Halloween Dusk to Dawn Movie Show Review

So in 2008   All Hallow's Eve happens at dusk on Friday Octobder 31st.  So here's some movies to watch for 18 hours or so that represent some of my personal faves in celebration of this odd holiday and it's bizarre bu now perfectly acceptable traditions.  

My fright fest begins in a kid friendly fashion... the first few features can be watched by everyone.. and then... put the small ones to bed....

First up, I'm going to show :

THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935, James Whale)

It will still surprise you. It's touching, humorous, imaginative and beautifully atmospheric with its german inspired gothic sets and lightng. I don't care how many times you think you have seen this film or it's parody Young Frankenstein, you probably haven't seen it enough times that you have every scene memorized. And that means it's a great time to see it again. This is perhaps the finest gothic horror film ever made. It may not be loaded with scares or jolts, but no other film surpasses it in terms of atmosphere, style, visual design, literate scripting (it opens with Mary Shelley remember), performances, sound and music.(Boris Karloff and Dwight Frye are particularly superb and Ernest Thesiger all but steals the film with his mad Dr. Praetorius).

Like the original Frankenstein, James Whale employed techniques of framing, movement, sets, lighting and more from silent films, mostly German, such as Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu and Metropolis. He borrows, adds and improves the techniques in every case.

Next we'll show

THEM (1954, Gordon Douglas )

It's THE giant bug movie from the 1950's that served as pretty much the formula for all giant bug movies of the 50's . Heck even Jaws re-worked the formula this film set in stone. It's done impressively well and even stars the poor man's Spencer Tracy, James Whitmore. Edmund Gwen is quite fun (out of his Miracle on 42nd Street Santa Claus suit), there's James Arness in a supporting role and if you look fast that IS Leonard Nimoy !! What's it about? Ants. Giant atomic bomb mutated ants. It's a classic, and a lot of fun. Oh sure the special effects are dated and some of the scientific mumbo jumbo is downright silly, but there's still a bit of suspense and younger ones might get a little scared by the thing... still.

We'll follow this with one of the most entertaining films of all time. Horror genre or not.  It's a gem

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948, Charles Barton)

It's a lot of fun to watch Abbott and Costello repeat their best bits from Hold That Ghost and work out some other borrowed slapstick routines and mix with with horror pro's like Lugosi and Chaney. Everyone will have a lot of fun watching this one. The monsters themselves are not out right ridiculed during the film. However you can quibble that you can clearly see Dracula's reflection in a mirror in a scene or two, and their demise in the film, is obviously temporary-- A fall into the sea can't possibly kill a werewolf or a vampire.

Now some of the younger children might want to leave the room because we're starting to get int a little bit darker territory here. I wouldn't worry at all about the ones about 12 or 13 however.

In fact the lights are going out now... We'll light a few candles.

Oh it's not really too bad. It's just

William Castle's camp classic HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1958, William Castle)

Vincent Price gives one of his most entertaining performance as the host of a nasty overnight dinner party in which party favors include guns given away to guests in miniature coffins. What's real and what's not? Who's out to murder who? Boo. Lots of screaming. It's low budget, but it has a sense of a macabre sadism throughout. A real Franklin Lloyd Wright house was used an atypical (non-gothic) Haunted House. Producer William Castle got attention for the film with one of his many in-theatre gimmicks. In this one, he sent a skeleton on a wire just above the audiences' heads at the right moment. He called it Emergo!!!

Hmm I can rig up something like that..... hehehehehe

Now we'll put on some slightly stronger stuff.

DEAD OF NIGHT (1945, various directors)

I'll be showing the complete 102 minute version of this classic chiller. It's British, the only director you've probably heard of that worked on the thing is Charles Crighton (maybe Basil Dearden). A gathering takes place in the country where a group of guests are telling ghost stories. One of the guests has been having nightmares which seem to be coming true. All of the supernatural tales are watch-able. A couple of the lighter ones are a bit silly and dated, but this film still remains the best anthology film ever made and it still has a real effective knock out punch. It's a gem.

