Before the re-watch, I remembered I liked this movie, but I had forgotten how unsatisfying the ending was.
The film stars Johnny Depp as an amoral dealer in rare books. His character is kind of a dick and he plays it well. He’s hired by and even bigger dick (Frank Langella) to track down and compare two copies of a very rare book to his. The book is said to be able to summon the devil and Frank’s character thinks only one of the three is genuine.
The good. Johnny Depp, Frank Langella and Lena Olin. Great actors who do a fantastic job in this movie. I enjoyed that it plays out like a mystery and detective story all about books. I also liked the sense of dread and menace that runs through almost the entire film. From the moment Dean meets with Boris, the audience is made to feel suspicious, then anxious, nervous, paranoid, mimicking Johnny Depp’s character. The viewer never feels safe or relaxed. Even the lovemaking scenes are tense. You’re not aroused because you KNOW something is off about these women. It’s a masterfully told story.
The bad. Roman Polanski. I hate that such a terrible person still evades justice and continues to live his life free of consequences.
I’m also not a fan of the ending of the movie. Unless I missed a lot, it’s kind of ambiguous.
*Spoiler Time*
Who was The Girl? Was she a demon, an angel, Lucifer? Was the whole thing about leading Dean through the gate, Lucifer never wanted Boris in the first place? Were the Ceniza brothers part of the setup? Did the gate actually lead to hell? Was it SUPPOSED to be this confusing or did I miss signs while watching? Was this supposed to lead to a sequel? I don’t mind when a story doesn’t answer all our questions, or when the ambiguity leads to meaningful discussion among the viewers, but this was too many unanswered questions.
I’m kind of in the mood to watch From Hell now. Not sure if it fits this months theme or not.
In 1985 I watched the Michael J. Fox comedy Teen Wolf. I loved it and did for a long time. Ginger Snaps is like the anti-Teen Wolf and it is soooo much better. Both are coming of age movies about outcast teens that become werewolves. Both have scenes with sports in them and both movies star Canadians, That’s pretty much where the similarities end.
This is another film that I had heard mentioned a lot over the years, but never watched. I could say I don’t know why I avoided it, but the truth is probably misogyny. At it’s core this is a story about high-school, teen girls and menstruation and I didn’t think I wanted to watch a movie about any of those things. I was wrong, and I wished I had watched this sooner.
My favorite thing about Ginger Snaps is the realism. No, I don’t believe werewolves are real and this is an accurate depiction of them, I mean it feels like the filmmakers started with the premise, “If my sister and I are out walking at night and are attacked by a strange animal, how would we react?” and everything flows from that. Their actions, reactions, the way they talk and behave are all natural and believable. That’s a big pet peeve of mine, when I think characters aren’t behaving like a reasonable person would, it pulls me right out of the story, so at the start of the film, I didn’t think I was going to like it, because I didn’t like Ginger and Brigitte.
Why are they so angry? Why are they so mean to their parents? Why do they hate life so much when they don’t seem to have anything to complain about? But that’s an old person’s instinctual response to teenagers. I see it a lot in people my age. We’ve forgotten how it FELT to be that age. What seems trivial and unimportant to us now in hindsight is the entire world to them. When I think back to how my kids were in their teens, how my grand-kids are now, the Fitzgerald sisters are 100% believable.
For a low budget film, it looks fantastic. Google says the average studio movie in 2001 cost $47.7 million, Ginger Snaps had only 4.5 to work with, which is $1.4 million LESS than the GOAT of werewolf movies was given in 1981. A lot of that I think can be attributed to director John Fawcett choosing to go far all practical makeup and effects. If they had used CGI it would have either eaten up a lot of the budget, or they would have had to settle for less or poorer quality. Going practical and keeping things dark worked very well.
I shouldn’t have slept on this film for so long, and I think it’s a lesson to be more open minded. The question arises though, do I watch the sequel? I haven’t had a lot of luck with sequels this month, especially with movies I really enjoyed.
The only thing I knew about this movie before watching it was that it was set at a ballet school, and I only knew that much from the promos released when the re-make came out in 2018. Unlike a lot of the other films I’ve watched this month, I’d never even seen the box for it at any of the video stores I’ve worked at.
Written and directed by Dario Argento, the look of Suspiria is unlike any horror movie I watched before. Most other films in this genre are dark and somber, but Suspiria is filled with bold vivid colours that dominate the scenes. The play of light and shadow is fantastic and does a lot to set the tone and mood. More so than the music, which I found too loud and confusing. It was filled with moans and wails and I often couldn’t tell if it was the music or something that was in the scene.
As gorgeous as the cinematography is, the visual effects don’t hold up as well. The blood is a bright cartoony red that no one could ever mistake for the real thing and there is a scene with a bat that looks exactly like the black tennis ball on a string that it probably was.
I still enjoyed it overall, and I find myself wondering if this may be a case where the remake actually improves on the original, but I may wait for next year’s marathon to check it out.
