the movie version of "The Color Purple" for a class, and I procrastinated reading the book until the night before I watched the movie, and I was so furious at everything that had been changed that I hated the movie for years. I can now appreciate the movie for what it is, but it took years for me to get to that point. since it's now b3en almost 20 years since I read the book, it's safer for me to watch the miniseries now, because I'll be able to take it in with fresh eyes and a fresh mind that isn't comparing every scene to what transpired in my head when I read the book. I repeat: send in the clowns.

Where have you been if you don't know what happened in "It" by now? Nevertheless, I will try to recap it for you. Back in 1960, in the little town of Derry, Maine, seven 12 year olds who are outcasts in school for various reasons, band together to fight an evil demonic force known simply as "It," that manifests itself most often as a creepy clown known as Pennywise the clown. The seven friends fight bravely and strongly as they can, and they think they have defeated It, but they make a pact that if they ever find out that It isn't really dead, they will come back to fight It and defeat it again once and for all. Thirty years later, six of them have left town and scattered around the world, but one of them remained back in town to keep watch over the town and alert the others if there's ever a sign that It has come back. A string of child disappearances and murders with Pennywis's signature signal to Mike, the one who stayed behind and became a librarian, that It is back and stronger than ever. Mike calls the rest, and most of them heed their promise to come back and fight It, but will they be able to defeat It or will the demonic force destroy them?

The new movie versions of "It" move the timeline up so the 12 year olds who fight It are in 1990 instead of 1960, because now it's been 30 years since the 90s (yes, I feel old). Those movies, with all their special effects, just fell flat for me and failed to capture the fear i felt while reading the novel "It." Of those movies, with their millions of dollars in their budgets, couldn't capture my imagination and scare me the way the book did, this movie doesn't stand a chance. I mean, while i was reading the book and i got to the part where one of the characters is walking across a bridge and It reaches up and grabs his foot, i was lying in bed and one of my blankets fell and touched my foot, and i almost had a heart attack. There's nothing in any of these films that can live up to that fear i felt back then, and it's really not fair to expect a movie to be able to do that, but there have been movies that have scared me as much as that moment with the blanket scared me, and this movie just isn't able to do that. The special effects aren't as special as I'd like them to be, but it's not even that, because the special effects in the new versions are full of big budget effects, and I still didn't like them.

Maybe it's just that nothing will ever live up to my expectations since the movie that played in my head while I read the book is so much scarier than anything will ever be onscreen. The actors do their best with the material they are given, and some of them turn in great performances (Annette O'toole in particular dies a great job as the adult Beverly) but I still found myself yawning and checking the clock. Tim Curry is always great in everything he does, even when I just don't like the movie (I'm looking at you, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Yes, I know, blasphemy, but I don't like that movie either, though I appreciate what it was trying to do, and I love Tim Curr's performance in it). As always, I appreciated what this movie was trying to do, but it just didn't scare me, and the giant spider at the end is absolutely ridiculous, with all due respect to the special effects team. The giant spiders in that terrible movie "Arachnia" look better than this. Overall, this movie still falls flat for me and ill never be able to recapture the fun the book brought me being scared. Poo. I'll say this; it's not as bad as i remember it being, but it's still a miss for me.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #95 "Pennywise: The Story of It"

After a terrible movie like the last one i watched, i like to watch somethingi know will be good. That's hard to do when you also want to watch a movie you've never seen before and whittle down your list of movies to watch. It's always hard to know what's going to be a definitely good movie, but documentaries are a pretty safe bet. Most of them are going to be interesting and teach you some things you didn't know about the movie. That's why I decided to finally check this movie out. It's a documentary about the TV adaptation of Stephen King's book "It." this TV miniseries came out in 1990, and it featured Tim Curry as Pennywise the evil clown. He was responsible for a lot of 90s kids being terrified of clowns. I wasn't allowed to watch "It" when it came out (I was still only 9 years old and my mom didn't start letting me read Stephen King's novels until i was 12, so me watching this movie was out of the question, but i remember seeing the ads for this movie when it first aired on TV, and of course i saw the cover of the VHS in movie stores all the time when i was growing up. Tim Curry made a great creepy clown, and so i was interested in seeing this documentary and finding out how they came to cast Tim Curry in that role, as well as whatever else this documentary could tell me about this movie. Send in the clowns!

90% of it is casting the right actor and then getting out of their way. that's what the director had to say about working with Tim Curry, and it rings pretty true to me from what i know about Tim Curry. He's a great actor. Of course, there are other great actorsin the movie too. Harry Anderson, John Ritter, Seth Green (when he was very young). This is one movie that didn't try to have 20 year Olds play pre-teens, they actually hired actors that were 12 or 13, which I appreciated, then and now. I learned a lot about the filming of this movie, including that the filmmakers have mixed feelings about the ending of the movie as much as I do. They worked really hard on those creature effects, but they acknowledge that it does look kind of silly, and it's nice to hear that they have problems with it too. Reading the book, I can see how it would be hard to make this ending work on film without millions of dollars that they just didn't have in their budget for the film. I get it. Maybe it's time for me to revisit the film now that I've seen this documentary, and for it to make me consider watching a five hour long miniseries again after I didn'tlike like it the first time I watched it, that's powerful filmmaking. Give this documentary a watch if you're a fan of the movie, or even if you're a fan of the book who didn't like the movie, see if this movie makes you change your mind.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #94: "Wicked Lake"

