Every October I watch and write a mini review for 31 scary movies. Since we’re half way through October, here are the first 15 reviews:
Scary Movie Mini Review #1: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) Directed by Tim Burton
Tim Burton’s 1988 film Beetlejuice is not a great movie, but its weird story and inventive visuals have captured viewers imaginations for decades, and I’ll admit that I enjoy it myself, though it’s always felt a bit shallow. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is just as shallow, but also feels like multiple sequels crammed into one. There are at least three subplots in this movie that could have easily been their own more clearly defined stories. I suspect this script started out as a TV series that was then condensed into a feature.
Tim Burton is at peak Tim Burton here and clearly having a non-Disney blast. The visuals are striking and it’s nice to see so many practical makeup effects and sets. It’s also fun to have talents like Catherine O’Hara, Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega riffing off each other, though it’s sometimes difficult to understand their motivations. The rich artistic yuppie vs mortality-obsessed goth dynamic from the first movie has become confusingly blurred with these characters as they’ve aged. Keaton’s Beetlejuice performance has actually gotten better with time. He’s great.
I was ready to give up on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as just another nostalgic cash grab crammed with too much plot, but then the third act happened. Burton goes so bonkers here that I had to admit he was doing something special, something more than just another fan pandering sequel. I only wish he could have paired this ultra-silly, anything goes cinematic energy with more disciplined storytelling.
Scary Movie Mini Review #2: The Cat and the Canary (1939) Directed by Elliott Nugent
It’s a classic setup: an old millionaire who lives in a creepy mansion in the bayou dies and leaves his money to his distant relatives, who are all required to come to the mansion at night to receive their shares. The millionaire’s beautiful yet ice cold housekeeper is up to no good. She talks about all the ghosts in the mansion that come to visit her at night, and the ghostly gong that signals a coming death. The lights keep going out and a murderous maniac who acts like a cat is on the loose.
I get all these cat in the title horror movies from the 30s and 40s mixed up, but Bob Hope’s name popped up in the credits so I had to watch it. The Cat and the Canary is beautifully designed and filmed. The sets are elaborate, the lighting moody and complex, and the image has this great ghostly glow to it. Hope jokes around the whole time, keeping up a running meta commentary guessing what’s going to happen based on his knowledge of cliche murder mystery plays. People complain about meta comedy in modern horror movies, so it’s fun to see it in 1939. The cast is great, the writing and pacing perfect. This is a gem of a horror comedy.
Scary Movie Mini Review #3: Enys Men (2022) Directed by Mark Jenkin
Enys Men is a very handmade movie shot on 16mm film by a very hands-on director. Mark Jenkin apparently shoots everything on film himself and does all his own film and sound editing. He knows how to get the most out of technicolor film, putting his actress in a red jacket against dark blue water and red-brown rocks. He also knows how to create a soundscape that’s as mesmerizing as it is haunting.
In Enys Men, a middle aged woman lives on a tiny rocky island somewhere in the British sea. She makes daily scientific observations of a patch of white flowers near an old ruined tower by the roaring sea, heading inland to relax in a tiny stone cottage in the evening, watched by a lone natural rock pillar that looks suspiciously like the form of a tall robed figure. She observes the sound that dry grass makes on the stones of her cottage and the uncanny lichen that grows on the pillar. She calls the mainland on a scratchy old radio. A bright red generator is her only source of power.
The island is peppered with ruins: old house foundations, half broken walls, a stone tower, overgrown mine cart tracks and a deep mine shaft she drops a rock down every day as she passes by. The woman is alone but doesn’t feel alone. She begins to see and hear things that may or may not be there. Are they echoes of the past or premonitions of the future? It’s all about the images, the dream logic connections. It’s scary in a breathlessly confusing nightmare kind of way.
Scary Movie Mini Review #4: La Casa Del Terror (1960) Directed by Gilberto Martinez Solares
This movie is incredibly weird. It’s a Mexican comedy about a lazy dude, played by Mexican comedian Tin-Tan, who sleeps through his night shift guarding a wax museum. The scientist who runs the museum has a secret lab where he’s trying to bring recently deceased people that he’s stolen from a graveyard back to life, and then he steals an Egyptian mummy from a museum, successfully resurrects it, and it turns out to be an old and fat Lon Chaney Jr. who immediately turns into a werewolf that looks exactly like his Universal Pictures Wolf Man. This zombie mummy werewolf hybrid has blood pressure issues and keeps passing out, so the scientist tries to give him a Frankenstein style brain transplant. It’s like every Universal monster movie was thrown in a blender with House of Wax, Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein and broad, 1960’s Mexican comedy.
