Scary Movie Review: Ginger Snaps (2001)

Title: Ginger Snaps
Release Date: May 11, 2001
Director: John Fawcett
Production Company: Motion International
Summary/Review:

The Fitzgerald sisters – Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) – are teenage sisters born a year apart who are also the closest friends.  Their morbid interests make them social outcasts at school. Ginger, the older sister, is the leader and they have a relationship a lot like Jennifer and Needy in the later film Jennifer’s Body.  Actually, that movie is a good comparison since they both have feminist themes, in this case with lycanthropy standing in for the changes of puberty, as well as dealing with the struggles of female friendship.

Towards the beginning of the film Ginger has her first period (several years later than is typical) which draws the attention of a werewolf who attacks her.  As Ginger slowly transforms into a werewolf, her social behavior and the way she treats Brigitte also change. The movie is interesting in that Ginger turns into a werewolf, including growing a tale, over the course of a month rather than all at once. Brigitte seeks help from the local arborist/drug dealer Sam Miller (Kris Lemche) who has experience with the plants that might cure Ginger’s lycanthropy.

The movie has some disturbing body horror but most of the worst gore occurs off-screen.  I feel the movie has some strong ideas but the execution is hit or miss.  But it’s definitely a notch above your typical teen horror film.

Rating: ***

Scary Movie Review: Carnival of Souls (1962)

Title: Carnival of Souls
Release Date: September 26, 1962
Director: Herk Harvey
Production Company: Harcourt Productions
Summary/Review:

This movie begins in media res, three young women in a car at a stoplight are challenged to a drag race by young men in another car.  In the course of the contest, the men’s car pushes the women’s car over a bridge.  In the midst of the efforts to pull the car out of the deep, muddy river, one of the women, Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), emerges from the water.  She seems unharmed but also unaffected by the crash.

A few days later, Mary drives to Utah where she takes a job as a church organist and lives in a rooming house.  She finds herself haunted by the vision of a corpselike man (director Herk Harvey) wherever she goes.  Mary is also inexplicably drawn to an abandoned pavilion on shore of Great Salt Lake that was once used for a carnival.  In addition to supernatural torments, Mary also has to deal with persistent come-ons from the creepy John Linden (Sidney Berger), a fellow boarder.

The movie oozes atmosphere as Mary deals with the increasing mystery and terror of her life.  The film feels a lot like a Twilight Zone episode and its style influenced directors such as George Romero and David Lynch.  One thing for sure is I’ll never hear church organ music the same way again.

Rating: ****

Scary Movie Review: Skeleton of Mrs. Morales (1960)

Title: El Esqueleto de la señora Morales
Release Date: May 26, 1960
Director: Rogelio A. González
Production Company: Alfa Film S.A.
Summary/Review:

The Morales are an unhappy couple.  At first, it appears that Pablo (Arturo de Córdova), a taxidermist by trade, ignores his disabled wife Gloria (Amparo Rivelles) to go drinking with his friends.  But its soon revealed that Pablo is actually a kind and amiable person, and Gloria is manipulative, overly pious, and downright untruthful about what she says about her husband.  Tensions build to a breaking point.  Did I mention that Pablo also mounts human skeletons for medical study?  That turns out to be important to the plot of this film.

This movie is wickedly funny and deeply uncomfortable, witnessing the bad blood between a long married couple.  Córdova does a good job making Pablo a likable character even when his actions are beyond the pale.  Will he find justice on earth, or  in heaven?

Rating: ****

Scary Movie Review: A Bucket of Blood (1959)

Title: A Bucket of Blood
Release Date: October 21, 1959
Director: Roger Corman
Production Company: Alta Vista Productions
Summary/Review:

Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) is a socially awkward and dimwitted busboy at The Yellow Door Cafe where Bohemians and artists socialize and share their art.  Wanting to become an artist to impress his co-worker Carla (Barboura Morris), Walter starts working with clay at home.  After accidentally killing his landlady’s cat, Walter encases its body in clay and presents it as his sculpture to the denizens of The Yellow Door.

When his art is well-received by the beat poet Maxwell H. Brock (Julian Burton) and others, Walter decides he needs to create more large scale works of … humans.  You can see where this is going. Cafe owner Leonard (Antony Carbone) cottons on to how Walter is making his “art” early on, but plays mum when he realizes how much money Walter is bringing in.

This movie is a wickedly funny satire of Beatniks and scenesters of the 1950s. A lot of the jokes still apply to hipsters six decades later.  Plus ça change …! Miller does a great job of making Walter sympathetic even when he becomes a killer.  He kind of reminds me of Lenny from Of Mice and Men in that he doesn’t seem fully cognizant of the enormity of his actions.  Overall the movie looks pretty impressive for a low budget film shot in only five days!

Rating: ***1/2

Scary Movie Review: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

Title: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Release Date: November 21, 2014
Director: Ana Lily Amirpour
Production Company:Logan Pictures | SpectreVision
Summary/Review:

A girl walks home alone at night, but she’s a vampire on a skateboard so she’s quite alright (and looks so very cool!).  Described as “The first Iranian vampire Western,” the movie is set in an industrial region of Iran known as “Bad City.”  The movie was actually filmed in California so it gets past the Iranian censors and can depict romance and sexuality as well as drug abuse, prostitution, and other unsavory activities.

