31 Days of Spooky Movies: The ABCs of Death

Day #29

The ABCs of Death

(2012)

A series of 26 short films, each done by a different director and each centering around a word that starts with a different letter of the alphabet.

Fright Factor:

1 / 5 Wasted Evenings

Gore Factor:

4 / 5 Cheap  Gross-outs

Should you watch it?

Let me tell you something, dear readers: I Hated this movie.

Correction: I still hate this movie!

SO MUCH!

I would gladly rewatch any of the other terrible horror movie I’ve watched during all my years of doing these 31 Days of Spooky Movies challenges rather than watch this shitstorm again.

My friends warned me that this movie was awful, but I didn’t listen! It just sounded like such an interesting premise that I just had to see it for myself. And it turns out that not only is this movie powerfully stupid and incredibly boring, but it’s also not at all scary. Sure some of the shorts are quite gory, but—as you may have already guessed by how I divide my ratings—gory is a very different creature than scary.

As Steven King says in his book Danse Macabre, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud. ”

And the real nail in the coffin, the real mind-numbing thing about the movie isn’t that it’s incredibly vapid and dumb (although it is): it’s that it’s 26 incredibly vapid and dumb movies! You’re forced to experience one confused disappointment after another in some sort of cruel, torturous, and seemingly never-ending parade...

I don’t know what else to say...

Fuck this movie.

“F is for Fart”

31 Days of Spooky Movies: Pontypool

Day# 28b

Pontypool

(2008)

When a strange and deadly infection appears in a small town in rural Canada the crew at the local radio station becomes ground zero for coverage. However, unlike most epidemics, the pathogen here isn't a physical one, but one hidden within our very language.

Fright Factor:

2 / 5 Shock Jocks

Gore Factor:

3 / 5  Word Vomits

Should you watch it?

Sometimes I’m not entirely sure if a movie is definitively amazing or if it’s just flipping all my switches. Whatever the case may be, I love Pontypool! I mean it’s a linguistic zombie movie that cares more about creating a mood of terror than sights of gore! What’s not to love about that?

The idea of a virus that spreads through language is such a brilliant twist on a genre based in the physical. Zombies bite, zombies swarm, zombies eat, zombies rip, zombies tear, and so on. Zombie movies almost always involve the virus spreading through acts of aggression. And yet here it’s the opposite: the virus spreads through words. How do you work together to find a way out of a bad situation without language? (Not to mention the interesting modern parallels one could make between this pathogen and a computer virus).

Even if the linguistic angle isn’t your thing, this movie still has quit a lot to offer. The cast is small but it is stellar. The costars of Stephen McHattie and Lisa Houle just give it their all and knock their performances right out of the park.

And if all that wasn’t enough, the real coup de grace of the is just how it well it was made and how refreshingly unique its focus. So much of Horror filmmaking is about showing you scary things. “Here! Look at this thing...isn’t it SCARY!”

I think if you look for it you’ll notice that a lot of weak Horror movies fall flat because the filmmakers aren’t able to construct any actual fright and forced to deal solely in shock and eww. They simply show you something gory, or violent, or brutal, or whathaveyou, and call it a day. But a great Horror works through multiple channels to unsettle you. Showing things can be great, but there’s also so much wasted potential from not attempting to trigger the viewer’s other senses and using our own imaginations against us. Unless the filmmaker is exceptionally talented there is rarely anything they can show you that will be worse than what you can imagine.

And that’s a big part of what makes this movie so enjoyable to me. The virus is one transmitted through sound, the movie is set at a radio station; it’s sound (not sight) that provides the central focus of the movie. The action for most of the story is coming almost exclusively from the calls the station is receving. Those calls combined with the reactions from the crew at the station work together to build this delightful tension as you begin to sense control being lost and danger looming ever closer. The film just trusts the viewer to fill in the details in a way that I just love and so rarely see.

At the end of the day Pontypool is a movie that’s not for everyone. (As much as I hate to admit it). It’s just too different and takes too many departures from the mainstream to have true mass appeal. But for me? Well, that’s exactly what I love about it! It takes risks, it deviates from your usual expectations, and delivers something exciting, unique, and best of all: Spooky.

“Kill is Kiss.”

31 Days of Spooky Movies: Under the Skin

Day #28

Under the Skin

(2013)

A creature disguises itself as a human woman and proceeds to seduce lonely people in order to consume them. But when she attempts to abandon this way of living things begin to spiral out of her control.

Fright Factor:

1 / 5 Human Experiences

Gore Factor:

2 / 5 Empty Skins Waving Gently Like Seaweed In the Current

Should you watch it?

You know what? Despite the fact that I really only had a vague idea of what exactly was going on, I greatly enjoyed this movie.

It’s slow and arty and has a strange kind of ethereal beauty about it. It’s one of those movies that leaves you thinking after it’s done. Something that could be about all sorts of things, or perhaps none at all. It’s completely up to you.

