October Horror Movie Marathon

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Demoncrat

The Last Voyage Of The Demeter (Andre Ovredal)

It looks nice, I'll give it that. I approved of the design of a certain passenger, though some may see echoes of another film cough.
Some of it ground my gears somewhat, but I don't have to watch it again do I?

You mean Barlow from Salem's Lot?

[Demoncrat]

I was thinking more of a Coppola film ahem.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

The Wolfman (2010)

Despite it's critical mauling at it's time of release i always enjoy this 17 minute longer directors cut. To think the wonderful railway carriage meeting between Benicio del Toro's Lawrence Talbot and Max von Sydow's elderly stranger who gifts Lawrence his silver wolfs head cane wasn't in the original cinema release is ridiculous, it's, at least for myself, both pivotal to the story and utterly charming too.

Aside from a lack of suspense there's not an awful lot wrong with this reworking of Curt Siodmak's original story of The Wolf Man. It looks gorgeously Gothic and it's Wolfman effects courtesy of Rick Baker are excellent. Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins are almost a match for Lon Chaney Jr. and Anthony Hopkins as the Talbots and i like the addition of Inspector Aberline of Scotland Yard as portrayed by Hugo Weaving, whom Hopkins gently mocks for failing to catch the Ripper. Meanwhile Danny Elfman's score is wonderfully epic although i did often hear echoes of Wojciech Kilar's classic music from Bram Stoker's Dracula in there.

But despite there being a fair old dollop of blood and guts there is that aforementioned lack of suspense which is a bit of a killer when it comes to horror films and certainly wrecks it's prospects, no matter how good it is technically and visually, of being on most horror fans list of favourites.

As an aside i do love the updating of the thirties Universal logo at the beginning of the film. Extremely eye catching.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Demoncrat

I was thinking more of a Coppola film ahem.

So not Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror then? From which this creature and Barlow are copied.

[Demoncrat]

He didn't fly about the place though ....

[MrBarlow]

Day Of The Dead. 1985.

A team of civilian scientists and a loose army unit clash with each other's motives after they have taken shelter at an underground military base from the hordes of living dead that storm the surface above. The civilian scientists aren't seeking to eradicate the zombies like the soldiers are hell-bent on doing, but are instead trying to get to the bottom of what is causing them to be what they are.

Granted that this movie is from 1985, so the special effects and zombie make-up is a bit outdated by today's standards. But it still works fine though, and the effects are still believable. But in the Romero movies it is not the special effects that drive the movie, it is the story and the characters, the special effects just help to progress the story and add a visual imagery to the dying world.

There is evidence of the dead developing conscious rather than instinctive will in the character of the zombie named Bub. The film's central location, a large underground mine, is plenty claustrophobic and serves as another storyline decision. NIGHT had a strong black character, DAWN had a strong black and a strong female character; this outing has a fiercely independent white woman who isn't obsessed with the plays for dominance the male characters engage in. This is one film in the Romero Zombie films that I couldn't take to but it has really grown on me.

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[Demoncrat]

I still remember when I first got to see Day, with a mate who was by his own admission a "film snob" who complained bitterly about the "poor script".
I merely watched agape at the gore on show, which was verboten under Ferman's grip on our viewing pleasures at the time. Sigh.

[MrBarlow]

The Crow. 1994.

Based on the comic book created by James O'Barr. The Crow stars Brandon Lee as rock star Eric Draven, who, precisely one year after his murder, returns from the grave to take revenge on the vicious criminals responsible for the rape and death of his fiancée and his own death.

It's an incredibly simple tale of revenge, but the gothic look and soundtrack that reflects the time of its creation drive this movie beyond its simple origins. There is some light humour from Ernie Hudson as the former detective busted down to patrol/beat cop who calls the hero a mime from hell. Michael Wincott as the Top Dollar who runs the city and creates fear and panic with his subordinates along with Tony Todd as the loyal henchman. Nearly 30 years on and this is still a classic film.

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[Frankie Teardrop]

CARNIVAL OF SOULS – I suppose everyone’s got one of those all-time horror top tens that often shifts around but somehow stays the same – ‘Carnival Of Souls’ is always near the top of mine. It’s such a classic, but also a total outlier, a true indie from a time when that kind of thing had a very marginal presence in horror. It tells the story of Mary, a church organist who we first meet when she’s about to be run off the road during a car race with the wrong hicks in the wrong backwater. She surprises her rescuers when she emerges from a lake after her car takes a plunge, and then she quits her place with a shrug and a bit of cold shoulder – she’s not the sentimental type, it seems. But when she hits the next town, even she starts to shudder after a spectre appears and follows her around… ‘Carnival Of Souls’ is a film that nails a very definite kind of mood, one that follows from its theme of gradually retreating reality, and its adoption of a noirish, expressionistic tone. Its nearest precursors must have been things like Jacques Tournier and Val Lewton, maybe also that tenebrous piece of American surrealism, ‘Daughter Of Horror’; I think director Herk Harvey said he was into Bergman and Cocteau. The shadowy photography is backed by a creepy, fogged over organ score that is similarly evocative, poised midway between the church yard and the end of the pier. But the main power within ‘Carnival Of Souls’ belongs to Candace Hilligoss. Her face, anguished but frosty, permeates the whole film and is partly the cause of its relentless claustrophobia. There’s no sultry noirishness going on with her performance, it has an eerie magnetism that feels very singular, the embodiment of someone not really there. Harvey keeps things anchored by introducing characters such as a sleazy lech played by Sidney Berger, and an oblivious landlady Mrs Thomas, but, as per JPS, hell is other people, and Harvey cleverly uses them to build the sense of a real world that is at least as oppressive as the spectral domain that seems to beckon Mary away. The scenes of her wondering the abandoned carnival or drifting through the streets of a world she seems no longer part of are enough to set my hair on end. Although apparently obscure for decades, I can’t imagine that a good many genre and arthouse practitioners never saw it, for there are echoes there from ‘Messiah Of Evil’ to David Lynch. These days, COS is venerated and regarded as pretty much the pinnacle of vintage atmospheric horror. It’s as vivid to me now as it was when I watched it on Alex Cox’s ‘Moviedrome’ all those years ago.

[Demoncrat]

You've done it again sir.
All I ask from a piece of fiction is to take me to another place entirely, and this stretches, for me anyhow, from Bagpuss waking up to the unbridled nightmare of Calvaire .
Carnival is one such film.