Plus, keep in mind that the Scream “Ghostface” mask is a hot legal topic. The original movie licensed the mask design from a Halloween costume company, and the owners have turned out to be very litigious.
Unfortunately, Fear Street falling under the “rubic of homage” is the very thing I’ve come to despise in horror films/television shows, thanks to things like American Horror Story. No wonder I wasn’t paying rapt attention to the details. What’s the story with the author of the books FS was based on? This Stine guy I always assumed was an author of horror stories for young teenagers, and because of that one would expect many, many overly-familiar horror tropes. Excuse me, I mean “homages.” I never read him that’s for sure. Is he the author of Goosebumps, or that a different guy entirely? Tbh, it did seem a bit rough and gory to be derived from horror stories I assumed were meant for very young readers.
Well, that was the problem (or one of them) with Hounds of Love. It didn’t punch you in the gut compared to many other horror films/crime dramas in a slightly similar vein. All’s well that ends well.
Speaking of Hounds of Love, years ago there was a low-buget but well-crafted horror film made in the USA with an almost identical premise to Hounds of Love but it had very light black comedy elements and didn’t take itself nearly as seriously. I think it had “American” in the title, and the actor playing the male in the couple looked maddeningly like Steve Buscemi . Anyone remember this? If so, please help me identify it. It was made in an age when low-budget filmmakers still used celluloid, I believe, and actually knew about film and how to edit. I quite liked it at the time, just not enough to remember its title these days. It was probably around 2004
Goosebumps for younger readers, Fear Street for teens. So yes, same guy. Not sure how much involvement he had with the Fear Street movies. My understanding is they do not directly adapt any of the books. (I never read Fear Street because they just looked like slasher stories and I don’t usually care about slashers.)
What a weird trailer lol Reminded me slightly of the first episode of that spanish horror series 30 Coins which started off well but fizzled by the 2nd episode.
Speaking of weird foreign horror, wanted to mention the Scandinavian horror film Gaia (2021) about a father and son + a wounded female ranger (due to their pungi traps) living off the grid in the forest. Their chief antagonists are mushroom men. William Hope Hodgson, move over (in your grave!)! Matango, Fungus of Terror aka Attack of the Mushroom People (1963) was approximately 100X better.
(Sorry, don’t know how to embed YT videos here)
Back in the old days I remember assuming that “R.L. Stine” was a pen name owned by the publisher and collectively used by a dozen authors or more because there was no way one guy wrote all those books.
That was certainly a common practice but as far as I know R.L. Stine is indeed one dude.
Trick (2019) - What happened to Omar Epps? In 2004 he transitioned from playing badass dudes in movies to largely playing Dr. Foreman in the TV series House. His movie career just sort of petered out after that and he’s been doing direct-to-video/streaming stuff like Trick and 3022 between roles on TV shows. The guy has been working steadily, but it was still a shock to see him in this low budget slasher garbage alongside Jamie Kennedy.
A teenager nicknamed Trick (short for Patrick) goes nuts at a Halloween party and kills some other kids. He’s captured, but escapes, then he’s presumed dead when he jumps into a river after getting shot by a police detective played by Omar Epps. Trick then comes back every Halloween and kills more people. Is he a ghost? A supernatural force for evil? The “shocking reveal” is about as dumb as it could be.
A shame, he was great on House.
I haven’t listened to the movie podcasts for a while, since I never go anywhere anymore, so don’t really have any time to listen to any podcasts. But I was on a long car trip, so I listened to the Oscars podcast (from only three months ago!). Anyway, there aren’t many Oscar movies I really want to see (although apparently The Father is good), but Kelly mentioned a movie called Shifter that he liked, but Tom didn’t. It sounded kind of interesting, so I checked it out.
Gotta say… I think I’m on Tom’s side on this one. It had a potentially interesting premise: extremely socially awkward woman invents time machine, but it has the side effect of unmooring her from time, so she jumps around randomly.
However, it never really does anything with the premise. She jumps around, nothing really interesting happens to her as a result of jumping around, and she doesn’t really learn anything from the experience.
The movie it most reminds me of is The Incredible Shrinking Man. In both movies, a person suffers from an unnatural malady. They have various difficulties arising from the malady, and both movies end the same way – the person simply disappears from the universe. However, at least in the Incredible Shrinking Man, the difficulties are somewhat interesting (I mean, he fights a giant spider!), and he has an epiphany at the end about the meaning of life.
Ha ha, you watched Shifter!
I’m guessing the folks behind Shifter don’t know the first thing about Incredible Shrinking Man, which is an astute comparison, @JoshL. But it seems to me Shifter’s only real inspiration was Cronenberg’s Fly. Which worked largely because of its two leads. Shifter, however, gives us a dud lead, a dud love interest, the most no-budget genius/mad scientist production design you’ll ever see, and some half-assed CG body horror. Also, it’s really mean to the poor cat. The most terrifying thing in Shifter is the lead actress’ attempts to make lovey sounds at her cat. Horrific stuff. I’m still having nightmares.
