October Horror Movie Challenge 2012

Five strangers wake up in an abandoned cave and realize that their captor intends for them to eat each other to survive. Several of the characters are pretty stereotypical and this one really doesn't add anything to the genre, but it's a nice little thriller. I don't care for the multitude of flashbacks explaining why the bad guy is holding them all in his twisted experiment - I pretty much figured out that he ate bits of his mother in order to survive and the experiment was to find out how long a normal person would need before hunger drove them to kill and consume - they're just unnecessary and drag the plot. ....Joe Egender looks like Giovanni Ribsci in a certain light....

A small dying town is beset by a kidnapper known only as The Tall Man. The town's nurse wakes up one night to find her home invaded and her son dragged away by a masked figure all in black. A chase ensues. Jessica Biel is tolerable in this, but this is what she's been doing for years - running around looking directly at the camera and pretending to be scared with magical blood smeared all over her. Spoiler: Totally called it - the bars on the windows and the fact that there wasn't a single picture anywhere of the kid in the house was a dead giveaway. I'll admit that I got a little fuzzy when the whole town started chasing after her, but then it made sense in the end. I just don't like the message this movie seems to be trying to convey - it's better for children to be raised by wealthy people because poor people can't love them like rich people can. The main character is treated like a martyr by the movie and we're supposed to be sad for how poorly she's treated by the parents of the children she kidnapped. Tsk.

A tattoo artist who believes in the spiritual properties of tattoos steals a Samoan tattooing tool in Saigon at a tattoo expo and then travels to New Zealand to give it back after suffering nightmares and visions. An angry spirit kills all his customers after they get tattoos from him. My only real criticism is about the soundtrack - it sucks and it's totally out of place. There's a ton of scenes with people talking in a native language where it doesn't get translated and the whole movie is about pride and shame in relation to their culture... could they not have found some appropriate music instead of this weird gangsta rap? Other than that, it's a cool movie about death by tattoo.

An anthology, this movie is a bunch of stories all tied together by the fact that they're the same sort of campy horror that would be drawn in the old horror comics that were popular a few decades ago (what spawned Tales From the Crypt). The opening concerns an overbearing father forbidding his young son from reading the Creepshow comic book and throwing it out. The movie then focuses on the wind-blown pages and the stories in the issue. The first story is about a woman visiting her father's grave on father's day and remembering him for the tyrant he was. The second story is all about Jordy and his unfortunate encounter with a strange meteorite that causes him to become a moss-covered man. The third story has cuckolded Leslie Nielson leading a philandering Ted Danson out on a day at the beach. The next story deals with a forgotten box containing a deadly creature tucked away at a college. The last story deals with a wealthy business owner with a fear of roaches and germs and then the movie wraps up with the kid and his father again. I swear I've seen this one, but only one of the stories actually looked familiar, everything else seemed like a ftv. I love these types of movies because they're just the right sort of campy. I'm going to watch the sequel next.

Another anthology. The original premise was that the dad caught the kid reading the comic book and the shorts were the stories in the comic. The sequel's premise is a kid waiting for a new comic to be delivered to the store and reading it hot off the truck. That being said, it's sort of a weak premise, but the stories are ok; this one only has three stories as opposed to the original five. The first story is about a wooden statue taking revenge for his murdered owners; the second deals with four college kids being hunted by a mysterious entity on a lake; and the third has a wealthy wife fleeing a hit and run. Romero directed the first one and wrote for both (Stephen King wrote for both, but actually had a lead role in the first!), but did not direct the second and it shows. The animation sequences that are the prologue and epilogue (the kid getting his comic and fleeing bullies) are cheesy and focuses on the 80s animation style rather than the EC comic style like the first one used. In the first story, the main bad guy looks like they airbrushed him to be Native American which doesn't make sense when they had actual Native American actors in supporting roles. The second story was actually pretty good, except I kept expecting the jerk to push someone in to the water... The third one keeps the gag going long after it stopped being scary and then it's all about seeing this bloody mess attacking her. Tsk. Could've been a lot better.

A grieving widow and new mother accidentally releases the old goblin Rumpelstiltskin from a cursed rock and has to go on the run in order to escape the deal she unwittingly made with him. The best lines easily go to Rumpelstiltskin and the one liners bump this from campy to awesome. At 90min, it's not a super long movie, but the pacing drags a little. After finding their third place to hide out, it's just too hard to not know what's coming.

Two couples come together with their group of kids to spend a Christmas at a winter cottage when a virus infects the children and has them turn on their parents. The parents are completely unaware of anything amiss until after enough of them have been knocked off and, even then, they blame each other rather than deal with the kids. The virus never gets explained, but the deaths are pretty gruesome and gory. The box claims it's from the makers of The Evil Dead trilogy and it makes sense because it's that same sort of horror-gore movie.

