Every year in October I try to watch and write about a scary movie for each day of the month. Here are my last 16 Scary Movie Mini Reviews for October 2023. Enjoy!
Scary Movie Mini Review #16: One Cut of The Dead (2017) Directed by Shin’ichirō Ueda
Here’s a fun one from Japan: filmmakers making a low budget zombie movie run into real zombies? This movie requires zero spoilers to fully enjoy so I won’t give you any. But if you don’t mind some splattery zombie gore, it’s a fun ride. That’s it. That’s all I can say. Watch it, it’s awesome! (I should watch more zero spoilers movies because writing the reviews for them is so easy.)
Scary Movie Mini Review #17: The Innocents (1961) Directed by Jack Clayton
The Innocents is a 1961 film version of Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, a book that I admit I had trouble appreciating when I read it years ago. At the time I found the horror so obscure that it was almost nonexistent, but my friend Joe recommended this film adaptation as one of his favorites so I had to give it a watch.
A woman nearing middle age is hired by a wealthy uncle to be the governess of his orphaned niece and nephew who live in a large lonely estate in the country. Their last governess died under mysterious circumstances, the uncle doesn’t want to hear any issues or complaints, a mysterious voice calls the children’s names from the vast estate gardens, and the children speak of death and ghosts. Not suspicious or creepy at all.
The screenplay does a good job maintaining the obscure horror of Jame’s original story while spelling out enough to keep it engaging, but enough mystery remains to leave the viewer guessing. Deborah Kerr as the governess is intense and superb and the black and white CinemaScope photography is gorgeous—the camera glides effortlessly from haunting composition to haunting composition. This is probably the best film version of a ghost story I’ve seen, or at least right up there with 1963’s The Haunting.
Scary Movie Mini Review #18: Ringu (1998) Directed by Hideo Nakata
In the 90s urban legends were a big deal. I remember hearing about the killer clown who drove around in a white van in my neighborhood. He would kidnap people and cut them up with a chainsaw in the woods. Kids just knew these things and they all seemed to know them at once. Ringu trades in this kind of urban legend: in late 90s Japan, kids are talking about a weird VHS tape going around. If you watch it and then get a phone call, you’re going to die in a week. We move quickly from some doomed kids to a young female reporter, initially reporting on this “cursed tape” story as an example of childhood urban legend but changing her mind and digging deeper as the body count rises. She finds and watches the tape. Bad idea.
Ringu has a subtle visual style. It’s filmed in a very neutral, mundane way so the supernatural threat creeps up on you. TVs are extremely dangerous in the world of Ringu, and you start to notice them everywhere in the movie. They start to look like monster eyes. It’s unsettling. This is the original Japanese film that the American film The Ring was based on. I’ve never see The Ring, but I thought it would be better to start at the source. I also tend to enjoy Japanese horror: it’s odder, eerier and a bit less obvious than American horror. It has a way of showing you images you wouldn’t expect that get under your skin, and Ringu is no exception, playing around with the instinctual feeling of dread we get when looking at a grainy out of focus video or a blurry distorted photo.
Scary Movie Mini Review #19: Frogs (1972) Directed by George McCowan
Old bad creature features are for late nights with friends when you’re bored and just want a good laugh. Sometimes they can be surprisingly good, but in the case of Frogs, they can be surprisingly worse than you ever imagined. In this absolute train wreck of a movie, a so young he’s unrecognizable Sam Elliot, sans mustache, is a photographer chronicling pollution in a southern swamp who ends up stuck in an isolated island mansion with an obnoxious collection of rich southern gentry. These people live in a swamp yet constantly complain about the noise of the frogs who live around them. They’re planning to poison the frogs to make them shut up, but they don’t get the chance because the frogs, along with a bunch of other unconvincingly filmed lizards, bugs, snakes etc. start picking them off one by one in the most implausible animal attack scenes ever put to film.
There is zero tension in Frogs because every two minutes or so the movie cuts to mismatched footage of frogs in the grass or frogs on logs croaking away. They show up so often that it just becomes funny. These angry amphibians also seem to be hiring other animals to do their violent bidding. Apparently frogs use tarantulas, lizards and turtles as hit men to take out their enemies, who would have thought? There are zero scares in Frogs and the goofy tiny animal-on-human violence never becomes anything more than unpleasant. Skip this one, or at least hop over it.
