October Horror Movie Challenge Day 9 - Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

With the first Paranormal Activity movie, I felt its strength was the way it established a normal, easy to relate to couple and instilled fear and terror in the viewers in a realistic way. It's weaknesses were pretty much all technical film making issues; mostly the low budget effects and production. That was because it was SUPER low budget; the movie was made for $15,000. With this "parallel prequel" those weaknesses were erased completely thanks to the huge success of the first movie (almost $200 million dollars worth of success), and therefore the budget of this one was $3 million dollars (that's 200 times more!).

So, with a budget increased 200 fold, you'd hope this would be a much better movie, and to me, it was. Things seemed to take a little longer to actually ramp up in this one, but I think it was due to the director wanting to create a sense of normalcy for contrast, which I think was well established. And it probably took longer to establish because the first movie was only two main characters, and this one focuses on a family of four.

Whereas the first film had one camera capturing all the spookiness, this one gives you so much more with home security cameras all over the house to capture all the weird going on. It's a more exhilarating ride all around in my opinion and does a good job of continuing the story.

October Horror Movie Challenge Day 8 - Hatchet (2006)

When my buddy Bennett recommended that I watch this 2006 indie film homage to slasher films, I noticed a certain deviously sly look on his face that told me: "you don't know what you're getting yourself into with this one,"and boy was he right. Hatchet takes everything synonymous with classic slasher horror films (i.e. Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street) flips it on its ear, cranks it right up to 11 and never turns it down. But for me, a fan of the genre, it was a fantastic surprise.

I don't have a lot to say about Hatchet other than I enjoyed it a lot. If you really like gory slasher horror mixed with dark humor, then it is for you. If you don't really like it, then stay away from this one.

October Horror Movie Challenge Day 7 - The Lost Boys (1987)

Wait, The Lost Boys isn't a horror movie, is it? Trust me, it is, there's a lot more graphic violence and gore than you think, deserving the "R" rating. At it's core it's more of an 80's comedy, but the horror/vampire theme is at the heart of the movie. Plus, this was one that I could get my wife to watch with me, so it counts.

I had seen this, but I didn't remember much about it at all and it was a fun ride to revisit. The first thing you notice it that the 80s were very forgettable as far as fashion is concerned. Most of Corey Haim's wardrobe is hilariously bad. And keeping with my confusion with A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge, there seemed to be an underlying gay subtext. I mean, why do we have that buff, shirtless, sexy sax man in concert near the beginning? I couldn't stop laughing at him. Hilarious! And why does Corey Haim have a poster of shirtless Rob Lowe on his closet door? I saw on IMDb that it was because director Joel Schumacher had just directed Rob Lowe in St. Elmo's Fire. But, then I found this funny article on Cracked.com that gave standing to my thoughts: The 5 Most Unintentionally Gay Horror Movies.

I really enjoyed this one and I recommend it, it has lots of unintentional humor and some that is intentional. But more than anything, it has a good story with decent special effects for it's time and a vampire bloodbath near the end that is very well done.

October Horror Movie Challenge Day 6 - Halloween (1978)

A big goal of doing this challenge was to see iconic horror films that I hadn't seen, and Halloween was high on that list. I knew very little about it other than the killer was named Michael Myers and wore a white mask and used a big kitchen knife and that Jamie Lee Curtis played the main character. That lack of knowledge turned out to be a good thing as the opening scene unfolded and the big reveal did somewhat take me by surprise.

In that opening scene, the first-person cinematography style is established and is used well throughout the movie. But to me, the big star of this one is the music, composed and performed by writer/director John Carpenter and along with the majority of the movie being filmed late at night sets a great tone.

As for Michael Myers: that mask is pretty creepy, especially considering that it was actually just a Captain Kirk (William Shatner) Star Trek mask painted solid white. He also establishes the slasher movie stereotype of a big lumbering killer who can basically appear and disappear at will and survive pretty much anything.

I'm really glad I finally got to see this one, a true classic.

October Horror Movie Challenge Day 5 - A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

With A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, I could tell that they wanted to forget about Part 2 and go back to the original story, but at the same time a new standard is set for the series with creatively sadistic ways to kill the poor teens that in someway play on their interests and a more lighthearted and corny sense of humor.

Heather Lagenkamp returns as Nancy, but now she's a therapist who specializes in dreams and she comes to Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital to help out a group of 7 teens all having the same Freddy-filled nightmares that she has. The main character in this one is played by Patricia Arquette in just her 2nd movie, and she does a great job, she's quite a good screamer.

