Last year I reviewed 31 scary movies, one for each day of October. This October I’m doing it again! Today is halfway through October, so here are the first 15.
Scary Movie Mini Review #1: Kiss of the Vampire (1963) Directed by Don Sharp
This lesser Hammer Horror film has a garish poster that promises “giant devil bats summoned from the caves of hell to destroy the lust of the vampires!” Not surprisingly, the bats are normal sized cheesy rubber puppets on fishing line. Despite that, this movie has a unique tone to it, something surprisingly magical and haunting that’s abandoned in the goofy and rushed climax.
A newlywed couple are on their way by motor car to their honeymoon. They break down somewhere in the German mountains near a castle, and of course there’s a menacing man watching them from a castle window. They end up at a strangely empty inn and are invited to sup with the wealthy doctor and his children who live in the castle. Unsurprisingly the doctor and his children are vampires, but they’re a different type, more satanic personality cultists than undead blood suckers. The young wife is slowly lured into this cult’s clutches, and the husband and local Van Helsing wannabe must save her. All this is rote cliché, but what stands out as unique is the slow, menacing pace and tone, the texture of long gray rainy days and gloomy moonlit nights. These vampires remind me more of the secret society in Eyes Wide Shut than the Draculas in countless vampire flicks, and their menace is more in the way they corrupt your soul than your blood. It’s a pity that the ridiculous rubber bats flap in at the end and ruin everything.
Scary Movie Mini Review #2: House (1986) Directed by Steve Miner
Stephen King by way of Looney Tunes, House is a classic haunted house story with a light, popcorny touch. A horror novelist (no surprise) loses his son at his crazy aunt’s house. His aunt dies and he inherits the place and moves in to try to write his next book. His new neighbors are nosy, he starts hearing his son’s voice coming from the bathroom mirror, and there’s a closet upstairs that may be a portal to a ghost dimension. The whole thing feels like a colorful cartoon: the household items come to life like an un-scary version of Evil Dead 2, the ghosts are all big rubbery blob costumes that look like baseball mascots, and even the Vietnam flashbacks that are trying to be serious feel like panels from a goofy comic book. This movie is not designed to scare you, it’s designed to entertain you. It kind of works.
Scary Movie Mini Review #3: Paranoiac (1963) Directed by Freddie Francis
The executives at Hammer films must have seen how much money Hitchcock’s Psycho made so they made this movie to cash in on the trend. That’s the only way I can explain Paranoiac, which shares so many things with Psycho that I’m surprised no one sued. On the surface the story is quite different: a brother who was thought long dead suddenly returns right as his younger brother is about to inherit their dead parent’s wealthy estate. The younger brother, played with striking intensity by Oliver Reed, is convinced that this returned brother is an imposter out to steal his fortune, while their sister begins to have strange feelings for him. Also there’s a creepy masked killer in a raincoat running around and weird organ music playing at night.
To explain the plot further would show you how similar the movie is to Psycho but would also spoil what turns out to be a pretty decent psychological thriller. The black and white anamorphic cinematography is superb, the acting appropriately intense, and the story, though kind of a ripoff, engaging. It keeps you guessing for quite some time.
Scary Movie Mini Review #4: Skinamarink (2022) Directed by Kyle Edward Ball\
Two very young kids wake up in the middle of the night in their 90’s suburban house. Weird noises crackle, scrape and boom, the phone signal is busy, and their parents are nowhere to be found. Worst of all, the doors and windows seem to be disappearing. We don’t see the kids’ faces. We see their bare and sock-covered feet tiptoeing around, we hear their toes swish on the carpet, they talk in whispers, sometimes with subtitles when they’re too muffled. Everything is captured in grainy static anamorphic-cropped shots, mostly low-angles of furniture, doorways and walls. Time passes but it’s always dark. The kids eat cereal, play with LEGO bricks and watch old cartoons. Something is lurking in the shadows. This is every child’s nightmare.
Often, I wasn’t quite sure if the kids were speaking or making a noise or if someone or something else was. Most of the time I wasn’t quite sure of anything. The story, a dreamlike nightmare of a story, progresses, but only vaguely. I was left with more questions than answers, though I think I got what was going on by the end. As a mood piece, Skinamarink works very well, but as a narrative it’s slow and a bit dull, even as it remains haunting throughout. The film could have been cut way down and still made the same impact, but I guess the overbearing pauses and agonizing runtime was part of the point. I will say this: it’s been about a week since I wrote that last sentence and this film is still in my mind, so it did a good job getting under my skin.
