The general category for posts on this blog.

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 30: Planet of the Vampires (1965)

Planet of the Vampires is an Italian science fiction horror film where two spaceships respond to a distress call on an unexplored planet. In their attempt to land, both ships become damaged. One loses its meteor deflector and the other takes engine and hull damage.

In their attempts to recover, it is discovered that some of the crews have become possessed by aliens. Those aliens want to hitch a ride off their dying planet and get to a new planet where they can thrive. Several people try to thwart the plans of the aliens, but ultimately the aliens win. However, the ship is still damaged and won’t make the long flight home. So instead, the aliens turn the ship to the nearest inhabited planet: Earth.

Dun dun DUN!!

Man oh man, the 60s!

There is just something about the way the colors look in movies from that era, especially sci-fi, fantasy and horror stuff. So vibrant! And the sets, caught halfway between realism and totally fake. With fog hiding the sound stage floor. And the fashions! Just look at these space outfits!

I want to make one of those, the male version of course, for Dragon*Con. Except, I’d need to figure out how to make it look that good while being made of a material that breathes.

Anyway, movies of this era can’t really be called “good” but they have a quality that makes them a lot of fun to watch.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames, nijomu

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 29: The Horde (2009)

My second favorite film of SHOCKtober, The Horde is a French zombie apocalypse tale. A group of police are going after a drug lord who is responsible for killing a colleague. They invade the condemned high-rise where the drug lord lives, screw up and get captured. But then zombies happen and they all need to team up to survive.

This movie is sooooo good. Unless you just cannot possibly tolerate subtitles, you must see this film if you like zombie movies. It takes the best elements of an action film and the best elements of a zombie film, and you get a high energy zombie survival action movie that is great from beginning to end.

The Horde is chock full of awesome moments. Bloody deaths, noble sacrifices, stupid people, less stupid people, actual smart people… there is this one moment, that looks a lot like this:

and that the movie reminds me at times of Dead Rising is a huge plus. But it also reminds me of Left 4 Dead as well. In fact, lots of the movie reminds me of a video game, but not in a dumb way like that terrible Doom movie.

It is a crime that I haven’t bought this on Blu-ray yet, but then again, it’s available on Netflix Instant Streaming, where I have watched it three or four times, so maybe I can be forgiven.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames, nijomu

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 28: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Rosemary’s Baby is one of those movies I have avoided for years specifically because everyone keeps telling me how great it is. I’ve done this before, and will continue to do it, because when people build up expectations like that the movie rarely ever meets those expectations. I still haven’t seen No Country For Old Men for exactly that reason – I’ll watch it the minute I can go six months without hearing about how it’s the best movie ever made. (It’s actually amazing how many “best movie ever made”s there are…)

Anyway, I’d always heard about how Rosemary’s Baby was so great and so I never watched it. But with SHOCKtober including it on the list, I did. And as expected, I was underwhelmed.

It was okay. It was slow. I’m not a Mia Farrow fan. There were no shocks or surprises. Every step of the way I was one step ahead of the film, and especially after having seen The Haunting of Julia, the end really wasn’t a surprise at all. Of course, since this movie came first, perhaps it’s Julia that shouldn’t have been the surprise…

Like many of the moody thrillers of the era, Rosemary’s Baby is well crafted. And I’d say well acted, but I truly loathe Miss Farrow in these sorts of roles (which is most of the roles that she plays), the wide-eyed innocent with the soft whiny voice. And really there is nothing wrong with the film, it’s good, it’s just not the best movie ever made, so don’t go in expecting it to be and maybe you’ll end up thinking it is…

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants - Life Between Frames, Blog @ Rotten Cotton, nijomu

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 27: Calvaire (2004)

Calvaire… I don’t really know what to say about it.

Crazy people?

It didn’t make any sense.

What a complete waste of time.

I won’t get that time back.

It’s gone now.

Gone.

And what did I fill that time with? A guy singing to the elderly? A man with a missing dog that doesn’t exists? Someone having sex with a calf? An innkeeper who emasculates a guest and pretends he is his wife?

Totally not worth it.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Life Between Frames, Blog @ Rotten Cotton

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 26: Triangle (2009)

Of all the movies in the SHOCKtober experience, Triangle is easily my favorite. And that’s saying quite a lot when you consider there are zombie films in this list. It is so good that I don’t want to talk about it. I just want you to go see it. You need to see it.

Yes, it’s a bit bloody. And yes, there are points at which you might be confused. But once you are done, and once you’ve thought about what you’ve seen, go check out this thread where some friends and I (as “jason”) discuss the film.