Five kids sneak into a closed carnival house of horrors and laugh it off until they get scared by some real ghosts and run off in opposite directions. Yuki gets left behind when she goes back for her bunny backpack and is never seen again... Until they're all much older and she shows up out of nowhere to bang on blind friend Rin's door, begging for help. Rin enlists Motoko and Ken in trying to return Yuki to her parents when they meet up with her little sister Myiu. When Yuki freaks and falls down the stairs, they take her to an eerie hospital that soon has more in common with the carnival ride. Oh my sweet Jesus was this movie slow! The characters ran and got out of the ride faster than they do as adults and the way they eat it is ridiculous. I mean, spoiler but, one guy literally gets pommeled by ghost girl's face as she falls on top of him over and over and then runs up to the top of the staircase to do it all again. The payoff wasn't worth the pace.

When Lena misses the bus home, her coworker Birdie offers to get her dad to give Lena a ride home. When Lena gets left alone in Birdie's spooky home, she goes wandering and gets a needle to the throat for her efforts. When she awakes, Dad is taking care of the last "daughter" while Mum coos and informs Lena of her new name and role in the family. Thus begins 90min of awkward sexual moments and torture. Eh, this is pretty standard "shocker" fare. The gore is censored and the sex stuff is mostly background and implied rather than overt and, while the heroine is often fondled or groped, she's never really molested. Like all horror movies with an awful family torturing a girl, the ending is pretty predictable.

A too-smart-for-her-own-good reporter told to cover a story about missing bees in Omaha ignores her boss and drags her coworker and on-the-rocks boyfriend to Poland to investigate the disappearance of a tourist. When they arrive at the last town he stayed at, they find a strange cloud hanging motionless in the forest and are chased off by the locals before they can investigate. Unfortunately, Miss I Know Better Than Everyone Else, she convinces her group to sneak into the forest anyway and find where the cloud meets the trees. I hate bitches who don't listen to anyone but themselves and think they're so smart. I sure as Hell don't want them to live when they're main characters in a horror movie, especially when they're so keen on getting everyone else into situations where they die. Easily, the best part was the way-too-photogenic demon in the mists and his smirk melted my heart, lol. This should have been a 15 minute short about a jerkass reporter who gets killed by locals who don't take kindly to trespassers.

A boy with far too much imagination moves to a new town with his parents and starts to question where the meat for their dinner meal comes from. He befriends a strange girl at school who gets him into heaps of trouble with his vaguely aggressive father. Nothing pushes this plot along until the end. It drags and drags until the final scenes and then wraps up with an equally unbelievable ending. Is Michael the son of cannibals or is he a serial killer in the works with an overactive imagination? In one scene, the school therapist finds a dead body, but, as she's chasing Michael up the stairs after he runs away, there's no body hanging from the window. eh...

A recent widower invites three institute researchers into his apartment to investigate a possible haunting. From the start, there's tapping on the walls, strange crashing noises from the kitchen, furniture rearranged, and doors slamming. The team talks to the 4-year old son Ben and explains what all the equipment does while trying to stay polite as Paul, the father, argues with his teenage daughter Caitlin. During the investigation, it's revealed how Cynthia, Paul's wife died and the circumstances around her illness. This one wasn't so bad. Outside of wanting to smack the crap out of the girl, the characters were well done and lent credit to the story. Even the ending was pretty sound (outside of the ghost crawling on the ceiling, but hey... can't fault them for succumbing to that impulse to show off a spooky makeup).

The movie begins at a casino in Las Vegas as the pit boss rails the waitress in a fallout shelter store room and the go-fer gets stuck in a supply room. On every tv, which everyone seems to be ignoring, a news anchor stands in front of a Daily Show setup talking about how scientists found a way to eliminate all nuclear weapons safely with no half-life chemical left overs. Suddenly, an explosion rocks the place and everyone but the aforementioned turns into zombies. The zombie makeups are pretty cool, but the survivors leave something to be desired. I don't understand writers who make sure that you absolutely hate every survivor character. I mean, you draw in an audience by making them connect with your characters. By making them all annoying, I'm not rooting for any of them and am just waiting for them to die in horrific ways.

