31 Nights of Halloween & Horror: 2021!

[Jared]

October 1st. 1- The Cat and the Canary (1927). 2- Vampyr (1932)
October 2nd. 3- Young Frankenstein (1974)
October 3rd. 4- The Return of the Vampire (1943)
October 4th. 5- Viy (1967)
October 5th. 6- Escape the Undertaker (2021) 7- Terror Train (1980)
October 6th. 7- The Company of Wolves (1984)
October 7th. 8- Gretel & Hansel (2020). 9- Babylon 5: Thirdspace (1998)
October 8th. 10- My Best Friend is a Vampire (1987). 11- The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)
October 9th. 12- The War of the Worlds (1953). 13- 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)
October 10th. 14- Kiss of the Vampire (1963)
October 11th. 15- Pale Blood (1990)
October 12th. 16- Apostle (2018). 17- Dracula (Spanish version, 1931)
October 13th. 18- Ghostwatch (1992) 19- Late Phases (2014)
October 14th. 20- Ghostbusters (1984) 21- Savageland (2017) 22- House of Black Death (1965)
October 15th. 23- It Waits (2005). 24- Within the Woods (1978)
October 16th. 25- Beetlejuice (1988)



This movie always holds up well. Michael Keaton hasn't done a full on comedy (Birdman, kinda) in a long time. It's weird to remember that's what he used to be known for. The entire cast is really good, unfortunately even Jeffery Jones who turned out to be a pedophile.

It's interesting how Betelgeuse's signature look in media is always that striped suit which he only wears for a little while near the end. I just learned yesterday that he was in an episode of Teen Titans Go. I may have to track that down. I used to watch the Beetlejuice animated series but I don't remember it well.

[Astral Disaster]

55. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) - Continuing with my Halloween franchise mini-marathon (I don't own either The Curse of Michael Myers or Resurrection) we come to the seventh installment, which completely ignores everything after the second movie and picks up 20 years after the events of Halloween night 1978. Laurie Strode (areturning Jamie Lee Curtis) has faked her death, created a new identity for herself and become the headmistress of a private boarding school, keeping a low profile in the hope that her brother won't find her, she also has a son who has just turned 17, the same age as her when she originally crossed paths with Michael. One of the better sequels of the series, with a tight script and brisk pace it always feels a lot shorter than its 86 minute run time. Random observation while viewing: Adam Arkin has a really big head.

Not sure yet if I'll watch the Rob Zombie entries or skip to Halloween 2018, or possibly opt for something else entirely. I'm thinking I may go see Halloween Kills early next week, so may put off those three until this coming weekend.

[Scott Taylor]

1. The Bat (1959)
2. Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)
3. The Vampire Happening (1971)

4. The Blob (1958) - A tradition for me in October and a classic. Practically a perfect horror movie in every way, I even don't mind the ultra lame kid who seemed sort of mentally special.

5. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) - Really good science fiction, with a timeless message about the dangers of mindless conformity. The original version is a classic and worth watching just due to the cinematography, the directing and the pacing. I really loved the slow burn it took the main character to go from rationalizing everything away to being truly off-his-gourd frightened as he learns the stakes are "stay awake or lose your soul", basically.

6. Magnetic Monster (1953) - Silly, goofy movie about an element that becomes conscious and threatens the earth as it eats enrgey or something and grows. I understand that some consider this to be a classic. They are wrong. This was terrible in every possible way.

7. Angry Red Planet (1959) - Mission to Mars, which turns out to be a jungle and supports lots of forms of life, including intelligent and very advanced life that kicks the earthlings out and tells them not to come back. The movie gets panned for all sorts of reasons. Its got terrible effects, cringey characters, a confusing plot, too much talking and it stole the ending of Heinlein's Red Planet book. But I loved it. It horrified me, especially the giant spider mouse thing. That is the stuff of nightmares!