Someone recommended this movie to me, but i can't remember who it was now, and just in the first ten minutes im really wishing i could remember who it was, because i have a feeling this movie is going to suck and i want to know who to be mad at if that happens. I read up a little bit on this movie after i started watching it, and that's not onspiring much confidence in me. IMDB only gives this movie a 3 out of 10 and it has like, 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. Uh oh. Too bad it's too late and the movie has started. See, the rules are that once I've started a movie, im not allowed to stop it. I made that rule so i wouldn't waste time. When you have 100 movies to watch in a month you don'thave time to dink around and start a bunch of movies then turn them off and go to something else. Unfortunately, that means i have to continue watching terrible movies even if my spidey sense is telling me they're bad early on. Supposedly this is a slasher, though, and i like slashers, even when they're bad, so who knows? Let's see what happens.

So this movie starts out with a very sexually repressed young man who dreams about having sex with the nude model he's trying to draw in art class. Poor kid. Sex seems to be the only thing he thinks about, and when he goes home, we see that he lives in a very abusive family situation, which makes me feel bad for him. Anyway, soon after this we meet our main characters, four young women (one of whom is the nude model we saw earlier) head out for a fun girl's trip, but soon their fun weekend turns into a nightmare when they run into some men who want to throw a big old sexual assault party, because all the men in this movie are sex-crazed freaks. The movie dispatches the only remotely sympathetic character in the first five minutes of this scene, and then we're left with the 4 girls, who aren't very likeable, and the men, who aren't any better (see my earlier comment about sex crazed freaks) and we have to wait until the tables are turned on the men (because it's pretty clear that's going to happen, even before i read the movie synopsis that says what happens). What will happen to the four young women (and do we even really care by this point?)

The tagline of this movie is a spoiler. it's like no one told the writers of this movie that you're supposed to keep plot twists a secret. The tagline says "Life's a witch, and then you die." So there will be witches happening at some point, yes? Unfortunately for me, i read the tagline of this movie before i started watching it, and i suspect that is true for most people, since the tagline is right on the cover of the movie. So the whole time, I'm just waiting for the witches to show up and save me from having to watch this boring movie. I do disagree with whoever classified this movie as a slasher. It'snot a slasher in any way, shape, or form. Just a movie about some witches who toy with some would-be rapists before torturing and killing them. And since none of these characters is remotely likeable, it's just boring watching the whole thing. I was counting the moments until this one was over, and that's not a good look for you, "Wicked Lake." Do yourself a favor and skip this one.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #93# "Bodies, Bodies, Bodies"

I've really wanted to see this movie for a long time. My friend Ed was kind enough to gift it to me, but then I put off watching it because I wanted to be in a place where it would really be fun to watch it, but now we're getting down to the wire with only two days left in the challenge, so it's getting to the point where it's now or never. Pete Davidson is in this movie, and he made major headlines last year when he was dating Kim Kardashian, so this movie either got a lot of hate or a lot of good attention, depending on whether people liked or hated the Kardashians. I'm neutral on the subject, and im not going to hate on a movie for its tenuous connection to an over exposed reality TV family. Davidson is also pretty well known for his presence on Saturday Night Live, but as you all know, I'm the most humorless person in all of Nofunnington so i don't typically watch comedy because I don't find it funny, so i didn't really know much about Pete Davidson other than the Kardashian thing, so im coming into this movie pretty blind. I think it might be a slasher but I'm not really sure. I guess we'll see.

So this movie is about a group of "friends" (quotation marke because they don't really seem to like each other very much) who gather at one of their houses for a party in the middle of a hurricane. Pete Davidson plays David, the guy whose parents own the house where they're partying and he spends a lot of time being pissed off that they're going to wreck the house (maybe you shouldn't have agreed to have a party there if you were that worried, bro). Anyway, they rather awkwardly party for several hours before getting bored and deciding to play a party game called "Bodues, Bodies, Bodies" where they turn the lights off and one of them is a killer and the designated killer has to tap someone on the back and that person has to pretend to be dead, and then the rest of the group has to figure out who is the killer. We used to play a similar game called "Mafia" when i was in college, but we didn't actively hate each other, so our games didn't result in this much fighting. Anyway, as they're playing the game, people start dying for real, and they have to figure out who really is a killer before they all end up dead.

When things start to get serious, and bad things start happening, people fall apart. It's like the poem says, "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Yeats really knew what he was talking about. We'veseen it over and over again, usually in zombie movies, where people start letting the stress get to them, and they break down and start tearing each other apart. I can't remember seeing it happen in a slasher before, but this isn't your everyday slasher either. These people are REALLY toxic and they turn on each other at the drop of a hat way before anyone gets murdered, so once people start dying it makes sense that things start getting even worse. Old grievances start resurfacing and people start lashing out and attacking each other. I have to say, I'm impressed with this movie. I didn't have a clue who was really the killer or what was going to happen from one second to the next. It's rare that a movie can genuinely surprise me; because I've just seen too many of them. But this movie got me. Kudos. I highly recommend this one.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #92: "The Last Slumber Party (Rifftrax)"

As much as i like slashers, even i couldn't find much to like with this one, so it was good to have the snarky Rifftrax commentary to make it more entertaining. Here are my favorite quotes from the commentary:

"One scene limps to a close while the other struggles to start. Who can keep up?"

"None of these teens are from the same town or century."