This is the 1999 remake and it's fun to see little things like Blockbuster VHS rentals and humongous cell phones. Stephen Price (huh huh, Price.... like Vincent Price who was in the original) rents out an old asylum that's been turned into a home for his money-grubbing wife. Both of their guest lists get erased and replaced with a group of five other guests. When the metal plates come down, locking them in, the party begins. First off, I love Geoffrey Rush; he makes me happy. The whole movie has a creepy feeling all the way up to the end and shows just enough of the ghosts to not get too campy. However, the ending just makes the whole movie fall apart as the strong characters are chased about by an ominous smoke cloud vagina with faces that devours them. Eh... If I could go back in time to the 90s, I would tell them that not everything needed computer graphics to make it awesome, because it really detracted from this movie.

After his wife and son are murdered in a random restaurant shooting, Abe decides to take too many pills and join them. Unfortunately, a well-meaning friend who only gets about 10 lines rushes him to the hospital and he's brought back from death. From the start, he can see "auras" that end up being indicators of who is eventually going to die. Thinking he can save them, he runs around hopping over things and junk and still manages to find love. I saw the first movie and it was sort of creepy while watching in the dark a couple years ago. The movie itself was eh, but then I started looking into EVPs and they creeped me out enough to keep me from sleep for a few nights. This movie isn't going to scare me anymore than the first, but the concept was pretty cool and the pace was decent. Yummy nummy Nathan Fililon playing lead is a nice enough reason to watch.

Newly divorced dad Clyde shows his two daughters that he's the cool dad by bringing them to his new house and then taking them to a yard sale where his youngest picks up a wooden box with no apparent seams. When she's all alone, the box opens and the girl plays with all the individual artifacts inside after which she begins exhibiting strange behavior and even stranger stuff starts to happen around her. I don't know why, after seeing a hoard of locusts swarming out of the box, the dad wouldn't throw the box away a little sooner. And then, when he suspects that he may be dealing with a spiritual possession, why he has to travel several hours to find a Jewish community to offend with his vehicle (as James assumes). Parts of the movie are funny - the girl stabbing her dad with a fork, while others are just cheesy - the magical MRI that shows the ghost living in the girl's body. A lot of it just doesn't make sense and it feels like it would have benefited from someone who actually knew the mythology of the Dybbuk. (I'm not sure when we watched this, but I'm going to count this towards October's Challenge since it was close enough.)

It's just another day at the store for widowed father Ed Harley when his son Billy is run over by a punk on a dirt bike posing as a motorcycle. The city kids run away to a cabin in the woods, leaving behind one guy while his girlfriend plans on calling an ambulance from the cabin.Unfortunately, the douchebag who hit the kid is on parole and won't let anyone call. Meanwhile, Ed finds his boy and seeks out an old witch in the woods for vengeance. The witch tells him to go find a pumpkin patch in a cemetary and dig up the body of a boy. After returning with the gnarled body, the witch animates it with the blood of Ed and his son. Suddenly, Pumpkinhead grows up and starts hunting the city jerks. I love this challenge because there are so many classic horror movies that I haven't seen yet. The 80s was a good decade for horror because they used cutting edge makeup techniques and technology that their predecessors would have killed for. Yeah, it's a little formulaic, but movies like this one are what set the formula. The monster looks awesome and the story is solid. Good watch.

Amber is desperate to get out of her small town and into an apartment in Chicago. When she learns that her mother is not her biological mom, she seeks out a ride with her friends, but their van breaks down on the way. Bernard, a friendly truck driver, stops and agrees to give them a ride, but only if they ride in the back of the truck. A party ensues and the kids in the truck don't realize what they're in for until they've already passed Chicago. When the door finally opens, the teenagers find themselves in a slaughterhouse where they are hunted by something in the dark. First off, if you have a choice, don't watch it in HD, because it's a cheaply made movie and it shows. The acting is cheesy and the beginning set up drags too long; in the middle, one of the bad guys word vomits the plot. The reveal, despite being ridiculous, is pretty predictable.

A popular model is stalked and kidnapped and then held in a basement room where she is tormented by a masked assailant. She finds she's not alone when discovers another captive in the next room and they form a bond in order to survive. The reveal is, once again, predictable, but it's still pretty effed up. The house is spectacular and it makes the plot fun. Not really the best so far, but not the worst either.

In post-apocalyptic America after a virus has turned most of the population into vampires, Martin's family is killed and he is rescued by a traveling fighter named Mister. Together, they hunt vampires, collecting their fangs and exchanging them for goods in the various small outposts of living people. Unfortunately, not everyone in the world is working together; a group of Christian extremists terrorize the land, convinced that the vampires were sent by God and should not be killed. When Mister and Martin come across two cultists brutalizing a nun, they come to her aid by killing her attackers and letting her join them. Eventually they become a family, but the cult leader is bound and determined to avenge his sons whom Mister killed. "We don't do history. Doesn't do anybody any good." This is a really refreshing take on apocalypse type movies and it feels right at home with movies like The Road, Book of Eli, and I Am Legend in that it's well acted and the story is surprisingly good. This one was by far my favorite view.