[Sean Whitmore]

1. Isle of the Dead (1945)
2a. The Vampire Bat (1933)
2b. The Body Snatcher (1945)
3a. The Thing (1982)
3b. The Old Dark House (1932)
3c. Freaked (1993)
4. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)
5. Wishmaster (1997)
6. Jason X (2001)
7. Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)
8a. Dracula (Spanish version) (1931)
8b. Count Dracula (1977)
8c. Terror Train (1980)
9. The Plague of the Zombies (1966)
10a. Deadly Friend (1986)
10b. Kiss of the Vampire (1963)
10c. Braindead / Dead Alive (1992)
11. The Deadly Spawn (1983)
12a. Frankenstein Unbound (1990)
12b. It's Alive (1974)
12c. The Bad Seed (1956)
13. Young Frankenstein (1974)
14. Halloween Kills (2021)
15a. The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
15b. Hollow Man (2000)
16a. The Undying Monster (1942)
16b. The Brain (1988)

17. Christine (1983)

It’s funny, I always assumed the idea of a car just being “born” evil was faithfully adapted from King’s story. As a huge fan of Haunting of Hill House, it’d be right up his alley. But reading the book’s synopsis, I see that the car in that version was specifically possessed by a dude, which to me is a lot less interesting. Score one for Carpenter, there.

[Astral Disaster]

56. Halloween (2007) - Rob Zombie's much maligned remake/reimagining of the John Carpenter classic. I'm in the small minority who actually like the movie, more or less, though I do kind of find the trailer trash aesthetic of so many of his films tiresome after a while, so don't usually find myself watching more than two in a row. The first part of the movie focuses on a young Michael Myers and gives him an expanded backstory, explaining the how and why of his development as a serial killer, then spends several minutes on his time at Smith's Grove before jumping to the present, showing his escape, and then essentially reproducing the original with a few tweaks.

57. Halloween II (2009) - Rob Zombie's second turn at the helm of the franchise, it cobbles together elements from both 1982's Halloween II and Halloween IV while mixing in Zombie's own ideas for adding to the mythology. Not all of it works, especially the parts involving the spirits of Judith and young Michael Myers communing with adult Michael, and the white horse motif comes off as unnecessarily pretentious. Also, Zombie seems to go even further in making most of the main cast unlikable, with Malcolm McDowell's Samuel Loomis becoming particularly insufferable. I'll still take it over either The Curse Of Michael Myers or Resurrection, I also find it amusing that one of the biggest and most repeated negative criticisms of a contemporary horror slasher is that it featured too much blood and gore.

[Conn Seanery]

My List:
1) Maximum Overdrive (1986)
2) No One Gets Out Alive (2021)
3) Pet Sematary (1989)
4) My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To (2020)
5) Tales From the Darkside: The Movie (1990)
6) It (1990)
7) Graveyard Shift (1990)
8) Misery (1990)
9) Sometimes They Come Back (1991)
10) The Lawnmower Man (1992)
11) The Power (2021)
12) The Dark Half (1993)
13) Needful Things (1993)
14) The Tommyknockers (1993)
15) The Stand (1994)



16) Stephen King's The Mangler (1995). Yikes, another swing and a miss. This one was Maximum Overdrive/Graveyard Shift level bad.

[ZuLuLu]

1) 1922 (2017)
2)Gerald's Game (2017)
3) Doctor Sleep (2019)
4) In the Tall Grass (2019)
5)Night of the Living Dead (1968)
6) Things Heard & Seen (2021)
7) Little Monsters (2019)
8) The Dead Don't Die (2019)
9)Escape Room (2019)
10)Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021)
11)The Unfamiliar (2020)
12)A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
13)Poloroid(2019)
14) There’s Someone Inside Your House (2021)
15) Wrong Turn (2021)

16)The Swarm /La Nuée (2020)

French horror drama film directed by Just Philippot from a screenplay by Jérôme Genevray and Franck Victor.
This was not a bad movie, but I didn't really enjoy it.

[Sean Whitmore]

1. Isle of the Dead (1945)
2a. The Vampire Bat (1933)
2b. The Body Snatcher (1945)
3a. The Thing (1982)
3b. The Old Dark House (1932)
3c. Freaked (1993)
4. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)
5. Wishmaster (1997)
6. Jason X (2001)
7. Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)
8a. Dracula (Spanish version) (1931)
8b. Count Dracula (1977)
8c. Terror Train (1980)
9. The Plague of the Zombies (1966)
10a. Deadly Friend (1986)
10b. Kiss of the Vampire (1963)
10c. Braindead / Dead Alive (1992)
11. The Deadly Spawn (1983)
12a. Frankenstein Unbound (1990)
12b. It's Alive (1974)
12c. The Bad Seed (1956)
13. Young Frankenstein (1974)
14. Halloween Kills (2021)
15a. The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
15b. Hollow Man (2000)
16a. The Undying Monster (1942)
16b. The Brain (1988)
17. Christine (1983)

18. Burnt Offerings (1976)

Man, even for classy 70s horror, that was a downer.