Scary Movie Mini Review #5: Night Creatures (1962) Directed by Peter Graham Scott
This may be the least horror-related scary movie I’ll review this October. Hammer’s 1962 Night Creatures sure looks like a horror film, from the garish poster promising an army of the dead in a field of flames to a very spooky and atmospheric early scene where a man is chased by an army of skeletons riding skeletal horses through a swamp at night, but that’s where the horror ends. We soon discover that the riders are mere smugglers who use glowing costumes at night to scare the locals away from discovering their operation. They have a chip on their shoulder against England’s high taxation of imported wine and we discover that their leader is none other than the village parson, Dr. Blyss, played pitch perfectly by a wonderful Peter Cushing. A Navy Captain arrives in town to investigate the smuggling and begins to uncover evidence that may prove that Dr. Blyss is not who he claims to be. This is a perfectly fine melodrama, well written and filmed, but horror it is not. In England the movie was called Captain Clegg, a more fitting and less misleading title. Oh, there is one scene where a guy disguises himself as a pumpkin-headed scarecrow, so I guess that’s a bit scary? It’s not, but it at least has a Halloween vibe to it. A movie where actual skeletons riding actual skeleton horses attack a small town would have been way cooler.
Scary Movie Mini Review #6: Digging up the Marrow (2014) Directed by Adam Green
Adam Green is a real-life indie horror filmmaker, and in this mockumentary he meets a fan who believes monsters are real. Green plays a slightly conceited version of himself, willing to exploit a crazy fan to make a funny documentary, but it turns out the fan may be right, his theory about an underground world of monsters called The Marrow might be real, and both he and Green end up working together to try to capture its denizens on video. The fan is played by veteran character actor Ray Wise, who is great at selling deep emotional intensity and madness. Green is not so great, his acting feels forced and fake, which lessens the impact. The story gets weirder and more twisted as it progresses, culminating in a classic horror ending that I won’t spoil here. Digging up the Marrow works as a fun little spooky story, but I can’t help feeling that it could have been spookier with a bit of story tweaking and slightly better acting.
Scary Movie Mini Review #7: Pumpkinhead (1988) Directed by Stan Winston
Pumkinhead has a simple premise and gets right to the horror monster action. It makes sense because this movie was directed by famed special effects artist Stan Winston, who knows that the monster is always the best part. A group of city kids on a backwoods motorbike trip commit a hit and run. The father of the boy they accidentally kill sics the eponymous Pumkinhead on them, but has second thoughts as the slasher-style body count begins to rise.
It’s nice to see a movie revenge plot with a twist, where the person seeking revenge has a change of heart. The production design and lighting are king here, with wonderfully detailed dusty backwoods cabins, dimly lit with flickering orange firelight, and mossy mountain forests streaked with blue moonlight and fog. My only issue is that Pumkinhead looks less like a demonic creature summoned from a graveyard and more like the Xenomorph from Alien. Regardless, it’s a beautifully designed suit/puppet and it’s hard to see any strings or seams. This monster feels completely real. The plot is a bit rushed and simple, but Pumkinhead is a perfectly serviceable monster movie.
Scary Movie Mini Review #8: Transylvania 6-5000 (1985) Directed by Rudy De Luca
In this supremely goofy classic monster movie parody, Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr. play a tabloid reporter duo sent to Transylvania to find Frankenstein’s monster. This movie is so dumb that its writers seem to think Transylvania is just a city and that Frankenstein’s monster is just called Frankenstein. It also seems to be trying to channel the comedic energy of Mel Brooks’ much better Young Frankenstein, but it’s a lot less clever and feels way more messy and improvised. Michael Richards plays the castle butler with no sense of personal space and a penchant for comedic prop work, and must have been told to just go nuts in each of his scenes, so much so that Goldblum keeps losing it and cracking up at his antics on camera. Richards gets the most laughs for sure.
I like a movie that doesn’t take itself seriously and isn’t afraid to stoop to the most stupid jokes possible. Transylvania 6-5000 is this kind of movie, but it’s also a mess and only half the jokes work. If you’re looking for a sendup of classic monster movies, I’d stick with Young Frankenstein.