"It's "Porky's" without the dignity and class."

"Maybe he went to a funner party, like the communist party in Stalin's Russia."

October Horror Challenge 2023 #91: "When a Stranger Calls Back (Rifftrax)"

This is a rough one. it's so boring that even with the commentary it's hard to stay awake. It's bad enough that i only found two quotes for y'all.

"Oh come on, even the bushes are getting bored."

"No, that's a typo. It should read it already feels like we've been watching this movie for five years."

October Horror Challenge 2023 #90: "Arachnia (Rifftrax)"

We continue our Rifftrax marathon with the movie "Arachnia." As always, here are my favorite quotes from the commentary:

"Suck it, Spielberg!"

"Dialogue by someone who's never heard humans speak to one another."

"Trying his best to be more physically repulsive than Sean White."

"Well, if you can't trust someone who lies to her father to abuse the US Airforce, who can you trust?"

"Finally! Someone using dynamite the way God intended: killing giant spiders."

"Ive never seen someone run this badly in a horror movie who wasn't a girl in high heels."

October Horror Challenge 2023 #89: "Jack Frost (Rifftrax)"

This is another Rifftrax snarky commentary for rhe terrible horrorclassic "Jack Frost." Here are my favoritequotes from the commentary:

"This is one of Those "business casual" executions."

"Oh, thank God I'm alive to help kill a man.

"Yeah, that'll never hold up in court. try this: it was the black kid."

"Every time a bell rings an angel gets its things and leaves because it can't stand watching Jack Frost."

"If you say Jesus one more time he's gonna appear like Beetlejuice and shut this whole thing down."

"Sure, why not. That's this movie's tagline."

"In Minnesota, removing one glove is considered public nudity."

"I wish this was one of those movies where the things the characters say make sense?"

"He grasped the concept of magic reconstituting snowman very quickly."

"In retrospect, I'm gonna say that the decision to build a police station without doors was a bad idea."

October Horror Challenge 2023 #88: "Ice Cream Man (Rifftrax)"

This is another classic Rifftrax commentary on the movie "The Ice Cream Man." Here are some of my favorite snarky comments from the commentary:

"He must have a very bribable health inspector. "

"Well, he WAS voted most likely to lurk outside someone's pool."

"This is like if "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" was a snuff film."

"Begrudgingly following a madman down a dark hallway for unclear reasons. That's "Ice CreamMan" in a nutshell."

"This movie is 30% grossness, 70% overexplanation of the Pied Piper allegory."

And the best one of them all, and this isn't from the commentary, it's an actual line in the movie:

"Who's the Pied Piper now, Ice Cream dick?"

October Horror Challenge 2023 ##87 "Dead Silence"

When i first saw this movie, i really hated it. i think my comment at the time was "beware the film of Mary Shaw, it has no scares, only flaws." I got a lot of mileage out of mocking the nursery rhyme they used instead of giving the movie a plot. This time around, I was more forgiving. I think my expectations were at rock bottom because of how much I hated the movie the first time I saw it, so I didn't expect much. This time around I kind of liked the movie, though, or at least i didn't hate the movie as much as I used to.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #86: "The Nun (2018)"

When i first saw this movie, I was in jail and i didn'tlike it. i don'tknow if my location was making me cranky or what, so i decided to gove this movie a chance again. i still didn'tlike it. It bored me instead of scaring me.

October Horror Challenge #85: "Insidious: The Red Door"

It's hard to believe that our little movie Insidious now has four sequels. I wonder if the filmmakers envisioned this kind of success way back when they made the first movie? It's hard for me to believe too, and yet here we are. The fourth movie in the series was actually my favorite of them all, so i couldn't wait to see this sequel after watching the other four movies. Lucky for me, Amazon was doing a sale on the fifth Insidious movie this week for Halloween, so I got to rent it for $2.99 instead of the usual price of $5.99 (yay good deals) so after bingeing the first four movies, whoch I own, i get to see the fifth one too. It looks like the family from the first and second movie are returning for this movie too, so we get to see what's going on with them now. I can't wait.

So in this sequel, we're jumping ahead a few years since thirteen years have passed since the first movie. The little boy, Dalton, is all grown up and going away to college. When the film opens, we're at the funeral of Josh's mother, and we discover that Dalton has become a sullen teenager who hates his father. Not that i can blame him totally, since i hated his dad in the second movie too, but Dalton is so mean to his dad atthe beginning of this movie that i actually felt bad for Josh. Unfortunately for Dalton, the family tradition of seeing ghosts has followed him throughout his life until now. We discover that he doesn't remember the ghostly events that happened to him as a kid. His whole memory of the events of the first and second movie is gone and he thinks he had viral memingitis when he was a kid and that's why he wasbin a coma for so long. You'd think that after how badly it affected Josh when they tried to take away his memory of the ghostly events that they wouldn't go ahead and do the same thing with Dalton, but I guess our characters aren't that smart. Now when the ghostly history starts repeating itself, Dalton has no idea what to do. Will the sins of the father be passed onto the son? Will Josh figure out what's going on in time to save his family once again, or will he lose the battle with the evil spirits who just can't seem to leave his family alone?