Of the first three movies in this series, this is the one I remembered the most about and has the tone that I remembered from them, but maybe I'd only seen 3-6, I can't remember. The tone is silly, but fun. With great one-liners from Freddy during his kills like: "This is it, your big break in TV. Welcome to primetime, b****!" as he slams the head of the girl who wanted to be a TV star into the TV (as seen in the header pic).

Overall, this was the most fun of the 3 in this series I watched, but definitely not as good a movie as the first. It had the best closing credits song though. German hair metal band Dokken's " classic "Dream Warrirors".

October Horror Movie Challenge Day 4 - A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

Taking a one-eighty from the original movie, Part 2 of the A Nightmare on Elm Street series isn't really about Freddy Kreuger at all, although he is certainly in it. It's about Jesse, who's family has moved into the Elm Street house where Nancy and her family lived. Instead of Freddy trying to kill Jesse and his friends, he's trying to use Jesse to kill his friends.

After watching this one though, I could tell that something wasn't quite right about it. I basically had this: "what did I just watch?" reaction. Like I said, the story wasn't at all similar to the first one, and the acting wasn't as good. But I can't really say it was horrible, there was just something off about it. I later read that Wes Craven didn't really want there to be any sequels and he didn't have much to do with this film. I also read that the screenwriter put in a lot of homosexual subtext and cast an openly gay actor in Mark Patton on purpose. That sort of explains all his extremely female sounding screams and mannerisms. If nothing else this movie was bold and brave at the time and at least gives horror fans some memorable scenes like the pool party scene where a Freddy possessed Jesse goes berserk and kills a ton of teens.

It was a bit of train wreck, but I still found enjoyment in it and it helped push the story arc of the series a little further.

October Horror Movie Challenge Day 3 - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

As I continue down the Rabbit Hole that is my October Horror Movie Challenge, I'm pretty much making up the rules as I go and picking whatever movie feels right when I have time to watch one instead of having a static list. The main goal is to cover as many classic horror films as I can with some newer ones mixed in. So when I finally had a 90 minute chunk to dedicate to watching something, I decided that for my next 3 films, I would watch the first 3 movies in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. I've seen these 3 films before, but I hardly remember anything about them since it's been a good 20 years since I've seen any of them, so I'm ready to refresh my memory.

The thing that I always liked about these movies was that there was a solid story and good writing and this one is definitely the strongest story. You get a "boy who cried wolf" sort of scenario where the main characters understand what is happening, but there is enough reasonable explanation for the events that no one believes their far-fetched tale.

The first movie opens with a montage of Freddy's iconic knife glove being fashioned in a workshop while the credits roll and soon thereafter you are watching Tina, one of the four teen main characters, in a nightmare and you're introduced to our badly burned killer who is chasing her. The idea that the events in the dream manifest in reality once the victim awakens is established early on when you see Tina's nightgown has four slash marks on it. The teens then start getting knocked off by Freddy and the two survivors fight to stay awake any way they can to avoid their imminent death. Eventually Nancy realizes that if she is holding on to something in the dream that it will be there when she awakes and she starts to devise a way to take Freddy down.

It finally reaches a climax when Nancy's boyfriend Glen (played by then newcomer Johnny Depp) meets his death in a manner that has no reasonable explanation to the parents (he's pulled down into his bed and ton of fake blood erupts in a geyser from the bed). At this point Nancy's mother has come clean with her explaining that Freddy Kreuger was a child predator that escaped the justice system and the teens' parents threw him in a furnace and killed him, thus establishing his motive for coming after these four particular teens.

So Nancy devises a plan to set traps for Freddy in the real world, go to sleep, set a countdown timer on her watch when alarms will go off, grab Freddy, and then be awakened with him in her house where she can kill him. Funny, I quickly realized that a lot of the traps she set were borrowed later in Home Alone, there's no new ideas in Hollywood. But she prevails and all is well. Or is it? It has a nice ambiguous ending that lets you decide what is real and what is a dream, which I really appreciated.

I'm really glad I re-visited this one, it's really well done, and a horror classic for sure.

October Horror Movie Challenge Day 2 - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

So, I probably shouldn't follow up my first movie in the October Horror Movie Challenge with it's sequel, right? I mean, they'd be too similar, wouldn't they? That's what I thought, but I soon realized that this sequel, which as you may have noticed came 12 years later, was NOTHING like it's predecessor, so it worked well as a follow-up. Kind of like the original, I didn't know much about it, but the one thing I did know about it was that it was directed by the same person, Tobe Hooper, so it had that going for it. Oh, and it had Dennis Hopper too.

