by ·Comments Off on A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 (1989, Stephen Hopkins)

They’re done with sequel numbering, but I’m not – it’s part five. A few years ago I watched four and a half of these in a month, but as much as these movies repeat themselves, it’s better to put a year or two between them. Opening titles sex scene with our survivors from part four, hell yeah, but things are amiss – Alice almost gets showered to death, and has a backstory vision of Freddy’s birth story (a nun assaulted by an asylum full of maniacs). Freddy always “dies” convincingly then comes back inexplicably in the next one, and the gimmick here is he can visit Alice while she’s awake through the dreams of her unborn child.

Prince of Darkness this ain’t:

Alice has four friends with diverse interests, ideal for getting murdered in character-appropriate ways in the first half of a 90-minute movie. Generic Saved by the Bell-lookin’ Boyfriend Dan gets beat up by his self-driving car then Tetsuo-the-Iron-Man‘d by a Freddycycle… anorexic model Greta gets force-fed… Mark gets Take On Me-d into his comics… star diver Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter of Popcorn and Miracle Mile) actually lives, releasing the momma nun’s spirit (she’d been sitting long-dead in some abandoned church), then Alice’s baby uses vomit-attack on Freddy, who once again loses/frees the souls of dead high schoolers.

It’s slightly less goofy than the previous one, but no better. Has Freddy always called every woman bitch? Final showdown where Alice rescues her baby from Freddy on Escher-stairs feels like a Labyrinth ripoff. Hopkins had a good 1990s career, including Judgment Night. The writer did House III the same year, and was a member of Sparks. Rosenbaum raved: “zero-degree filmmaking … flaccid editing.”

You can tell a movie has no prestige when its blu-ray extras are just music videos by The Fat Boys and Whodini. The former is from Mondo director Harvey Keith, opens with a very awkward sketch, making me doubt my memories of the Fat Boys’ great acting talent in Disorderlies. The three then run around a very well-dilapidated movie house pursued by Freddy. Good use of movie clips in the song, and Englund gets to rap. The Whodini is a much better song, has twin dancing Freddies on a staircase, and the band wisely doesn’t go inside the horror house, just dances on the porch.

by ·Comments Off on House of 1000 Corpses (2003, Rob Zombie)

Tourists stop at Captain Spaulding’s then foolishly decide to check out the nearby grounds of the Dr. Satan killings. Momma Karen Black was delightful – don’t think I knew who she was last time I saw this.

RIP Jennifer Jostyn (The Brothers McMullen), Rainn Wilson (Super), and the cooler and less condescending Chris Hardwick (RZ’s Halloween II). Final (but still doomed) girl Erin Daniels was on The L Word, her also-doomed dad played a cop in Humanoids from the Deep (alongside Deputy Walt Goggins), and Sheriff Tom Towles (Fortress) will sorta have his revenge in part two.

by ·Comments Off on In a Violent Nature (2024, Chris Nash)

Monster follow-cam, like if Ben Russell made a horror movie. Maybe this was an experiment in distancing and de-emphasis – like, what if a crazed zombie stalking and slaughtering a group of sexy young people was just one of many things occurring in the life of the forest. Looking for his stolen locket, our zombie monster starts by killing the wrong guy, an asshole trapper. Strange to see this kind of thing with no music score. Maybe they didn’t know or couldn’t afford anyone who could pull off groovy stalker-tension music. They didn’t manage to write or deliver any good dialogue so maybe they should’ve done without that too. This movie’s major outcome was getting me to immediately rewatch The Cabin in the Woods, and it’d been too long since I’d last seen that, so, thank you.

by ·Comments Off on Where the Devil Roams (2023, Poser/Adams/Adams)

Unpromising beginning with dodgy compositing and fake film distress as we’re told a long poem, then a bridge that reminds me of The Empty Man (everything reminds me of The Empty Man). Watching this after When Evil Lurks because I keep getting them confused with their similar titles, and Lurking definitively beat Roaming. This movie certainly does roam. Its three leads (family of hopeless carnie thief/murderers with a terrible musical act until they steal a better one from a devil-dealing finger-traumatist) are a real family, also the movie’s directors. They’d previously made Hellbender (metal music/witchcraft) and The Deeper You Dig (clairvoyant murder-suspense).

The devil-dealer is Mr. Tipps, who nightly cuts off his fingers for the crowd, then sews them back with cursed thread – he stole the thread originally, so it’s only fair that our trio steals it from him later. The girl of the family is said to be mute but I didn’t realize, since she sings in their act. The mom kills somebody in each town they pass through, and I can’t tell if this is supposed to be vigilante justice or if they’re just remorseless criminals. Dad gets WWI flashbacks when he sees blood (and is incidentally afraid of birds), so has to be blindfolded during the crimes, and eventually during their circus act. So it’s set in the past (1920s?) but doesn’t feel authentically past-tense, more of an antique shop present. The parents eventually get some limbs chopped off by an axe girl at a home they invaded (played by their other IRL daughter) and the dad becomes catatonic, but still performs his nightly onstage dance to the girl’s alt-rock song.

by ·Comments Off on When Evil Lurks (2023, Demián Rugna)

An ancient evil is going to be born into the world unless two dummy brothers can stop it (spoiler: they cannot). The movie is torn between needing to explain itself so we know the stakes, and wanting to withhold information for suspense. So we’re told there are seven rules to follow (that’s more than twice the number of rules for Gremlins so you know it’s serious) but one rule remains secret until the end. And since there are set rules for demon possession, and specialists with suitcases of equipment, and the local cops and government have procedures in place, we know this has all happened before, elsewhere, so if this particular demon gets loose it’s probably not the end of the world, just maybe of this town. But despite all this knowledge and procedure, the dummies keep losing ground, because (per Matt Lynch) “everyone in this forgets what’s happening to them every three to five minutes.”

