Every October I watch and write mini reviews for 31 scary movies. It’s the last day of October 2024, so here are my final 16 reviews.
Scary Movie Mini Review #16: House of Usher (1960) Directed by Roger Corman
Another Poe story from schlock master Roger Corman, who used his schlock money to make these artful Poe adaptations. The fiancé of a wealthy woman visits her family’s brooding gothic home. He finds both her and her brother in a sickly and fragile state, claiming to be cursed and unable to leave. The house is literally crumbling around them. If you’ve read the Poe short story, you know how it ends, though Corman never stuck that faithfully to the text, and deviates pretty wildly on some major plot points here.
House of Usher has atmosphere for days, a striking technicolor palette and grand, melodramatic acting and music. The concrete soundstage floor in some scenes is a bit distracting, but the otherwise elaborate house sets make up for it, as does the sound design and simple yet effective visual effects. There are even some crane shots and camera moves that feel strikingly modern, as well as a gorgeous color-tinted nightmare sequence. I particularly liked the creepy paintings of past Usher family members and the house itself, done in a wild neon abstract style that’s as creepy as it is anachronistic. Corman always got the maximum bang for his buck, and House of Usher has plenty of bang.
Scary Movie Mini Review #17: Dressed to Kill (1980) Directed by Brian De Palma
A beautiful, middle-aged woman is unhappily married and seeing a psychiatrist. They flirt a bit, but don’t take it farther than that. She gets into some trouble and her psychiatrist gets called in to help. There’s also a mysterious killer running around with a stolen straight razor, and a nerdy young high school inventor and plucky call girl duo trying to solve everything.
A thriller in the first degree, Dressed to Kill draws you in with deceptively simple storytelling then throws you in the deep end. I’ve seen some De Palma before, but his style here still blew me away. It’s a series of perfectly timed camera movements, split diopter deep focus shots and tension building edits. There’s this fantastic scene where the woman goes to an art museum and attempts to flirt with a stranger. He ignores her, she drops her glove, he still ignores her, she follows him, loses him, he finds her glove and follows her, she pushes him off, etc. The camera glides effortlessly from moment to moment, telling this perfect silent movie story. It’s genius.
This is an exploitation film. The female form is exploited, as is mental health. It’s all a bit tawdry, but also effectively thrilling.
Scary Movie Mini Review #18: Road Games (1981) Directed by Richard Franklin
There’s nothing quite like a good low to mid-budget 80s horror film. The lighting is simple and contrast-y, the colors are muted, the music and audio design are stripped down, the shots and camera moves are immediate and to the point and the overall effect feels less like a movie and more like you’re watching real life, as lurid and over the top as these movies sometimes get. Road Games is one of these kinds of movies. It’s also an adventure horror film with a noble hero, one of my favorite sub-genres. Instead of focusing on the killer, it focuses on the hero fighting the killer.
This hero is an American truck driver working in Australia. He quotes poetry, plays a harmonica and hangs out with a domesticated dingo. He also has a penchant for picking up hitchhikers and seeing things he shouldn’t, including a creepy man in a dark green van who may be killing young transient women along the highway.
Tonally, Road Games is more of a thriller than a straight horror movie. It also has a certain madcap energy. Goofy characters keep showing up and our hero accidentally smashes up pedestrian vehicles and a gas station on his increasingly manic quest to save the day. There are also some fairly tense and dark moments. Road Games is a crowd pleaser with an inventive finale that has to be seen to be believed.
Scary Movie Mini Review #19: Curse of the Blair Witch (1999) Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez
A fake documentary chronicling the fake folklore and history of a fake found footage film, Curse of the Blair Witch was made as a TV special to promote the movie The Blair Witch Project. It’s pretty standard fare, convincingly interviewing actors playing the family members, friends and teachers of the three lost film students, as well as adding some extra lore to the story of the Blair Witch. We also get staged TV news segments and interviews with historians, cops and search party members, as well as some extra clips and photos of The Blair Witch Project movie’s cast, which are fun to see.
If anything, the actors being interviewed play it too dry. It’s hard to believe these talking heads actually feel anything for the lost students. It’s also hard to believe that people thought this documentary was real when it aired, but apparently many did. I guess you had to be there. It’s a bit creepy, the historical stuff is fairly well produced, and it’s a nice companion to the film, but by itself it doesn’t really work.
