numbercrunch

I just got in a massive hardcover limited edition book on Dario Argento. video link below:

Spiderbite

I am behind on my recaps so I will be brief:

Jaws 3-D - Light, goofy and entirely unnecessary. 3D is decent but it appears Universal didn't give the transfer much clean-up or love. The only reason to watch this movie is for the 3D and the gorgeous Lea Thompson.

Wolfen - Original take on the werewolf mythos but not a lot happens. The ugly old woman from Throw Momma From The Train stars in it...oops...my bad. Actually it is Albert Finney with a bad haircut.

Julia X - Watched this one in 3D as well but the 3D wasn't that great. A serial killer goes on a date. This movie thinks it is smarter, funnier and cooler than it actually is. A twist on a twist on a twist. A lesson in tedium.

Son Of Frankenstein - Kinda fun but kinda dull. It doesn't really add anything to the first two movies other than to have Bela and Boris together. Frankenstein appears to have lost all the smarts he developed in Bride...but he gained a fuzzy sweater!

Alien 3 - I just don't understand the hatred for this one. It is still decent. Its biggest issue is that it follows two masterpieces.

247 Degrees F - Not as horrible as you might expect. It held my interest throughout. Three drunken teens get trapped in a sauna. Should have had some nudity though.

Island Of Death - What is it with goats this year? A crazy couple causing havoc on an island. Anyway, this one really tries hard to be repulsive and succeeds in many ways...but is ultimately a boring and pointless exercise. I don't like to be bored by my sleaze.

numbercrunch

alien 3 gets hatred because they kill off the main characters from aliens 2 right off the bat and the cgi aliens were pretty bad. they look like they were green screened into the shots

Spiderbite

I blame the CG on the time it was made. They should have stuck with practical effects though. Only Cameron could have gotten the money at the time to do the CG effects right at the time. OR Lucas or Spielberg. They certainly weren't going to given an unknown director the money. Oops...

I never have cared that they killed the two characters (actually three) at the beginning. If they had stuck around it would have just been second half of Aliens 2 Part 2. Plus...I don't think I would want to have two movies

Chad

Sleep deprivation is apparently catching up to me. Mistook today for tomorrow's aqua theme and watched Swarm of the Snakehead this morning. I regret that decision. On the bright side, I don't have any more snake/fish hybrid puppet movies planned for tomorrow.

For today's actual theme I'll attempt a scarecrow triple feature with Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Scarecrows, and Night of the Scarecrow. I'm pretty sure at least one has a storm in it.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I'd suggest the movies of Larry Cohen. Maybe start off with It's Alive and The Stuff

I watched this last week and liked it except that it just ran too long. Maybe trim off about 20 minutes but I've noticed the same thing with all this director's films. I still think it's good, considering it's his first time directing but it almost seems like he's gotten worse the more films he makes. I watched Hired to Kill last month and that looked like more of something a first time director would have done.

Chad

I think these fit the bill:

Q: The Winged Serpent
Squirm
Stuart Gordon's From Beyond and Dolls
Slither
God Told Me To
The Sender
Curtains
Graduation Day
Two Vincent Price anthologies that are underappreciated - The Monster Club and From a Whisper to a Scream

Looks like it's also available in paperback for around $30, so I'll probably go that route once it drops a bit.

BobO'Link

I'm at the hotel. It's a good thing I have some stuff loaded on the tablet as the internet pretty much bites. Sluggish, slow, some sites don't load at all or don't load properly (I chalk it up to these "captive portals" hotels think they have to run). And we're here for a *Tech* conference! Which is being held at this hotel! Hopefully stuff during the day will work better...

Dick Laurent

With all this talk about re-buying the Universal Monsters sets, has anyone noticed the Walmart exclusive Blu-ray packages being sold in stores? Found today, and this just makes my collecting bug all the more anxious.

Universal Monster Walmart Titles (link is for Dracula but all the other titles show up on the page)

DaveyJoe

The People Under the Stairs (1991)

Wes Craven's horror comedy about class warfare is truly bizarre. Starring Twin Peaks Everett McGill and Wendy Robie as brother/sister real estate moguls who like to kidnap neighborhood kids, this movie feels like it's inspired by David Lynch. Tonally, the film is all over the place, some moments are genuinely scary, as the film progresses it gets increasingly campy and funny. A young neighborhood kid known as Fool learns that his family is about to be evicted and his mother has cancer. He and a friend decide to break into the landlord's house to steal priceless coins. Thanks to a high tech security system, the pair get trapped in the house and have to survive a shotgun-wielding gimp, ravenous dogs, and basement-dwelling cannibals.

If you can handle the wildly shifting tones, you might find this to be pretty entertaining. McGill and Robie are a lot of fun to watch as they rant and rave through the halls of their old house. Their relationship feels incestuous, even if the film never comes out and says it. It's kind of weird to see a film deal with heavy themes like child abuse, racism, and gentrification also feature zombie creatures and slapstick comedy. I particularly enjoyed the eerie soundtrack and I thought the creatures in the basement were effectively creepy. A lot of people think the film is trying to do too much, but Craven has a long history of infusing comedy in his horror films. Freddy Krueger always had a lot of one-liners, and even the otherwise gritty and horrifying The Last House on the Left had the bumbling local police providing comedic relief. So I really don't think this is out of place in Craven's filmography.





