There's not much to say about Halloween that hasn't been said. Halloween is the preeminent slasher flick - all slash, no bullshit. John Carpenter made this movie at the point in his career when he had everything to lose. He knew he needed a hit to ensure his place in the public eye - and he hit it out of the park with Halloween. The creepiness of the film is unmatched in the genre. Michael Myers is the ultimate cold blooded killer. We see him, we see what he does, we know his past, but we still don't understand him. The character Dr. Loomis says it all: "No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong."
A huge amount of the success of Halloween, and the creepiness of Michael Myers as the killer, is due to Dr. Loomis, expertly portrayed by Donald Pleasance. Pleasance acted the shit out of that movie. His paranoid rants about the insipid vileness of Myers MAKES you believe the guy is evil. A blank mask, a blank look, a lumbering walk, and Michael Myers becomes the vessel for all of the audiences fears. We are left to imagine how he must be operating, what he must be thinking. Michael Myers IS the boogeyman.
Michael Myers belongs to a small fraternity of ultra-famous horror film monsters from the late 70s / early 80s. Myers, Jason from Friday the 13th, and Freddy from Nightmare on Elm Street showed horror audiences that there were still things you should be afraid of in this world. It was no accident that each film spawned a plethora of sequels. These movies pwn! All of them! But for me, Halloween is the best. Freddy relied a lot on effects to get his scare through. Jason owed a good amount of his success to the juiciness and goriness of his kills. Myers doesn't leave a lot of gore behind. Halloween doesn't have very many effects at all. It's just damn creepy. The realness of the climactic scene gets to me every time, with Jamie Lee Curtis cowering in the closet and Myers manhandling his way in. Bad ass. I figured I owed Carpenter a big nod for Halloween. Even if you've known about the film for years now, it's worth checking it again. The sequels are even worth a second look... just not the third one. I'd like to forget that film ever happened.
- Halloween (1978) on Wikipedia 
Some talented (read: twisted) individual has taken it upon himself to make a trailer for an imaginary live-action Thundercats movie. I bet Warner Bros will have it pulled from YouTube when they should be getting their ass in gear and making this movie.
- Read up on Thundercats @ Wikipedia
Basket Case (1982)
Before I watched Basket Case, a fine piece of schlock cinema if I’ve ever seen one, I had noticed the film countless times in rental-places buried in the Horror section. Also, countless people had recommended Basket Case to me based on my peculiar taste in movies (yes, I do think Astro Zombies is better than Resident Evil!). I’m not sure exactly why I was saving it until now to watch… maybe I saved it to remind myself who I really am, right when I needed it the most. It did just that. Watching Basket Case was a life affirming experience for me.
I can safely say that I have never seen another film quite like Basket Case. I really appreciated the way the main character’s formerly conjoined freak-twin scurried about the floor as he hunted his kill. I really appreciated the way endlessly competing screams and sprays of deep red blood littered the screen as victims were man-handled into mutilated corpses. I really appreciated the way… well, I guess the murder/rape scene was a bit much even for me. I do appreciate a film that manages to honestly gross me out, though.
Gross-out was definitely achieved, especially with the excruciatingly slow shot of a nasty low rent hooker pulling off her panties. Basket Case is grimy all over! All of this blathering doesn’t mean I think it was well made, exactly. On the contrary, my friend. Basket Case is one of those films populated by actors that aren’t even able to behave like actual human beings on camera. Some of the delivery of already-questionable dialogue is simply priceless. And it seemed like a single set was used for every scene, everything from a seedy motel to a vet’s office. The crap quality of every frame shot for the film was bizarrely unique, however. It’s crap, but it’s damn entertaining crap. Exactly the kind of bullshit I enjoy.
- Basket Case on Wikipedia
- Rent Basket Case from Netflix
In theaters January 16, 2009
I was walking to work this morning and, cheesy as it may seem, a movie poster for My Bloody Valentine 3-D completely arrested my attention. The poster was quite rugged, in fact. I couldn't find it available for download but you can peep it on the IMDb page. It featured a keen looking set of consecutive images featuring a pick-axe wielding maniac comin' at ya, as if to imply 3-D. If you didn't already know, I'm a complete sucker for 3-D. I'm really excited about the new trend toward 3-D movies in theater.