Scary Movie Mini Review #20: Over the Garden Wall (2014) Created by Patrick McHale, Directed by Nate Cash
Over the Garden Wall is a beautifully animated miniseries made for Cartoon Network in 2014. It’s made up of 10 chapters that are 12 minutes each, a two hour film if viewed in one sitting. It boasts a unique blend of influences, from the flippant humor of 2010s children’s animation, to the unique character design of Studio Ghibli, to the whimsical fantasy world of The Wizard of Oz, to the musicality and plain silliness of 1920s cartoons, to the countryside hauntings of Victorian era Halloween greeting cards and American folktales.
Two brothers, one in a cape and pointed hat, the other with a teapot of his head, are lost in the woods. They meet an old woodcutter who tells them they’re in the unknown and should watch out for the Beast. Shortly after they meet a talking bluebird and a town full of dancing pumpkins. Something is off about this endless October countryside, and the boys aren’t sure what to think of it. Neither is the viewer, who is left wondering what’s going on and encouraged to piece little clues together as the series progresses. I won’t give anything away, but I will say that what starts as an overly precious, self aware romp ends somewhere a bit more nuanced. I was initially annoyed by the constant silly randomness of the dialog and scenarios, but they grew on me. If you’re looking for something to watch with a hint of Halloween in it that’s also about the changing of the season and going on an adventure with friends, watch Over The Garden Wall. You won’t regret it.
Scary Movie Mini Review #21: The Watcher in the Woods (1980) Directed by John Hough and Vincent McEveety
My sister saw The Watcher in the Woods at a childhood sleepover. She was so traumatized that she couldn’t sleep, and she told me it was the scariest thing she’d ever seen. I’ve wanted to see it ever since, but it’s been out of print. Disney produced this movie in 1980, and after scaring a generation of teenage girls, they stopped publishing it. I found a pretty good widescreen version on Internet Archive though.
Two sisters move into an old English mansion with their family. The old owner, played by a creepy Bette Davis, lives in the cottage next door. The older sister begins seeing weird visions in mirrors and glowing lights in the woods, while the younger starts hearing a disembodied voice that calls itself Karen. Davis admits that her daughter disappeared during an eclipse years ago and that she might still be on the grounds somewhere, or watching from just within the woods.
The Watcher in the Woods is beautifully lensed in mostly real locations with plenty of eerily lit foggy forest scenes, ghostly lighting and wind effects, and nightmarish, dreamlike imagery, but it maintains a nice naturalistic style at the same time. There’s a potent sense of dread that builds throughout, and I can see how kids in the 80’s may have found it too scary—my sister sure did! There are moments that feel borderline The Shining, an odd tonal choice for a Disney kids film. I liked it a lot. It’s a solid ghost story with some interesting twists.
Note: The original theatrical version of this film is a great example of a movie showing more than it should, and I think the second, 1981 re-release version, which has a more subtle ending that leaves more to the imagination, is superior. If you’re curious, you can find a fan edit that combines the two versions on YouTube.
Scary Movie Mini Review #22: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1968) Directed by Charles Jarrott
Here’s an interesting version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Shot on video for ABC as a TV movie with elaborate sets and costumes, it’s a strange mixture of high production value and low quality, faded video tape. It’s a pity it didn’t get transferred from tape earlier. Jack Palance plays Dr. Jekyll, which is hard to believe because he’s got such an imposing figure and features that he looks like the fearsome Mr. Hyde even before he transforms.
You already know the story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic, so it’s pointless to recount it here, but there are some unique additions, including a scene where Jekyll argues with a group of doctors about the evolutionary origin of man’s evil, and one where Hyde trains in swordplay with an instructor so he’ll be a more effective killer. Mr. Hyde also has a girlfriend which he gets jealous over? It’s bizarre to see Mr. Hyde morally outraged when he’s the epitome of immorality. The design of this made-for-TV movie is admirable, but the adaptation is sub par. It tries to increase the drama and action but misses the point of Stevenson’s story in the process.
Scary Movie Mini Review #23: Fangs (2002) Directed by Kelly Sandefur
Want to watch poorly animated CG bats attack bad actors? Watch Fangs. A small town university biology teacher has created an army of flesh eating vampire bats in his lab. When they hear a certain sound, they go crazy with blood lust. They don’t stay in their cages for very long.
This is the kind of movie that thinks stereotypes are characters. You’ve got two ditzy female lab assistants who talk like they’re valley girls when discussing lab procedures: “then you, like, totally push this button.” Then there’s the widowed animal expert with rugged good looks and a wry sense of humor and the pretty police detective who initially spars with the widow then falls for him. There’s also a wimpy cop, a big dumb heavy and a mustachio twirling villain who has been corrupted by the evils of capitalism and land development. He’s just like the mayor from Jaws: he wants to keep the whole killer bats thing hush hush because he doesn’t want the annual apple blossom festival to be canceled. It’s so derivative and stupid.
The script thinks it’s way funnier than it is, and the actors are forced to deliver one groaner after another, but the worst offense here is the CG animated bats—they just aren’t scary. We’re told they can eat all the meat off your bones, but when they show up they just kind of flap around characters’ heads. Also, the screenwriters don’t seem to know that you need a rabies shot when you get a bat bite. Multiple characters get bitten and just slap a bandage on it. This movie stinks like bat guano.
Scary Movie Mini Review #24: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) Directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard
I’m a huge fan of the original Halloween, while I find Halloween 2 and 3 to be just okay. I finally watched Halloween 4 last year for my 2022 Scary Movie Mini Reviews, and I was surprised by it. I assumed the movie would be a late 80s gore-soaked slasher nightmare, but found it instead to be a fairly restrained and well-made homage to the original Halloween, if not a tenth as good. This year I jumped into part 5, which is a direct sequel to part 4.
Halloween 5 picks up where Halloween 4 ended. Michael has been hit by a car, shot repeatedly and fallen into an old mine shaft. Obviously he’s just fine, and ready to do some more stabbing. Jamie, the girl Michael was trying to get last time, is in a hospital and can no longer talk. She also has some weird psychic connection to Myers and freaks out when he attacks people. It’s weird. Donald Pleasance returns as Dr. Loomis, still hell-bent on stopping Michael. But he’s too old and it doesn’t work anymore. He just seems so tired.
These movies start to run together: Michael sneaks around and stalks attractive young people who are stupidly unaware of a large man following them. This time the filmmakers try to add to the mythos with a mysterious cult, and there’s a fun segment where Michael goes incognito in the Halloween costume of another character, all the time being berated by his date for acting weird. He also attacks his victims by chasing them in cars now? It’s stupid.
One thing that can be said for this movie: the scope is much larger than all previous Halloween films. Rather than just some suburban houses and streets, this time we get a children’s hospital, an old farmstead, the woods, and a spooky abandoned house that’s dripping with atmosphere. The third act takes place in this elaborate house set and is legitimately frightening and nightmarish in a way unique to the series. Halloween 5 is a mixed bag. It’s overly long, has some bad acting, but some well crafted sequences. It still doesn’t hold a candle to the original.
Scary Movie Mini Review #25: Ghostwatch (1992) Directed by Lesley Manning
This mock live TV news report was made for BBC television in the early 90s, and like The War of the Worlds radio show before it, it was so realistic that many viewers didn’t know it was fake, traumatizing a generation of British kids who saw it. Ghostwatch begins with home security footage of two children sleeping, only to be woken by loud banging noises to flee their room. These children belong to a normal British family who have volunteered to let the BBC investigate their ghostly experiences live in their home on Halloween night. Things go poorly.
The show cuts back and forth between a studio with a host interviewing a ghost expert and taking phone calls and an on-location team at the supposedly haunted home. This team is equipped with special microphones and heat sensing cameras and tasked with finding the ghost that the family’s youngest child has dubbed “Pipes,” a being she claims lives under the stairs. As the show progresses, things go from dull to weird, and we begin to see things lurking in the shadows and corners of the screen. Is there really a ghost haunting this tiny British home?
Ghostwatch has that warm “let’s put on a show” energy while still delivering plenty of scares. It reminds me of a time when live TV was a shared communal experience. You couldn’t make something like this now. If you’re a fan of the found footage genre, Ghostwatch is a must-watch.
Scary Movie Mini Review #26: Magic (1978) Directed by Richard Attenborough
In Magic, a young Anthony Hopkins plays Corky, a struggling magician who discovers success by partnering with a foul-mouthed ventriloquist dummy named Fats. Corky is so good at throwing his voice that Fats seems almost real, so real in fact that they often have private conversations together. Corky is a rising star, wide eyed but strangely principled. He won’t sign papers or let a doctor examine him, even if it means losing a TV deal. When things get too stressful, he flees to a cabin by a lake near his old hometown, and runs into an old crush in the process.
The closer Corky gets to success and happiness, the more his dummy Fats gets in the way. Corky talks through all his problems with Fats, and Fats talks back, mostly with terribly impulsive advice—It’s not a healthy relationship. Hopkins’s performance is mesmerizing. He’s icy and sharp and angry and scared, sweating and shouting in a shrill voice that sounds more like his dummy the more emotional he gets.
Things get complicated up at the lake. You could say Fats is Corky’s id. I’ll say no more. Magic is less scary than it is a deeply sad and unsettling story. It’s a tragic character study that’s very well made.
Scary Movie Mini Review #27: Monster from Green Hell (1957) Directed by Kenneth G. Crane
It’s the space race and our heroes are part of a team that launches small animals into space to see if they survive. With a title as wild as Monster from Green Hell, you know this movie is going to take a crazy turn, and it sure does. One of the rockets with wasps in it misfires and lands in Green Hell, a patch of wilderness in central Africa where no person or animal dares tread. Being enlightened scientists, our hapless heroes do dare tread in Green Hell, and encounter giant wasps of their own making. In space, you see, the radiation makes living things grow giant. In this timeline I guess Buzz Aldrin would have been forty feet tall.
The sets are cheap, the dialog is awkwardly delivered, and big chunks of the movie are scenes from another movie set in Africa clumsily edited in. What is original footage is mostly just people in Pith helmets walking around in Southern California. The giant stop motion wasps are charming though, and the huge practical wasp head and pincer puppet used in the few scenes with the actors needs to be seen to be believed. It doesn’t look good, but it’s impressively large. To be honest, I thought this was a movie about a giant killer jungle tree, but that one is called From Hell it Came, also released in 1957. I kind of wish I had watched that movie instead. Monster from Green Hell is a great example of a movie with a killer title and not much else.
Scary Movie Mini Review #28: Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (2004) Created by Richard Ayoade and Mathew Holness, Directed by Richard Ayoade
This genius comedy horror miniseries is funny on three levels: on the first it’s a parody of bad low-budget horror filmmaking from 80s, on the second it’s a send up of Stephen King’s worst copycats, writers who think all you need for a horror novel is an outlandish concept and graphic description of gore, and on the third it’s a satire of washed up c-grade celebrities who are as selfish and full of themselves as they are untalented.
The character of Garth Marengi hits all three levels: he’s an untalented and self-aggrandizing hack horror novelist and actor who made a terrible horror TV series in the 80’s, one so bad that it only ever aired in Peru. In each of the series’s 6 episodes we get an indignant introduction by Garth (played with true genius by series co-creator Mathew Holness) and footage from the old show, occasionally interrupted by interviews with the cast commenting on what we’re seeing. The comedy of watching such an awful show and then hearing the show’s cast talk glowingly about how groundbreaking it was is really something to experience.
That cast includes the always funny Richard Ayoade as Dean Learner, Garth’s long-time producer who can’t act his way out of a paper bag and has an extremely shady past, Matt Berry as Todd Rivers, a very serious actor whose line readings are all over the place and is often inexplicably dubbed, and Alice Lowe as Madeleine Wool, an awkward and clearly very uncomfortable actress who we’re told has disappeared without a trace.
Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace is set in a Darkplace Hospital, a place of medicine that always seems to have something paranormal going on. This show within a show tackles horror subjects like spontaneous human combustion, telekinesis, ape men, and the terror of being near Scottish people. Garth claims the show was ahead of its time, and I have to agree. Darkplace is hilariously funny. It’s a brilliant and insightful parody, extremely quotable, and I find myself returning to it again and again.
Scary Movie Mini Review #29: Horror Express (1972) Directed by Eugenio Martin
What Halloween movie viewing season is complete without the pairing of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing? In this movie they’re not playing mortal enemies but fellow anthropologists, hauling the frozen corpse of an ancient Manchurian humanoid creature back to England via Russian rail. Coming in contact with this corpse does weird things to people, and it may not be as dead as it appears, turning a normal express train into a… horror express? Long story short: don’t take weird frozen creatures on trains.