There’s a scene in an MRI machine that really freaks me out because I've had an hour and 45 minute MRI once and I've never fully recovered from that experience. Stupid movie, bringing up past trauma for me. I really like the character Chris, Dalto's roommates in this movie. She's the supportive friend he needs when ghostly stuff starta going down. It's funny how things change because as much as i wanted to punch Josh in 0art 2, i wanted to punch Annie in this one. I don't care if Josh agreed to it, after you saw how badly it screwed up his life when his mom made him forget everything when he was a kid, you shouldn't have agreed to do it again not only to Josh but to your own kid as well. Seriously. Bad idea all around. At least they do the right thing this time around and let everyone remember what happened without trying to erase their memories. Too little too late in my opinion, but at least they learned their lesson. This was a good sequel. Not as good as part 4, but still way better than any fifth movie in a series has any right to be.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #84: "Insidious: The Last Key"

Another day, another Insidious sequel. Actually this is still the first day and im just bingeing all these movies like a psychopath. Such is the life of a horror movie fan. This movie goes even further back than the last sequel did. It shows us what Elise's childhood was like as a child with special gifts. Even then, she could see and talk to ghosts. I'd imagine that would be a tough gift for a kid to have, especially since no one would believe you and people would think she was crazy. As a former child who no one believed and everyone said was crazy, i can confirm that it sucks and it can really mess with your head. It's a wonder that Elise turned out as normal as she did considering how rough her childhood was. This movie goes to some pretty dark places, and i didn't realize how harrowing it would be until it was too late to go back. Here there be Tygers.

We begin this movie with a flashback. Young Elise is just coming into her powers, and she can see and talk to dead people. We learn that her mother believes in her gift, but her father thinks it's evil and punishes her horribly when she claims to talk to ghosts. Flash forward and adult Elise is a mostly well-adjusted adult psychic who helps people get into contact with spirits. A man asks for her help, but helping him would force her to go back and face the demons of her childhood. At first she refuses, but then she eventually relents and agrees to help him. With her two trusty sidekicks in tow, she goes back to her childhood home to try and suss out why spirits seem to be hanging around the place. Who are they and what do they want? Will Elise be able to find out, or will she be defeated by her own personal demons?

Since this takes place before the events of the first movie, we already know that Elise survives her ordeal with the spirits here, but even though I knew that, I still feared for her health and safety throughout this movie. That's how good it is. Elise's father really pissed me off in this movie. If your kid can see ghosts, you don't try to beat it out of them. That's not going to help the situarion. Her dad is played by Josh Stewart, and he does a good job of making me hate him. Kirk Acevedo plays the man who calls Elise for help, and he does a good job too. I cared about him and wanted them to be able to help him. There's a pretty big twist at the end of this movie, and i really didn't see it coming though I probably should have. This one may actually be my favorite of all the movies which is pretty good for a third sequel in a series. I can't wait to see part 5.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #83: "Insidious: Chapter 3"

This is the third movie in the Insidious series. These movies just keep getting better and better. I was excited to check this one out. My friend Ed who gave me the movies told me that the sequels were all good, so I was stoked to get to watch them and i llanned on watching them back to back, but something came up every time i meant to watch them, so even though this movie came out in 2018, I'm just now watching it. I hope it'sworth the wait. This movie is supposed to go back to the beginning and show us what happened before Elise died at the end of the first movie. I'm glad they keep bringing Lin Shaye's character back because i love seeing her in horror movies. She's in a lot of my favorite horror movies, like "Dead End" and "Ouija" and "Ouija 2." Let's see what she does this time around.

In this movie, a teenage girl named Quinn who had a close relationship with her mother is devastated now that her mother is dead. She had such a connection with her mother that she can sense that her mother's spirit is still around, even after her death, so she seeks help in contacting her mother from famed psychic Elise Rainier. At first, Elise is reluctant to help, but she senses that something evil is trying to attach itself to Quinn, so she warns Quinn not to try to contact her mother again by herself. Typical of teenagers, Quinn doesn't listen, and soon she brings back something evil to this world. Now it is Quinn's father who seeks Elise's help in getting his daughter back from the dark presence that wants to take her soul.

This sequel shows us how Elise met her two ghost hunting associates, Specs and Tucker. They're fun characters and it was cool to see how she met up with them and started working with them. we also get to see a glimpse of how Elise helped people before her death in the first movie. We learn that at one point Elise actually gave up using her gift at one point because it was too dangerous for her to use it (I mean, as we see, it led to her death) but she comes out of semi-retirement in order to help Quinn, because she's such a good person that she can't turn down someone who genuinely needs her help. Dermot Mulroney is in this movie too, he plays Quinn's father and does a good job at first being a skeptic who slowly starts to believe and eventually would do anything to save his daughter. This is another sequel that's equal to the original in quality. I highly recommend this one if you're a fan of the first two.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #82: "Insidious: Chapter 2"

This is one of those movies that I've been wanting to see for years now. It came out in 2013 and I've been meaning to see it for 10 years now. My friend Ed gave me all 4 of the Insidious Movies as a gift for my birthday a few years ago, and I've been holding onto them ever since. I finally got around to watching them today, so I'm having an "Insidious" marathon, bingeing all 5 of the movies (that's right, I waited so long to watch this movie that there's 4 sequels now! That's what happens when you procrastinate, I guess. I'm excited to watch this movie and finally find out what happens next in the story.