Next up is the classic

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956, Don Siegel)

One of the original and still the best paranoid conspiracy ever made. It's got the McCarthy era subtext. Some of the acting is over-the top, but in a deliciously entertaining manner. The tense script was written by Daniel Mainwaring from Jack Finneys book. I'll be showing director Don Siegel's original 76 minute cut of the film minus the studio imposed prologue and epilogue. Look fast and you see a cameo by none other than Sam Peckinpah (who wrote a scene or two for the film).

Now we are going to screen a disturbing film and you might put anyone under 16 to bed now.


FREAKS (1932, Tod Browning)

Freaks features a still shockingly effective climax that few will ever forget. It's truly the stuff of nightmares. A few of the images from this film are memorably disturbing. A few are also quite touching. This once banned and heavily censored film is from the very early days of sound films and it's slightly dated. The impact however remains very strong. I'm fascinated that our hero in the film is not completely heroic at all, and that the villains of the story are not the circus freaks but the truly grotesque normal people who are downright obscene and deserve what happens to them. Todd Browning risked his career on this film, (a follow up to his Dracula, starring Lugosi) and essentially lost. Several generations of film goers gained a classic film in return, though.

Next we'll change the pace a bit. We'll put on one of those films that slowly crawl around inside your skin and give you itches you can't make go away. A film that will slowly make you more and more uncomfortable. Perhaps next year I will show one of the best examples of this: DON'T LOOK NOW,  or  Rosemary's Baby but both are a bit too subtle for my mood tonight so instead let's make the next one:

PEEPING TOM (1960, Michael Powell)

Director Michael Powell (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes) kissed his career goodbye when he made this still disturbing, denounced, banned film about a psychotic serial killer (much like Tod Browning did when he made Freaks). Several scenes are shown from the perspective of the killer and these are the ones which upset people a great deal in 1960. The film has many thematically similar ideas to Hitchcock's Rear Window and voyeurism. This film however took ideas where no man had gone before. It's still a sometimes surprisingly brutal film, though it's minimal gore is quite tame by today's standards. It was primarily this and Psycho which are the father's of today's slasher films.


The next few films are the modern Halloween classics you pretty much expect to see around this time of the year, every year. They still work quite effectively and if you're over-familiar with them, well think of them as you would It's a Wonderful Life around Christmas time. They are nostalgic, they are ones which pretty much are your duty to watch. . .....

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968, George Romero) (Sub - Land of the Dead or  Diary of the Dead if you've seen this one more than 2 times in the last 5 years)

While the low-budget aspects of the film make it easy to wriggle out of the implied and somewhat shown gruesomeness, I say stop taking the easy way out-- people. Pretend you have never seen a film like this ever before. A film that dares to show you some truly shocking scenes of gore and cannibalism. A film which portrays a world gone mad, where the dead rise from the grave, where a women is so scared she wanders around in a state of shock and the person who helps her is a young black man. It's the late 60's remember. This film is going to go too far, it's going to show you things most film-goers have never been shown before. It's going to keep the tension going not for a few minutes but for a great deal of its running time. Yeah, some of the acting is really over the top, but give the amateur actors their 15 minutes of fame and realize with the equivalent amount that Blair Witch project was made for, George Romero and company made this classic which has inspired hundreds of horror films and nearly as many film-makers. And it just doesn't really feel like Halloween without a peak at the thing.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)

The Tobe Hooper classic is not nearly the gore-fest many remember it to be, but that doesn't mean it's not a gruesome, sadistic and brutal low budget film. The very idea of a family of nearly retarded, essentially unstoppable cannibal psycho killers is scary stuff. Since you know it was inspired by Wisconsin's Ed Gein it's a little more disturbing yet. The fact that nearly all of the young characters we meet are as annoying and whiny as those in the Blair Witch Project, might dilute the horror of what happens to them for some of you, but some of the images, and motifs that Tobe Hooper finds are at times nightmarish and disturbing. The amateurism of the film adds to its dark grisliness. Nuff said (I hope).