There are slapstick and comedy routine bits, musical numbers, and lots of jokes about the main character being sleepy and lazy, but the werewolf makeup and some of the atmospheric horror scenes are well done. There’s actually way more werewolf action in this movie than in any of the Universal Wolf Ma movies. Chaney’s werewolf runs along a highway at night growling at cars when he gets caught in the headlights, goes on a murder spree in a park, climbs tall buildings, and stalks a woman through city streets to her home. We even see gory crime scene photos from his attacks. 1960s Mexican cinema was not afraid to mix true horror and violence with their comedies and it’s kind of jarring. I had no idea this was a werewolf movie when I started watching it. I guess Lon Chaney Jr. needed money. It kind of feels like a lost Wolf Man film, something like “The Wolf Man Goes to Mexico.”
Scary Movie Mini Review #5: The Maze (1953) Directed by William Cameron Menzies
A young man about to be married inherits an old castle with a creepy hedge maze behind it. He mysteriously breaks up with his fiancée by letter, who decides she must go to the castle for answers. The young man has seemingly aged decades and sternly follows the rules of the castle that were left to him: lock all the doors at night, never get married, and keep others out of the maze!
This movie was originally filmed and projected in 3D and it shows. Characters walk from the back of a room to the front towards the camera, the camera glides down corridors and hedge mazes, and things are flung towards the lens. Scenes are shot with deep background and foreground elements. It’s a striking visual style for a 50s film, and feels oddly modern. The ending is … different. I won’t spoil it here, but it’s not what you expect. This is a movie with a lot of heart and style but a lackluster finale.
Scary Movie Mini Review #6: Vivarium (2019) Directed by Lorcan Finnegan
A young British teacher and her American boyfriend are house hunting. They end up finding just the right place in a new housing development called Yonder. That the real estate agent moves and talks like a robot and the development looks like a nightmarish minimalist painting or a lifeless 3D render from the 1980s doesn’t seem to bother them at first. I would have fled the minute I saw the place. They end up getting stuck there, driving through an infinite loop of identical roads and houses, and are forced to take shelter in one of the homes. Is this some sort of alien zoo for humans like something out of The Twilight Zone? Hard to say. When they try to escape, their mysterious captors give them some strange conditions.
It’s frustrating that these characters have so little imagination. I’d be asking more questions, trying more things, testing the limits of the artificial space they’re trapped in. They mostly just mope around and dig a hole. Vivarium seems to be commenting on the horrors of mundane suburban family life, but it’s a ham-fisted commentary written by someone who’s only ever heard of suburban family life second hand. At least the story is allowed to supersede this thin critique for a while, but the ending is very on the nose. I like that the visual effects have an artificial, handmade feel to them, and the story does have some unique elements, but overall it’s an uninspired drag.
Scary Movie Mini Review #7: War-Gods of the Deep (1965) Directed by by Jacques Tourneur
With a title as good as War-Gods of the Deep it’s bound to be crap. And it is, kind of. Originally titled City Under the Sea in England, this film is a low-budget knockoff of those ancient underground world movies like Journey to the Center of the Earth, and you can tell because in that much better movie there’s an Icelandic man with a pet duck, so of course in this one we’ve got a British guy, the dad from Mary Poppins, in a kilt with a pet chicken. It’s weird and though David Tomlinson is an endearing actor, he breaks the creepy atmosphere too often with telegraphed silliness.
Limited to a couple simple yet beautifully strange sets and a poem by Edgar Allan Poe that’s only marginally involved so the studio could claim it was based on his work, War Gods of the Deep tells the story of a mansion by the sea and a trio of its visitors who are transported to an ancient undersea city called Lyoness. Vincent Price rules over this matte painting city’s bedraggled human and gill man residents with an iron fist, though he’s terrified of the growing undersea volcano next door that might erupt at any moment. He commands our heroes to find a solution, which is pretty stupid. How are you supposed to stop a volcano anyway?