Scary Movie Mini Review #20: Trap (2024) Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Every time M. Night Shyamalan makes a good film, I’m reminded why he’s my favorite filmmaker. Trap is a good film, and it plays into everything great about Shyamalan’s best traits: his strong visual storytelling, realistically understated direction of actors, and his ability to thrill with surprising fantastic tales set in mundane worlds.
A family man who is secretly a serial killer? This is well-trodden pop horror ground, but what if we’re rooting for him to succeed while also hoping he gets caught for the sake of his victims? What if we get thrown off by his lesser goals? The killer is, after all, just trying to help his daughter have fun at a concert, and we want to see him succeed at that, but the concert is also a setup to trap him, and we kind of want that to happen too. The entire plot of Trap is an exercise in playing with the viewer’s emotions as we are forced to live in the killer’s head. It’s also very funny. This may be Shyamalan’s funniest film to date, more of a dark comedy than a thriller, though there are plenty of thrills to be had.
One of things I most enjoy about M. Night is his insistence on telling horror stories without resorting to graphic violence or nihilistic morality as entertainment. He’s always firmly on the side of the good guys and wants to thrill you but not celebrate acts of evil in the process. Trap walks this line narrowly: the killer smirks when he gets away with stuff and we’re tempted to laugh at the ridiculousness of his brazen immorality, but never to be on his side.
Scary Movie Mini Review #21: The Clown Murders (1976) Directed by Martyn Burke
A beautiful young woman from the countryside is dating a rich land developer. Now they’re selling her family farm to build apartments. Her old flame doesn’t like that very much and organizes a playful kidnapping stunt on Halloween night to stop the deal from going through. One of his friends along for the ride was instrumental in losing him a big job, another has the hots for the woman, while the third is a party animal and a loose cannon. All of them have dressed up like clowns to pull off the kidnapping, but there’s a mysterious fifth clown running around outside the old farmhouse who has murder on his mind.
The Clown Murders is apparently one of those so bad it never made it past VHS movies. I disagree. While the film is at times obvious and cliché, it has a few effective creepy moments and jump scares and the actors are giving it their all, especially John Candy in one of his first movie roles. I could see the twist coming from a mile away, but the resulting conflict was suspenseful enough. This movie has a good chance of getting a restoration and a little more appreciation in the future.
Scary Movie Mini Review #22: Dude Bro Party Massacre 3 (2015) Directed by Jon Salmon, Michael Rousselet, & Tomm Jacobsen
Can a comedy group that makes five second YouTube videos make a feature film? In this case, the answer is yes. Dude Bro Party Massacre 3 started out as a five second YouTube parody trailer of 80’s slasher films where instead of sorority college girls being stalked by a male killer, the victims are fraternity dude bros and the killer is “gasp!” a girl! Partially funded by their fans, the 5 Second Films team took this concept and stretched it to a constantly ridiculous feature length.
The Delta Bi fraternity is an all “dude bros” club that treats girls like they have cooties. Their past college pranks, some involving international conflicts and the accidental deaths of thousands, have finally gone too far, landing them in an old lake house for the weekend. As they drink beer and awkwardly dance, a female killer is hunting them down one by one and killing them in the stupidest ways you can imagine.
Why start at part one when you can start at part three and make crazy references to the other non-existent movies? An absurdist parody of 80’s slashers and college films, the script is nonstop nonsense and the cast is great at the high energy comic delivery necessary to make it all work. Not everything made me laugh, but even the dumbest jokes made me chuckle. There’s some truly genius meta comedy near the end, where characters start questioning the plot inside of flashbacks, and one character goes to such lengths to find a missing friend that he ends up searching in the background of earlier scenes of the movie. There is a lot of cartoonish gore here, and it might not be for everyone, but if you want to see an absurdist comedy parody of 80’s slashers, this movie is for you.
Scary Movie Mini Review #23: Twixt (2011) Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Twixt is a 2011 shoestring budget, shot on HD video movie by none other than The Godfather’s own Francis Ford Coppola. It’s apparently based on a dream he had. I admire that someone as big as Coppola wasn’t afraid to make a little experimental film like this, but the end result is a mixed bag. Val Kilmer plays a third rate horror novelist signing books in a small town hardware store when he’s approached by the town’s sheriff, played by Bruce Dern, looking for help to solve a recent Jane Doe murder. Drawn to the mystery, the writer remains in the town and begins to have vivid dreams where he meets a pale young girl who might be a vampire. He also meets Edgar Allan Poe. It’s weird.