And for this year rather than something like Carnival of Souls (too tame for this crowd tonight), or Halloween or Friday the 13th (too familiar for us), let's choose:

The HILLS HAVE EYES (1977, Wes Craven)

Wes Craven's shocker about a family's vacation in the desert that is turned into a nightmare thanks to an incestuous family of cannibals who live in caves and wanna party.. It's an ugly, unrelenting horror film that is part Texas Chainsaw, part Night of the Living Dead, and part David Lynch. Yep that's Elliot's (ET's mom Dee Wallace Stone) in this Wes Craven gore fest which features some gross-outs, some creepiness, some sick humor and well.... a good time is had by all.

Just remember our Last House on the Left, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream horror guy started his career path as a teacher!!!

Ah but for something truly different. For something utterly bizarre, let me direct your attention to:

SANTE SANGRE (1989, Alejandro Jodorowsky)

Alejandro Jodorowsky's take on the psycho killer/ slasher genre is so different, you might not realize what it is until it is almost over. But it's gruesome Fellinesque images are just perfect for our film festival. A dutiful son, is the arms for his Saint-like mother. He will do anything for her, including murder. Full of bizarre and disturbing images (some will consider part of the film blasphemous), and sometimes gruesome gore, this is one of the strangest films you'll ever see.
Jodorowsky however has crafted a film that does make sense in a traditional sense (though how it gets there is bizarre) and is not as flawed as El Topo, or Holy Mountain.

And as a bonus film #13....

It's time to give into totally to blood lust and decide upon a gore film. We'll do this democractically. Which one of these have you not seen, or which one are you most in the mood for.

The Asian gore film Evil Dead Trap (1991, Seishu Ikeda)

Miyuki Ono, who plays the t.v. hostess of Nami's Late Night receives a snuff video and she grabs several of her co-workers to investigate. There's also a rapist nearby . Very much influenced by Dario Argento, with music that sounds like Goblin. There's a few too many cheesy false scares but it doesn't get much gorier than this one does. The Killer (in Peeping Tom mode) has tapes of his mother who seems to be berating him. There were many sequels to the film, the first involved a haunted female projectionist, is called Hideki: Evil Dead Trap 2 and was released in ‘93. Our own Mike Bracken has done such a wonderful job reviewing Evil Dead Trap I suggest you look it up if your aren't familiar with it. I'll concur the film wears out its welcome ten or fifteen minutes before its over and has a problematic ending. It's still worth seeing a few times though.

OR

An Italian gore film Demons (1986, Lamberto Bava)

There's no plot... just a set up. People attending a marathon of horror films (if I remember that part correctly) in a movie theater are either turning into murdering zombie madmen or becoming victims of them. Lots of heavy metal music (Motley Crue too) Directed by Lamberto Bava, from a script by Dario Agento and Lamberto Bava. Some of the gore effects are quite good, others are cheesy. If you like slaughterhouse movies this is one of the best.

Note:  If you haven't seen  Dawn of the Dead,  Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead or Diary of the Dead.. see those before you watch either Evil Dead Trap or Demons

OR

the campy New Zealand gore film: BrainDead 1993 (the uncut version of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive)

Peter Jackson gave us the outrageous short feature (Muppet Satire) Meet the Feebles before he started working on full blown feature films. Brain Dead was cut quite a bit when it was released in the U.S. and retitled Dead Alive (to avoid confusion from a pretty good Roger Corman produced film called BrainDead with Bud Court). It's set in 1957, and the humor, horror and gore increase as the film progresses. It's hard to fathom how far Jackson will take his bloody tale. He takes it farther than you think possible and crosses over into cartoonish absurdity at it's finale. And remember the best way to get rid of a house-ful of zombies is with a Lawnmower.... Oh yes.......It's closely related in tone to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series. Not quite as visually inventive as Evil Dead, but bloody fun none-the-less.

And there you have a 13 film, fright festival that should satisfy even the most rabid among you.Next year we'll choose at least 9 or 10 different films to make up our 13....

That is of course, if you make it till next year.

Ah.. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
(Cough cough)
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

BOO !!!