Black October 31: Halloween

Well, sure, it’s Halloween. It was always going to be Halloween. The whole point of this month of horror DVD reviews was building up to this moment. I plan things out, people.

Maybe you take John Carpenter’s 1978 classic film for granted, because you’ve seen it so many times. Maybe you’re pretty young, and you saw it on DVD for the first time last year, and you said “This is just like every other slasher movie.” You’d be wrong.

When Halloween was released, it was part of a fairly new genre of films. It isn’t the first slasher movie, despite what a lot of people think. Black Christmas, the seminal Canadian film, has more of a claim to that title than Halloween. What Halloween did do, though, was define the next 30 years of horror movies, and define it well. Every horror movie made since owes a debt to John Carpenter.

Plot: Laurie has to babysit on Halloween night. Meanwhile, a killer named Michael Myers is stalking her. And that’s it. That’s all. It’s perfect in its minimalism. The later sequels would try to attach more reason, more explanation, to the story, but it wasn’t necessary. Halloween works because it is brutal and honest and frightening as hell.

I came to this movie in a weird way: I read the book first. Not that this is based on any real novel; someone smuggled me the knockoff paperback adaptation when I was about 11, and because it had murders and a couple of sex scenes, I thought I’d struck bloody gold. I didn’t see the movie for a few more years, when Betamax came out, and boy, was I hooked. There’s a clarity to Halloween that sets it above and beyond all the other slasher films that followed it, and that’s what makes it work.

The sequels are crap. I’ll just come out and say that. Ted, Tony and Doug at the Horror Etc. podcast just spent three episodes dissecting the Halloween series beautifully; I recommend you listen to those shows. I agree with them completely: some things should be left alone, and later attempts to graft the supernatural onto the Halloween series were a mistake.

Rob Zombie remade the original film a couple of years ago, and made a terrible, terrible sequel called H2 this year. I didn’t mind Zombie’s first movie, but it didn’t come close to the original film. If you haven’t seen them, go ahead and skip them all. Just watch the original.

I’ve spent the last month watching and reviewing movies from my DVD’s horror shelf. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and I hope you’ve found at least one movie you didn’t know about. But if you aren’t a horror movie fan, you should at least watch Halloween. Especially tonight.

Update: Simply Syndicated’s Movies You Should See podcast takes a look at Halloween in its latest episode. Great minds think alike, and so do ours. Here it is.

Black October 30: Ghost Ship

I thought I’d seen this movie, but as I watched it just now, I realize I hadn’t. I think I was mixing it up with Virus, that movie with Jamie Lee Curtis, which I know I saw, but can’t remember. So Ghost Ship has been on my shelf all this time. I suppose this makes my random-access horror movie reviewing system worthwhile, but honestly, there are a couple of dozen other films I’d rather talk to you about, like Don’t Go In The Basement. But here we are with Ghost Ship.

It opens very strangely, with 60s Desilu-type titles and a swoony, dreamy tune. We realize we’re at sea, and it’s 1960 or so, and this is a luxury liner. What follows is one of the most gruesome scenes I’ve seen in a mainstream horror film, and it’s very, very well orchestrated.

The rest of the film? Not so much. This is a Hollywood attempt at blockbuster horror, so it has B-level actors, lots of action and stunt work, gloomy cinematography and, true to its time, incessant nu-metal music stings to make sure you know this is supposed to be scary.

The plot: A salvage crew learns of a luxury liner adrift in the Bering Sea, and heads north to find her and claim her. Once aboard, strange things begin to happen, visions appear, and it becomes clear that there is something on this boat that doesn’t want them to leave.

Gabriel Byrne heads the cast, and that gave me hope. Karl Urban’s in it, too. But so are Julianna Margulies and Ron Eldard, a couple, who were also on ER together and here play exactly the same characters: the tough woman and her mouthy subservient wanna-be boyfriend. And they don’t do it well. Margulies, who I have never thought of as a strong actress, mumbles her stupid dialogue while staring straight ahead at whoever’s in the scene with her. It’s bad, bad acting. And Eldard, who looks like a surfer here, falls back on his “Yo hey, I’m a dude” routine, which worked well on the short-lived American version of Men Behaving Badly, but is tiresome everywhere else.