This movie picks up right where the first one leaves off. First we go back into the past to see what happened when Josh Lambert was a young boy, how his family first discovered that he has a gift to talk with ghosts, and what his family decided to do about it, which caused a lot of problems for them in the future, then we jump back to the present day and see what happens right after the first movie ends. The ghosts are pissed that Josh and Annie Lambert tried to get rid of them in the first movie, so they're back with a vengeance in this movie. Josh's mother, played by Barbara Hershey, knows that something weird is going on with her son, so she seeks the help of the Paranormal Activity experts from the first movie, trying desperately to save her family from supernatural forces. Will she succeed or will she lose her family forever?

Josh is a real jerk in this movie. I wanted to punch him in the face for most of the running time. I know it's the ghosts' fault, but he's still an asshole. He treats his wife like crap. If I were Annie I'd want a divorce. Lucky for him, she's not me and she's willing to work to save him. She's not some little weak submissive woman like Wendy from the film version of The Shining either, she really throws a wrench in his plans (haha, I crack myself up). This movie is that rare unicorn, a sequel that's as good as if not better than the original. I dug it. I think you'll dig it too. You should check it out.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #81: "Insidious"

I rememberloving this movie when i first saw it. I actually remember it pretty well because it stuck out to me. It's one of the first movies i saw where a person is haunted instead of a house so you know how you always want to scream at the movie screen and tell the people to just move away from the haunted house before something bad happens? Well thais family tries that when scary things start happening and it doesn't work for them because it's not their house that's haunted, it's the people themselves. Creepy, right? What would you do if your family were being haunted by some unknown entity? That's the presmise of this movie, and I'm excited to check it out again and see if it holds up after all these years (i originally saw it soon after it premiered in 2010).

Like I said before, this movie is about a family that'sbeing haunted, but these aren't your regular ghosts who haunt one particular house. Instead, they target a specific family and try to take their souls. They start with the family's young son, who is lured into a catatonic state by the evil spirits that he is unable to escape from and thus he is in a coma for most of the movie. The family tries desperately to save their child, even going so far as to call in a Paranormal Activity expert, played by Lin Shaye, who happens to be an expert in the supernatural and thinks she can help the family. She has a plan to save the family, but will she be able to do it or will the other world claim their son's soul forever?

This movie doesn'twaste any time gettingto the jump scares. they start right away with the opening credits sequence. The jump scares then continue throughout the rest of the movie. It even got me a few times. To top it all off, i felt really bad for this family. Their lives suddenly turn into a nightmare out of nowhere, and I felt for them as they tried everything to help their son and save their family. Lin Shaye is great in this movie as the Paranormal Activity expert who comes in to help the family with their problems. It's always great seeing her in movies like this. The movie kind of ends on a cliffhanger, and we're left wondering if someone will realize that the evil spirits aren't completely gone. Good setup for part 2 of the movie! This movie is as good as i remembered and I'm excited to see what happensin in part 2.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #80: "Blade: Trinity"

I liked this movie quite a bit when i first saw it. That was back in 2005 when it first came out on DVD I watched it with some friends and we all enjoyed it (of course we did; comic book movie about hunting vampires, what's not to like?) This movie has some major star power in it. Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel are both in it. This was before they became big stars, but it's still really cool to see them in this movie. Back when it was released Wesley Snipes was the bigger star in this movie. For some reason, people seemed to hate on this movie a lot (which shouldn't surprise me, since I usually like movies that everyone hates) but I couldn't see back then why people didn't like this movie. Maybe watching it again will enlighten me. Let's see what happens.

So in this sequel, Blade is still being his usual broody badass self, hunting and killing vampires. Unfortunately for him, the vampires are sick of his heroics and they decide to wage a media campaign to turn the human population against him. They set him up to make him look like the bad guy, and this both alerts the public of his existence and turns them against him, neither of which are good for his mission. We also see some new faces in this movie, like I mentioned before, Jessica Biel and Ryan Reynolds are in this movie playing rogue vampire hunters who must team up with Blade in order to defeat the biggest vampire foe they've ever faced: none other than Count Dracula. Will the trio of vampires be able to thwart his evil plan, or will he be able to destroy the world?

Jessica Biel is a badass in this movie. She plays Abbigail Whistler, Blade's beloved friend Whistler's daughter, who is also an accomplished vampire hunter herself. Ryan Reynolds plays Hannibal King, another rogue vampire hunter who must work with Blade and Abbigail to fight the vampires. Of course, Blade isn't happy about working with anyone else to fight the vampires. He likes to work alone, but in this movie, he needs all the help he can get, since the vampires are working with the humans to try and take him down now (and doing a pretty good job of it, I must say). Once Blade is finally resigned to working with the team, things go more smoothly, until the vampires begin to execute their plan. I must say, hearing Ryan Reynolds call someone a "cock juggling thunder cunt" is worth the price of admission. I still don't know why so many people don't like this movie, I for one loved every minute of it.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #79: "Blade II"

Sequels are hard to make, especially when the first movie was so cool and such a success that it's a tough act to follow. Roughly 89% of sequels aren't as good as the original film, according to statistics I just made up, so "Blade II" had it rough from the start. The original was a surprise hit, and no one expected it to do as well as it did, so the sequel needed to make a lot more money in order to be considered a success. The original movie was so cool that I didn't think a sequel could touch it, so I honestly wasn't expecting much when I settled in to watch Blade II.To put it mildly, I was blown away by how much I enjoyed this sequel. Getting to revisit it again today was the logical next step after watching the first movie again, so that's what I'm doing.