Feel free to come back here and continue discussion in the comments. I’d be happy to chat about this film with anyone. So, I guess that means the comments might eventually be filled with spoilers. See the movie first.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames, nijomu

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 25: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

If you like movies with resolutions, Picnic at Hanging Rock is not for you.

Students from a girls’ school, along with some chaperons, head to a local geological formation for a picnic. Three of the girls go missing, as does one of the teachers. An investigation happens. One of the girls is found. She doesn’t remember anything. A school administrator dies. The end.

This film is what you get when there isn’t a murderer with an ax stomping around killing the girls. Instead, you have the mysterious nature of an untamed land that no one fully understands simply whisking the ladies away. To what end? We’ll never know.

Director Peter Weir perfectly captured the landscape of Hanging Rock, giving it a character, making it feel at times light and airy and other times like it is almost closing in around the people. Slowly closing in. The pace of the film is languid at best. And it never really delivers a moment of release where the mystery is solved or fates are learning. It hangs open at the end, telling you that no answer is ever going to come. And of course, the pan pipe music adds to the unsettling feel the film drips with.

At the heart of Picnic at Hanging Rock is Australia itself. The image in most people’s minds, and not really too far from the truth, is an island with coastal cities surrounding an ancient Outback where things happen that cannot be explained.

As I said at the top, if you require solutions to your films, don’t go near this one. But if you are okay with not knowing what happened, then Picnic at Hanging Rock is a delightful, eerie film to experience.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 24: Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971)

Man, oh man. Tombs of the Blind Dead delivers. It begins innocent enough with a girl in a shower… it’s a beach shower next to a pool, get your mind out of the gutter! Betty is showering and another woman, Virginia, calls out to her. They are old friends. Quickly they catch up and V tells B that she and a friend are going camping and that B should come. At the sound of his name, Roger climbs up out of the pool and immediately begins to flirt with B. But doesn’t she see that V is totally upset by this?!

The next morning at the train, because you always take a train to go camping, R and V are waiting for B and her guest, but B’s guest doesn’t show up. B tries to back out of the trip, but R convinces her to go. V is so angry!!

Once on the train, R and B are all flirting again, and V stomps off to get some air. B goes out to see what is the matter and we get a dream sequence where we learn that V isn’t upset that B is flirting with R, she’s upset that R is flirting with B! Total lesbo! Then R shows up and ruins everything!  V gets super angry, goes back to her seat and even asks the guy checking tickets if they can stop the train. But he says the train never stops here. V really wants off though, and the train is pretty slow, so she gets her bag and jumps off the train. B and R call out to her but they stay on the train. R does pull the emergency cord, but the guy driving the train won’t stop because the area is cursed.

V walks until she finds an abandoned town in ruins. She makes a camp and goes to sleep. Zombies – very cool looking Zs, Zs on zombie horses – rise up from their graves and totally chase her around. She climbs on a zombie horse and tries to escape, but they run her down and drink her blood.

The next day, B and R rent horses and go looking for V. They find her shoe in the ruins after their horses run off, and they also run into cops who inform them that V has been murdered!! B and R identify the body and head off to find out more about the ruins. Then V gets up, totally one of the undead, and kills the coroner! V then tracks down B’s work, but B isn’t there, and the girl who is there sets V on fire which destroys her undead life!

B and R find out that the Zs might be Templars who returned from the crusades with Egyptian artifacts and Satanic rites. They killed people and drank blood until the townspeople captured the Ts and hung them from trees until birds plucked out their eyes. Now the Ts rise as TZs each night to continue drinking blood! But that’s not enough to scare off B and R. They get a couple new friends and head out to spend the night at the ruins. Well, the TZs rise and attack them. B manages to run away and she sees the train. This time the train stops…

Okay, this tween/valley girl shorthand is going to stop for a moment, because something happens here that makes me very very angry when it comes to horror films. Betty is running for the train, she trips and rolls down a small (very small) hill. The conductor jumps from the train to help her. As he does, the zombies ride up on their zombie horses, get off their horses, and slowly walks toward the train. This takes, almost literally, 2 minutes. During that time, the girl is acting like she is paralyzed form the waist down. The guy is dragging her and she is just dead weight. Even if I had a broken ankle or broken leg, with zombies that close, I think I could quite easily ignore the pain for the 8 seconds it would take to hobble over to the train and get the heck out of Dodge. Instead, the conductor has to struggle with her, wasting time, finally getting her into the train but now surrounded by slow blind zombies. He dies. The engineer dies. Everyone else on the train dies. But now, her legs totally working fine, Betty climbs atop the pile of wood for the engine. The train begins moving again because the brake is released and it heads to its usual destination. When it stops, Betty climbs off the train. Everyone else is dead. Everyone died because this woman couldn’t get up and move before. The conductor should have dropped her ass on the ground, gotten back in the train and drove off. That’s my one and only complaint about this movie.

