October Horror Challenge 2018 #64: "Bride of Re-animator"

I loved the first "Re-animator" when I was younger. I wanted to see it when I was a kid but my mom put the kibosh on that plan, so I didn't see it until I was in college, and I thought it was a lot of fun. Now that I'm old and cranky I probably like it less, it's weird but not as cool as I used to think it was. I should have seen this sequel back in the day, when I was so excited to be watching horror again for the first time in years that I thought every movie was awesome. Let's see what my cranky ass thinks of this one today.

This movie takes place eight months after the events of the first movie. Dr. Herbert West is still wreaking unholy havoc, perfecting his theories about re-animation. Another doctor joins him, Dr. Dan Cain, and the two work together in a secret lab under Cain's house. A nosy police officer threatens to ruin their fun, but they have a solution for him. They try to build a perfect human out of discarded parts (because that worked so well for doctor Frankenstein) and they will stop at nothing to achieve their goal.

I get the idea that Dr. Cain thinks he's better than Dr. West, and maybe h err doesn't act as outwardly awkward and weird, but he does just as much disgusting, illegal, unholy crap, so I got real tired of his "I'm a good person" schtick real quick. Dude, you're evil, just shut up and accept it. Dr. West is as nutso as I remember. Jeffrey Combs is great at what he does, even I have to admit that.

The movie is really gory and icky, and there are even some shots that turned out more artful and poetic than I would have expected from a movie like this. Sometimes I feel like Brian Yuzna (the director of this movie) throws so much into making his movies over-the-top and weird that he gets in his own way and keeps them from being good. I feel that way about a lot of the H.P. Lovecraft adaptations in general, especially  "From Beyond," even though everyone loves it. I tend to just roll my eyes and think "yeah, we get it, you're weird, now can we pretend to have a plot now?"

Maybe it's  me getting sappy in my old age, but I liked this movie more because of the love story aspect. Yeah Dr. Cain is a douche, but that's not his girlfriend's fault, and she seems to really care about him. It's also not the fault of any of the reanimated creatures that they're monstrous. They didn't ask for this. In that way, this movie works like the original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. I feel bad for the monsters. So yeah, this movie has some disgusting gore, but it also has s plot I care about, too, so it impressed me more than I thought it would.

October Horror Challenge 2018 #63: "Slice (2018)"

So remember how I was reviewing the movie "Superargo and the Faceless Giants" and I was ts talking about how sometimes I watch really weird-ass movies for the horror Challenge, and you were probably thinking "dude, why does she do that? She wouldn't have to watch so many crappy movies if she stayed away from the really weird stuff." Well, the simple answer to that question is that I stick with the weirdest little movies because sometimes I get to see something crazy amazing that I would have missed if I read the description and thought "WTF? NEXT." "Slice" is one of those amazing little weird movies, and I'd watch a million "Superargos" for the chance to see something this cool.

Oh where do I even begin with this one? I mean, like the voice over in the beginning says, this movie is about a bunch of ghosts, some witches, a werewolf,  and a really shitty pizza place. No, no, quit running away! Come back, I promise this one is worth watching.  I know it sounds crazy, and trust me, it's going to get even crazier before the movie ends, but it's also one of the coolest, most fun movies I've ever seen.

So yeah, there's a pizza place, and it's located in a ghost town. No, that's not just an expression, it's located in a town full of ghosts
 That part of the city was built over an old asylum that happened to be haunted, and when the ghosts got pissed about being displaced from their haunting grounds, the city decided to move them into scummy housing, and that became ghost town. The pizza place is staffed by mostly living people (and one dead guy, you know, on the name of diversity) but mostly only the ghosts order the pizza, because the place kind of sucks. Anyway, some murderers start happening, and the police aren't sure if it's the ghosts, or the local drug dealers, or this mysterious werewolf who's back in town after many years, possibly to settle an old score.

In case you can't tell, this movie is messed up. Half the time I thought I was on drugs, the other half I kinda wanted some drugs because I thought maybe they would help. I was enthralled the whole time,  though. The performances are great, everyone seems to be having as much fun as I was, and there are a lot of twists along the way, and there's a lot of humor that's surprisingly actually funny, not just what passes for funny in a lot of today's comedies, which is mostly just lazy and stupid. I feel like anything else I say will give too much away, and this movie is best seen with as few preconceptions as possible, so just give it a chance. I'm sure it's not for everyone,  but I loved every minute.