Scary Movie Mini Review #9: The Battery (2012) Directed by Jeremy Gardner
Two young men roam aimlessly through empty suburbs and countryside. One listens to music on a CD player while the other explores abandoned houses with a baseball bat. We find out that they’re friends, pro baseball players, and survivors of some kind of zombie apocalypse. They sit around in ramshackle camps and talk about how money and being good at baseball is pretty worthless now. Micky, The younger, more innocent of the two, doesn’t want to kill zombies and listens to music wearing headphones, which makes him more vulnerable to attack. Ben, his jaded companion, is a survivor and tells Micky he needs to stop letting his guard down and start killing zombies because he’s going to be forced to sooner or later.
We watch these young men joke around, argue, fight, kill zombies and feel bad about it—It’s all a bit tiring. They bump into another group of survivors who don’t want to be found and things don’t go so well. This is well-worn zombie movie territory, but the low budget aesthetic is clever enough. The director clearly just shot in areas where people hadn’t mown their lawn in a while, at campgrounds and vacation homes out of season or where he could angle the camera just right to remove all signs of life, but it works.
The Battery reminds me of a simpler time when all you needed to be a successful indie filmmaker was a full frame DSLR that shot compressed HD video, some prime lenses and a shotgun mic. It’s one of those low budget movies where the characters listen to a lot of music, but it’s all extremely experimental no-name indie bands that are probably personal friends with the director. Based on how quirky it was up front, I was expecting a bit more originality from The Battery. I was let down by its overall predictable zombie movie nihilism, but this film still has enough craft and charm to make it worth watching.
Scary Movie Mini Review #10: The Dead Zone (1983) Directed by David Cronenburg
David Cronenberg directing Christopher Walken in a movie based on a Stephen King novel? Now that’s quite a trio! Walken plays an English teacher in Maine—I mean, it is a King story—who has a severe car accident on a dark and stormy night. The accident puts him in a coma for five years but also gives him the unique power to see the futures and the pasts of the people he touches. He ends up in physical therapy at a clinic run by Dr. Weizak, played by the wonderful Herbert Lom, who warns Walken’s character that using his powers may be deadly.
The film admirably clips along, with not a wasted scene or frame. Walken’s psychic powers are immediately made public and most everyone accepts them as real, which is a nice twist on a story that usually stars a psychic who no one believes. Soon the local sheriff approaches him to help solve a string of serial killings, and the story progresses from there.
Walken plays the character very strangely, with a weird stare and his typical bizarre line readings. It sort of works for his character, but also makes him a bit hard to relate to.
The Dead Zone has a simple yet striking light design with some nice colored gel scenes to sell the horror moments. It’s set mostly in the winter and shot with non-showy yet effective camera work in wintery Toronto. The story is fast and uncomplicated yet engaging. All this plus an old fashioned, haunting musical score make this beautiful, simple paranormal thriller work.
Scary Movie Mini Review #11: Creature From the Black Lake (1976) Directed by Joy Houck Jr.
I’ve always had a soft spot for low-budget creature features, especially anything made before the 90s and set in a swamp. And this low budget ripoff of another low budget Bigfoot exploitation film (The Legend of Boggy Creek) does not disappoint. It appeared on Amazon Prime fully restored in all its grainy film glory, and I had to give it a watch.
In Creature From the Black Lake, its title a shameless ripoff of a Universal Monster movie, two goofy college students get funding to search for Bigfoot in the Louisiana swamps. They’re obsessed with eating beans and burgers and flirting with local women, a couple of real goobers. These two students stumble through a series of interviews with locals who tell their experiences with the Bigfoot-like creature, each interview cutting to a flashback scene. Eventually they encounter the beast themselves.
Creature from the Black Lake was shot on location in Louisiana with a mix of some classic Hollywood character actors and local actors who you can tell are really excited to be in a movie. The eponymous creature’s costume design is pretty poor. In some shots it looks good, but in others it looks like a medium height skinny dude wearing furry pajamas and a cheap Halloween mask. Regardless, the editing, lighting and music manage to deliver some legitimate spooky atmosphere. Notably, John Carpenter’s cinematographer Dean Cundey lensed this movie and it shows: for all its cheapness, it has a nice look to it.