The Girl (Sheila Vand) appears to be a feminist figure as she seems to only feast on bad men, including Bad City’s pimp/drug dealer, and warns a young boy to behave.  But this is more than a revenge fantasy, and is a movie of how two people can form a connection despite dealing with their past and facets of their identity they don’t want to acknowledge.  The Girl forms a bond with Arash (Arash Marandi) a young man struggling with his father Hossein’s (Marshall Manesh) heroin addiction and the general malaise of living in a dead end town.

There’s also a cat (Masuka).  The cat is very important.  The highly-stylized movie draws on German Expression and spaghetti western influences, with a little French New Wave thrown in.  The  movie is visually striking and conveys a lot of emotion with very little dialogue.  The soundtrack which mixes Western indie rock with Iranian artists is also quite good.

Rating: ***1/2

Scary Movie Review: Beetlejuice (1988)

Title: Beetlejuice
Release Date: March 30, 1988
Director: Tim Burton
Production Company: The Geffen Company
Summary/Review:

Beetlejuice was on cable TV a lot in my youth, and despite seeing it multiple times, I never really liked it.  I’m not quite sure why it rubbed me the wrong way, but as a Harry Belafonte fan it did annoy me that so many people acted like his calypso music was original to his movie.  I thought my younger child might enjoy seeing a young Winona Ryder after watching Stranger Things, and that I would warm to the movie since my surly teen days are long behind me.

But it didn’t.  I still don’t find it funny.  It’s almost funny which can be worse than not being funny at all.  The basic plot is kind of a take on gentrification.  Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam (Alec Baldwin) Maitland are a young couple restoring a large Victorian house in Connecticut.  When they die in a car crash, they find themselves trapped in the house as ghosts.  When an awful yuppie couple from New York, Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and Charles (Jeffrey Jones) Deetz, Barbara and Adam try to use their ghostly powers to scare them away.  They do bond with the Deetz’s goth daughter Lydia (Ryder), but ultimately call on the creepy “bio-exorcist” Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) to help them drive out the Deetzes.  Hijinks ensue.

There are aspects of this movie I like, starting with just the general weirdness of everything that is distinctively Tim Burton.  The stop motion animation effects are well-done and a lot of fun.  And Ryder is terrific in one her earliest roles.  But overall, Beetlejuice just doesn’t do it for me.

Rating: ***

Scary Movie Review: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022)

Title: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Release Date: April 15, 2022
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Production Company: Love In Winter LLC | Dweck Productions | Flies Collective
Summary/Review:

Casey (Anna Cobb) is a teenager with a widowed father who appears to spend a lot of time alone.  At the beginning of the movie Casey records a video of herself taking “The World’s Fair Challenge,” a viral online horror roleplaying game that really just seems like playing “Bloody Mary” with added technology.  The bulk of the movie consists of videos Casey and other teenagers showing the symptoms and changes that occur from participating in the challenge.

The movie never makes clear whether the game is really taking a psychological and physical toll on its participants, or if they’re just acting for the sake of the game. One person who believes that bad things are really happening is JLB (Michael J. Rogers), a middle-aged man who apparently lives alone in a large house and spends a lot of his time watching World’s Fair Challenge videos.  He contacts Casey over Skype to show his concern.  Again, it’s uncertain whether he’s really a concerned adult or just a creepy old dude.

There are a lot of reviews on Letterboxd from people who say this movie captures the feeling of being a teenager who spends a lot of time alone using the internet.  Since the World Wide Web made it’s public debut the same week I started college, I never had this experience, but can believe it’s true.  Regardless, this is a weird and unsettling psychological drama.

Rating: ***1/2

Scary Movie Review: They Live (1988)

Title: They Live
Release Date: November 4, 1988
Director: John Carpenter
Production Company:Alive Films | Larry Franco Productions
Summary/Review:

A decade after Halloween, John Carpenter made this even movie that feels even more low-budget.  But I guess he wasn’t going to get a lot of money to make this odd satire of Reagan’s America (that somehow feels even more relevant in 2022).

The movie starts off at a comfortable slow pace with no real science fiction or horror elements. Drifter Nada (Roddy Piper doing a half-decent Kurt Russell impersonation) arrives in Los Angeles and finds work at a construction site and a place to stay at a shanty town adjacent to a church. Nada begins to suspect that the people in the church aren’t really running a church but before he can learn any more, the church and the homeless encampment are destroyed by the police.  And honestly this scene is more scary than anything else in the movie because it so real.

Before fleeing the church, Nada takes a box of sunglasses and discovers that they help him see the world as it really is.  Subliminal messages are everywhere telling people to consume, conform, and not question authority.  Furthermore, there are skull-faced aliens living amongst humanity, and getting people to collaborate with them by giving them wealth and power.  Nada instantly becomes a revolutionary.