In this sequel, Blade, the half human half vampire antihero, is back and broodier than ever! Now Blade has always had a complicated relationship with vampires, considering that he's partially a vampire himself (as he puts it, "I have all of their strengths and none of their weaknesses"). This time around, however, he is forced to join forces with the vampire as they face a common enemy: the reapers, a race of super-vampires that are hellbent on wiping out both vampires and humans. Jerks. Will Blade team up with the vampires to help defeat the reapers? Can he trust the vampires not to screw him over (probably not)? Who will win this epic battle of the wills?

I forgot that Norman Redus is in this movie. He looks so young! We all were younger way back in 2002 when this movie originally came out. In the absence of Stephen Dorff, the villains in this movie look pretty cool and appropriately gross and evil. There's a fair amount of gore, though nothing as cool as the blood shower from the first movie. Some of the characters return, and Blade is faced with an ethical and moral dilemma that forces him to make a choice he desperately doesn't want to make. As much as Blade pretends to be all aloof and uncaring, just a killing machine, he clearly does care about his friends and we definitely see that in this movie. Overall, this is a good sequel and a worthy follow up to the original movie. Other moviegoers apparently agree with me, since this movie made about $155 million worldwide. Check this one out! You won't be disappointed.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #78: "Blade (1998)"

What do you watch when you're crabby and tired of watching movies? For me, going back to the late 90s was just what I needed. When Blade came out, it was the year that I went into foster care and my life was in upheaval, and one of the only constants in my life was that vampires were cool. I really wanted to see "Blade" when it came out in theaters, but i didn't get to see it until a few years later when i was in college. I rented it on VHS (remember VHS?) and marveled at how cool Blade was. Half vampire, half human, all hero. The comics were awesome, and for me the movie was even better. It was great getting to see Blade come to life onscreen. When you're tired of watching movies, it helps to watch something that reminds you of why you started watching horror movies in the first place.

In this movie, right at the beginning a pregnant woman is rushed to the hospital because she got bitten by someone and she's bleeding heavily. We savvy viewers know that she must have been attacked by a vampire, and she's fading fast. The doctors are unable to save her, but they do manage to save her baby, who is now half human and half vampire. Damn, i hate it when that happens. Fast forward 30 some years or so and that baby is all grown up and he now hunts and kills vampires. He travels around, hiding in the shadows, fighting the creatures that killed his mother. He's teamed up with a human who helps him in his vampire hunting quest, played by Kris Kristofferson, and fights against an evil vampire leader played by Stephen Dorff. Will Blade be able to thwart his evil plan in time to save the city and possibly the world?

I forgot how badass Wesley Snipes is in this movie. He really nails the role of the broody superhero who walks with one foot in the vampire world and one foot in the human world and he's 100% moody all the time. Gotta love him. I like how he's kinda got that Bateman vibe down, the tempermental hero who's mad at the world. I like how the vampires in this movie are so ingrained in the system that they've infiltrated the government and they basically run the police now, so there's no one safe to go to for help except for Blade and his companion, the good guys who have to operate on the wrong side of the law because the law is corrupt. Stephen Dorff plays Deacon Frost, the head bad guy vampire in this movie. I forgot how hot he was in this movie. There's some great gore in this movie too (check out the opening sequence with a literal shower of blood at a rave). When you're tired of reviewing movies, this movie is the perfect palate cleanser. It's just what i needed.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #77: "Dracula: Dead and Loving It"

For someone who loves Dracula as much as i do, it's kinda amazing that I haven't seen this movie before today. I've heard of it, of course I have, but I just never got around to actually watching it. In my defense, I tend not to like comedies. They're often stupid instead of funny to me, so I was in no rush to watch this movie, but I couldn't pass up the chance to see it today. Let's see what I think of it.

Dracula has never been more dapper than he is in this movie. Leslie Nielson plays the infamous Count Dracula, first enslaving the hapless Renfield, then traveling to London to wreak havoc upon unsuspecting citizens. First he attacks and kills Lucy, then he sets his sights on the perpetually virginal Mina, the daughter of renowned doctor Seward. At first the men of science refuse to believe in vampires, but when faced with evidence they can no longer ignore, they soon change their minds and team up with Professor Van Helsing to fight the evil Count Dracula before he chows his way through the UK.

That synopsis makes this movie sound more like a drama than a horror movie, and that's part of the problem. It just isn't very funny. Most of the jokes fall flat for me and i wind up staring blankly at the screen and frowning slightly. I know some horror comedies are ones i like. "Shaun of the Dead" had me rolling. This one just isn't it. How disappointing.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #76: "We Need to do Something"

This movie is based on a book by Max Booth III. I've never read the book, so I can't tell you whether it follows the book very closely or not. it's probably for the best that I've never read the book, though, because film adaptations of books tend to go badly. Either they leave out too much detail of they include too much and become clunky and boring. I am still not sure where this movie will fall on that spectrum. To tell you the truth, I'd never even heard of this movie before Hulu started bugging me, telling me how much I would like it. And you know me, I'm a sucker for a good horror movie, so I finally relented and decided to check it out today.

The plot of this movie is simple. trying to take shelter from a raging storm, a family decides to hole up in their bathroom until the storm passes. Mom, dad, teenage daughter, and little brothertry to occupy their time by playing cards and talking in awkward fits and starts. You see, this particular family has a lot of problems simmering below the surface; a lot of secrets, and what do we all know about hidden secrets? That's right, they refuse to stay buried, especially when people find themselves caught in a bad situation, and that's exactly what happens to the family in this story. Not long after they take refuge in the bathroom, the storm knocks a tree down on their house, and it breaks through the roof and barricades them in the bathroom with no way to escape. Tensions run high, secrets are revealed, and soon they can't tell which is more dangerous: the Horrors that start to reveal themselves in the bathroom or the unknown and possibly deadly creature that seems to be lurking outside.