I typically like a slow-burn movie, and with this one's cast (Oliver Reed, Karen Black, Burgess Meredith, Bette Davis), I did not expect to be bored in between the supernatural-scare scene. Buuuut I was. Still, the parts that worked, worked well. I always loved the ending of The Shining, so I gotta give credit where it's due, because this movie (and the novel it was based on) inspired it.

[Astral Disaster]

58. Halloween (2018) - Finally finished with the 9 Halloween movies in my collection. The 2018 franchise reboot wipes away everything that followed the 1978 original and picks up again 40 years after the events of that Halloween night, Michael Myers has been institutionalized at Smith's Grove Psychiatric Hospital this entire time and awaits transfer to a federal maximum security prison, Laurie Strode has never gotten past the trauma she experienced and has become something of a reclusive survivalist obsessed with Michael returning to finish what he started. Myers does indeed escape the prison bus and goes on a killing spree which ultimately leads to a showdown between him, Laurie, her daughter and granddaughter.

59. Beyond The Black Rainbow (2010) - More of an art-house sci-fi, though it does dip into horror imagery throught the run time, and the slow tracking shots of cold, minimalistic interiors combined with droning synth sounds, odd framing shots, and dialogue drained of nearly all emotion, serve to create an air of dread and unease. I've described it to friends as mixing the trippier elements of Scanners, 2001, and Altered States then playing it back at 1/4 speed, all that AND a slasher inspied final act.

[Scott Taylor]

1. The Bat (1959)
2. Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)
3. The Vampire Happening (1971)
4. The Blob (1958)
5. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
6. Magnetic Monster (1953)
7. Angry Red Planet (1959)

8. The Blob (1988) - Remake of the earlier film, and this is set in the 1980s and feels very 1980s. Mullets, big hair, used cars from the 1970s, everything. To my surprise it wasn't bad. The only real flaws in my opinion were where the film did deliberate homages to the original by playing certain scenes out almost word for word and shot by shot and the monster itself. There is something neat about the original where the blob felt like it was more a force of nature. This blob was a hunter killer that had the ability to create blobby tentacles and was way more corrosive. The movie really is its own thing. Well worth a watch.

9. The Raven (1935) - Original story about a retired doctor (played by Bela Lugosi) who is so obsessed with Edgar Allen Poe that he owns a pet raven, has a Poe-centric torture chamber built inside his house and sits around alone at home doing Poe readings. Lol! Its not like he's even posting them on instagram! Kinda bizarre, even for the genre, right? The retired doctor ends up with a grudge against a colleague because he wants to date the colleague's much younger daughter but the colleague says no. So the retired doctor invites the colleague, the daughter and a bunch of other people over to his house, puts some of them asleep with sleeping powder in their drinks, ties the colleague up to a pit and the pendulum device, and tries to crush the daughter and her boyfriend in a room with walls that come together. This was a bad movie, overacted and dumb. Freakin Boris Karloff was in the movie but his part is so pointless that it wasn't even worth talking about. His name was just there to sell tickets at the time I am sure.

[Jared]

October 1st. 1- The Cat and the Canary (1927). 2- Vampyr (1932)
October 2nd. 3- Young Frankenstein (1974)
October 3rd. 4- The Return of the Vampire (1943)
October 4th. 5- Viy (1967)
October 5th. 6- Escape the Undertaker (2021) 7- Terror Train (1980)
October 6th. 7- The Company of Wolves (1984)
October 7th. 8- Gretel & Hansel (2020). 9- Babylon 5: Thirdspace (1998)
October 8th. 10- My Best Friend is a Vampire (1987). 11- The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)
October 9th. 12- The War of the Worlds (1953). 13- 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)
October 10th. 14- Kiss of the Vampire (1963)
October 11th. 15- Pale Blood (1990)
October 12th. 16- Apostle (2018). 17- Dracula (Spanish version, 1931)
October 13th. 18- Ghostwatch (1992) 19- Late Phases (2014)
October 14th. 20- Ghostbusters (1984) 21- Savageland (2017) 22- House of Black Death (1965)
October 15th. 23- It Waits (2005). 24- Within the Woods (1978)
October 16th. 25- Beetlejuice (1988)
October 17th. 26- Halloween (2018). 27- Halloween Kills (2021)



