B.L.A.M.'s. Pre-Halloween FrightFest!

So, my wife is pregnant with our second child, and she goes to bed WAY early every night, leaving me with the run of the television for the evening. So, I figured I'd take the opportunity to catch up on some horror/ supernatural movies in the lead - up to All Hallow's Eve.

There may be some booze consumed.

Ground rules:

1) They have to be movies I've never seen before
2) Preference is given to those I can access for free, or through a service to which I already subscribe - Not Netflix, as we've recently broken up over a service dispute
3). I will take ANY recommendations, provided they meet number 1

I will report back with a review the following morning.

First up - The Woman in Black, starring Harry Potter

So, a third ground rule: I will write the "review" first take, without editing.

And there will certainly be spoilers.

The Woman in Black

So, this movie had a lot of fog. Starting in London, with Daniel Radcliffe's portrayal of a young widowed lawyer on the verge of a personal and professional meltdown, we see foggy and hazy recollections of his wife dying during childbirth. We then move to someplace in the North, which should be completely clear to EVERYONE who has ever watched anything that takes place in the North is where supernatural shit happens. In the fog. Radcliffe's character is tasked with wrapping up the estate of a deceased rich couple, and is taken to the house, which is on a tidal island near a spooky town populated with scared people who are all a bit damp. From the fog. He proceeds to start wading through the cobwebs and dust to take ... what. An inventory of things? A history of the family? It's not terribly clear, because every time he starts working, he gets distracted. One of the causes of his professional problems is therefore pretty clear from that point on. However, in this particular case, the distractions take the form of disembodied eyes and faces, shadowy figures in foggy groves of trees, and crosses stuck in marshland where apparently the young scion of the deceased rich people died/drowned/was swallowed by marshland.

Radcliffe has made the acquaintance of the richest man in the county, played by Ciaran Hinds. He brings Radcliffe over to his house for dinner, at which point we begin to see that his wife is batshit crazy, carves things into their dinner table with knives, and dotes on a pair of small dogs like they are twin children.

We then see a young girl die in Radcliffe's arms after swallowing some lye. That girl's parents blame Radcliffe because he saw the Woman in Black, which automatically dooms a child to death. No apparent rhyme or reason to which child, but just that a child must die when the Woman in Black is seen.

So, back to the foggy island house in the mud, where he continues to avoid any real work and determines that the child in question was the son of a crazy woman with VERY bad handwriting who was placed in the care of said crazy woman's sister and husband, and who let him AND the son of the rich couple die in the mud. This is determined from a pile of letters from the woman in black to her sister that were found in a pile that just happened to be in chronological order. We can tell this by the deterioration of the woman's handwriting and the strength of her accusations against her sister/husband. The woman in black then hangs herself, thus making herself into the homicidal apparation of the title.

Another child dies in the town during a house fire because she had been locked in a basement by her parents who were scared of her being killed by the Woman in Black. Note: Supernatural women with homicidal agendas are not easily kept away from kids they want to kill, even by locked doors that Daniel Radcliffe - all 5'2" of him - can shoulder open. So don't try to keep them locked down there as if it were Cleveland. Maybe move from the damp town where the kids die. Just a thought.

Radcliffe decides that Woman in Black must be reuinited with her son in order for this to stop, because his son is coming up from London to visit, and Radcliffe would like to avoid him dying. So he and rich dude go mud diving and recover the kid's corpse, which has remained entirely intact and only a few feet below the surface of the marshland mud. He washes and dresses the corpse, winds all the REALLY FUCKING SCARY WIND UP TOYS in his nursery to start clattering away at once, apparently in an effort to wake the dead. It works, because rich dude's kid's ghost shows up, though nothing really comes of that if I recall. Woman in Black screams, Radcliffe thinks its all good. BUT IT ISN'T. Woman in Black made it VERY clear that she would NEVER forgive her son's death. NEVER. Which means she won't.

So, Radcliffe goes to the train station, where we see the woman in black again, Radcliffe meets his son at the station, and he's a cute little kid. Who then walks out onto the train tracks. Radcliffe attempts to grab him, and they both are mowed down by the train. They are then reunited with Radcliffe's deceased wife, and they walk off down the spectral rail line.

Overall, a decent ghost tale with some good shock takes, but nothing I would recommend paying for. Radcliffe was not Harry Potter and I never thought he was. And there was fog.

i'll work on some stuff, otherwise this thread might help (assuming some of this stuff has drifted over to other digital providers by now)

Hey it's halloween, everybody should shit their pants - ilx horror crew top tens.

I'm pretty much going to sit down after everyone goes to bed and just pick a random movie of a horror/fright persuasion that I haven't seen yet and let you know what I think the next day. Netflix would have been good, but we have Hulu Plus (thanks sister in law) and Amazon Prime (thanks lots of baby stuff shipments), as well as On-Demand and AMC's October horror/fright programming.

Just typing that is embarassing, but somehow life-affirming. I have access to literally years of content, but still manage to have a healthy marriage and body, a good job at which I'm thriving, and have kept a kid alive for 15 months. Go me!

A big one that I had never gotten around to watching:

The Evil Dead (original)

Five college students drive into the Tennessee woods for spring break. On the way, they almost get run over by a delivery truck of some sort, and the implication is that supernatural forces have already begun to conspire against them. The driver and the woman in the passenger seat are singing some yacht rock tune at the time. They survive the near collision, yell at some roadside hillbillies, and get to a bridge that is showing some SERIOUS decay in viability. However, they drive their late 70s Oldsmobuick sled over it, at one point causing portions of the wood ties to fall into the river below.

Upon arriving at the cabin they have rented (through WHAT serivce?), Scotty, the driver, approaches the front door while the other four unload the car in a combination of wary, what-the-fuck-are-we-doing-hereness and spreak break joviality. He finds a ring of keys on the top of the door jam, and proceeds to open the door. All the while, a porch swing has been incessently knocking against the front of the cabin, but upon Scotty's unlocking of the front door, the swing ominously stops. Again, superntural forces are clearly at work here.

The fivesome explore the house, which has a LOT of doors. Like, I've been to the Winchester House in San Jose, and the House of Seven Gables, and per square footage, I'd put this cabin right up there with them in terms of doors. There were three into one bathroom.

Ash discovers the woodshed, which is filled with lots of stuff hanging from the ceiling and old saws and such.

During dinner, a trap door - heretofore unopened - is blown open, revealing the basement, which has at least two other doors. Behind the second door, Monty, is a room that contains a shotgun, an old book with some foreign language and evil, foreboding drawings, and a tape recorder. They bring the recorder up into the main room, and play it. It is a professor from some school who has apparently discovered a Sumerian book of the dead, and he proceeds to read the incantations contained therein onto the tape recording. Which essentially creates the same plot line as The Ring, because once those incantations start, demons show up. One of the women freaks out, and runs out into the woods, and is raped by demon trees.

She returns to the house, and they don't believe her, so Ash volunteers to drive her to town for medical treatment. The bridge has been totally washed out, so they return to the cabin. At this point, two of the women become possessed, and start speaking in demonic tones. They manage to lock one in the basement, but the other one needed to be dismantled with an axe. The third woman eventually gets possesed, too, and is dismantled with a chainsaw. Scotty and Ash end up fighting, too, and Scotty dies in the end.

To be honest, I fell asleep about halfway through, and replayed about half the movie three times. I can totally see why it got such a positive initial response, and why it is so well regarded now: The humor/horror combo was really over the top and explicit; the seemingly banal setting was totally different from previous possession movies like the Exorcist or Rosemary's Baby (not really possession, per se, but demonic inhabitant of another's body) in that those movies took place in settings that were TOTALLY foreign to a huge amount of the potential audience - Georgetown on location setting for a film, the Dakota on Central Park West; and the violence is a real-life cartoon and does not take itself seriously whatsoever. All the while, it keeps up several old reliable tropes: Country people/settings are scary, basements are scary, voices from beyond the grave are scary, and the woods are fucking scary.

I may go back and revisit it, or may watch the update later this month and compare, but I'm glad I was able to cross this one off my list, despite my Thursday evening fatigue.

Let's scare Jessica to death
Black Christmas (1974)
The shout

All on youtube.

Suggestions are hard, not knowing what you've seen or what's available on streaming services, but I'll give it a go:

Threads
Repulsion
Hour of the Wolf
Masque of the Red Death
Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly
Peeping Tom
Berberian Sound Studio
Carnival of Souls
Suspiria
The Haunting (1963)
BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas
Kwaidan
Black Sabbath
Messiah of Evil
Possession (1981)
The Beyond

^^^^

I have not seen any of those, except Suspiria. Excellent!

Esp 'girly' and 'possession'. The best of the bbc ghost stories are 'whistle and I'll come to you' and 'the signalman'. The former, in particular, is amazing. Also a handful of Tales of the Unexpected. The best two I've seen by far are 'the flytrap' and 'the landlady'. Both only 20 odd mins long.

'The Signalman' is my favourite of the Ghost Stories, actually. Though 'Whistle' is definitely up there. I need to watch more Tales of the Unexpected.

Be warned, whether 'Threads' counts as a horror film is a matter of some dispute. I always include it as it's the scariest film I know, but it's a social-realist nuclear destruction film.

Also, I really really need to watch Let's Scare Jessica to Death at some point.

If you haven't seen it then yes, you do.

Let me just reiterate that 'the flypaper' is just about the creepiest 25 mins you'll find on Youtube.

man you guys have been repping Let's Scare Jessica to Death for years and I'm still waiting on my local store to get a copy

I'm sure you've culled your unseens from this too already, right?

The Haunt Of Fear: ILX Top 100 HORROR Movies Poll Results Thread

Guys, I'm sorry to say but I think Let's Scare Jessica to Death is incredibly boring.

my recs:

God Told Me To
Reanimator (and Bride of Reanimator)
Basket Case
Teeth
The Strangers
Society
May
Cabin in the Woods
Slither

The following are all very good:

Inferno
Alucarda
The Short Night of Glass Dolls
Ghostwatch
The Stone Tape
Martyrs
Who Can Kill A Child?
Zombi 2

For stuff that'll probably be on Hula, Absentia, Kill List, Grave Encounters, Livid, The Innkeepers, Lovely Molly and The Awakening are all decent.

I've totally fallen off on this - just too much other crap going on. I hope to catch a few more scare flicks between now and Halloween, and I'll post reviews of those.