When Virginia brings Nathan home to meet the family, the leader of a local werewolf pack is killed by an outsider werewolf determined to take over. When the family discovers that Nathan has been bitten by Gabriel, the outsider werewolf, the family moves to kill the wolves before Nathan becomes a full on werewolf. The Sheriff brother is a supreme let down; he folds after the first real fight. However, the goofy younger brother is a bad ass and takes out quite a few before taking on the main bad guy. Felicia Day is always cute, except when she cries and then she just looks constipated. All together, not a bad movie.

As a child, Johnny watches his sister Katie get brutally murdered by a serial killer in a wolf costume and gets a nice slash across the face for his efforts when he interrupts the killer carving "Are You The Woodcutter?" on a nearby tree. Years later, Johnny's all grown up and married to a psychiatric nurse of some sort who spends her days singing to psychopaths and having chitchats with cannibals. Meanwhile, Johnny is on the hunt as The Wolf strikes again. He and his partner track the killer down; Johnny captures The Wolf after the death of his partner. Years later, Johnny and his wife are separated and Johnny sneaks into the asylum in order to kill The Wolf who is one of her patients. Then the power goes out and all the doors are unlocked.... The title is ridiculous and has nothing to do with the movie since The Wolf didn't technically eat anyone. The reveal is silly - I totally would've made the killer out to be the murdered partner who just staged his death or something... eh... whatev. John Rhys-Davies has a small role in this as the partner.

After an accidental death of a little boy, an orphanage closes, leaving behind two cleaning women and a teenage girl with mental issues. As the new cleaning woman, Anna, acclimates to her surroundings, she begins hearing voices and seeing things that should not be in the abandoned house. Judy, the teenager, spurs on Anna's imagination by telling her stories about the "scary children". All along Anna is hiding a secret of her own. The opening sets a very good tone for the rest of the movie and it worked. The acting was pretty good and the special effects were minimal for a ghost story. Overall, I liked it.

For Spring Break, a group of college kids go to a cabin in the woods and then all Hell breaks loose when the geeks behind the hidden cameras release chemicals into the house that lower inhibition and prevent rational thinking. When the cabin gets attacks by redneck torture zombies, they have to outrun the plans of the geeks in order to survive. Holy crap, this is a fun take on an old stable. Each kid represents a stereotype and the geeks are counting on them to live by that stereotype. I have to say that I totally called the stoner bit, but I still love the reveal, especially the storage room. This is a perfect blend of campy humor and cheesy horror. Very good, I think my favorite of this challenge.

Two children are visited nightly by a figment of their imagination come to life called Hollowface who wants their faces in order to be loved. Juan, a Spanish boy who writes monster stories, dreams of Hollowface coming through his window and hurting both him and his mom who drags him to the Church and gets involved with the priest there. Mia, on her twelfth birthday, finds a scrap of paper with a story and begins writing about Hollowface when he suddenly appears and steals her voice. Clive Owen is delicious as always and the acting is pretty solid in this one. A sense of creep is pervasive as the movie has some really interesting camera angles.

When his wife and child are infected by a virus spreading across the country, a man leaves his home and drives until he runs out of gas on the outskirts of a farm. Walking to the farmhouse, he meets a teenager named April who is, at times, openly hostile and welcoming. They live together for a bit until another woman, Kate, shows up. Kate used to be a nurse and went to live with her mom when the virus broke out. Now that her mom's dead, she traveled towards the sound of April's generator. Immediately, April distrusts Kate and wants her to go, but then changes her mind and says she can stay for one night before leaving. Daniel, the aforementioned man, enjoys Kate's company and tells her that April is immune to the virus, clearly violating April's trust as she had previously asked him not to say anything to Kate. Kate drugs April and kidnaps her after knocking Daniel out. They don't get very far as Kate crashes the van after an infected man jumps into her path. Daniel wakes up and then swoops to April's rescue. They get back to the house and then kill a bunch of infected intruders before hopping into his car and driving back to his house so that he can kill his infected wife and kid. The end. First off, there is no logical reasoning behind any of the characters' actions. Daniel just lost his wife and kid, but he doesn't act out of any sense of loss or self-preservation. He almost seems to want to reason with the infected and protests every time April tries to shoot them. April screams at Daniel to get out, but then changes her mind and lets him stay as long as he's not infected. He turns out to be sort of infected since he's taking the vaccine which she claims speeds up the virus, but she doesn't make him go. When Kate shows up, April actually gets angry because she thinks Kate is going to take Daniel away. Kate is a nurse so it sort of makes sense that she would want to use April to make an antidote, but, in her back story, she left all that behind when she went to be with her mom, so what sort of connections would she have in order to produce an antidote? Nothing makes sense in context. And then there's April's weird back story - something about her mom maybe being a drug user and her blaming her grandparents for why she and her little brother had to go to a children's home when their mom died. That's ok, but then there's something about doctors rounding up kids and putting them in isolation and there's a flashback of April in a straightjacket in a corner... I just don't get how it relates. And then there's the technical issues. The soundtrack covers up most of the dialogue in the latter half and the ridiculous sound effects are placed at random and often contends with the dialogue and the soundtrack at the same time.And the infected range between normal looking people with random blood spatter on their faces to people missing half their face so it's never clear if they're sick or zombies. Seriously, just skip it. It's boring.