October Horror Challenge 2018 #62: "Superargo and the Faceless Giants"

I don't really know, guys. I just watch weird-ass movies sometimes for this challenge. Amazon or Netflix will be like "hey we think you might like this movie from our Halloween collection" and more often than not, I do like them, so I flip through movies for awhile looking for something to watch, and after awhile this movie starts looking better than it did a few ago when I was flipping through movies trying to watch something for the Challenge, so I click on it. Most of the time, I find something to enjoy about it. Other times...this happens.

So this movie is about evil robots who are kidnapping world-class athletes in order to put together a super army to do evil things, and the government has to enlist the help of this superhero called Superargo to stop them. Yes, that's really what the movie is about. No, I don't know what kind of drugs they were on when they came up with this story. I wish I had been on drugs though when I watched it, because that might have made it a lot better. As is, it's just really weird and boring. Weird, I can forgive, but boring is inexcusable. Don't make the mistake I did. Watch something else instead.

October Horror Challenge 2018 #61: "The Satanic Rites of Dracula"

When I was a kid, Dracula was the coolest. I loved the Bram Stoker novel, and I loved every movie version of Dracula that I had seen. I wasn't allowed to watch horror movies, but my mom considered the black and white ones as classics, so I was allowed to watch those. "Horror of Dracula" was my favorite,  and Christopher Lee was my favorite Dracula. He still is. He's who I think of when I first think of Dracula, even after all these years.

This is the last movie to feature Christopher Lee as Dracula. While his portrayal of Dracula is classic, it's generally agreed that the later Dracula films were perhaps not the best. In this movie, Scotland Yard stumbles across what they believe is a case of vampirism, and they call in a descendant of Professor Van Helsing to help them investigate. It turns out to be Count Dracula himself, disguised as a rich land owner and plotting to unleash a deadly virus upon the world. Dracula is getting lazy in his old age.

Even Christopher Lee himself wasn't fond of this movie, once referring to it as "a mixture of Howard Hughes and Dr. No" in an interview. It is pretty in your face, with its nude satanic rituals and far-fetched plot. I still enjoy it, though. I mean, Christopher Lee's worst movie has to be better than some people's best movie. While this is more weird Satanic rituals juxtaposed with long scenes of men in suits discussing the supernatural, but I still had fun watching it. Dracula is still the coolest, even in a cheesy movie like this one.

October Horror Challenge 2018 #60: "Shivers (1975)"

This is the first David Cronenberg movie I ever saw. I'd heard his name for years, and how he was supposed to be a great horror director, and I wanted to watch his films, but this is the first one I managed to see, even before I saw "The Fly." It's a micro budget movie, but it doesn't need a ton of special effects to tell its story. I've always thought it benefitted from it's more scaled-back approach. I tend to go back and watch it every few years now, so I've seen it many times. It's one of my favorites, and it always reminds me why I do this every year.

So this movie is about a luxury hogh-rise apartment, swanky and secluded, that touts itself as a gated community. It has an on-site dental clinic and health clinic, and now it's home to it's very own parasite! The creature multiplies and starts to spread from one resident to another, turning them into mindless drones who want nothing but sex. I know some people like that too.

Like I said, the movie doesn't have or need huge special effects. Simple things like a shot of someone walking on broken glass are effective enough. There's also a scene that takes place in a bathtub that makes me never want to take a bath again. It's creepy and icky and gross, and it definitely makes me side-eye my neighbors. I even had a nightmare about this movie once where I lived in the apartment building where it takes place, and I and some other residents escape and hide in the woods to survive the parasitic invasion. I guess the movie is in my head, but I wouldn't want it any other way.

October Horror Challenge 2018 #59: "The Brood"

I love this movie, I love this movie,  I love it so much. It's one of the horror movies Stephen King wrote about in his book "Danse Macabre," which I read when I was younger and vowed to watch all the movies he mentioned. Yes, I'm a fangirl, I accept that. Anyway, I didn't get to see this movie until I was in college, and I really didn't expect to like it much. It's so weird, I mean apeshit insane at times, but I couldn't look away, and it impacted me so strongly that I just fell in love. It's been years since I saw it, though, so I wasn't sure if the movie really was that great or if it was just the first time I'd seen a movie like this so I remembered it as better than it was. Either way,  it was high time I checked it out again.