This movie features mostly unknown actors, and it works for the purposes of the film, because they are dressed-down and ordinary looking, so they could be anybody, even someone you know. I didn't really like the characters at first, but as the movie wore on, they kind of grew on me. Except the dad. He was an asshole the entire movie. There's not much gore, but what gore there was worked well. This movie is more about the psychological horror, the fear of the unknown, and what happens to already strained relationships when put under the stress of being trapped in a small place unable to get out. The monsters that might be outside are nothing when compared with the monsters inside of these people. I usually don't like movies that keep us in the dark and don't have a satisfying conclusion that explains everything that went before, but in this movie's case, it kinda worked. if you like dark, psychological horror, you might want to check this one out.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #75: "Sharknado 2"

I really enjoyed the first "Sharknado" movie on Rifftrax, so I'm hoping this one is good as well. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the snarky commentary:

"The power went out, but only where the guitar guy is sitting! There is a God!"

"Are they trying to kill sharks or get laid at a Renaissance festival?"

"Blowing sharks down Broadway: the adult version of West Side Story."

"Stop trying to act, you're embarrassing the rest of the Sharknado cast."

October Horror Challenge #74: "Robot Vampire"

Here's another one of my favorite Rifftrax movies. usually i quote some of my favorite lines from the commentary here, but nothing really stood out at me from the commentary this time. I'm hoping that we'll get some good quotes from the next one, because it's Sharknado 2 and that should be a good time.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #73: "Rifftrax: Feeders"

Ive reached that point in the challenge where I am tired of reviewing movies and i need to take a break and watch me some comical relief, so as per usual, i turn to the "Rifftrax" crew to entertain me with their snarky humor. Here, enjoy my favoritelines from the movie:

"A river runs through it. 'It' being a crappy movie."

"Maybe I'll check the closet to see if i can find a more boring shirt."

"I have to hand it to them, they found a way to make "Paranormal Activity" look like a non-stop thrill ride."

"Increased Synthasizer is the same thing as drama, right?"

"This is like "War of the Worlds" if H.G. Wells had a full frintal labotomy before writing it."

"I like this movie, every two minutes it becomes a different movie."

October Horror Challenge 2023 #72: "Crawl"

You ever wonder why people say things like "alligator infested swamps"? i mean, it's kinda rude, they live there, it's their home, and like the tagline of this movie says, they were here first. I mean, we don’t say "human infested beaches" now do we, and that's arguably more accurate. Regardless, I didn't know much about this movie before I watched it, but from the poster I ascertained that it was about alligators chowing down on humans. I've already seen a movie about a killer alligator, just named "Alligator," I've also seen "Alligator 2," come to think of it. But when I saw this movie was directed by Alexandre Aja, who directed my favorite movie of all time, "The Hills Have Eyes (2006)," I knew I HAD to give this movie a chamce, so that's what I'm doing now. Here goes nothing.

The premise of this movie is even more scary because it couldcome true. "Alligator" wasn't like that. No one believes those old wives' tales about pet baby alligators being flushed down the toilet, somehow surviving, and mutating into giant killer beasts, but this movie? This could happem. It'sabout a girl and her dad who get stranded trying to evacuate during a hurricane. As if that weren't bad enough, they soon find themselves surrounded by a bunch of hungry alligators. Trapped and with little hope of rescue, they find themselves fightingfor their lives. Nature is out to get these two. First the weather tries to kill them with the hurricane, then the hungry alligators try to make them into dinner. Will these two be able to stave off the alligators and get themselves to safety, or will they become Alligator chow?

Hurricanes are scary enough on their own. They're destructive at their best and devastating at their worst, so this movie is already terrifying even before any alligators get involved. Unfortunately for our heroes, alligators eventually DO get involved, and they'rereally menacing and scary. i love animals, but im not a fan of anything that's huge and wants to eat me and could easily kill me if it wanted. I'm fuuny like that. This movie is large with the jump scares. I'm easily startled, so jump scares usually get to me and this movie has a lot of them. There'salso some gote when the hungry gators start munching away on some side characters. This movie is intense and we'renever sure what'sgoing to kill our characters, because the storm and the gators are equally dangerous. I like how Aja made it that way; thr characters are damned if they do and damned if they don't. This was well worth checking out.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #71: "Extraordinary Tales"

I've seen this movie before. That happens sometimes when you watch as many movies as i do, you forget which things you've seen before and which you haven't. In this movie's case, it's a kid's movie based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe, so of course I watched it as soon as I could after it originally came out, and I don't remember what year that was, but as soon as I put this movie in, I recognized it. Whoops. Oh well, there's no rule against rewatching a movie I've seen before, and I remember liking this movie, so I'll give it a watch again. Why not? got time.

