Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Director: Tommy Lee Wallace

Writers: Tommy Lee Wallace

Composers: John Carpenter, Alan Howarth

Starring: Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin, Dan O'Herlihy, Michael Currie, Ralph Strait, Jadeen Barbor, Brad Schacter, Garn Stephens, Nancy Kyes, Jonathan Terry, Al Berry, Maidie Norman, Jamie Lee Curtis

More info: IMDb

Tagline: ...and now the earth will run with blood again!

Plot: Kids all over America want Silver Shamrock masks for Halloween. Doctor Daniel Challis seeks to uncover a plot by Silver Shamrock owner Conal Cochran.

My rating: 7/10

Will I watch it again?  Maybe.

I hope I'm not alone in feeling this way but when I saw this in the early 80s on a tape rental, I was expecting another HALLOWEEN movie with Michael Myers and I was, at very least, disappointed (if not pissed) that it was not the further adventures of an unstoppable killer.  Many years later I watched it again and I rather enjoyed it.  Carpenter never intended for the first movie to continue but instead have a series of films that had one thing in common and that's that they all took place on Halloween.  Well, I like it.  Two things make this totally watchable and that's Carpenter & Howarth's synth score and the wonderful Tom Atkins (and at near 50 he was looking great and he was in great shape, judging from his nude scene).  The music oozes classic Carpenter pictures.  Atkins is just all kinds of fun and he's sometimes delivering lines a little differently than what anyone else would and they feel genuine.  That adds a lot to his performance.  The story isn't as solid as it should've been.  There's a chunk of the picture where not much happens as far as unfolding the mystery is concerned but it's still enjoyable and that's what matters. But it does have one great little ending.  I score films based on how much I enjoy them, not on the merits of their technical aspects.  I don't care much about budgets, special effects and all.  It's what's on screen and how I react that counts.  Knowing where Carpenter wanted to take this series and make it one big anthology, that' would've been a neat way to treat the series.  At the same time I'd still like to see Myers killin' folks.

The Monolith Monsters (1957)

Director: John Sherwood

Writers: Norman Jolley, Robert M. Fresco, Jack Arnold

Composers: Irving Gertz,  Henry Mancini, Herman Stein

Starring: Grant Williams, Lola Albright, Les Tremayne, Trevor Bardette, Phil Harvey, William Flaherty, Harry Jackson, Richard H. Cutting, Paul Frees, William Schallert

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Mammoth skyscrapers of stone thundering across the earth!

Plot: Rocks from a meteor which grow when in contact with water threaten a sleepy Southwestern desert community.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again?  Maybe.

This is an OK, by the numbers 50s sci-fi/horror flick that benefits from a good cast and crew.  One thing that keeps this from being great is the formulaic story and how mundane it can be.  The effects for the monoliths are fantastic!  I loved how they grew, broke apart and then the new pieces grew.  That was really neat.  It's a shame that there aren't any big names in the cast or actors who became stars later.  That alone would add to the cool factor.  This is one of five classic sci-fi horror movies from the 50s in the Universal DVD set The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection.  This flick is fullframe as it was theatrically shown.  The only extra is the theatrical trailer.  It's a great set.

Grim Prairie Tales (1990)

Director: Wayne Coe

Writer: Wayne Coe

Composer: Steve Dancz

Starring: James Earl Jones, Brad Dourif, Will Hare, Marc McClure, Michelle Joyner, William Atherton, Lisa Eichhorn, Wendy J. Cooke, Scott Paulin, Jennifer Barlow

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Hit The Trail...To Terror.

Plot: A cynical bounty hunter and a clerk traveling through the prairie rest by the campfire telling four stories of terror to each other.

My rating:  7.5/10

Will I watch it again?  Yes.

Wow, what a surprise this turned out to be!  Jones and Dourif are the two storytellers and boy are they fun together!  They work well off each other and I can't remember the last time I saw Jones having so much fun.  The stories are all pretty good.  I say pretty good because a couple of them are VERY short and feel like they could've/should've been expanded (the first and last were like that).  I enjoyed the diversity of the stories, too.  The one with the family arriving to their plot of land to build on had value of being reality-based horror but also of showing hope for bad people.  The others had supernatural elements to them.  It's rare that I like all of the stories from a horror anthology, especially one like this film that has more than the usual.  I thoroughly enjoyed this picture and the ending was hilarious.  The IMDb trivia says that Coe planned on a sequel that never happened.  This is his only film.  I'd like to know more about this cat.  He made one fine movie.  And what do you know...Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer on this picture (his second film) has been Steven Spielberg's DP since SCHINDLER'S LIST (1993)!!!  The only print I could find is a horrible VHS copy.  I'll definitely get this if it ever comes out on DVD and this picture deserves a proper release with commentary and all the extras they can muster.