… so, anyway, B, whose hair looks totally icky, looks back at the train and screams!

The main thing for me about this movie is the zombies. 100% practical effects, and they look way more convincing than some of the CGI garbage we see in newer movies. They totally work, and despite the horse riding, they are nice slow zombies of the inevitable doom sort. Now I was to watch the rest of the series, of which there are three more. But here, take a gander at a few stills of the zombies of Tombs of the Blind Dead.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames, nijomu

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 23: The Mothman Prophecies (2002)

I am the Mothman. Goo goo g’joob.

A reporter and his wife go out house hunting. While driving home, she swerves the car to avoid the giant flying moth thing with red eyes that her husband doesn’t see and wrecks the car. She is only hurt a little, but when doing the head CT the doctors discover that she has brain cancer and is going to die.

After she’s dead, the reporter finds all these drawings she made of the Mothman. Two years later, he’s driving, gets lost and winds up on the doorstep of a house intending to ask to use the phone. The man who lives there pulls a gun, angry that this is the third night in a row this reporter has come asking to use the phone. When a local police officer show up to handle things, the reporter learns that other strange things have been happening and the two of them start investigating.

The rest of The Mothman Prophecies revolves around the Mothman, or Indrid Cold, or someone, making vague yet accurate predictions of disaster as well as phone calls to phones not even plugged in anymore. More conspiracy theory with supernatural or alien overtones than real horror film, the movie mostly just has a bad script which doesn’t deserve the beautiful work of director Mark Pellington.

The only way this film will terrify you is if you are prone to hearing voices, because maybe those voices are actually alien moth ghosts predicting future disasters. For me though, I can’t believe I bothered sitting through it again. Yeah, that’s right – I’d seen this before but I’d apparently wiped the majority of it out of my head. Hopefully I can manage that trick again.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 22: Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)

Who Can Kill a Child? Our gut tells us that we should protect children. But then, most children aren’t actually trying to murder you.

Tom and Evelyn go on one last holiday before the birth of their child, and arrive on an island populated almost entirely by children. The kids they encounter don’t speak to them. And soon it becomes apparent that something isn’t quite right.

Then it become REALLY apparent when the kids start to attack them.

Children as killers is actually a fairly well tread ground at this point, but I suspect back in 1976 is was much more rare. I mean, at this point we’ve had 9 Children of the Corn movies. But even before this particular movie we had things like Village of the Damned. And still, children as murderers is really creepy. I find this stuff more disturbing than monsters or zombies or regular plain old psychopaths.

There was a lot to like in this movie as a horror film. Especially that nothing really stood out as a giant glaring plot driven idiotic decision. “Hey, let’s split up and enter these dark tunnels without weapons but waving flashlights around and yelling the name of our missing friend… that won’t be dangerous at all!” Didn’t happen here.

By far the most disturbing part of this movie is the opening, which uses documentary footage to show the atrocities committed against children all around the world beginning with the concentration camps in World War II. I like horror films, mostly because they don’t happen. I’m a huge fan of zombie films because the likelihood of a real zombie apocalypse is so near zero as to be zero. In fact, it probably is zero. But when I see real footage of real stuff that really happened… I almost turned the movie off a couple of times. If you can muscle through it, though, or skip past it, then Who Can Kill a Child? is a good horror movie to watch.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants - Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 21: Battle Royale (2000)

Before there were the Hunger Games, there was Battle Royale.

Imagine if the “kids today” were so ungrateful and disrespectful that the government decided it needed to sort them and quell rebellion through pitting the children against one another in a fight to the death… This is Battle Royale. Forty-two students, half boys and half girls, are gassed and transported to an island where they are given equipment, exploding tracking collars and three days to reduce their own number to just one winner.

Yeah, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it does make for a fun, bloody thrill ride of a movie.

You’ll see kids killing kids, and kids killing themselves. You’ll see kids get shot and stabbed and blown up. It’s just wall to wall dead kids right up until the end.

Watching BR, I can’t help but think, “If I’d seen this 10 years ago when it came out, I might have been shocked.” Instead, thanks to the torture-porn style horror films, this is merely an action film with a slightly twisted premise. And of course, I can’t help but compare it to the Hunger Games. The book, in its way, is fairly ruthless, but when HG was translated to the screen it was sanitized for mass consumption and so many of the fights and deaths of the film lack the gravity they held in the book.

Anyway… I enjoyed it. I think I’ll track down a copy of the book…

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames