4th Annual N&G 31 Days* of Halloween (2022)

Day 40.

Grimcutty

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I'm irritated by how hard this one is getting dragged. It has a cringy plot and the creature looks terrible, but imo they pulled it off with very strong acting performances and it's one to just watch and enjoy with your mind turned off.
The generational gap idea doesn't play out in the stupid trope of dumb parents/smart kids even as it toes that line. How they do it adds to the humor of the film. And the idea of a mommy blog being the cause of this malevolence is funny.
There is one scene they did poorly, but I can overlook that for what I found to be a solid horror film that entertained me.

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MOVIE #38
Salem's Lot (1979)
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A solid made-for-TV Stephen King adaptation directed by Tobe Hooper. Obviously restricted by its network budget at points, but at it's best, it's a legitimately well-told vampire story. The effects are a bit cheesy and dated, but there's still something unsettling about the way the eyes glow and how eerie they look as they float. The biggest flaw is that it's way too damn long. I guess it's to be expected since it was originally a two-part miniseries that aired across two nights, but still, the three-hour runtime is excessive. That said, I think it's worth waiting through some of the slower bits to get to the good stuff. Just maybe take an intermission.

Rating: 💀💀💀🦴

boxd.it

A ★★★½ review of Salem's Lot (1979)

This made-for-TV Stephen King adaptation had always been recommended to me, but because I know how slow and plodding 70s TV movies can be, the runtime always gave me pause. Thankfully, it was paced a lot better than I would have expected, with Tobe Hooper knowing how to work within the network...
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7. Housebound (2014)
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Very enjoyable haunted house/whodunit/comedy from New Zealand. I'd say it operates mostly as a comedy (with a very Kiwi-esque style), but it definitely ramps up the intensity and danger and gets serious when it needs to. The characters are enjoyable. I definitely recommend this one if you haven't seen it - available free on Tubi.

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D Jilla said:
7. Housebound (2014)
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Very enjoyable haunted house/whodunit/comedy from New Zealand. I'd say it operates mostly as a comedy (with a very Kiwi-esque style), but it definitely ramps up the intensity and danger and gets serious when it needs to. The characters are enjoyable. I definitely recommend this one if you haven't seen it - available free on Tubi.

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HUGELY underrated gem. This movie is too much damn fun.
 
Not a movie but have been watching Midnight Club on Netflix. Only a few episodes in but it's not capturing me like Flanagan's other series but it's not bad. It reminds me of Are you Afraid of the Dark which I used to watch when I was younger... And maybe a bit of Ghostwriter, anyone remember that show?
 
Rewatched Silent Hill for my daily challenge theme. Although the theme literally stated the movie, they said it could be anything comparable, but since we have a tradition of watching the movies related to our costumes each year and the roomie is pulling from the Silent Hill game series, we took this as our chance to check Silent Hill proper off the list.

She's a big SH buff, and I've played SH2 and PT. We both fall into the camp of not being fans of either of the movie adaptations. There's some fun imagery here, but they failed to capture the psychological horror of what I enjoyed from the games and overwrote themselves into a tangled, contradictory mess.

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#29.

Halloween (2007) 💀💀

I always think Rob Zombie could make a decent movie if he would stop writing them. If he could just take someone else's script and add his visuals and style, I think there could be something that was actually kinda good. The best he's done was Lords Of Salem, a slow burn that didn't have a whole lot of dialog, but still fell apart in the 3rd act.

And he needs to stop casting his wife in big roles.

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Significant Other (2022)

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I got to finally finish the second half of this one and pretty much echo @Hemotep thoughts on it. It almost felt like a different movie in the second half but I really enjoyed the entire thing and it's always nice when a movie can land the ending as nothing is more frustrating to me then a solid/great movie with a horrible ending which ruins everything before it. Maika Monroe has endless potential in the Horror genre imo and has dropped two really solid performances this year and several others recently but hopefully she gets attached to another GREAT project like It Follows soon because that's still easily one of my favorite Horror films of the past 10 years.

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Speaking of Maika Monroe, I just realized she had a series out in 2020 that looks interesting called The Stranger that was a Quibi exclusive.. Anyone ever watch this?​
 
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The She-Creature (1956)

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This one has been on my watchlist for a reallyyyy long time as many people that recommend The Creature From The Black Lagoon (Who is my favorite Universal Monster) stuff mention this whether it's positive or mostly negative. Welllll, this movie was just bad imo. I'm glad to have finally watched it and while the actual design of the monster is kind of original for the time especially it looks horrifically bad on film haha even for 50's B Level. It had a solid cast and a few good performances but it simply wasn't good just kind of stuck in mediocrity at it's best. It had a bit of that classic 50's sci-fi charm to it at least though but I wouldn't recommend it unless you need something to help you go to sleep.