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

Director: Jack Arnold

Writer: Richard Matheson

Composers: Irving Gertz, Earl E. Lawrence, Hans J. Salter, Herman Stein

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Almost beyond the imagination . . . A strange adventure into the unknown!

Plot: When Scott Carey begins to shrink because of exposure to a combination of radiation and insecticide, medical science is powerless to help him.

My rating: 6.5/10

Will I watch it again?  Maybe.

Good movie.  Good effects.  The spider fight was great and it made for a great action piece at the end of the picture.  Something that didn't make sense was why he didn't go back to the scientist that halted his shrinking.  It might've been touched on when I blinked or something.  I guess that doesn't matter much because most people were going to the theaters to see a guy shrink and face wild obstacles us giants take for granted.  That's the real spectacle.  It's not all doll houses and big bugs.  There are some neat ideas that Scott (Williams) is faced with and he ponders them.  The ending leaves him and the viewer wondering about his fate as well as wondering if there are others like him (who encountered the mystery mist) and if this is the fate of mankind (one of many reasons I dig Matheson's work).  It's an interesting and fun ride if a little slow at times.  This is one of five classic sci-fi horror movies from the 50s in the Universal DVD set The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection.  This flick is anamorphic widescreen and it looks great.  The only extra is the theatrical trailer (also anamorphic wide).  It's a great set.

Dracula Exotica (1980)

Director: Shaun Costello

Writer: Kenneth Schwartz

Composer: ???

Starring: Jamie Gillis, Samantha Fox, Vanessa del Rio, Eric Edwards, Roger Caine, Gordon G. Duvall, Bobby Astyr, Murry Bukofski, Alba Bonn, Leigh Hope, Terry Yule, Carol Markoe, Inez de Falla, Denise Sloan, Diana Sloan, Herschel Savage, Donald Blank, Ron Jeremy, Randy West

More info: IMDb

Tagline: He came to bite... and ate the whole thing

Plot: Sailing to the USA, smuggler Vita Valdez stabs Count Dracula, but he bites her. A necrophiliac morgue attendant reveals she became a vampire. She becomes Dracula's secretary but turns a sergeant into a vampire against Dracula.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again? No.

Oh, no!  Not wax play!  The horror!

At an hour and forty minutes this XXX movie is a lot longer than usual, but then this one is different than your usual porno.  There's a good attempt at telling a fun story.  There are some genuinely funny moments.  Dracula gets off the boat in America and kills a few folks on the boat and dock.  Then he attacks Vanessa Del Rio, strips her, bites her neck and boob, goes down on her and out of nowhere asks, "Can you type?".  Fucking classic.  The answer, for those dying to know, is 50 wpm.  It looks like Dracula just picked himself up a secretary. 

Here's another.  There's a disturbing turning hilarious scene when Anatole (Astyr) arrives at an apartment where his teenage daughter is all innocent like.  She calls him Daddy, he gives her a lollipop and they talk about daughter/fathers stuff. Then he fingers her telling her it's a butterfly chasing its wings.  It's creepy.  Naturally, they fuck.  I kept thinking, "They're really going there.".  After all, this was practically the 70s.

Afterward, she answers the phone and she's completely out of character.  It was role play all along and the girl was Sally (Fox) in disguise.  The man on the other end of the phone tells her to kill him.  She does by continuing the play time with Anatole and puts a gun barrel in his butt.  Bam.  The movie has its funny moments but not enough.  There are little spots here an there that couldv'e been shortened to help with the pacing and length but it's more entertaining than most porn features I've seen from the 70s.  The fuck scenes are OK.  There isn't any effort into creating any genuine horror but it is one of the few pornos from the era that dabbled in horror.  The best acting goes to Murray Bukofski as Chikopnik, his only IMDb credit.  The the award for "I Didn't Know He Could Juggle" goes to Ron Jeremy for an early scene when he's juggling oranges while getting blown. 

The Phantom Carriage (1921)

Original title: Korkarlen

Director: Victor Sjostrom

Writers: Selma Lagerlof, Victor Sjostrom

Composer: Matti Bye (for the 1998 release?)

Starring: Victor Sjostrom, Hilda Borgstrom, Tore Svennberg, Astrid Holm, Concordia Selander, Lisa Lundholm, Tor Weijden, Einar Axelsson

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Metro's Sensational Production

Plot: On New Year's Eve, the driver of a ghostly carriage forces a drunken man to reflect on his selfish, wasted life.

My rating: 7.5/10

Will I watch it again?  Yes.

It's so rare that I watch silent pictures and it's not by design.  I just don't seem to get around to them as much as I'd like.  This one's been on my radar for a few years and I'm glad I finally got around to it.  I loved it.   Victor Sjostrom as David Holm is fantastic and he plays a real bastard.  The little things he does facially are remarkable.  They brought me further into not only the story but it gave him even more depth.  There's a nice use of tinting like having blue for night and so on.  And that got even better when the neat visual effects were thrown in. 
 

There are several nice shots, shots that I wouldn't have expected in a movie made almost a hundred years ago.  Another thing I dug was the scenes aren't chronological.  There's a good deal of skipping around with the timeline.  It made for a little confusion at times but it also helped hold my attention.  Some of it was possibly unnecessary, and so were some of the scenes which led to covering the same ground story-wise.   Hey, does this look familiar?

"Here's Davey!"

When David started going to town on the door to get to his wife I was hoping for a shot similar to THE SHINING (1980) but this is as close as Sjostrom got. The ending had me all choked up.  Call me surprised.  It was heartbreaking and beautiful and it's all thanks to Sjostrom's performance.  He really is magnificent in this.  I would've preferred a much darker ending (which it looked like it was going there but turned on me) but I'm happy with what is there.  The score by Matti Bye is gorgeous.  I see YouTube has the movie in full with a much darker score.  I watched a few minutes of it and it sounds like that will be the one I watch the next time.  If you've never seen a silent film or only a few, you might want to start somewhere else as this one runs about an hour and forty-seven minutes which is probably more than what most people are willing to take in that are unfamiliar with type of thing.  I really enjoyed it and I look forward to seeing it again someday and with this other contemporary score.  Congratulations for reading this far.  This picture is less of a horror movie than a drama but it does have horror and fantasy elements which might be enough to draw the horror fans in.  That's what prompted me to see it and I'm not disappointed in the least.

Curse of Chucky (2013)

Director: Don Mancini

Writer: Don Mancini

Composer: Joseph LoDuca

Starring: Fiona Dourif, Brad Dourif, Chantal Quesnelle, Danielle Bisutti, A Martinez, Maitland McConnell, Brennan Elliott, Summer H. Howell, Adam Hurtig, Jennifer Tilly, Alex Vincent

More info: IDMb

Tagline: Be afraid. Be effing afraid.

Plot: After her mother's mysterious death, Nica begins to suspect that the talking, red-haired doll her visiting niece has been playing with may be the key to recent bloodshed and chaos.

My rating: 7/10

Will I watch it again?  Yes.

I REALLY like this franchise!  The last two films (4 (Bride) and 5 (Seed)) took a left turn in Albequerque and went from horror to comedy/horror.  This one goes back to its roots for a straight up horror movie and it's good.  I loved the atmosphere of the house.  It's almost entirely set there so the house needs to have some personality and variety.  The kills are good but more importantly, Mancini delivers the goods when it comes to making a good horror movie that DOES NOT RELY ON FUCKING JUMP SCARES!  There are none.  Having Nica (Fiona Dourif, Brad's daughter...neat...and she does a great job!) confined to a wheelchair works very well and it doesn't feel gimmicky at all.  What's better is that there's a great fucking reason why she's paralyzed below the waist.  I loved how this story ties into the previous and how it expands on Charles Lee Ray's history.  The movie looks great and it feels at just the right length.  The Blu-ray looks outstanding.  The sequel, CULT OF CHUCKY (2017), dropped a few days ago and I'm anxiously awaiting that one.