Still it’s a good gruesome, apocalyptic time at the movies, and the actors are game for its grievous head injury theater.

Two attempts to shoot evil with a gun:

This is Argentina so of course somebody was in La Flor – that’s lead brother Ezequiel Rodríguez, a go-to demonic horror guy lately between Legions and The Witch Game. Brother Demián Salomón is right there with him, starring in Satanic Hispanics, Welcome to Hell, and Into the Abyss. Somebody needs to look into the current wave of Argentine horror. These guys discover the neighbor’s tenant’s kid has become demon-bloated so they drive it some hours away so it can become someone else’s problem. Too late: it gets to the neighbor, and to Ezequiel’s wife (who kills one of her kids) and dog (who kills another). The brothers drive off with the remaining (possessed, autistic) kid and their mom, pick up a demon hunter, and head to the Village of the Damned where they’d dumped the body. The spooky kids there defeat the exorcism plot pretty easily, barely even moving around much, a new evil is born, and the autistic kid eats his grandma.

by ·Comments Off on Stopmotion (2023, Robert Morgan)

Young animator Aisling Franciosi (The Nightingale) is completing her dying mom’s final stop-motion film, then tries to turn it into her own work. But Aisling has no ideas of her own. Where do ideas come from? She tries asking her man’s sister for psychedelic drugs, then starts listening to the girl down the hall who doesn’t actually exist. She begins animating in a trance state, believing the monster they created inside her film is after her, and it does finally eat the girl they also created. In the meantime, Aisling pushes her bf Tom down the stairs, and his character name must be a Peeping Tom reference since she kills his sister with a tripod. Unfortunately the movie we’re watching isn’t a stop-motion horror but a mediocre live-action indie movie. I’ve tried to make it sound eventful, but the twist is that it’s ponderous and tiresome, offering nothing fresh, and that’s a crushing disappointment from the creator of the brilliant Bobby Yeah.

by ·Comments Off on Thanksgiving (2023, Eli Roth)

Lotta characters in this – at least the third feature film based on joke Grindhouse trailers – but what’s important is that the survivors of a black friday riot are being hunted, captured, and posed at a private “turkey” dinner by bereft psycho cop Patrick Dempsey, who loved riot victim Gina Gershon. The killer hides behind a pilgrim mask until the climactic parade, when he swaps out for a killer klown mask. Lotta nastiness – one girl gets corncob holders in the ears then chucked into a table saw. Enough victims and false leads to get over the 100 minute mark. A gross good time, but not substantially better than the two-minute version. I’ve skipped everything by Roth for sixteen years – since Hostel 2 he’s done a couple TV things, a shark documentary, a remake, a kids movie, a cannibal horror, and a Keanu Reeves movie I watched the last ten minutes of.

When you’ve been facially mutilated and cannot call for help:

by ·Comments Off on Chopping Mall (1986, Jim Wynorski)

I guess rewatching Dawn of the Dead got me nostalgic over horrors watched when I was 12 that were set in malls with gun stores. Back then I wouldn’t recognize Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov camping it up in the opening scenes, but my whole life I’ve known Dick Miller, seen here being electrocuted by killer robots.

Robot knows the best stores:

The robots are smarter and more resourceful little ED-209s, slow and loud (but apparently silent to the hearing-impaired characters), meant to guard the mall but turned evil by a sinister lightning strike. The teens who work at the Sbarro and the furniture store are partying after hours when the robots go on a killing spree, until only the two nerds remain.

Watching Leslie’s head explode:

These kids: Nerd Allison was in Night of the Comet (also with Mary Woronov), Nerd Ferdy in Karate Kid, Rick in Friday the 13th Part 2, Greg in Electric Boogaloo. Early victim Mike is Deathstalker himself. Most importantly, torched Suzie was Barbara Crampton, in the midst of becoming a horror legend with Re-Animator and From Beyond.

by ·Comments Off on Wendigo (2001, Larry Fessenden)

Family on vacation, local hunters unhappy at family for hitting a deer they’d been tracking, pink hat Otis will get his revenge – my second Otis movie of the week. Though afraid of the deer hunter, the family settles into their vaca home and gets settled: Patricia Clarkson here between The Green Mile and a Carrie remake, dad would appear in Jennifer Lynch’s Chained and the Dawn of the Dead remake, and their son, Middle Malcolm’s little brother.

The kid is given a wendigo figurine by the Phantom Indian of a store intown, then there’s a gradual ramp-up of displaced-Indians imagery. Both parents intended a getaway but have work stuff come up. Some sweet stop-motion/photo-montage scene transitions keep the movie lively and mysterious, then Otis shoots dad and kills the sheriff with a hammer, glimpses of deer creatures and antler mazes as the camera rushes the doomed people.

I was wondering if you could make a whole week of Malcolm in the Middle horror movies… Malcolm’s in teen gamer flick Stay Alive, Reese starred with Dee Wallace in Invisible Mom II, Francis did a kidnapping thriller, the mom did a Manson family thing, and dad was in a haunted novelist story and sci-fi horror Dead Space… so Dewey here is the champ.

tfw malcolm in the middle isn’t on TV: