Kino decided to release the Italian and AIP versions of Black Sabbath and Black Sunday separately. I can't really see any other reason they would do this except to get more money. Maybe I'm wrong though, their Blu-ray of Bay of Blood includes two versions.
It's a little tricky to find the separate versions on Amazon, sometimes the AIP versions pop up for me, other times it's the originals. If you buy them, I would double check that Amazon sent me the correct version. They've accidently sent me a dvd of On the Waterfront once instead of the Blu-ray.
Thanks for the info. Sadly it looks like Kino fucked up the Italian language version of Black Sabbath with an overbearing green tint, and a large part of why I want to see that version is because the colors were messed with in the AIP version! It also doesn't have extras. Sigh, the arrow version sounds literally perfect...why must it be region locked.
Thanks for the info. Sadly it looks like Kino fucked up the Italian language version of Black Sabbath with an overbearing green tint, and a large part of why I want to see that version is because the colors were messed with in the AIP version! It also doesn't have extras. Sigh, the arrow version sounds literally perfect...why must it be region locked.
Yeah, region locking sucks. I finally got tired enough of it that I bought a second player last month. I could have maybe toughed it out and stayed region 1 only, but it's really nice to be able to buy those Arrow releases. The player didn't cost all that much either and switches between regions 1, 2, and 3. I haven't tested out any region 3 blu's though.
Never seen this before, and it's a great classic mummy movie. A huge physical mummy that smashed through shit while Christopher Lee emoted perfectly just with his eyes behind the great makeup. Love the Egyptian sets too.
I admire the storytelling of the time too. The monster is defeated, roll credits immediately.
Starting things off tonight with 'Most Likely To Die' I was a big fan of 'The Last Shift' last year so my expectations are kind of high. This is Director Anthony Diblasi's throwback to 90s horror..
Acting it pretty rough thus far but hopefully it's saved by some creative and fun kills. Definitely has a 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' vibe.
lol true. My Blu Ray defaulted to Italian with English subs when I started watching it, but I was like "wait a minute, this is in English". So I just watched it with the English dub.
Later tomorrow, or today if I'm being technical.. I'll watch the last man on earth
I read the book it was based on (I am legend) and I had no idea there was a movie based on it
I previewed the movie a while back when this thread popped up and it hit me when the man in the movie was in the situation of the man in the book doing the same things he was doing, I was like omg this is I am legend lol!
So yeah pretty excited to see it, I waited til October 1 and I understand others will watch and discuss it too!
Starting things off tonight with 'Most Likely To Die' I was a big fan of 'The Last Shift' last year so my expectations are kind of high. This is Director Anthony Diblasi's throwback to 90s horror..
Acting it pretty rough thus far but hopefully it's saved by some creative and fun kills. Definitely has a 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' vibe.
Starting things off tonight with 'Most Likely To Die' I was a big fan of 'The Last Shift' last year so my expectations are kind of high. This is Director Anthony Diblasi's throwback to 90s horror..
Acting it pretty rough thus far but hopefully it's saved by some creative and fun kills. Definitely has a 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' vibe.
I definitely want to watch this during the month. I'm a big fan of The Last Shift and Dread. I was planning on renting it from Amazon, so I'm really glad it popped up on Netflix.
For something that has such a great concept and spawned so many sequels I expected a bit more. This wasn't offensively bad but more than anything it was just consistently bland. Things definitely picked up a bit towards the end but it was too little too late.
The ending sequence was also comical in a not so fab way.
For something that has such a great concept and spawned so many sequels I expected a bit more. This wasn't offensively bad but more than anything it was just consistently bland. Things definitely picked up a bit towards the end but it was too little too late.
The ending sequence was also comical in a not so fab way.
I have a soft spot for anthology films. Recent years have brought us the good (Trick 'r Treat, Tales of Halloween), the bad (All Hallow's Eve), and the...mixed (V/H/S).
Southbound falls more into that first category. An anthology film centered around the basic premise of traveling along the desert highways, it doesn't take too long before the full premise reveals itself.
It's Hell. They're basically in Hell. "Southbound". Get it? Ha ha.
There's a total of 5 segments, and they're all watchable, which is more than can be said for the V/H/S franchise. Directors include Radio Silence (Devil's Due, "10/31/98" in V/H/S), David Bruckner ("Amateur Night" from V/H/S, plus, y'know, Bloodydisgusting.com), Patrick Horvath (Entrance,.The Pact II), and actress Roxanne Benjamin in her directorial debut.
Plus, it features horror workhorse Larry Fessenden as the voice of the DJ.