A very good reboot/sequel. Rebootquel? This was my second time seeing it since 2018, it's still mostly works. I think the actress playing Laurie's grandaughter and the one who played her blonde friend should have switched roles, the latter is much more charming. Alyson is less interesting on screen than her mom or grandma. John Carpenter's score is great. It's very well shot. Some of the humor feels out of place. All in all, this is still probably the second best movie in the entire franchise. In hindsight, they probably should have just made this like it was going to be a single movie with a definitive end...



WTF happened here?! This is the most disappointing movie of the year for me. It's hard to believe this is the same director and two of same writers as the previous one. Tonally it's all wrong. I can enjoy pure-shlock slashers when that's what I'm going in for. But that's not what 2018 was and it damn sure isn't what the original movie was.

There's an endless parade of too-stupid-to-live characters that Michael slaughters in improbable ways. Laurie Strode spends the whole movie in the hospital with nothing to actually do, which is exactly the thing people didn't like about the original Halloween 2. There's an overwrought subplot about mob mentality that doesn't mesh with the action splatterfest or the borderline parody that other scenes seem to going for. I remember David Gordon Green saying he didn't like how earlier sequels went more and more overboard in making Michael into an overtly supernatural monster...he lied.

This movie is already retconning the previous movie! The officer who was stabbed in the neck and then run over...forget the run over part. Laurie is a recluse...except she has a tight circle of friends all bonded by that night in 1978...including the nurse who drove to the sanitarium with Loomis and didn't live in Haddonfield. In 2018 we were told that Myers killed 5 people in '78...flashbacks (which look good, at least) add another kill that he would surely have been blamed for. People freak out about how Michael Myers "has haunted this town for 40 years!"....as if they're in the original series continuity. But they're not, according to these movies he killed his sister when he was a kid, killed some people in 78, and that was it. Most people didn't even know much about it anymore.

As its own thing, this is an OK slasher, probably still in the upper half when ranked against the entire franchise. But it's a terrible sequel to 2018 and doesn't give high hopes for Halloween Ends.

I would bet money that within a few years we'll see Jamie Lee Curtis in interviews joking around about how freaking stupid this one was. She probably doesn't know WTF happened either.

[ZuLuLu]

1) 1922 (2017)
2)Gerald's Game (2017)
3) Doctor Sleep (2019)
4) In the Tall Grass (2019)
5)Night of the Living Dead (1968)
6) Things Heard & Seen (2021)
7) Little Monsters (2019)
8) The Dead Don't Die (2019)
9)Escape Room (2019)
10)Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021)
11)The Unfamiliar (2020)
12)A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
13)Poloroid(2019)
14) There’s Someone Inside Your House (2021)
15) Wrong Turn (2021)
16)The Swarm /La Nuée (2020)

17) His House (2020)


Written and directed by Remi Weekes from a story by Felicity Evans and Toby Venables. The film tells the story of a refugee couple from South Sudan, struggling to adjust to their new life in an English town that has an evil lurking beneath the surface.

This was a great directorial debut by Weeks. I loved this movie. It had some scary moments and the twist is devastating.

18) The Power (2021)


British horror film written and directed by Corinna Faith.
In the 1970s London, a nurse in training spent her first night at the East London Royal Infirmary during power outages. In the near-total darkness of the old hospital, she is haunted by a supernatural presence.

This was a well-done atmospheric horror movie.