If you’re in the mood for something really Scary, I’d say you should probably keep looking. But if you want something spooky yet artistic? Something off the beaten Horror path, perhaps? Well, look no further.

“When was the last time you touched someone?”

31 Days of Spooky Movies: What We Become

Day #27

Sorgenfri

[What We Become]

(2015)

When a zombie virus comes to town the government quarantines everyone inside their homes. A family does their best to survive the situation, while their idiot son’s poor life choices constantly threaten to destroy everything they hold dear.

Fright Factor

1.5 / 5 Nuclear Families

Gore Factor

2.8 / 5 Knives to the Eye

Should You Watch It?

You know what? No.

It’s not a terrible film, but even at its best moments it’s still pretty generic.

To its credit there were two things I did like. The first being that the government’s actions, while aggressive, seemed very appropriate. I mean, sure it would be pretty creepy to get quarantined in your house upon threat of being shot if you left, but still a better situation than being eaten alive by the living dead, no?

Second was that I also liked the main family (for the most part). There was something very honest and relatable about them. Unfortunately the movie manages to sour this by means of the family’s son who is, without a doubt, THE WORST.

I mean, good golly, that kid is awful. I would have turned this movie off, but I REALLY wanted to see someone eat him. He ruins every decent thing the film had to offer by rebelling against it and becomes this incredibly frustrating embodiment of everything that makes some teenagers so irritating: he rebels against any authority that disagrees with him, he acts on impulse and never considers the consequences of his actions, he doesn’t listen, he thinks more with his hormones than with his brain, and did I mention that he thinks he knows everything?

And guess what happens to this void of common sense when a zombie virus hits town?

That’s right! His vast supply of idiocy constantly endangers everyone he encounters.

If this was a comedy that might actually be pretty entertaining, but it’s not a comedy! They play everything straight and serious.

If you want to spend an hour and a half yelling at a teenager who constantly ruins everything for everyone, then by all means watch this movie. But if you’ve watched any other zombie movie than nothing here will surprise you. There are FAR better zombie movies out there. And FAR better Scandinavian horror movies as well.

“Right now there is no specific cure.”

31 Days of Spooky Movies: The Brood

Day # 26

The Brood

1979

A father tries to get to the bottom of what’s being done to his institutionalized wife and the strange string of murders that seem to revolve around her.

Fright Factor:

1 / 5 Embarrassing Mothers

Gore Factor:

1.5 / 5  Live Births

Should You Watch it?

Oh my dear gosh, I hate this movie!

So. Much.

If I hadn’t been under a time-crunch this day I would have definitely turned it off. It is so stupid and POWERFULLY bland. Half of the movie is just the father doing fatherly things, trying to get on with his life sans wife, and talk-talk-talking and they give you absolutely no reason to care. Then these weird children-things start showing up and killing people despite their lack of subtlety or skill. And even when there are murders occurring the film still manages to be boring!

And then the ending. Oh, the ending. Admittedly the ending is the most interesting part of the movie BY FAR, but, jeez...does it ever come out of nowhere. I mean, really, just completely out of nowhere. I won’t spoil it, because the reveal is the only part of this movie that was even remotely worth watching. But just know that if you attempt this and find yourself bored out of your mind like I was, you won’t be missing much to skip over large swathes of the film.

I could probably find some kernel of interest to grasp onto and make a better post about it, but it just doesn’t deserve it. It’s an extremely boring horror movie that is far from scary and WAY too 70s for its own good (let alone the viewer’s).

If you can’t find a better horror movie to watch than The Brood you either don’t have many options or just aren’t trying hard enough.

“The movie, I mentioned, is a bore. That's because hardly anything of interest happens until the last 15 minutes or so. Eggar's husband is opposed to the institute, thinks she's being kept a prisoner there, rants and raves a lot and finally breaks in. But otherwise there's just a lot of coming and going and musing, as the music on the sound track hints darkly at the terrible things to come.”

-from Roger Ebert’s review of The Brood

31 Days of Spooky Movies: Animal

Day #25

Animal

(2014)

A group of friends go out for a day hike in the remote woods, but things take a turn for the worst when they start being hunted by a monstrous creature.

Fright Factor:

2 / 5 Condescending Men

Gore Factor:

3 / 5 Maulings

Should you watch it?


Common among Horror movies are the ones that get made not because a talented creator had a good idea, but because someone needed content. Think of them like the Hallmark Lifetime specials of Horror: they’re not movies made to rake it up at the box office or create art, they’re made on the cheap to serve as content (generally as television stuffing or streaming filler).

And I guess their dastardly plan worked, because I ended up watching it! Touché.