A lot of money was spent on Ghost Ship, and it’s a slick-looking flick. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough to make it anything more than a quick popcorner. It barely even qualifies as a horror movie, in my book.

Black October 29: The Grudge

I liked The Grudge when I first saw it, in 2004. Coming off The Ring, I was in the mood for another good adaptation of a Japanese horror film — in this case, Ju-On. I loved Ju-On. I liked The Grudge.

Seeing it again now, years later, I wonder why.

Aside from a few spooky moments (mostly involving whiteface makeup and quick edits), this isn’t a very frightening film. An attempt is made to focus on the American characters’ fish-out-of-water situation in Tokyo, but it fails; there are so, so many Americans in this movie that it seems like it was filmed in a neighbourhood next to Chinatown in San Francisco.

It’s a good story. I’d even say it’s an excellent story. And this movie is very, very well constructed. It just doesn’t hold my attention. It tries hard, but you can actually see the moments when director Takashi Shimizu — imported from the Ju-On series to helm the American remake — decided to throw in a gross-out scene to amp up the action. These scenes don’t further the story and serve only to highlight the inadequacies of Sarah Michelle Gellar and the actor who plays her boyfriend, who was in Roswell and whose name escapes me.

The Grudge comes close, but fails, to scare, relying on scenes of mutilation rather than building suspense through mood. I don’t think I’ll be watching it again anytime soon.

If memory serves, I liked The Grudge 2 better, but I haven’t seen it in ages. Maybe I’ll do that soon. But to be honest, I’m glad this month of horror DVD reviews is wrapping up. I might watch The Sound of Music for a while to cleanse the palate.

Wait, it’s Jason Behr. I just remembered. Also, Ted Raimi is in this, which is always good. So there’s that.

Black October 28: It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

In an unnamed American town, children walk the night streets, costumed against the cold. In the darkness, a quirky loner waits in a dank field, watching for a forgotten spirit of Halloween, a strange, monstrous being. As the night wears on, and as a brave military hero struggles to reach safety across a surreal nightmare landscape, a young blonde seeks out the loner and stands vigil with him, waiting, watching, for … The Great Pumpkin.

It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is the only “scary” DVD I know of that features “It’s A Long Way To Tipperary.”

This film is a tradition for us. We make sure to watch it at least once every October, and more times, of possible. It isn’t easy; kids today don’t get the charm of Charlie Brown. The old-fashioned animation and clinky storytelling sends them back to Rugrats and SpongeBob every time. But we grownups keep watching it. I remember it fondly; I had the book, too, which was treasured for years. Elizabeth loves it as well, perhaps more than I do.

We talked about the “why” tonight, and decided that the rarity of prime-time animation in the 70s — cartoons were seen only on Saturday mornings back then, and VCRs didn’t exist — meant that shows like this were a big deal. This imprinted them into our memories, into our hearts, much more deeply than the shows kids watch today.

And let’s not forget the scare factor. I suspect a lot of the things I like about horror movies — mood, surreality, colour play — come from this show and book. Snoopy’s wartime fantasy sequences offer a shifting array of greys, blues, oranges and blacks, the colour of autumn, the colour of fear. Yeah, it’s a funny little kids’ cartoon. But it captures Halloween perfectly.

“I got a rock.”

• October is drawing to a close, and so is my series of daily reviews of horror movies from my shelf. Three more to go … no more cartoons, though.

Black October 27: Dark Water

Ouch.

As I come to the end of October, and the end of my daily look at my horror collection, I wanted to pick a film at random, but I wasn’t sure how. Over at Simply Syndicated’s Simply Read, Jakob from Nerd Hurdles is using some kind of D&D dice thing to pick CDs at random, so I thought I’d try that, but I don’t have any weird nerd dice. So I thought about using real dice, but it turns out I have none of those. In the end, I went with the free playing cards we got from our local cable provider on the weekend. I came up with a scheme: the first card I pull at random indicates the shelf number, the second and third card indicate the disc. This ended up not working at all, because the first card I picked was a Jack, and there’s no shelf called Jack. This was a stupid idea. So I fired a Nerf gun at the shelf, waited for a dart to actually stick, and picked the closest horror DVD.