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Asylum (1972)

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Third and final movie I watched which was another one that's been on the watch list for awhile. Like most anthologies this one had a few strong stories and a few weak ones. The first two including the one with Peter Cushing were far and away the best and i'd probably rate the first half a solid 4 but sadly it dropped off a cliff after that and the third story was very mediocre followed by the fourth and final story which I was fighting to stay awake for and wasn't very entertained by it. I still had a good time overall with it and nearly all the practical effects were extremely well done and creepy along with mostly solid performances all around but i'll have to give it another watch sometime when i'm not as tired and that might change my opinion a bit on the second half.


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#30.

Halloween II (2009) 💀💀💀

I like this slightly better than Zombie's original remake - mostly because he made his own movie (it still isn't written all that well)....there's the bit of "remake" with Laurie in the hospital, but it was all a dream, so it doesn't count.

I took a pic of this Unrated version - as that is the only version of this that is on Blu Ray, but I watched the theatrical version streaming on Peacock....since I hadn't watched that version in quite some time.

The theatrical is just an easier movie to watch, the characters aren't yelling at each other all the time - and Laurie is a bit easier to like in this version.

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gaporter said:
MOVIE #1
Mad God (2021)
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Starting this Halloween season off with a bang! This was an interesting film to be sure. Animator-director Phil Tippett spent 30 years putting it together and the time and effort really comes across. Everything is so detailed, so fully realized. I wish more people would recognize what an awesome medium stop-motion can be, especially for horror. Movies like this really push the limits of what the human brain is capable of coming up with and putting on the screen and if animation as a whole got more respect, surreal gems like this wouldn't be so rare. Because it is so grimly gruesome and experimental in form, I imagine it won't appeal to broader audiences as much, but sick bastards like me will sure get a kick out of it. An enormously impressive work of art.

Rating: 💀💀💀💀💀

Also, just as an aside, now that I have a Letterboxd account I'll be logging the movies I watch on there as well. My reviews here will probably just be more direct versions of whatever I write on LB, but I figure it wouldn't hurt to attach them anyways in case anyone wants to read them. Thanks to @LeeVing for setting this up once again!!
boxd.it

A ★★★★½ review of Mad God (2021)

Awe-inspiring. Phil Tippett's decades-in-the-making passion project is an enormous achievement in filmmaking. I can't even begin to fathom how much time and effort went into every frame of this, every minute little detail. I hope that seeing labors of love like this help to convince any skeptics...
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Watched this a few nights ago and loved it. What a labor of strange love lol
 
Ever since watching the GdT-backed Don't Be Afraid of the Dark remake last year, I've been itching to see its made-for-TV original.

Having spent my fair share of time searching for the most inexpensive way to view it, I figured I probably owed it to myself at this point to finally spring for the $3 rental on YouTube.

Sure enough, this is a solid little film! On its base, it's another "nobody believes the woman" story which makes it easy to empathize with the central character and feel contempt for her counterparts. There's some fun production involved too. Good by TV standards, which probably adds to its reputation—but I question whether its reception would have been as notable if it had been a theatrical release.

GdT and team definitely understood the assignment of raising this to cinema-level entertainment, despite my misgivings about their overall conclusion. (It was fine, I just felt some alternative decisions would have been more satisfying given the prominent arch of the relationship between the girl and her dad's girlfriend.)

The original is simple yet satisfying with its creepy house and things that go bump in the night.

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It is my last day off after giving myself an impromptu stay-cation by taking last week off work.

I'm looking at the 2 most recent Halloween movies today, and then it won't be until Saturday that I'll get to Halloween Ends.


And yes. I hate myself for using the word "Stay-cation"
 
Finally wrapped up another tonight:
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It's fine. Way too plodding, way too underwhelming. Liked where it was going but like the short story it just ends. This one probably needed King to stay out of it and let it get more Hollywood. Did like some of the social commentary.
 
The Stranger (2020)

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I ended up finding this entire series on Youtube so I watched it last night and at first I was going to just watch an episode or two at a time but instead binged all 13 episodes at once haha.. It's from that massive failure of a streaming service Quibi and there silly idea of super short episodes. They are all only 7-8 minutes long so it's basically like watching a movie cut up in 13 parts. It was kind of cool how they separated it though which made it less distracting, they pulled a "24" and made each episode take place over an hour so the entire thing takes place from 7pm to 8am. Once again Maika Monroe nailed her role but everyone was solid in it I thought. For some reason when I read the reviews a lot of people tore it apart because it wasn't "perfectly believable" but I enjoyed the hell out of it personally outside of maybe the ending being a little over the top but it didn't ruin it for me at all. It could have absolutely been a bit more polished but it was a fun concept and I couldn't stop watching it.

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Close to a 4 though.​

Quibi is long gone but I found a Link for all 13 Episodes on Youtube

Also the guy on that youtube channel above has the full Anna Kendrick show that was on Quibi as well which looks insanely weird but super interesting haha.. It's this show Dummy (2020) 🤔
 
#32.

Halloween Kills (2021) 💀💀💀💀

Again...I don't see all the hate. I get it not being in the top 5 of peoples Halloween ranking, but it's better than any in the Thorn trilogy.

Could have done without all the "Evil Dies Tonight", but overall it isn't a bad middle of a trilogy.

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