The awkward framing, fakey computer animated effects, weird day-for-night color grading and thrown-together sets could be called stylistic, but they feel more like budget limitations. The acting is also spotty, not helped by the awkwardly scripted dialog. It’s good in some scenes and pretty awful in others. I watched the director’s cut, which I’ve read has a more focused story. I found the story pretty generic, like a Stephen King/Twin Peaks mashup, but it does slowly fade into some unique abstractions. There are some hauntingly beautiful dream sequences, especially near the end, and while nothing really gels, it’s at least a memorable viewing experience.
Scary Movie Mini Review #24: Barbarian (2022) Directed by Zach Cregger
If you double booked an Airbnb, would you go inside the house with the person who was already there to resolve the issue? What if it was the middle of the night and raining? There’s this little house on Barbary street in Detroit, surrounded by empty, burned out buildings. A young woman who’s booked the place finds a soft spoken young man who’s also booked there. He seems nice and invites her to stay.
Is this just an accidental meet cute or is something sinister going on? The answer might be found in this next question: if you found a secret passageway in the basement of that Airbnb, would you go into it? What if you heard someone calling for help deep inside?
Barbarian is a tightly constructed, perfectly paced little horror movie, telling its story with visually efficient gusto. Filmmaker Zach Cregger started out with the genius early 2000’s comedy troupe The Whitest Kids You Know. I love them and I’m happy to see one of their own translate his whip-smart comedy chops into whip-smart genre filmmaking. This is definitely a grotesque movie, and I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but it’s got a good heart, both morally and artistically.
Scary Movie Mini Review #25: The Day Time Ended (1980) Directed by John ‘Bud’ Cardos
While staying at a vacation home in the desert, a family runs into a series of strange happenings triggered by three stars going supernova at the same time. Stylistically this is a mashup of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Poltergeist, with a dash of Ray Harryhausen. There are strange glowing lights, killer UFOs and stop motion monsters. Only the little girl of the family seems to be able to communicate with whatever forces they’re encountering, able to convince the good forces to defend them from the bad.
There’s a particularly cool scene where two beautifully detailed stop motion humanoid beasts fight each other outside the house at night. They don’t look like anything I’ve seen before and are the highlight of the movie.
The Day Time Ended takes some time to get going, and initially feels pretty cheap and cheesy, but once the time warps start happening and the gorgeous matte painting effects start flowing, it’s actually quite a sci-fi treat. Scattered among the overacting and awkward pacing are some moments that are truly breathtaking. Overall this is a C-grade, low budget movie, yet it totally worked for me.
Scary Movie Mini Review #26: From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) Directed by Robert Rodriguez
Wouldn’t it be funny if a movie started as one genre and suddenly became another? Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino actually did it. In From Dusk Till Dawn what starts out as a tense, well written crime drama becomes a big stupid vampire movie.
This movie is pretty tasteless. It’s exploitation with a capital “E.” But it’s got that great Tarantino storytelling and dialog in the first act. What’s more unforgivable than the switch from smart crime drama to dumb vampire horror is how easily the vampires are dispatched. Literally a handful of random characters kill an entire hoard of vampires by breaking chairs and pool cues and just stabbing away with the wooden pieces. Why would the vampires even have wood in their secret lair if it was so deadly to them?
From Dusk Till Dawn has one of George Clooney’s early starring roles and he’s effortlessly great, as are most of the cast. It’s a shame that the script goes so campy half way through because Tarantino could have told the same story while keeping the vampire plot twist grounded and threatening for a more consistent dramatic effect. Oh well.
Scary Movie Mini Review #27: The Innkeepers (2011) Directed by Ti West
A century old inn is going out of business and two disgruntled employees are left to run it into its final few days. Claire is in her early twenties, bright eyed, energetic and insecure, while late-30s Luke is bitter and jaded. Both have experienced paranormal things in the old inn and both are trying to capture the resident ghost or ghosts on audio. They only have one more weekend left to do so.
I really appreciated the craft in Ti West’s 2009 indie horror film The House of the Devil, but I never caught up with his other films. I’m glad I finally did. West is great at taking a simple concept and making it entertaining and memorable. The Innkeepers is a one location film with only a handful of actors, and much of it is slowly paced and dialog driven, almost like a horror hangout film. It’s also effectively chilling and a lot of fun. You can tell that West knows his ghost stories, and this one is as classic as they come.
