Wind Chill (movie #102)

I saw this movie a few years ago for the first of these Halloween challenges that I did,and it's one of the few that I remember from that challenge. It's so bleak and mean-spirited that it's hard to forget. First of all, the characters aren't the most likable in the world. Two college students who don't know each other very well decide to carpool home to save money. The guy secretly likes the girl but she doesn't like him (she doesn't like much of anything, as she botches and complains throughout much of the movie, treating him like shit). On the way home, they get into an accident on a deserted stretch of road, and soon they're trapped in a snowbank without much hope of rescue. To top it off, they start seeing people around them who turn out to be apparitions of spirits of other people who died on that stretch of road. Soon they're fighting frostbite and trying to survive while also battling ghostly visitors from the past.

It's a pretty good little movie. the atmosphere is so thick that it actually has me shivering because it looks so COLD onscreen, the ghosts are pretty cool looking,and there's even a mystery to solve that had me intrigued. I really enjoyed watching this movie again and it's one indie that I can safely recommend since most of the pitfalls of indie filmmaking aren't in evidence here (bad acting,horrible special effects, etc.)

Diary of the Dead (movie #101)

When I was a kid, my brother and I weren't allowed to watch horror movies, but my mom thought that if a movie was black and white that it couldn't do us much harm,so she let us watch the original "Night of the Living Dead" from 1968. I was excited to watch that movie at first, even though I thought an old black and white movie couldn't affect me very much, but let me tell you...that movie messed me up. I was young, and I still expected my movies to end with the good guys triumphing over the bad guys, so the kind of downbeat ending that the original NOTLD movie has was something I didn't expect,but I never forgot how that ending made me feel.

This movie is George Romero's latest "Dead" movie, a continuation of his zombie epic that he began over 30 years ago,and to me, this movie had almost as much of an impact on me that the original did back then. A lot of people don't like ":Diary of the Dead," and I get why. It's cheesy at times and a little silly with some bad acting, but that doesn't bother me too much. the movie follows people of my generation, disillusioned college students who live their lives on the internet and get a lot of their news from YouTube. When the world starts to end, news spreads fast, and an amateur film crew of students at a local college decide to drive around the countryside documenting the events to make a film for whoever is left behind.

A lot of the movie is shaky cam footage, and the people in the movie fight amongst each other the way most people do in zombie movies. A lot of that is captured on the film ans the gravity of the situation reaches them and they realize that the world is changing and things will never be the same for them. It's pretty bleak watching people die and watching the film crew slowly lose hope. the movie ends with a scene that I'll never forget (just as the original NOTLD did) asking me "Are we worth saving?" Since I ask the same question myself a lot, so I appreciated this movie even more because of that. This movie isn't perfect, but it really gets under my skin, and I appreciate it for that. In that way, it hearkens back to the power of the original NOTLD and it was the perfect thing for me to watch for my wrap up of the challenge this year.

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2 (movie #100)

Wow, this was a mean-spirited little movie. Not that that's a bad thing. Horror movies are supposed to be disturbing and evil,right? I don't know how the abysmal slasher cash-in "Prom Night" inspired this nasty follow up, but I'm glad it did. this movie follows the story of Mary Lou, a bitchy, rebellious teenager in the 50s who terrorizes a local priest in the opening scene of the film. Mary Lou likes to terrorize people, namely her fellow students at school, and she moves from one guy to another, dumping her boyfriend on prom night to hook up with someone hotter. When a prank goes wrong, Mary Lou is burned to death in front of the rest of the students at prom (like a witch being burned at the stake, which wasn't lost on this viewer). Fast forward to the late 80s, and that school is gearing up for prom again when Mary Lou decides to return from the grave for revenge. She possesses the body of a sweet, innocent girl and pretty much turns her into the embodiment of pure evil (what a bitch).

this movie is really mean-spirited. Mary Lou likes to do horrible things to people, and in one scene, she walks around a locker room, totally nude, terrorizing a fellow student. this scene surprised me. I hear a lot of bitching that movies these days are mean-spirited and they don't offer much hope for the redemption of the characters, but it's clear from watching this movie that this attitude is nothing new. I've never seen this movie before (I didn't like the original Prom Night, so I wasn't interested in seeing the follow up) but I'm really glad I checked it out for the challenge this year. to me, this is what the challenge is all about: discovering cool little horror movies you wouldn't have otherwise seen.

Skeleton Dance (Wildcard #6) (movie # 99)

When I was a kid, this was one of my favorite cartoon shorts. They played it every fall around Halloween during the Saturday morning cartoons my brother and I watched. It takes place in a graveyard where a bunch of animals are spooked by the atmosphere. An owl is sitting in a tree hooting at the audience,being blown about by the wind. Two cats are hissing at each other (much the way my cat hisses at her own reflection in the window) until a skeleton climbs out of a grave and scares them literally out of their skin. Then some other skeletons join the first one, and they begin dancing around,enjoying the music,until the song end is and they climb back in their graves. I haven't seen this cartoon in years, but I'm glad I looked it up for this challenge (and I'm glad I saved all my wildcards but one for the last day, so I could catch up on fun little movies like this on Halloween).

The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) (Wildcard #5) (movie #98)

Having recently watched a newer update on the classic Edgar Allen Poe tale "The Fall of the House of Usher," it was intriguing to go back and watch this, one of the earliest silent films based on this story. Let me tell you, if I thought that movie was trippy and weird (and I did) it has NOTHING on this little silent movie. the dreamlike/nightmarish imagery in this movie is crazy, and it's hard to tell the dream world from reality (which I suspect was the point). This silent movie follows the original story a little more closely than the recent update I watched a few weeks ago (a man goes to the ancestral home of his friend whose sister has recently died of a mysterious disease, only to discover that something more sinister might be going on and she might not be dead) but the nightmarish imagery makes it hard to tell what is going on. I remember reading the Poe story and not being sure what was going on either, though, so I think this is just a theme of this story. Nevertheless, I'm glad I watched this, because it gave me a better appreciation for the "House of Usher" update of the story.

The Devil in a Convent (Wildcard #4) (movie #97)

his is another short movie that's over 100 years old. It's from the year 1899,and it depicts a convent full of nuns that are suddenly terrorized by a demonic little guy (perhaps it's Satan himself; that part isn't totally clear) who appears out of a portal to hell (represented by a trapdoor in the floor) and begins filling the convent with demonic images until he's banished by a Priest. The quality of the primitive special effects is impressive, considering the year this movie was made. It's short, so there's not much of a plot (but then again, some movies today that are hours long don't really have a plot either) but it was still cool to see the early special effects at work trying to tell a creepy little story.

The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (Wildcard # 3) (movie #96)

This is a horror short from the 1890s, and a lot of people call this "the first horror movie." It's only a few seconds long, but it's done in the style of a newsreel, and it depicts the execution of Mary Stuart. The clip shows her kneeling before the executioner, who raises his blade and chops her head off, grabbing it and holding it over his head triumphantly. In the olden days, people used to gather to watch public executions, cheering and jeering when criminals "got what they deserved" (and people say society today is violent). This was a ghoulish practice, but by the 1890s,it was history, so I can't imagine the uproar this movie caused when people saw what appeared to be a woman getting her head chopped off onscreen. By this point I'm sure everyone knew the story of Mary Stuart's execution and knew it was long in the pasty, but if this was the first murder ever captured on film, I wonder how many people believed the image was true? I wonder if people reacted to these images the way they did to a movie like "The Exorcist," running from theaters in terror? It's cool to witness a part of history like this (and to see an onscreen decapitation that's over 100 year sold that's still better than most movie decapitations today).