The art design of this movie is really beautiful: all golds and browns and deep blues. You can feel the cold winter air and the warmth of the train cars. The creature design is also solid. It has these fantastic hairy paws and arms, an exposed skull face and eyes that can glow red. It’s super smart, and in a really creepy twist, it whistles its own theme song. Don’t ask me how.
Some really bonkers stuff happens in the second half of this movie. What started out as classic horror quickly becomes wild science fiction. It’s stupid but fun, a mashup of Victorian era horror and sci-fi pulp. You’ve never seen a train murder mystery like this before, and I’m surprised I’ve never heard about this movie before. It’s my favorite discovery of the season.
Scary Movie Mini Review #30: Dracula (1979) Directed by John Badham
Frank Langella stars in this version of Dracula I had never heard of before. One of my hang-ups with most movie versions of Dracula is how they skip over some of the best bits in the book, one of my favorite novels ever written. This adaptation does it’s fair bit of skipping and revision, cutting directly to Dracula’s boat arriving in England right at Mina’s doorstep and Mina finding Dracula’s body washed up on the shore, and there’s plenty more changes from there, including Johnathan Harker never going to Transylvania, Van Helsing being Mina’s father, and Dracula moving into a Carfax that looks more like a massive fantasy castle than a ruined abbey.
Langella’s Dracula is less like an old creepy man and more like a silver-tongued, smoldering Jane Austen love interest. He’s also plenty creepy when he wants to be, turning into all sorts of shapes and animals, just like in the book. Lucy falls hard for him and their relationship feels like a dry run for Coppola’s romance-centric Bram Stoker’s Dracula made a decade later
This movie looks gorgeous, lensed, lit and desaturated (apparently later for the laserdisc release) in a way that feels more like a mid 2000s film, not one made in 1979. The art design is lavish, as is the cast. Olivier and Pleasence play Helsing and Dr. Seward respectively and have some great scenes together. John Williams composed the score, and with its gothic stylings it almost sounds like a lost Harry Potter soundtrack. With all its revisions, this is still a pretty dang good version of Dracula. If not very faithful to the original plot, it manages to capture the spirit of the book in a way few other Dracula films have.
Scary Movie Mini Review #31: The Village (2004) Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
I like to save the last entry of my 31 Scary Movie Reviews for a movie I truly love, and M. Night’s The Village is one of my favorites, even if it’s not that scary. In The Village, a small group of New England settlers live in a happy, close-knit community surrounded by a deep forest. On the surface everything seems normal, but this community has some strange rules, and if these rules aren’t kept, monstrous creatures that live in the woods will break their truce and attack. Within the joy and merriment of this community lies a creeping fear, one that’s amplified as random acts of violence start to occur, and the creatures in the woods begin to grow restless.
Our hero is a young apprentice blacksmith who’s in love with a sweet blind girl but is too shy to tell her. He has a lot of questions about the rules and is frustrated by how opaque the village elders are. After tragedy strikes, his sweetheart seems to be the only one who can save him, but how can she escape the creatures hunting her when she can’t even see them?
The cast here is stacked! Our three main leads are a young Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, and Adrien Brody, but then you have an even more impressive supporting cast with William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, and Brendan Gleeson. The cinematography by Roger Deakins just sings off the screen, and the score by James Newton Howard, led by a solo violin and backed by piano and haunting horns brings out the rich, emotional core of this film.
The Village starts out as standard folk horror but becomes an achingly beautiful love story and a fable about the futility of hiding from the effects of sin. The elders of the village think retreating to simplicity and the innocence of ignorance will save their children’s souls, but they find that evil hides even in the most innocent of hearts, triggered by simple pride or envy, and that hiding from the reality of our sinful world ends up requiring the additional sins of deception, neglect and wielding oppressive fear. Nevertheless, Shyamalan does not hate the world of The Village. The village elders have good intentions, and the tiny society they’ve built has a lot of beauty and sweetness to it. I love this social complexity, something sadly lacking from modern morality tales. In the end, we have a beautiful story of the goodness and hope of selfless innocence in the face of darkness, a fitting way to close out a season of death by looking towards the joy of a willing savior.