[Jared]

October 1st. 1- The Cat and the Canary (1927). 2- Vampyr (1932)
October 2nd. 3- Young Frankenstein (1974)
October 3rd. 4- The Return of the Vampire (1943)
October 4th. 5- Viy (1967)
October 5th. 6- Escape the Undertaker (2021) 7- Terror Train (1980)
October 6th. 7- The Company of Wolves (1984)
October 7th. 8- Gretel & Hansel (2020). 9- Babylon 5: Thirdspace (1998)
October 8th. 10- My Best Friend is a Vampire (1987). 11- The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)
October 9th. 12- The War of the Worlds (1953). 13- 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)
October 10th. 14- Kiss of the Vampire (1963)
October 11th. 15- Pale Blood (1990)
October 12th. 16- Apostle (2018). 17- Dracula (Spanish version, 1931)
October 13th. 18- Ghostwatch (1992) 19- Late Phases (2014)
October 14th. 20- Ghostbusters (1984) 21- Savageland (2017) 22- House of Black Death (1965)
October 15th. 23- It Waits (2005). 24- Within the Woods (1978)
October 16th. 25- Beetlejuice (1988)
October 17th. 26- Halloween (2018). 27- Halloween Kills (2021)
October 18th. 28- Slumber Party Massacre (2021)



For a SyFy Channel movie, this was surprisingly good. Maybe the best October movie I've ever seen from them. It's a spoofy, loose remake of the 1982 slasher that was already somewhat of a spoof to begin with. It continues the series tradition of being directed by a woman. I caught a lot of nods to the first two Slumber Party movies, I never saw the third but there's probably some in there. The main joke is that group of girls kind of know what genre they're in without getting explicitly meta. But they aren't as clever as they imagine themselves to be. One of the funniest bit is a role reversal where the girls spy on a group of guys having a 'sexy pillow fight' and wonder if that's what guys do when they're not around. The weakest part is a very abrupt ending, I wonder if that was due to TV time constraints.

I hope they do a sequel with a rockabilly ghost drill killer. Then again, if he was rockabilly in the 80s movie, maybe he should be grunge now.

[Astral Disaster]

60. Mandy (2018) - After watching Beyond The Black Rainbow, I just had to follow up with Panos Cosmatos' second film, and while it does recycle some of the themes, imagery and production style of his first effort, it's anything but a retread. Set in 1983, "the enchanted lives of a couple (Red Miller, a logger with a past [played by Nicolas Cage], and Mandy Bloom [Andrea Riseborough], a writer and illustrator) in a secluded forest are brutally shattered by a nightmarish hippie cult and their demon-biker henchmen, propelling [Red] into a spiraling, surreal rampage of vengeance" (from IMDb). While not technically a straight up horror, the first half of the film builds up an atmosphere of dread, while the second half has the look and feel of a descent into hell.

61. Pieces (1982) - Women on a college campus are being targeted by a chainsaw wielding killer who is collecting their body parts to create a human jigsaw puzzle. Oh, what to say about Pieces... in a nutshell, the premise is far more interesting than the execution, but even then, it's kind of just the Frankenstein story without the benefit of the mad scientist reanimating the dead angle, though the film still inexplicably goes for just that in the final shot. So much about this movie is bad, the acting, the dialog, the cinematography, the obvious English dubbing of Spanish actors... the one positive I will give it is that the absurd ridiculousness on display will have you laughing out loud more than a few times, and there's at least entertainment value in that.

62. The Fog (1980) - John Carpenter directed supernatural horror. The coastal community of Antonio Bay is celebrating its centennial, but on the eve of festivities a long hidden, dark secret is uncovered, and the ghosts of the shipwrecked Elizabeth Dane return to exact revenge on the descendants of those who murdered them.

[Conn Seanery]

My List:
1) Maximum Overdrive (1986)
2) No One Gets Out Alive (2021)
3) Pet Sematary (1989)
4) My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To (2020)
5) Tales From the Darkside: The Movie (1990)
6) It (1990)
7) Graveyard Shift (1990)
8) Misery (1990)
9) Sometimes They Come Back (1991)
10) The Lawnmower Man (1992)
11) The Power (2021)
12) The Dark Half (1993)
13) Needful Things (1993)
14) The Tommyknockers (1993)
15) The Stand (1994)
16) The Mangler (1995)



17) Stephen King's The Langoliers (1995). Half the cast is terrible, the effects are embarrassing, the speed at which the characters figure out and accept what's going on is ridiculous, but I still like this one. It's worth it for Bronson Pinchot's Craig Toomey alone, he's amazing (and really creepy with his character's ASMR).