Scary Movie Mini Review #28: The Amityville Horror (1979) Directed by Stuart Rosenberg
On a cold and rainy November night, a family of four are murdered in their beds in a house that looks like it has evil glowing eyes. Soon after a new family moves in, aware of the murders but unaware that their new house is profoundly haunted.
This is one of the few big franchise horror movies I’ve never seen before, and I was surprised by how un-showy it is, capturing all the haunting events in a dreary, matter of fact, almost documentary style. All the old haunted house movie tropes play out: doors slam and strange voices echo down hallways, black goop comes out of the pipes, one of the children has a creepy imaginary friend, the husband gets increasingly angry and aggressive, flies swarm everywhere etc. etc.
Two priests sense something in the house is evil and want to stop it, kind of like another big horror movie from the 70s. This whole movie often feels like a cheap copy if not a direct ripoff of The Exorcist, but nowhere as good. Supposedly based on true life events, most of The Amityville Horror book has since been proven to be a sham, a get rich quick scheme by the homeowners. For all its unpleasant runtime, the movie version feels like a get rich quick scheme too.
Scary Movie Mini Review #29: Chosen Survivors (1974) Directed by Sutton Roley
A small group of men and women are flown by helicopter to a desert and manhandled by soldiers into strange silver room, which descends deep into the ground. The people are drugged and the scene moves in slow motion like a bad dream. This is the potent opening of Chosen Survivors, a Mexican-American movie about the individuals chosen by the American government to survive nuclear war.
The underground bunker these chosen survivors are confined to is beautifully designed, a combination of gleaming mirror-walled sci-fi and colorful 60’s blocky minimalism. But even before they can settle into these new fantastic surroundings, a deadly complication arises: killer vampire bats. Every time the lights short out, they attack.
The filmmakers use real bats for most of the scenes, which adds a striking level of realism to the proceedings. The poor acting does the opposite. This movie looks great and has some good ideas, but it suffers from cheesy overacting. It’s still worth a watch.
Scary Movie Mini Review #30: The Uninvited (1944) Directed by Lewis Allen
A wealthy brother and sister purchase an old house on the British coastline for a surprisingly low price, even though the owner’s granddaughter warns them not to. Soon after they discover why: late at night, echoing from the black void of the downstairs rooms, a woman’s crying voice can be heard. Is it the disembodied voice of the old owner’s daughter, who is said to have fallen off the nearby cliffs seventeen years ago? Is the granddaughter at risk from the spirit of her dead mother?
The Uninvited has a unique tone. It’s light and witty like a romantic comedy, then suddenly flips to creeping gothic horror. There are some legitimately terrifying moments in this movie, moments that get under your skin. The cinematography and lighting are beautiful, as are the incredibly realistic rear projection effects. An A+ ghost story with a light touch, The Uninvited is superbly entertaining and one of my favorite cinematic discoveries of the year.
Scary Movie Mini Review #31: Halloween (1978) Directed By John Carpenter
John Carpenter is a master filmmaker and Halloween is one of his masterpieces. Producers realized no one had made a film called Halloween before and saw a cheap way to capitalize on that: make a series of low budget horror films with the holiday’s title and release them every October. Carpenter was brought in and elevated the concept to an almost mythic level. I’d argue that every horror film made after Halloween owes something to it.
Carpenter distills everything that thrills us about this late autumn celebration down to a gloriously simple, almost entirely visual story of evil vs innocence. Even though it’s shot in southern California neighborhoods with a couple fake orange leaves scattered on green yards, Carpenter manages to convince us it’s a cold October day in a small Illinois town. A killer is on the loose, one we’re told is pure evil. This is not a story about the tragedy of insanity, but the reality of true darkness. This darkness wears a blank white mask and coveralls and is called Michael. All he wants to do is kill the innocent. The only job for our heroes is to stop him.
After the sun sets we’re treated to a perfectly blocked, perfectly paced sequence of terror as Michael attacks babysitter Laurie and her friends. Unlike later installments, Halloween is almost entirely bloodless. The horror is not in graphic violence but in pure filmmaking: dramatic lighting, camera movement, an unsettling score.
What I love most about Halloween is that, unlike most horror films, evil is defeated at the end. Michael is gunned down and Laurie and the kids she’s babysitting are saved. But in the last moments it’s revealed that the body is no longer there. Michael’s disembodied breathing fills empty streets and rooms and the mythos of the masked killer is born. In this life all you can do is beat back evil. Be vigilant to fight it when it comes back.