Three separate people are taken from their lives and tossed into a musical carnival where they face their sins as the Devil relates them to Aesop's Tales. John, at the death of his son, kills himself in the bathroom only to wake in the carnival where he chases glimpses of his son running about. Mrs. Merrywood is a jewel thief found out by the cops and brought to the Carnival with the promise of a large diamond. Tamara is the murdered girlfriend, always drawn like a moth to the flame of a bad boy. Jeezy petes, I want to watch it again!! This isn't really a horror movie despite being labeled in the horror genre - it's a horror musical, I guess. From the same guys who brought us Repo! The Genetic Opera, The Devil's Carnival has the same sort of awesomely catchy songs that move the story along. At 55min, it really only feels like we get a brief taste, but the ending leaves room for a sequel (possibly?) so, fingers crossed.

When they move into a new apartment, a family finds their new neighbors just a bit strange, but nothing could prepare them for what happens when a troll shows up determined to convert everyone into faeries. One by one, the neighbors find themselves tricked by the troll in the guise of the family's daughter, Wendy Anne. Sensing that his sister is not what she appears to be, Harry Jr finds a kindred spirit in the nutcase old woman upstairs, Eunice St. Clair. The trolls are adorable so it's really hard to be scared by them. Phil Fondacaro makes a freaking adorable elf. Every synopsis that I've read says that the troll is looking for a ring to turn him back into a human, but that's not what the movie is about - Torok sided with the rogue faeries who wanted to take over the world and uses the ring he already has to turn humans into trolls. Hokey by today's standards, but still pretty cool. Oh! Before I forget! The dad's name is Harry Potter and he's a big reader. =P

When a toddler dies due to an unfortunate accident, his spirit possesses a bunch of people around a woman in an attempt to kill her. After half a dozen people die, Laura finally figures out that the crazy Christian woman who raised her son after she gave him up for adoption managed to put a curse on him when he was taken away from her. When the child possesses the body of her boyfriend, she takes matters into her own hands and fights back. Spoiler: While the ghost of her son is possessing her boyfriend, Laura has sex with him and impregnates herself.... Yeah. Ugh.

After zombies have pretty much taken over the world, a group of survivors initially holed up in Alcatraz look for a cure. An all star cast of B actors couldn't save this movie. Normally, I'd love to have Danny Trejo in my zombie survivor group, but his character lacks a good amount of the common sense he usually displays. Mariel Hemingway has a bitch face and looks terrible when she's pretending to cry. The only real criticism that I can voice that doesn't focus on script, storyline, and effects would be that zombies just seem to appear out of nowhere and swarm.

Finally able to declare her husband officially dead after being missing for 7years, Tricia and her wayward sister Callie try to move on with their lives. Unfortunately, Tricia keeps seeing visions of Daniel screaming at her, thinking that he hates her due to the fact that she's pregnant with another man's baby and for declaring him dead without a body. Unfortunately, just as Tricia moves on with the detective who likes her, Daniel shows up, malnourished and beaten. Yeah, I don't think having a really real preggers woman as the lead was a great idea, especially since she's dragged around a bit. Beyond that, she's just not that great of an actress - really, mood swings doesn't endear her to me as a character. I like the fact that they proposed alternate outcomes.

Adventure tourists take Uri's tour through a nearby town that had been evacuated in under 5min when the disaster at Chernobyl occurred. When the tourist attraction is closed for maintenance, the tourists refuse to go home so soon and force Uri to find another way in. After breaking into the town, they run all around, taking ridiculous pictures and acting stupid. When dark falls, they return to the van to find that its been sabotaged and something is moving outside. Thoroughly unsatisfying.