Now, this movie has a leftist bent that coincides with my own political leanings, but I am uncomfortable with the idea that everything bad in the world is due to aliens.  After all, conservatives have a lot of conspiracy theories blaming socialists, Jewish people, Muslims, LGBTQ people, you name for all that they see wrong in the world.  Meanwhile some Democrats choose to believe that everything the Trump/MAGA types do is personally coordinated by Vladimir Putin. The truth is that there are a lot of assholes in humanity and a lot of assholishness within every human.

The thing that this movie really gets right is that through ignorance, indifference, or manipulation the assholes can get otherwise good people to fight each other.  This is exemplified by the back alley fist fight between Nada and his only friend in L.A. Frank (Keith David) when he tries to get Frank to wear the glasses.  The fight purportedly last six minutes, although it feels longer and gets at the futility of human nature.

Unfortunately, the final act of the movie isn’t as strong as everything that set it up.  Perhaps because it’s more reliant on special effects the cheapness really shows.  But the pacing also picks up and rushes too swiftly toward a resolution that doesn’t make much sense.  I feel like the first hour would’ve made a great pilot for an ongoing TV show.  Nevertheless, the legacy of this movie cannot be denied.  The “OBEY” logos were adopted into Shepard Fairey’s street art, right down to the font, and the oft-quoted line “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum,” has it’s origin here.

Rating: ***

Scary Movie Review: Halloween (1978)

Title: Halloween
Release Date: October 25, 1978
Director: John Carpenter
Production Company: Compass International Pictures | Falcon International Productions
Summary/Review:

I remember watching Halloween with my family on Halloween night on broadcast TV (which included extra scenes not in the theatrical release). If I remember correctly, it was 1983, meaning I was a few weeks short of turning ten years old, but regardless I was probably too young to be watching Halloween although it seemed like all my classmates had already seen it.  Anyhow, it’s been a long time since I’ve been truly frightened by a horror movie and I oddly kind of miss that feeling.

Revisiting Halloween means sorting out the original movie from it’s legacy, both the endless sequels (I don’t believe that the current release Halloween Ends will actually be the end of the franchise) and the slasher film copycats that dominated the next decade of horror.  As a young horror buff, I wasn’t drawn to following Michael Myers story as much as Friday the 13th (in retrospect an inferior franchise) and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

But on this re-watch there were three things that made Halloween really stand out as a classic of the horror genre:

1. The cinematography is excellent, starting from the tracking shot the opens the film and the POV shots that would be endlessly imitated.
2. John Carpenter’s score is terrific and is responsible for much of the menace in the first half of the film when there’s not actually any killing.
3. Jamie Lee Curtis is an excellent actor.  Even though she’s still drawing a paycheck from Halloween sequels I don’t think I’m alone in not considering her “scream queen” era defining her career just because she’s been so good in so many different kinds of movie.  And it starts here with Laurie Strode.

I also appreciate the effort the movie crew put into making Pasadena, California in April look like October in Illinois on a budget. Also, I remember liking Annie (Nancy Kyes) as a kid, and I still like her now.  A lot like Rose McGowan’s Tatum in Scream, she’s the funny best friend who really needs to survive longer in the movie.  If you haven’t watched Halloween in a long time like me, this week is a good time to do it!

Rating: ***1/2

Scary Movie Review: Train to Busan (2016)

Title: Train to Busan
Release Date: July 20, 2016
Director: Yeon Sang-ho
Production Company: Next Entertainment World | RedPeter Film
Summary/Review:

Divorced workaholic investment banker Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) doesn’t have much time  for other people, including his young daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an), but feels guilty enough to fulfill her wish to visit her mother for her birthday. They board the Korean Train Express (KTX) in Seoul for what should be a one hour journey to Busan.  But their departure coincides with a massive zombie outbreak and unfortunately an infected person boards the train.

The infection spreads quickly among the passengers and crew.  These zombies are fast than your typical movie zombies. But they are docile when they can’t actually see live humans and dumbfounded by darkness, such as when the train passes through tunnels.  The uninfected passengers must work to gather themselves together in the same car and defend themselves against the zombies until they reach Busan which is purportedly secured by the military.

One of the things I like about the movie is that it feels like the disaster movies of the 1970s with the characters fitting into archetypal roles.  There’s the high school baseball team with one girlfriend/cheerleader tagging along, the elderly sisters, the homeless man, the selfish business man, and the pregnant woman and her husband.  These last two, Seong-kyeong (Jung Yu-mi) and Yoon Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok), become key characters in the survival story and in Seok-woo’s transformation to becoming someone who is more caring for others.

The movie has a lot of scares and a relentless pace that makes it very exciting to watch.  But it also has a lot of heart.  The characters may start as archetypes but they definitely are fleshed out quickly as real people with real stories. The movie has a lot to say about humanity, negative and positive, even if there aren’t a lot of humans left by the end of the film.  Perhaps the scariest part of this movie is that even in a zombie apocalypse the Korean rail system is better than the U.S. on a good day.

Rating: ****