They might have succeeded in getting another view, but they certainly didn’t succeed in making a great movie. The filmmakers seemed rather clueless about the art of creating fear. And what do you do when you don’t know how to create something original? That’s right! You just try to copy what other people have done. Yet without a developed sense of the Who/What/When/Why/Where/How’s of Horror, it all just falls flat. The plot is hackneyed and the writing is quite lazy and only has one (and only one) memorable element: the indomitable Keke Palmer.

Palmer out-acts everyone in the film and single-handedly straps this movie onto her back and drags its out from the pit of Awful and into the plains of Mediocre. If it wasn’t for Palmer’s character Alissa I would have turned this thing off really early on. And thus Alissa is really the only part of the movie worth talking about.

Alissa is such an intriguing element to find in a crappy movie like this. Here’s this badass woman of color who is outdoorsy, caring, and fiercely clever. A character who consistently analyzes threats to the group with remarkable precision and is without a doubt the group’s MVP.

But the truly infuriating thing about this movie isn’t the poor writing or the sloppy production, it’s that NO ONE in the movie will acknowledge Alissa’s contributions! Some dumb-ass dude is always ignoring her advice and straight-up telling her she’s wrong...and then they end up suffering the results! (As do we!)

The level at which female opinions are dismissed is so high that at points I started to wonder if the whole thing was some sort satiric move on the filmmaker’s behalf to mock the tropes of the genre, but sadly this just isn’t the case. What it comes down to is that the movie is just inherently sexist. They wanted to have a strong female character who was more than just a damsel to distress, but they didn’t want to actually follow through with what that entails.

So there you have it. Animal is a made-for-cable monster movie that was saved from utter blandness by a stellar performance by Keke Palmer. And yet in spite of her valiant efforts, the film sabotages her character at every turn in order to stick to a bland recipe of over-used plot-lines and tropes. While it really isn’t worth watching, it does provide an interesting example of the inherent friction between people’s desire for fully-formed female characters and the industry’s reluctance to fully commit to it.

“I think it wants us here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, how did Vicky and Carl end up here? How did any of us end up here? Coincidence?”

“But it doesn’t matter.”

“Thing ate Jeff like it was nothing. How come it didn’t do the same thing to the rest of us?”

“Babe, Don’t do this.”

...

“All I’m saying is that it herded us here. Eating what it can and saving the rest as prey.”

“Babe, baby-”

“How else can you explain it?”

“Baby, I know it’s hard for you. Okay? But you can’t keep doing this. You’re over thinking-”

“No, I’m not. I’m being completely rational.”

“Bab-”

“You’re not even listening to me.”

“Babe, look at me... it’s just an animal. That’s it. And what’s happening in here? To us? Is happening because it just is. Figuring out why that it’s happening doesn’t help us. But figuring out how to get out of here? That does.

...

Come here. You’re the smartest girl that I know. You’re a genius. So don’t let that beautiful brain of yours spiral out of control because you can’t figure out something, okay?”

31 Days of Spooky Movies: The Witches

Day #24

The Witches

(1990)

A young boy on holiday discovers a secret coven of witches who are scheming to turn all the children of the world into mice.

Fright Factor:

1/5 Ill-conceived Schemes

Gore Factor:

2/5 Dear Ratboys

Should You Watch It?


I first saw this movie back when I was I kid and to be fair that’s really the way it was intended to be seen. I doubt the filmmakers were aiming for the coveted twenty-something-roommates-watching-nearly-30-years-later demographic.

Despite no longer being a part of the movie’s intended market there are still a some things to enjoy about The Witches. Angelica Huston is fantastic and I’m always happy whenever Rowan Atkinson shows up in a movie. But it’s the practical effects and monster make-up that elevate this movie into the realm of the memorable.

The scenes that stuck with me after seeing it as a kid weren’t ones about mouse-boy hijinks (aka most of the movie), they were the gruesome effects-heavy scenes! The Jim Henson company did the effects for the movie, so that says it all right there, but what you might not expect is just how grotesque this movie gets! Especially considering its PG rating.

The Witches is not a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination and as a whole it comes across pretty heavily as low-budget kiddy-fantasy-adventure. Yet there still are some wonderful moments where the filmmakers seem to have legitimately gone out of their way to try and give children nightmares. And there’s something you just have to respect about that.

So with that in mind, if you’re looking for a horror movie you can show to frighten a child without mentally scarring them forever, then maybe check it out. But if you’re an adult with no particular nostalgia for the book, then the gruesome bits probably won’t be enough to overpower the kiddy-centric-sweetness of the rest of the film for you.

“Real witches are very cruel, and they have a highly developed sense of smell. A real witch could smell you across the street on a pitch-black night.”

“She couldn’t smell me. I’ve just had a shower.”

“Oh yes, she could. The cleaner you are, the more a witch can smell you.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh, yes it does. A dirty child, it is the dirt she smells. A clean child, it is the child.”

“Wow. I’ll never have a shower again, and I’ll have you for an excuse.”

“Well, just not often. Only once a month is probably safe.”