When it gets effects heavy, I tend towards wishing they'd shown a little bit less - the stuff in question is more effectively creepy when it's half-glimpsed. But it's an anthology film, and they tend to go pretty crazy, so it's not a big deal. The last segment is also probably the weakest, despite a cute little "Halloween" homage. Still, it hangs together pretty well, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone on the lookout for a decent horror anthology - in fact, I'd easily recommend this over, say, V/H/S: Viral.
Surprisingly okay for a "crazy animals" film (usually hate the subgenre). Not amazing by any means but I didn't hate myself for watching this. There was surprisingly little mayhem caused by said animals but at least there was no extreme shark jumping as often seen in similar films.
A werewolf procedural, though not of the "werewolves investigating a crime" variety, Wolfen makes it known right away that we're dealing with some serious money, and not just because our first slaying involves a real estate tycoon. Indeed, there's a really healthy budget present at virtually every point of the film, with a lot of great photography of New York City in all its shapes and sizes, complete with some rather strong use of Steadicam shots to help simulate the POV of our furry killers. The film is at its strongest when it sticks to the harder investigation aspects, as it feels a lot more confident in what it wants to be, offering up a pleasingly clinical vibe to help it stick out from virtually every other werewolf film, let alone the other ones that came out in 1981. When the film decides to broaden its horizons with several subplots (terrorism comes up a whole lot in this film) that are tangentially related and start to equal the number of characters, things start to get hairy (pardon the pun) as its reach quickly exceeds its grasp. As the film gets closer to concluding and starts making less and less sense, it seems undeniable that things didn't pan out so well on the first cut or two, leaving a small battalion of editors to sift through the remnants of a bigger if likely unwieldy film to get something easier to grab onto. The entire finale is especially piecemeal, as it requires characters to be somewhere where they wouldn't congregate normally and botches the symbolic meaning of actions, perhaps as a result of the filmmakers being unable to find a good middle ground for both the drama and the spectacle of the special effects to share the stage. A game cast feels a bit wasted at times as a result, though they make their chemistry work pretty well and it should be said that the story problems are not lacking in entertaining yet poor life decisions (Tom Noonan's exit from the film is so intensely stupid that it almost has to be deliberately suicidal). I feel like that a new adaptation of the source material would be worthwhile here, as the good bits of the film do point to something that could have been a lot better if it didn't have the production issues that I suspect it had. As the film stands, it's easy for me to be more on the side of liking what it could have been versus what it actually is, but I can't deny that the messiness does have a big impact on its overall effectiveness.
Q the Winged Serpent. Ahh that's the sound of October and horror movie screams. Tis the season. I picked this because I've seen it mentioned here and there but little did I know just how good this really was. Yeah the monster effects are more Harryhausen but that's a good thing. I love these old stop motion monster flicks. The cast was damn good in this too. There's actually quite a bit of story in this monster movie and it all ties together nicely.
I kicked off the month by watching The Neon Demon which is only like 20% horror film despite what anyone tells you. It was really good until it became that last 20% and then it was just weird before ending on gross and dumb.
It had a lot of striking cinematography and it definitely had something to say about the modeling/fashion business which made it feel special, but it's like they didn't know how to end the movie so they went and turned to horror with poor results.
I think some horror fans may really like the later section of the movie, but I wasn't feeling it.
Vincent Price is such a horror icon, I thought I must have seen a lot of his movies, but looking at his filmography that turns out not to be the case. However, of the few I have seen, I think The Last Man On Earth is probably now my least favourite. I guess Price was going for a lonely and depressed vibe, but for the first half of the film he comes across as being mainly bored, even in the flashbacks. His performance picks up for the last half hour or so, but even then it feels like he isnt fully committing himself to the role until the last few scenes.
In fairness to Price, there were plenty of other things wrong with the movie. The way the
infected
were portrayed was rubbish for a start. I dont know if thats how they were in the original novel, but even
plague vampires shouldnt be shuffling round like something from a Romero film, they should be agile and deadly, surely.
Spoilers for the second half and finale:
The movie improves a bit in the second half, with Prices wife rising from the grave to provide one deliciously creepy moment, though that is cut short all too quickly. Franca Bettoias introduction livened things up considerably, though when the good bad guys finally revealed themselves for the climactic shootout, I did wonder at what point during their project to rebuild society they thought it would be cool to pop out and pick up some groovy matching black outfits for everyone. Probably after our hero had allegedly killed a load of them, or he might have noticed the co-ordinated attire.
I think that Francis Lawrences I Am Legend (for all its flaws) is a more satisfactory version of this story, despite apparently straying further from the source material. Having said that, The Last Man On Earth definitely has a better ending, and Im really glad I watched it. Ill have to try and check out The Omega Man at some point.
Creepy little Gothic Italian chiller featuring Barbara Steele as the wife of a freaky doctor with a secret kink. Also includes special laboratory, black cat, and creepy housekeeper. Strange spelling of Hitchcock too.
#1 (October 1st) - Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006, Scott Glosserman)
Interesting and still unique concept; the movie is a mockumentary/horror movie following a presumed dead, soon to be serial killer. It makes references to the big horror series (Friday the 13th/Halloween/etc) and places Leslie in the same world. It's very meta and self-referential. The movie follows Leslie around up to the start0 of his legend and along the way explains several horror movie concepts. It's basically the revered running gag from scream in a feature length run or the flip side of a how to survive a horror movie book.
It's a movie I've been meaning to watch for years. Until recently, actually, it was a movie I saw on tons of horror movie lists and I'm sad it's fallen off of people's radars since it's pretty ahead of its time. It's the perfect movie to just randomly throw on in the middle of a marathon or watch with some of your friends that are into horror movies just as much as you are. It's best to go into it without knowing too much about it.
[1A: Stung (2015, Benjamin Diez]
- A Sci-FI channel movie script combined with a netflix original budget. Better than expected.
1. The Exorcist
It had the shock value going for it, releasing the day after christmas in 1973, and featuring a blasphemous foul mouth possessed child--no real build up or reason behind the possession was really given--with some grotesque make up and head spinning special effect, but overall the film felt like a disjointed narrative that was missing major scenes. Major plot points are never shown and the viewer is only told about them later in passing, leading to some confusion about the events that took place. For example, in one scene, a priest is talking to his mother in a psychiatric ward, in the next someone says she's been dead for two weeks, a jarring time skip that is only given away by brief dialogue. The film starts in Iraq for some unbeknownst reason following an older archaeologist, and while the archaeologist makes an appearance in the final half hour of the movie, why Iraq was an important set piece is never explained.
My horror marathon begins in fine form with Mario Bava's sumptuously filmed gothic romance. While the who-dunnit plot is a little too muddled and lethargic to be as thrilling or clever as say Bava's Blood and Black Lace, which would release the following year. The english dub is also fairly stilted and it's littered with cheesy melodrama. But a kinky sadomasochistic bent to the romance adds a sense of lurid intrigue that might otherwise be too stiff and lifeless. But enough about the story, since that's not really why this film excels. Bava is first and foremost a master with the camera, and that is on full display here. The perpetual nighttime gloom of this film is lensed with striking chiaroscuro lighting and beautiful colored lights (lots of gloomy blues and greens) that lay a thick layer of gothic dread to the perfectly dressed sets and characters. Christopher Lee also adds a nice bit of presence and menace to an attractive but otherwise flat cast. It plays and looks almost like a Bava'd version of the Roger Corman Poe adaptations, which is about as lovely as it sounds. While this is probably the weakest of the four Bava's I've seen prior to this Bava heavy marathon (the other three being Blood and Black Lace, Black Sabbath, and Black Sunday), it's still a most promising start to October, and plays well to my fondness for gothic horror.
It's not one of Carpenter's best but it's still a decent movie. A nice twist on the usual Vampire tales. James Woods is ridiculous in this however. It was a rewatch but it's been probably a decade or so since I've seen it.
2.5/5
2. Stephen King's Cat's Eye
I've never seen this but I love horror anthologies. I liked the first story best, then the 2nd, and the 3rd the least. I liked the nods to other King stories. James Woods was also in this and his acting was only slightly better.
3/5
3. Child's Play
Another rewatch but it's been a long time since I've seen this. This one is so much better than the sequels that became more comedy than horror. It also made me hide my "My Buddy" doll when I was a kid. That thing went into a garbage bag downstairs. This movie has some truly creepy moments.
3.5/5
Eh it's a cartoonish movie! He brings some much needed vivacity to the proceedings, especially when you consider the character that is on screen the most besides him is played by one of the fucking Baldwin chuckleheads.
Years ago I read I Am Legend, the novel on which The Last Man on Earth is based because I had heard it was Romeo's inspiration for Night of the Living Dead. I loved the book, and even though it was written in 1954, it didn't feel dated at all. I thought the story was perfect for a movie, which only made me more disappointed with Will Smith's tacky effort.
I had known that despite the title change, The Last Man on Earth was supposedly closer to the source material, but I was not expecting it to be as close as it is when I sat down to watch it today. I was really surprised to see the accuracy. As far as my memory of the novel goes, this pretty much the novel, only faltering a bit with some changes (for the worse) to the finale.
That's not to say it's as good as the book. The film suffers from severe pacing issues. Mainly everything is told too briskly and you never really get a feel for the extremity of Morgan's plight. Basically, they hit all the big story beats, but none of the detail made the transition to the film, losing a lot of drama and tension. It also feels dated due to budget and film-making limitations of the time.
Overall, The Last Man on Earth is not a bad film considering its age, but I'll continue my hope that someone does the novel justice.
First day, second film and already my carefully ordered list has been cocked up. My darling wife asked if we could watch this tonight, and who was I to argue? So here we are, 18 days early, Crimson Peak.
I was a little concerned by a few negative reviews earlier in the thread, because Ive been saving this film all year, and Im a big GDT fan. I neednt have worried though, this was just my cup of tea. The usual gorgeous visuals, coupled with a story that while not groundbreaking, was perfectly serviceable, provided just what I wanted and expected from the movie. The fabulous Hiddlestone and the even more fabulous Chastain were also predictably great, and seeing Jim Beaver made me realise it will soon be time to watch Harpers Island again. Very enjoyable.
Vincent Price is such a horror icon, I thought I must have seen a lot of his movies, but looking at his filmography that turns out not to be the case. However, of the few I have seen, I think The Last Man On Earth is probably now my least favourite. I guess Price was going for a lonely and depressed vibe, but for the first half of the film he comes across as being mainly bored, even in the flashbacks. His performance picks up for the last half hour or so, but even then it feels like he isnt fully committing himself to the role until the last few scenes.
In fairness to Price, there were plenty of other things wrong with the movie. The way the
infected
were portrayed was rubbish for a start. I dont know if thats how they were in the original novel, but even
plague vampires shouldnt be shuffling round like something from a Romero film, they should be agile and deadly, surely.
Yeah, I appreciate the dates, and I guess using a Romero comparison was clumsy on my part. I wasn't trying to suggest the film ripped anyone off, merely displaying my own prejudices about how vampires should be portrayed! It's like when zombie purists moan about 'fast' zombies in modern horror.
Bonus number 1...hell I have only watched one so far and I'm already adding bonus films to the list...
Kill Baby Kill. I'm trying to blast through as much Bava as I can in case Shudder drops his films soon so this one is up. Pretty cool ghost flick. The copy Shudder has is a bit grainy and somewhat shitty looking but I actually liked that it wasn't crisp and clean because it helped with the atmosphere. Maybe it was made that way but either way was cool.
1. The Last Man on Earth (1964, mandatory, rewatch)
I saw this last year as recommended by Cinemassacre's Monster Madness and it was noted that it was a public domain movie, and thus free to watch on YouTube (like several other movies I saw that year). I should mention I've also seen Will Smith's I Am Legend, though I think my favorite version is The Simpsons Halloween special "The Homega Man"..
The movie sets a desolate atmosphere where Morgan is alone in a city of corpses by day and vampires by night. It makes you wonder what keeps him going, or when he's able to eat or sleep. It's not just scavenge and fortify either. It shows the increasingly problematic plague spreading through the neighborhood and his own family. Finally, Morgan finally gets some hope with another survivor. This isn't the best movie, but it's still a good story.
1. Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935)
A mad doctor replaces pianist's destroyed hands with the hands of a murderer. The film is carried by Lorre's great performance as the evil doctor Gogol. Karl Freund's direction is clearly influenced by German expressionism (director Freund worked earlier on his career as a cinematographer on such classics as Metropolis and The Last Laugh). Definitely one of the better early horror films. 8/10
2, Graduation Day (Herb Freed, 1981)
80's slasher film where the members of the school track team start disappearing after a girl dies of a heart attack during a 200 m race. Pretty standard slasher. Cheesy enough not to become boring at any point. 6/10
3. Spirits of the Dead (Roger Vadim, Louis Malle & Federico Fellini, 1968)
An anthology film based on Edgar Allan Poe short stories. Like it's the case often with these kinds of film, the film is very uneven. First segment by Vadim is okay but ends too abruptly. Vadim seems to be more interested in showcasing Jane Fonda in different anachronistic but very revealing outfits than forwarding the plot. Second segment by Malle is well-acted but ultimately quite uninteresting and dull. The third segment by Fellini is by far the best of the bunch even though it has very little to do with Poe. It's best described as a horror movie version of 8½. (5+4+9)/3=6/10
I don't feel like spending a load of cash on new movies so I'm just going to watch flicks from a time when I was way into asian horror about 8-9 years ago that I haven't watched since back then with a few new movies thrown in.
In the first hour of the film most of the horror stems from guys not being able to cope with attractive women being way into them. The second hour is a really unique take on the usual slow asian horror build where it's not about spooks and gore but about loneliness and the apocalypse. For being a horror flick that heavily features 56k internet the effects hold up well outside of an overuse of really bad particles and the ghosts look weird despite never being too creepy outside of one really good moment at the end where the male lead realises he fucked up big time.
Rating
Spooks: 2/5 (5/5 if you had to live through the cost of early dial-up internet)
Horror: 5/5
Poor fashion choices: Wallet chains/5
Tech savviness: How does man bookmark/5
Does it still hold up: Well worth a watch.
This is technically a rewatch, and I technically started it before the 1st, so I'm not counting it toward my 31 movies, but I hadn't seen it since I was little so I figured it was time for a rewatch. It's definitely a fun and charming movie, but I wouldn't quite call it the horror masterpiece that it's often described as. Still, a very enjoyable watch. And the finale is excellent.
#01 - The Last Man on Earth [1964]
My first official viewing of the month, although this is also technically a rewatch since I saw it when I was little. I remembered pretty much nothing about it though, so that's OK. It's definitely cheesy B-movie fare, but it's still pretty fun, and I love Vincent Price so that's a plus. And it's kind of cool how it prefigures Romero's zombie films, even if the stakes (heheh) aren't nearly has high in this one.
And now for a little Bavathon to finish off the Bava horror / giallo films I haven't seen yet.
#02 - Five Dolls for an August Moon (5 bambole per la luna d'agosto) [1970]
Pretty stylish as I've come to expect from Bava, but definitely not one of his best. He wouldn't perfect this particular formula until A Bay of Blood the following year. There's no real sense of tension here, and the kills are few and far between and tame enough that a lot of the movie is just bad actors arguing. And the freezer waltz becomes comical after the fourth or fifth time, and the ending is whatever. Groovy soundtrack though. Probably the weakest Bava I've seen yet, although I generally prefer Bava's gothic supernatural 60s output to his gialli, with the exception of Blood and Black Lace.
#03 - Hatchet for the Honeymoon (Il rosso segno della follia) [1970]
Now that's more like it. Still not Bava's best, but a considerable step up from Five Dolls. Feels very proto-American Psycho, and it's oozing with atmosphere. It's a lot more psychological than I expected, and it's pretty funny at times too. I was also amused by his use of footage from Black Sabbath in this movie. The plot is a tad disjointed, with different subplots not quite coming together as well as I would have liked, but overall it's a fun movie. A solid middle-tier Bava film.
I kicked off the month by watching The Neon Demon which is only like 20% horror film despite what anyone tells you. It was really good until it became that last 20% and then it was just weird before ending on gross and dumb.
It had a lot of striking cinematography and it definitely had something to say about the modeling/fashion business which made it feel special, but it's like they didn't know how to end the movie so they went and turned to horror with poor results.
I think some horror fans may really like the later section of the movie, but I wasn't feeling it.
Id not seen Christmas Evil (aka You Better Watch Out aka Terror In Toyland) before tonight, but what an absolute corker of a movie it turned out. Sold as a slasher flick, its actually more like a study in psychological distress (with some occasional moments of very bloody violence). It tells the story of Harry Stadling, a man traumatised by what he saw one Christmas Eve when he was just a small child (think I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus and then some!)
This trauma has caused Harry to grow up into a man with a serious St Nick obsession. He sleeps in a santa suit, has a house that seems permanently decorated for Christmas, and does his daily exercises listening to festive music. He spends his spare time spying on the neighbourhood children, and recording their behaviour in his version of the nice and naughty list. Disparaged by his younger brother Philip (played by the excellent Jeffrey Demunn aka Dale from The Walking Dead in a very early role), put upon by his co-workers at the toy factory and humiliated by his boss, one Christmas Eve Harry cant take it anymore, and cracks, coming to believe that he genuinely is Santa, and that people are going to get whats coming to them.
The best, and perhaps most surprising element of the film, is how sympathetic star Brandon Maggart manages to make Harry. I was rooting for him pretty much from the word go, with the scene where Maggart managed to make Harry nearly getting stuck trying to go down a chimney weirdly poignant as opposed to laughable being a genuine highlight.
Eaten Alive. This was not very good. I expected something better from Hooper after TCM just a couple years before but this sucked. It did have some elements of TCM in the chase scene towards the end but otherwise the only good thing about this is the nice tits. Robert Englund plays Buck who likes to fuck lol so there is that too. Sadly you'd think a dude wielding a scythe with a giant crocogator on the cover would yield something a bit better.