I hoped it would land on something really cool. It didn’t. It landed on a disc I forgot I had. This turned out to be Dark Water, which I paid money to see in the theatre.], and later bought on DVD because it was really cheap and I forgot that I didn’t like it in the theatre. I liked it a bit better on DVD. But not much.

This, like The Ring and The Grudge, is an American J-horror remake, and it’s thematically and stylistically similar. I’ve never seen the original, and I probably won’t, because the whole thing got tired about five years ago. Anyway, Dark Water stars Jennifer Connelly — who I really, really like — as a single mom who moves with her daughter to an apartment on New York City’s Roosevelt Island. Something is wrong with the apartment upstairs. Evil water runs through the corridors. Yes, evil water. There are messages from the grave, and the child is tapped into something … you know where this is going.

I wanted to like this, because Roosevelt Island is a fascinating part of NYC, and I’ve always wanted to see more of it than we saw at the end of the first Spider-Man movie. Dark Water gives us that, offers up a fascinating look at a slab of land, set apart from the city, that was turned into a cheesy strip of bland apartments and sterile streets. We get a nice tour of the island in this film. Unfortunately, this is supposed to be a horror movie, and the horror just isn’t there.

It is not a bad film. Like I said, the cinematography captures the locale wonderfully, and the crew does a fine job of focusing on Jennifer looking confused and sad. It just isn’t frightening, and it isn’t suspenseful, and after the first fifteen minutes you know exactly what’s going to happen.

As you know, I value atmosphere over jump-scares, mood over murder. There’s an honest attempt at building atmosphere here, but it doesn’t work; I suspect Connelly wasn’t nuts about doing this, because she never truly appears to be in fear, and if she isn’t, we aren’t.

If you never see this, you aren’t missing much. But if you do, you won’t be mad at yourself. Or at me.

Black October 26: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation

With a title like that, how could it not be the best horror movie of all time? And look at that action: Leatherface! Texans Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger as the leads! Spelling their last names without looking them up is hard!

I bought this for a dollar in a video store last year. I’d seen it before, though; in the old days, I had a wall of videos, because they were sent to me for review purposes. I didn’t get a lot of the big blockbusters; I received films from marketing agencies desperate for any coverage at all. I have always had a lot of appeal for desperate people.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, also known as The Return Of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, makes no sense. If you see the preceding films, they follow a story, a lineage, that first fired up its Husqvarna with Tobe Hooper’s perfect original film. The sequels are lesser, but still effective, explorations of the aftermath as the tourist-eating family of Texans tries to move on.

TCM:TNG is some kind of reboot, maybe, or the story of a branch of cousins. I’m not clear on that. But it is not crap. After a different opening, it mimics the original film for a fair bit, right down to some of the stunt scenes, before offering up a frightening new element to the TCM mythos. I won’t spoil it, but in the final 10 minutes we learn something about this whole story that we didn’t know before, and when a newcomer unbuttons his shirt, he shows us something more frightening than Leatherface in your closet.

Plot? Sure. Zellweger, who is very young in this, is a high school student whose prom night ends on a lonely dirt road in rural Texas. She and her friends are helped by a weird tow truck operator (McConaughey, also very young) who has some kind of clockwork leg brace. And then they end p at a remote house, and there’s a guy with a weird mask, yadada yadada yadada.

Aside from the original, I like this the best of the subsequent films. It veers away from the stock slasher-flick stories of the earlier sequels (and doesn’t bother with the grim, scratchy rock video cutting of the later remake and its sequel) and offers something new while revisiting the better parts of the original. And McConaughey and Zellweger are great; Matthew, in particular, gives us a crazed we haven’t seen since he realized he was a leading man and started peeling off his shirt all the time.

You’ll always be able to find this cheap, and it’s worth watching. It has a few good laughs, plenty of frights, and some very, very creepy moments.

• Note: I’m reviewing a film a day from my horror movie collection this month. We’re almost done. Then it’s time for Christmas movies.