-Tom
Rot - uh, a slightly pod personish tale that isn’t about anything in particular ( I mean it’s barely about infected pod persons infected people) and is mostly pretty staid and then at the end the main character - an overworked/stressed grad student pursuing her thesis and in turn being pursued by her infected ex - strips naked to embrace said infected ex and cuts off his monster penis and then it grows into a really big monster penis and sort of sprouts some shit and she hammers that to, uh, death I guess, and all the infected sort of paw at the corpse of the ex and then the movie ends.
The Aristocrats!
No kidding. The end is entirely out of left field. There’s nothing to identify the infected other than behavior up until the finale. I was floored.
Kandisha - a French movie about a trio of young women in the poorer part of a French city. One of them is accosted by an ex who’s drunk and attempts to rape her. In the aftermath she recalls an Algerian legend one of the other girls told the trio in the abandoned building they’ve been tagging and summons a vengeful djinn named Kandisha. The next morning, her ex has died, hit by a car. In fairly rapid succession, other men in their lives start dying in horrifying ways, and it becomes clear that Kandisha is real and she’s actually been summoned…but it turns out that she won’t leave again until she’s claimed six men, not just the one she was summoned for. And she wants ones they care about. Cue consulting a local imam’s assistant and then the sorceror he knows (apparently, his dad) for advice and eventually exorcism, and so on. It’s okay. not especially scary, but it was well enough acted and I just enjoyed the different cultural environment of the whole thing. On Shudder.
The Canal - Irish movie about a guy who works for a film archive and discovers police footage from the turn of the century surrounding a savage murder that was committed at his house. This leaves him in an unsettled state, and it doesn’t help that it turns out that the murderer killed his wife over the affair she was having and…huh. Seems like our protagonist’s wife is having an affair and…then she goes missing. And turns up drowned in the canal by their house. And from here his grip on reality really starts slipping and he’s behaving very oddly, freaking out his boss (/coworker? it’s not really clear) who seems to have a crush on him, and the young nanny that’s helping care for his son, and seeing ghosts and strange things everywhere and finding a whole litany of terrible crimes surrounding this canal and… it’s also okay. I liked it well enough, but I had a sense of what was going on that proved correct, and I was kind of looking for a ghost movie which this…only sort of is. It’s made pretty clear at the end that there is something supernatural going on, but also the degree to which any of the things he perceives are real cannot be trusted.. On Shudder.
Resident Evil: Extinction - zombie movie so technically it counts. I knew these movies got dumb but the leap from the second one to this one is profound and random, and it is very, very stupid. Despite this and Milla Jovovich playing a character that does not exist in the source material but is Paul W.S. Anderson’s wife so must do everything important in these movies and who gains new and increasingly ridiculous superpowers every movie so far but so much more so in Extinction, more entertaining than Apocalypse, which was simply a dumb and rote zombie movie.
Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness I guess technically a Netflix miniseries but it’s a CGI movie in four half hour chunks. Nothing terribly interesting to say about it but like the other CGI Resident Evil movies (Degeneration, Damnation, and Vendetta), it’s actually competently executed for the most part, far more so than the live action ones, looks very good, and feels pretty much exactly like the better story cutscenes in the games, in every sense, including plenty of ridiculous nonsense, quotably silly lines, gnarly biomonsters, and melodrama. You probably know whether that’s something you’d like. Personally, I love 'em.
Come True - literally dreamy kinda cosmic horror sort of thing about a young woman who gets into a sleep study at a university to have somewhere to sleep that isn’t her mother’s house or the streets. She’s having vivid, surreal nightmares and after an ill-advised off-script test from one of the students running the sleep study, things start getting really weird and she’s losing time, sleepwalking, etc. Mostly really powerfully atmospheric, understated. A lot of things are sketched for you rather than explained step by step. Gorgeous cinematography. Unfortunately I felt like the very end, while not necessarily a bad idea in and of itself, kind of undercut the rest of the movie by an unexpected and abrupt premise shift in the final shots.
PS: This is not a recent watch, but at one point in this thread I gushed about a French werewolf movie called Teddy I saw in an online film festival sometime last year. At the time I couldn’t really exhort you to see it for yourself because it wasn’t in distribution. It just hit Shudder. If you have access, see it:
Teddy | Ad-Free and Uncut | SHUDDER?
A Return to Salem’s Lot - I suppose the “A” is because there could have been other returns to Salem’s Lot, and this was just this particular return.
As to this particular return, I lack the mathematics to describe what I just watched.
It’s. . .
IDK man.
I was going to joke that Michael Moriarty is too good for this but we all now that’s not true.
Also, I did not recognize Tara Reid at all but she has a prominent role.
Eraserhead
WTF man.
So the whole thing is just one long crawl nightmare, and then at one point there’s another nightmare inside of the nightmare, but it all ends in a dream. Happy ending?