For all its cheapness and overlong scenes of exposition, there are some effectively chilling sequences here. The gill men (all two of them) are well designed and legitimately creepy, and there were moments where I felt a bit spooked by the eerie sound design, sets and lighting. A lot of my goodwill was lost in the overly long underwater diving suit sequence near the end. The steampunk style diving suits look great and it’s really filmed underwater, but the suits all look the same and you can never tell who is who or what anyone is doing or trying to accomplish. It’s a mess.
Overall, this whole movie is a mess, yet it also has a look and feel to it that drew me in. War-Gods of the Deep is a great example of a movie with nothing going for it that still manages to pull off a memorable mood and atmosphere.
Scary Movie Mini Review #8: Manhunter (1986) Directed by Michael Mann
Michael Mann Is a master of muscular action and cool atmosphere, a unique choice to helm the first adaptation of a Hannibal Lector novel. Hannibal the cannibal film adaptations have since played the subject matter much more operatic and gothic than Mann did here, as he chose to take a more grounded crime film approach.
In Manhunter, Will Graham, a cop famous for taking down notorious serial killer Hannibal Lector is convinced to come out of retirement to take on a new killer. We watch him coolly analyze blood-splattered crime scenes, only his eyes betraying the rage and trauma his job entails. Figuratively and literally scarred by Lector, Will still turns to the dangerous killer for help, realizing the necessity of his genius. Brian Cox plays a Hannibal quite different from Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal. Cox’s Hannibal is brainy and brawny and direct, just as evil but much more mundane. His performance is as scary as Hopkins’s is, but in a more subtle way.
You’ll never see a film that looks quite like Manhunter. Mann fills many frames with blank white walls and empty hazy night spaces. Whole locations are stripped of detail and decor, making the actors stand out like lonely targets. It’s very effective at building a graphic sense of paranoia and impending doom. As creepy as Manhunter gets, it never loses this striking, almost graphic novel quality. It’s stunning.
Scary Movie Mini Review #9: Man Beast (1956) Directed by Jerry Warren
Man Beast is a film about explorers searching for the yeti in the vast Himalayan mountains with comically small backpacks. What’s impressive is how it’s shot on location in actual California mountain ranges above the tree line. It looks really good for a low-budget creature feature from the 50s. The acting is bad, and every time it gets dark they switch to shooting on a black backdrop in a studio, which really ruins the effect. But the sweeping vistas look great, as well as some truly striking night scenes shot with flares on an actual glacier. The yeti costume is cheap-looking but a cool design. Man Beast doesn’t have a lot going for it other than the visuals, but it’s at least an earnest attempt at making a low-budget yeti film. I admire the effort.
One funny note: the actor playing the old scientist in the movie looks surprisingly like Walter White from Breaking Bad. He even wears multiple outfits that look like Walter White’s outfits from the show. It’s uncanny.
Scary Movie Mini Review #10: Asylum (1972) Directed by Roy Ward Baker
A slickly made anthology from the 70s, Asylum sets up its four short stories as interviews with four mental patients, conducted by a psychiatrist applying for a position at a mental asylum for the dangerously insane. One of the four is not who they claim, and the psychiatrist has to figure out who is the imposter to prove that he’s worthy for the job. Each story is fairly simple, yet told with solid visual flair and creepy restraint. Most of the horrific visuals are implied rather than shown, and the whole affair has a certain British charm to it. I love a good short scary story, and all four stories here don’t disappoint.
Scary Movie Mini Review #11: Longlegs (2024) Directed by Osgood Perkins
What starts out as a standard serial killer police procedural quickly becomes something quite different in Longlegs, Osgood Perkins fourth film. I liked his first: the Blackcoat’s Daughter, an atmospheric chiller that was more about loneliness than fear. Longlegs has this same intense atmosphere in spades, every shot just drips with carefully designed mood.
In Longlegs, a young FBI agent is investigating an improbably related set of killings. As she gets closer to the killer, things get increasingly strange. I won’t say more, no need to spoil some interesting twists, but I will say that though the marketing for this film was brilliant and definitely got me to buy a ticket, it also unfairly set up the film to disappoint. Whatever Longlegs is, it’s not what they were selling in the trailers. I found it to be more of a reserved, dark fairy tale than the terrifying, Shining-esque horror film that was advertised, and Perkins seems more interested in unsettling than scaring his viewers here. The story of Longlegs is engaging to a point, but the conclusion left me a bit cold. If you like a more subtle horror film, it’s worth a watch. Just don’t watch the trailers first.