The Mutilator (1985)

Buddy Cooper brings us this violent slasher about a group of college students being stalked by a psycho with an axe. The film opens with a bizarre scene of a child named Ed playing with his father's gun. He accidentally shoots his mother to death and his father quietly drags her body to the study for a glass of liquor. Flash forward and Ed is grown up and trying to figure out what to do during Fall Break with his college buddies. What exactly is Fall Break? I've never heard of that phrase, is it Thanksgiving weekend? Anyway, the kids decide to party it up at Ed's father's beach house. For some reason, after all this time has passed, Ed's father decides now is the time to snap and hunt down Ed and his friends one by one.

I'm a big sucker for slashers, and no matter how bad they are, I usually seem to enjoy them. That's the case here, even though there are a lot of inexplicable scenes. For instance, the kids come across a framed photo of a mangled corpse at the beach house. Ed explains that his father ran over the guy with a ski boat, but it was an accident. So his father decided to take a photo of the guy and frame it... uh, what? The movie features a catchy original song called Fall Break, and one of the most gruesome kills I've ever seen in a slasher involving a fish hook. I mean this kill got an audible OUCH from me. If slashers are your thing, it's worth checking out. If not, you'll probably think it's awful.

MysterioMan007

I am catching up on Ash Vs. Evil Dead. Season 2, Episode 2...

I've seen a lot of horror movies, but that had one of the sickest things I've see in live action. To top it off, I was eating pizza at the time. Damn.

ViewAskewbian

Had a good 80s triple creature feature last night with:

Forbidden World
The Deadly Spawn
and
Brain Damage

Tonight is Dekker Double with

Night of the Creeps
and
Monster Squad

ViewAskewbian

Why did Dekker stop with Night of the Creeps and Monster Squad anyway? Both movies are great but he never directed again after his next feature...

...I mean RoboCop 3 wasn't THAT bad.

Dick Laurent

I watched Blood Stained Shadow. I have a giallo DVD set, but that movie is also streaming on Amazon Prime I believe.

Oh, wow. I'm kind of broke now between the Criterion flash sale and the Scream Factory Shocktober sale. But that sure looks fancy.

TheBigDave

Vudu's Free With Ads feature is finally available.

It works much better than other ad-supported content on the Roku. The movies are usually HDX 1080p with DD+ 5.1 audio. And the commercials are shorter and less intrusive.

Lots of good Horror titles to choose from:

The Return of the Living Dead
Killer Klowns from Outer Space
Jeepers Creepers 2
Sleepaway Camp
Pumpkinhead
The Collector
Lady in White
Poltergeist II
Poltergeist III
Carrie (1976)
Dolls ------ I loved this one.
The Dead Zone
Amityville Horror (1979)
Amityville II: The Possession
From Beyond
The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1977)
The Dentist
P2
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
The 50 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen
Lord of Illusions
Witchboard
Night of the Demons (1988)
Body Bags
Day of the Dead (1985)
The City of the Dead (1962)
Species
Ghoulies
The Bird with the Crystal Plummage
After Dark: Zombies of Mass Destruction
Dark Night of the Scarecrow
The Eye (2002)
Slaughter High
The Unholy
Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)

Trevor

Yeah, wish he did more too. Looks like nothing since 1993 except writing a few episodes of Enterprise; although he is involved with the upcoming Predator. His first work in the industry was writing that film House, which I love more than it deserves perhaps. He must have a "real job", and just made cult hits in his spare time.

DaveyJoe

Can anybody remember if there's a storm in John Carpenter's The Fog?

nezumi

I've got a feeling that it isn't by choice that Fred Dekker doesn't work these days. Both Creeps and Monster Squad, while rightfully remembered as cult classics, didn't exactly break any box office records. Robocop 3 was supposed to be his breakout movie, much like the original was Paul Verhoeven's ticket to the big leagues.

In some respects, Orion was ahead of its time with Robocop 3: the way it toned down the gore and blood that the previous two installments were notorious for in order to achieve a PG-13 rating to ensure more ticket sales, making Robo's antagonist a humanoid ninja robot, so the hero and villain can perform acts of violence that would otherwise earn the movie an "R" rating if they were committed against humans, giving Robo superhuman and toy-friendly abilities to make him even more of a comic book character. Orion (who were in financial distress and really needed a tentpole blockbuster) did everything right...

... So when the film didn't perform as well as expected, the blame fell on the shoulders of one individual: Key Grip Robert Kempf! I'm just kidding, it was Dekker who took the fall. In some ways, he made the perfect fall guy. Dekker's films, while unmistakably idiosyncratic, aren't really made with the general public in mind. Nevermind the fact that the original Robocop was a sleeper hit due to the fact that it too was something the public wasn't expecting. By playing it safe, Orion neglected its core audience to reach a potentially larger one. Meanwhile, it seemed to the general public that Orion was offering them something they weren't asking for.

Personally, I don't think there's room for filmmakers like Dekker at the multiplex these days. The business of movies has changed so much since his heyday with even more at stake with every studio film released. Few are willing to take a chance on someone whose perceived as niche or cult. Then there's the possibility that Dekker himself might be a little gunshy about sitting in the director's chair again. Maybe he has said his peace and hasn't anything more to add. If he does, then Dekker has to be the one to make the first move. Nobody's going to come calling.

Trevor

Pretty sure there isn't, but my memory sucks.

DaveyJoe

Bummer, I was thinking a movie with inclement weather in the title might work for tonught's theme. I'll save it for supernatural night or something.

jacob_b

Such a disappointment on 247 Degrees. Was really hoping for something nice and instead got nothing.

Undeadcow

In the past 24 hours I've somehow seen two movies with giant penis monsters, literally penis monsters.

DaveyJoe

Were they at least tastefully done?

mrcellophane

Are they, like, sexy penis monsters? I'm asking for a friend...

SethDLH

I'm going to guess that one of them was Bad Biology.