Scary Movie Mini Review #12: The Rental (2020) Directed by Dave Franco
There’s this beautiful house on a cliff by the sea. You can rent it, but it’s pricey. Two brothers and their partners decide to share the rental fee and spend the weekend there. The caretaker seems a bit passive aggressive and leaves them on a sour note. Why do characters in these movies never get creeped out and go home? Two of the four end up cheating on their partners with each other. They also begin to believe that the caretaker is watching them and knows what they did. The paranoia and relational conflicts deepen. The dog that they weren’t supposed to bring disappears. I won’t say any more because the twists come fast and loose after that.
The cinematography in The Rental is super muted, soft, under-lit and has that disgusting 2010’s orange and blue color grade look to it. I’m not a fan. If you can get past the look, it’s not a bad little thriller, but a bit sour. One of my issues with movies like this is how they make the surprises and twists and ideas more important than the morality of the story. When a movie’s plot becomes nothing more than an amoral chess game where the director is just moving characters around on the board, I lose interest.
Scary Movie Mini Review #13: All Eyes (2022) Directed by Todd Greenlee
Here’s another recent low-budget indie horror film, this one about a disgraced paranormal podcast host. A live interview gets out of hand and he loses his job. Unsure of what to do next in his life, he ends up following up on a well-paid lead to help an old farmer investigate a thousand-eyed beast in the woods. All this happens in the first ten minutes of this movie. The farmer thinks he can help the podcaster get his show back and honor the memory of his wife, who loved the show, while also slaying the beast with booby traps. The podcaster thinks it’s all nonsense.
The production values of All Eyes are all over the place. Some shots look a bit cinematic while others are embarrassingly bad. It’s strange that in a time where it’s so cheap and easy to get a cinematic look that these filmmakers decided to go for a flat video look and choppy higher frame rate instead. The art design is super fakey, as are the locations. A simple row of trees in a cornfield is intercut with stock footage of a massive forest and we’re supposed to believe that the two are related. The acting and screenplay are also pretty bad: the humor is forced and characters monologue about their feelings over emotional stock music. The third act is kind of unexpected and fun, so it’s not a total waste of time, but this is a script that would have worked better with a couple more rewrites and at least a slightly bigger budget.
Scary Movie Mini Review #14: The Raven (1963) Directed by Roger Corman
In between churning out countless schlocky drive-in movies in the 1960s, Roger Corman would take an occasional break to work on his passion project: a cycle of horror films based on the stories of Edgar Alan Poe. The Raven is one of eight of these films, shot in striking technicolor with beautifully crafted costumes and sets.
The Raven is a reimagining of Poe’s poem of the same name. In this narrative version, Vincent Price plays a small-time sorcerer who pines for his dead wife Lenore. A raven shows up pecking at his study window who turns out to be a magician himself, played by a fat and aging Peter Lorre. Lorre’s character has been cursed by the evil magician Doctor Scarabus, played brilliantly by Boris Karloff. The hapless pair set out on a mission to magically duel with Scarabus and restore Lenore’s life, complete with finger laser combat, human to raspberry jam transmutation and a very young Jack Nicholson in a foppish hat.
This movie has a weird tone to it. It’s mostly silly and goofy with an occasional moment of haunting atmosphere or spookiness. Price and Lorre do their best to channel the energy of a comedic duo but they’re just a little too old to make it work. The finale is a lot of fun and made me wonder why we don’t see more dueling wizard movies like this. If you’re looking for something more light and fun to watch this Halloween season, The Raven is a good place to start.
Scary Movie Mini Review #15: Dimland (2021) Directed by Peter Collins Campbell
A young woman is feeling depressed. She takes her boyfriend to an old family cottage she remembers going to as a kid to try to recover. This is a fairly generic horror film trope, but it leads somewhere pretty unique. One day a soft-spoken man wearing a black coat and a simple wooden mask shows up, claiming to know the woman’s name. He claims to have played with her when she was a child and she starts to remember him.
The fact that the young couple don’t immediately flee is less because they’re typical dumb horror movie characters and more because this is a fairy tale of sorts, where the fantastic lives side by side with the mundane. As the woman remembers more about her old masked friend, he takes her deeper into the woods and to places beyond.
Dimland is a great mood piece. It’s surreal and eerie and melancholy in all the best ways. I’ve heard someone describe it as a sort of liminal horror. I’d call it a spooky fairy tale.