I watched another 6 movies last week:
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- Who Can Kill a Child? is incredibly grim, and not remotely subtle—I could have, for instance, done without the extensive documentary footage of actual starving and dying children that opens the movie—but it’s also upsetting and haunting in equal measure.
- There’s a compelling idea at the heart of Parents, but the movie doesn’t know what to do with it. “Is it a satire, a black comedy, or just plain horror?” asked Roger Ebert. “The right note is never found, and so the movie’s scenes coexist uneasily with one another.”
- Not to spoil anything, but Come to Daddy goes off in much stranger directions, and much more quickly, than I was expecting. A lot of that strangeness seems only for its own sake, but the movie certainly wasn’t entirely what I was expecting.
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- The Blob updates a classic, but actually kind of boring, 1950s classic with a creepy 1980s vibe. That doesn’t always work—these can feel less like characters than random names on a call-sheet—but there are a bunch of genuinely scary shots throughout.
- Altered States is very silly, but it takes itself seriously, which surprisingly very much works. “I can tell myself intellectually that this movie is a fiendishly constructed visual and verbal roller coaster,” wrote Roger Ebert, “a movie deliberately intended to overwhelm its audiences with sensual excess. I know all that, and yet I was overwhelmed, I was caught up in its headlong energy.”
- The Tingler is enjoyable camp, largely thanks to Vincent Price, which is good, because as an actual horror movie, it’s goofy and convoluted and not especially compelling.
I also rewatched Ghostwatch. I don’t know how real the movie actually seemed to UK television viewers on Halloween night in 1992, but the documentary feel and very slow build is quite effective.