This movie opens with a talking crow in a cemetery talking to death, who happens to be a woman in this story, and the crow is spinning his tales of sorrow and death. This is a morbid little movie. The first story the crow tells is an adaptation of the Poe classic "The Fall of the House of Usher."In this story a man obsessed with death finds out that his morbid obsession has harmed his fsmily. Thesecond story, the crow retells "The Telltale Heart," which i loved so much when i was a kid that i memorized the whole story. In this tale, a man becomes obsessed with his neighbor who has a deformed eye, and this obsessionlrads him to do something terrible. The third story is adapted from Poe'sstory "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," which is about a doctor who wants to study what happens after death, so he convinces one of his dying patients to allow him to hypnotize him and see if he could come back to life if he dies while he is hypnotized. The fourth story is loosely basedon Poe's tale "The Pit and the Pendulum," about (you guessed it) a man obsessed with death, and the final story comes from Poe's work "The Masque of the Red Death." That one is about a rich man who throws a masqueradeball and discovers to his horror that he has an uninvited guest.

This is pretty heavy stuff for a lot of kidd. i read Poe when i was a kid, but I was definitely a weird kid. i wasn't allowed to go to school, so i had to teach myself to read and write, and my home life was darl enough that i tended toward books that were dark, macabfe, and scary. I wasn'tallowed to read Stephen King novels until i was 12, but my mom considered Poe'sworkto be classics, so i wss allowed to read those, and i devoured them. All of Poe's characters seem to be obsessed with death. Poe himself was pretty obsessed with death after all the death and pain he suffered in his life. I once saw the actor John Astin perform in a play about the life of Edgar Allen Poe, and he went through some harrowing stuff, the poor guy. So this cartoon is right up my alley and i ge r to pretend to be a kid again as i watched it. This would be a fun one to watch with your kids.

October Horror Challenge #70 "Ready or Not (2019)"

So one day my friend Courtney asked me if I'd seen the movie "Ready or Not," because it was a horror movie and she knows how much I love horror movies. I avoid spoilers like the plague, so she didn't tell me anything about the plot of the movie, but she said it was really gory and not the kind of movie she'd usually watch, but she really liked it. Unfortunately for us, video stores have gone the way of all the earth and they're not around anymore, so there's no place around where you can browse a bunch of movies and rent one, but yay for the library because it has stepped up to fill that void by having a bunch of movies available to check out for your viewing pleasure, and lucky for me, they had "Ready or Not," so I checked it out of the library to watch it today. I'm stoked to see how it is.

This movie is about a newly married couple who visit the groom'sfamily on their wedding night. This is no ordinary family visit, however. You see, this family is rich, and i mean the kind of filthy, stinking rich that makes people think they can get away with anything, and they have some very warped and twisted traditions. Soon, The new bride found herself hiding in terror as her new family goes batshit crazy around her. You see, this family likes to play games, and not just any games, but these games are especially sadistic and deadly. Soon the bride is fighting for her life. Will she be able to survive the night or will her in-laws succeed in their evil plan?

This movie isn't as gory as i expected it to be. Courtney said it was gory, and she said i would know what scene i was talking about when i saw it, so i spent the whole movie watching for something really gory to happen. I'm glad this movie has more to offer than just the gore though. The story is interesting, and it fits into how i feel about rich people (I mean excessively rich people who only really care avbout their money, i know not every rich person is like this). At least I'd HOPE not every rich person is like this. There may not be a ton of gore, but there are some pretty brutal deaths. Someone gets crushed, someone gets shot in the hand, someone else gets shot in the face, all bloody hell breaks loose. I finallygot to the part my friend Courtney was talking about, and it is gory, but i still think the Saw movies were more brutal, as far as that goes. This is a really good movie, though, and you should watch it.

October Horror Challenge 2023 #69: "The Menu"

I'm addicted to 2 things in this life: horror movies and the Food Network, and this movie is the lovely mix of the two. Plus it has Anya Taylor-Joy in it, and she'sa modern day scream queen, so if you see her name on a movie, it's bound to be good. I saw a bunch of ads for this movie when it first came out, and it had me rolling with its satirical commentary on the food world that i experience primarily through watching the Food Network. Ralph Fiennes plays the head chef, and he's a good actor, but he outdid himself with this performance. I felt sorry for the chef even while he creeped me out. I've been watching commercials for this movie all summer, and i was so excited to finally get to see it.

So this movie is about opening night at a new, fancy restaurant and only VIPs are on the list to attend. There's a famous food critic as well as a few celebrities and people in positions of power, all eager to eatthe food of a famous eccentric chef. Unfortunately for the guests, this is no ordinary swanky restaurant. This chef takes his work very seriously, and tonight he's going to exact his revenge on those who have done wrong. This meal is about retribution, and nothing will stop him from carrying out his evil plan. Unbeknownst to him, however, one of his guests has brought an uninvited friend to the party, and she throws a wrench into the works. Will she be able to outsmart the crazy genius and beat him at his own game?

What can I say about this movie? I haven't watched the Food Network all month now because I've been watching horror movies exclusively this month, so I've missed hearing people talk about food, and that aspect of the movie was a lot of fun. I could picture one of the chefs i admire so much on the Food Network saying some of the lines from this movie, and that made it even funnier. There's not much gore here, but what gore there is happens to be very well done. Body parts get chopped off, someone gets stabbed in the leg, someone gets stabbed in the throat. It's an unpleasant affair for everyone involved (though the chefs making the food seem to be under the head chef's spell, and they trespond in unison whenever he asks them a question, like some kind of deranged Greek chorus). I really enjoyed this movie, and if you're obsessed with horror films and the FoodNetwork like i am, you should check it out too.