This movie is about a father who's separated from his wife, and his young daughter has court ordered visits with her mother, who is institutionalized and under the care of a psychiatrist with contraversial methods. The man thinks his wife is abusing his daughter and wants to stop the visits because of the abuse, but the psychiatrist thinks this will be harmful for the mother. Meanwhile, we see that the psychiatrist's therapeutic methods are much stranger than we thought, and soon people around the man and his daughter start being horribly murdered. The man must find out what's going on and save his daughter before it's too late.

Samantha Eggar plays the mother, and she's just great. She's obviously nuts, but she's also charming and she has this vulnerability that almost makes you pity her and want to help her. It's not easy to pull that off, but she really does a fantastic job. Oliver Reed plays the psychiatrist,  and he's also obviously disturbed and yet somehow alluring at the same time. It's obvious that his therapy is doing more harm than good, but he's mad with power, so he won't stop. They're a great pair.

Art Hindle plays the hapless father, and he's clearly perplexed and just wants to protect his daughter. He's also probably still in love with his wife, at least in some way, and he's also afraid of her, which makes sense, because she's nuts. She clearly has problems with rage, which made her abusive and terrifying when she was mad, but probably also passionate and loving at times, which can be very confusing.  I've been in  abusive situations like that, so I know what it's like, and it makes me feel especially bad for the little girl, who is probably very confused and mixing up love with fear in her young mind in a way that's definitely not healthy.

I haven't really said what the movie is about yet, and I want to do that without spoiling anything, which is hard to do. Basically, the psychiatrist trains the woman to project her rage outward, which in her damaged mind makes her create "children of rage," sending them out into the world to get violent revenge on those she blames for her situation. If that sounds weird, trust me, it's nothing compared to actually seeing it happen onscreen, her rage taking a physical form. It's creepy and bloody, and leads to one of the most disgusting scenes I've ever seen in a horror movie. I can stomach a lot, but this scene makes me want to vomit. Icky.

I'm glad to see this movie is just as viscerally shocking as I remember. The aforementioned nasty gore, plus the plot is so messed up that it really is terrifying. Watching what happens to a teacher in front of her classroom full of young students is really messed up, and that's even before the big stomach-turning scene I mentioned earlier. I'm happy to report that the movie is as good as I remember. I might even like it more now that I'm older and have a better grasp of family dynamics than I did when I first saw it. Overall,  this is still one of my favorite horror movies,  and I'm so glad i got to check it out again.

October Horror Challenge 2018 #58: "Blackwater"

It's hard to find info about this movie. I expect since it's an ultra low-budget horror flick and it's got the same title as a bunch of other movies, it gets lost in the shuffle a bit. It's a shame, too, because this movie really isn't that bad. I mean, yeah, when it began and I saw how grainy it was, and how cheap it looked, like someone's home video, I was sure it was going to be terrible, but it ends up being much better than I expected.

The movie is about a group of four women who call themselves the Getaway Girls. They're old friends, and they meet up once a year or so to go on a girl's night out trip. This time, Angie, the tough girl of the group, got to pick the getaway location, so she signed them up for a secluded camping trip in the Everglades. Unfortunately for our characters, there ate some deranged men lurking in the swamp who want to tape and kill them. I hate it when that happens.

The opening scenes of this movie seem to suggest that these men have killed before, or at least been extremely violent, and gotten away with it. I don't think that's very plausible,  because there are laws, even in the swampland, and people would be missed. Whatever. Plus I mean it when I say this movie is ULTRA LOW-BUDGET,  I could have shot it in my backyard and it would have looked about the same quality.

What saves this movie are really the performances. The women are a bit awkward from time to time, and the script is a bit clunky every once in awhile,  but the women really do put a lot into their performances. I really believed they were friends and I cared what happened to them in spite of myself. This movie reminds me a lot of another ultra low-budget horror movie I like called "Five Across the Eyes," and this one has a similar "female empowerment vibe. Sue me, but I liked this one a lot more than I thought u would. I'm glad I checked it out.