This movie has grabbed my attention so much so that I'm considering breaking my own boycott on film remakes. Yes, My Bloody Valentine 3-D is a remake of a slasher flick from 1981 with the same title (minus the 3-D part). Everything I've read about this new one makes it sound hella entertaining, specifically that it's bloody-as-hell and boasts impressive use of modern 3-D technology. And Tom Atkins plays a minor role. I became an Atkins fan after watching Night of the Creeps for the first time. It's good to see him in another horror flick (he's done a bunch, but none too rescently). It's going to be a hard choice whether to see this movie in full theatrical 3-D glory, or honor my own boycott of remakes. My girlfriend may just have to decide for me...
- My Bloody Valentine 3-D on IMDb
- Review for My Bloody Valentine 3-D on Twitch
- My Bloody Valentine (1981) on Wikipedia
- The Case Against Remakes from SSK's Blog
- About the Resurgance of 3-D from SSK's Blog
The way the internet moves these days, this already old news (5 days old!) but I thought I should share anyway. There's news about the feature film script adaptation of World War Z! I got real excited back in March 2007 when I read online that they had already started to adapt World War Z into a feature film script. So excited, I wrote an article about it. J. Michael Straczynski, the dude who created Babylon 5, is penning what may prove to be the bravest adaptation of a horror novel ever undertaken, not to mention the most epic zombie film of all time. World War Z, baby! You can't handle that much zombie flavor! Check out a quote from Straczynski that I quoted from a recent article on Shocktillyoudrop:
"Most zombie movies to this point have been small, focusing on a few people in a house. And this has got real scare. You're in India with hundreds of boats trying to get out of there with a tidal wave of zombies. The scale of what we’re doing here is phenomenal."
The real news, though, is that Straczynski is claiming to have remained extremely faithful to the source material. The nagging question on my mind was always whether or not they would include the main character in the film, the guy conducting the interviews in the novel. There would be so many amazing opporunities to fade and cut in between the stories and the people telling them! Check out the juiciest part of this story. I can't wait:
"Let's show the book being written. We follow this guy all over the world as he goes on these interviews, and he has his own personal story as well. You're cutting between the past and the present, how he got to this point."
- Read the article on Shocktillyoudrop.com
- Grab the book on paperback from Amazon.com
aka Sugar Hill
Before watching The Zombies of Sugar Hill, my girlfriend asked, "HOW old is this zombie movie", to which I replied, "70s", and she settled down to watch with a heavy groan. That pretty much says it all. Most of the zombie movies from the 1970s just weren't that good. The voodoo zombie formula had gotten tired by that point, but schlock film makers kept plodding along. Still, though, I enjoy some of the ones that hit the right level of cheesy theatrics to keep my attention. The Zombies of Sugar Hill managed to do that.
I thoroughly enjoyed the flick, but I wouldn't say the same for the female viewing audience I was attached to. She didn't appreciate the ridiculous amounts of hardcore ghetto-speak nearly as much as I did. The Zombies of Sugar Hill is definitely a blaxploitation movie first, and a zombie movie second. There were tons of zombie scenes, though. One aspect of the film that won me over was the make-up job on the black voodoo zombies. They genuinely looked creepy as they loped through the screen with their machetes in hand. The most magnificent part of the zombie look had to be the eyes, all bugged out and green. Very cool.
Baron Samedi was a bad ass in Sugar Hill. He shows up in iconic top hat with glasses, cigar, suit, and cane. They did much better with his character in this movie than they did in the much-higher-budgeted Live and Let Die (the James Bond flick from 1973). The guy who played Samedi in Sugar Hill commanded the screen with his creepy facial ticks and related nonsense. I originally read about this film in an article from a reprinted issue of Tales of the Zombie (the classic comic by Marvel). I had been saving this film for a rainy day (which happens often in San Francisco) and I have to say, I was not disappointed. Partially because I knew what I was getting into...
- The Zombies of Sugar Hill on Wikipedia
- The Zombies of Sugar Hill on IMDb
- Sugar Hill (1974) on Amazon.com
Black Jesus The Second Coming, from Aaron McGruder and the producers of The Boondocks
UPDATE: Check out more Black Jesus on DEATH BY VIDEO