The tone of this one is pretty much a one-eighty from the original. It's almost like the goal was to parody the first film, and mimic the style of the horror films at the time, while at the same time somehow advancing the story of the Sawyer family maniacs. And if so, they nailed it. One thing is clear within the first five minutes or so, this movie is gory and is more of a dark comedy than just a straight slasher film. Also, the top billing of Dennis Hopper is a bit misleading, because his on screen time is pretty minimal, but he does have some awesome scenes including a chainsaw duel with Leatherface. However, in my opinion, the "star" is actor Bill Moseley who plays the deranged hippie Sawyer brother named "Chop Top". He delivers great character acting and ridiculous and memorable lines like "Dog will hunt!" (which is sampled in the Primus song "Jerry Was a Race Car Driver").

I can see how this could be classified as a cult classic, and I did like it, but in a very different way from the original, quite the contrast. Some words that came to mind while watching: demented, bizarre, quirky, and uncomfortable, yet all the while enjoyable and likeable.

October Horror Movie Challenge Day 1 - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

This is one of those movies that I knew was a horror classic, but my knowledge of the movie pretty much ended there. But, of course, I kind of assumed that it would involve chainsaws and lots of killing.

I was actually quite surprised when I finally sat down to watch it and realized that wasn't at all the case. I mean, there was a chainsaw involved, but it didn't play as big a role as I expected.

The movie takes a little while to really get going, but the mystery and mystique established with the opening text crawl is very well done (even if the fact that it's a true story is a bold faced lie) and kept my attention and interest. When it's finally established that the 5 teens are venturing to a small town in Texas to visit a homestead of the brother/sister, the viewer kind of assumes it's gonna get ugly fast, but it really doesn't. The first 30 minutes are filled with pretty bad acting inside a van, where you quickly began to get tired and annoyed by the invalid, wheelchair bound brother Franklin, at least I did. He's a whiny piece of work, that Franklin. *pbbbbt*

As far as the execution (no pun intended) of the film, it was much more tame than I expected in the kill scenes of the 4 teens that bite the dust in the film. I guess this was probably due to the filmmakers wanted it to get shown in theaters. The beauty of the film though, and I guess one of the reasons it is such a classic is that it doesn't need to have gory kill scenes. It's documentary style and suspenseful music and film editing give it all the terror that it needs.

One thing about this movie that really stood out to me was the art direction and set design. For a low budget film made in the '70s, there was a lot of hard work put into these aspects. I mean, you had a house completely covered in skulls, skeletons, bones, fake flesh, etc. I read up on that a little and found out that there was actually a family living in that house during the filming, geez, that had to suck. I also read that to keep the equipment rental cost to a minimum, the film crew insisted that everyone be willing to work around 16 hours a day, seven days a week for a couple months, that's pretty much a sweatshop mentality, but I suppose it paid off.

So, at the core of the story lies the terrifying concept of an inbred family who kill people for sport and use their bones and flesh for trophy and house decoration, and eat and serve up their meat to unknowing patrons of their little dive gas station and barbecue restaurant. Man...I can see why this movie is ranked among the most terrifying of all time, just in concept alone, writer/director Tobe Hooper has to be one demented dude. To help drive the suspense home, you have a lead actress who spends the last about 20 minutes of the movie running and screaming at the top of her lungs, two things she appears to be very good at, oh, also jumping out of windows, which she does twice. The movie ends at the climax where the faceless simpleton killer, Leatherface, is unable to kill the last of the 5 teens and goes crazy in the street twirling his chainsaw around in what seemed to be a dance routine and then it fades to black. Awesome.

Kicking off a 31 day marathon of horror films has to be done just right, and I'd say this was the perfect choice. One heckuva great horror movie and one that I think really set the bar for how to do a slasher movie right. The take-away for me from this one was: a horror movie with a well execute concept/story is just as effective if not more effective than one where you actually see a ton of detailed, gory deaths.

Getting Started

So, I have a blog now. I will post here (hopefully) about things that I do for entertainment.

First up is a fun little challenge for the month of October that Patrick Klepek inspired me and my buddy Bennett to undertake. We're calling it the October Horror Movie Challenge and the goal is to watch 31 horror movies over the course of the 31 days in the month and post short little thoughts on them.

There was a time when I was really into horror movies, but I honestly haven't seen a lot of "the classics", so this little project will help me correct some of that. And I may use it to revisit some that I enjoyed, but haven't seen in a really long time, including some that my wife, who doesn't like horror, might actually watch with me.