I watched 6 movies last week:
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- To call House of Evil (or the handful of other names by which it’s called) a Boris Karloff movie is being far too generous. Actually, calling it a movie at all may be as well. Confusingly chopped together, ponderously slow, dubiously dubbed, and never convincingly interesting or scary, this is one of four Mexican horror movies Karloff leant a few weeks of his acting talents to in the year before his death. While his performance is easily the best part of the movie, it’s not his finest work, lasts for only a brief handful of half-formed scenes, and doesn’t feel much connected to the rest—which is a weak riff on killer toys.
- Roger Ebert called The Hitcher “diseased and corrupt,” which I think is a bit much. But even if I didn’t find the movie as morally reprehensible as he seemed to, it is a nasty piece of work—sometimes beautifully shot against the open natural landscape, but often more cruel than clever or tense, taking a plot that worked much more effectively with a faceless menace in something like Duel and muddling it.
- Dark Night of the Scarecrow is surprisingly good, and it’s amazing for a 1981 network television movie. There are a few moments when it stumbles a little, where it might have benefitted from a feature-film budget, but it does a lot with very little, building tension just through the story and performances, particularly from Charles Durning.
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- Miroirs No. 3 is odd, often unsettling or unclear, but I feel like that’s sort of the point. It’s a contemplative chamber piece of a movie—literally in its last scenes—and while it doesn’t resolve anything, it does give you a glimpse into the interiority of these characters.
- I’m not sure Bird always works, in its weird blend of fantasy and reality, but there’s a strong central performance from newcomer Nykiya Adams, and the movie treats characters usually left at the margins with real understanding and empathy.
- I didn’t have high hopes for wrote Brian Tallerico, “replaced by relentless bodily devastation that occasionally winks at the audience in a can-you-believe-there-are-sickos-that-thought-of-this manner. It gets exhausting early.”
I also rewatched 6 movies, all of them horror movies:
- The Fog—What it maybe lacks in story, it makes up for and the some in an atmosphere of dread and well-drawn characters.
- Hellraiser—I’m not the biggest fan of the series as it progressed, and I think this initial outing isn’t always successful, but there is something to the bloody and transgressive viciousness of it that suggests Barker was best equipped to bring his visions to the screen.
- Halloween—I love the simple and quiet simplicity of this movie, and there’s a reason it’s still one of my favorite horror movies of all time.
- Lake Mungo—I’m not sure everything here works, and in the end some of it feels like it was just there for misdirection’s own sake, but it’s an expertly crafted scary movie, and, weirdly, one that doesn’t leave you feeling scared.
- The Descent—It’s tense and terrifyingly claustrophobic, but I feel it becomes significantly less interesting once the monsters show up.
- Carnival of Souls—I don’t think it’s the movie’s fault that you can see the twist coming several miles away; it just subtly influenced a lot of filmmakers going forward. It’s still a beautifully shot movie, full of ethereal and haunting images and score.