Scary Movie Mini Review #12: Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959) Directed by William J. Hole Jr.
Hotrodder high schoolers busting ghosts in a haunted mansion? Sounds like a great idea for a movie! Unfortunately Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is more of a series of goofy vignettes that only ends in an underwhelming haunted house sequence. This 60s drive-in curiosity seems to change what it’s about every ten minutes. What starts as a cool drag race in the LA river reminiscent of Terminator 2 becomes a lecture on hot rod roadster assembly, then transitions from an impassioned defense of 1959 youth culture to a musical sequence featuring a band that shoots pistol rounds into the ceiling to a comedy about a crazy old aunt and her talking parrot to a pajama party to… well, you get the idea.
Finally the gang ends up in that haunted house on Dragstrip Hollow mentioned in the title, and we get to see a pretty cool monster costume, but the scares are all handled incredibly poorly and before we know it we’re back to that weird pistol-wielding band jamming out and blasting at the ceiling. There are a couple fun ideas here but it’s mostly a huge mess of a movie. I’m guessing the filmmakers assumed the audience would be too busy making out in their own hot rods to notice.
Scary Movie Mini Review #13: Fear in the Night (1972) Directed by Jimmy Sangster
Hammer made some great monster movies, but they made some good thrillers too. Fear in the Night has a classic thriller setup: a young woman moves to a remote boarding school in the country to live with her newlywed husband who’s a teacher there. She has a history of mental breakdowns and thinks she’s recently been attacked by a mysterious stalker with an artificial arm, though others claim she imagined it. She arrives at her new home before term begins and explores the empty school building, running into the old schoolmaster, played by an eerily soft-spoken Peter Cushing. The stalker somehow finds his way to the school and attacks the woman again, or does he? Maybe the woman is imagining things, or maybe there’s something very wrong going on.
One of the highlights here are the atmospheric autumnal shots: lovely panning shots of autumn leaves and wet green fields and foggy highways. It’s a little slow, with too many scenes of people walking around in empty rooms, but there are some unique twists near the end. Fear in the Night isn’t a perfect thriller, but it’s an interesting one.
Scary Movie Mini Review #14: The House (2022) Directed by Emma de Swaef, Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, & Paloma Baeza
The House is a made-for-Netflix British stop motion horror anthology. Each short is set in the same house but in drastically different times and places. In the first story, a man from a rich family falls on hard times until he’s offered a custom built mansion for free. The only problem? The mansion his family moves into keeps getting bigger and bigger.
In the second, a rat is left to finish the renovation of a large house by himself after he has to fire his builders. Just as he puts the house on the market, he uncovers a massive beetle infestation in the walls and a strange couple shows up that won’t leave.
In the third, a cat is trying to make her rental house work after flood water has covered most of the area, causing almost all of her tenants to flee and leaving her house isolated on a tiny island. A mystical seafaring handyman arrives who may be the answer to her problems. Or maybe he’s an existential threat to her ever-shrinking world.
The stop motion here, though way cleaner than pre-digital stop motion, still has that uncanny, airlessness to it that just feels wrong. This has always been an issue that’s plagued stop motion, and it’s a secret weapon for horror storytelling. I was impressed by the way all three shorts went to places I didn’t expect. These are three very original and creepy tales.
Scary Movie Mini Review #15: Mimic (1997) Directed by Guillermo del Toro
I don’t know why it took me so long to see this movie because I’m a huge fan of Guillermo del Toro. Here he’s doing big bug horror. In a characteristically over-designed, gothic del Toro version of New York City, children are dying from a disease spread by cockroaches. A CDC doctor and an entomologist work together to breed a new insect that can wipe the cockroaches out, but in so doing unwittingly create an even deadlier threat. Three years later and there’s something big living in the NYC sewers. It might look human, but it’s not.
It’s funny to see a movie starring CDC doctors in a post Covid world. Though this film is visually del Toro, its script reads like every big budget 90s science-themed horror film post Jurassic Park. It’s more Crichton than Lovecraft, with a healthy dose of C.H.U.D. thrown in. Del Torro does manage to put his own spin on it, creating a real visual sense of place and an almost fairly tale tone. Anyone can make a giant bugs in the sewer movie, but few can make one that feels like a descent into a mythical world of storybook monsters.