I mean… It’s The Shining. Not a lot for me to add that hasn’t already been said many times about this film. In the forty years since it’s release, there have been countless articles and interviews related to it, research papers, essays, probably a few doctoral thesis as well, not to mention all the books about Stanley Kubrick that have been published. As a lifelong Stephen King fan, and someone who started reading his books at an age modern parents would probably find shocking, I’m going to give my impressions about the movie from that angle.
When people compile lists of favorite horror movies, or even greatest films of all time, The Shining is always there, so it was fascinating to me that when I opened the Wiki page for this movie, I saw that that was not the case when it was first released. Reaction wasn’t just mixed, Kubrick and Duvall received nominations at the very first Golden Raspberry awards for this production. I think both were undeserved.
Remember back when I reviewed Sleepaway Camp 2 and I wrote how important music and sound was to the feel of a movie? This is the absolute perfect example of what I meant. From the very first scene when the movie opens, the musical score by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind sets the tone. It is ominous and foreboding, despite the beautiful scenery of a mountain road winding through Montana (not Colorado as we are meant to believe) the audio cues fill us with a sense of dread, setting your expectations for the next two hours.
Google’s AI tells me there are over 77 books about Stanley Kubrick out there. AI lies a lot, but in this case, it’s probably not far from the truth, so if you want more in depth opinions on him as a person and as a filmmaker, you have plenty of options, but my opinion as someone who is going just by surface observations, is that if you take my complaints about the other 17 movies I’ve reviewed this month and fix them, you’ll wind up with a Kubrick film.
The soundscape, the imagery, the beautiful shots done with the newly available Steadicam, the natural dialogue and realistic character behaviours. It all just works. So why didn’t Stephen King like this version of his work? You’d have to ask him for the definitive answer, and I suspect as the years have passed, his stance has probably mellowed some, but I think it came from his inability differentiate between what works on paper and what works on screen. The thing I’ve always loved about King’s works is his ability to create characters you care deeply about. He then does horrible, horrible things to them which puts the reader through an emotional wringer. Part of what makes the people in his stories unique and endearing are the mannerisms and ways of speaking he creates for them (Laws yes!), but many times when you put them on screen, and have the words come out of a real humans mouth, they just sound odd and unnatural.
Books, because everything takes place in the imagination of the reader, also have the ability to compress or stretch time in a way we don’t notice while reading. This is very apparent in the 1991 TV mini-series version of this book that Stephen King himself wrote and produced. There is a scene where Danny is being chased by his father, they stop, have a conversation, and then the chase starts up again. That works in the pages of a book, but comes off as jarring and unrealistic when played out in real time for a viewer. Some things just don’t translate well from paper to film and some things need to be cut for time. As cool as the topiaries were in the book (they freaked me out and I’m sure were Steven Moffat’s inspiration for the Weeping Angels) they don’t add anything to the story or characters in an already 144 minute film.
One change the celebrated horror author and I both didn’t like *SPOILER ALERT* was the killing of Hallorann. In the book, he’s the one that rescues Danny and Wendy, he does too, indirectly, in the film, but they spend a good amount of time showing him being contacted by Danny, trying to reach Wendy by phone, calling the police, flying to Colorado, renting the Snow Cat, driving to the hotel, only to get killed as soon as he arrives? With no impact on the story except to deliver a car? The movie was already pretty long, it could have been trimmed and tightened if the getaway vehicle had simply been provided by a nameless sheriff’s deputy sent to check on the family when they became unreachable by radio. There was no need for Dick to die, unless Kubrick was trying to subvert our expectations, or simply for shock value after all the buildup of him coming to the rescue. I don’t know, but it’s the only thing I didn’t love about the movie.
Still a great film experience. Still holds up well, and a re-watch has put me in the mood to watch Doctor Sleep, the sequel I have never seen or read, but it’s not an old movie and doesn’t fit with this months challenge so I won’t be writing a review on it… yet.
For the longest time, I thought this was a Stephen King story. There’s just something about it that made me associate it with him. Probably the similarity between the “The Shop” and the company in Scanners that was producing a drug that gave people mental abilities. That’s not a spoiler by the way, it’s pretty much explained right at the beginning.
This movie is all David Cronenberg though, well, Cronenberg inspired by William S. Burroughs. It’s not as strange as Naked Lunch or eXistenZ and I’m not really sure why it’s considered a horror. The movie is more unsettling than it is scary, but it’s still really good.
It has been a long time since I‘ve watched Scanners and I had forgotten most of it, except the imagery of the people using their powers. I think that’s the thing about David Cronenberg’s movies, the vivid mental pictures that get burned into your memory and haunt you.
I’ve been a comic book nerd most of my life and this film is one of the few times I can recall mental telepathy being shown as an almost physical act, both the scanner and victims emote and struggle. It’s also not a passive thing, it’s an act they have to wilfully engage, which I guess is why two gunmen are able to get the drop on a literal room full of psychics.
Michael Ironside takes a lot of the credit for this movie staying with me for so long. His performance is fantastic. Actually, I’m trying to think of a movie with him in it that I didn’t enjoy and am coming up blank. There probably is one or two, nobody has a perfect track record of picking their projects, but I think it says a lot about the man’s talent and charisma that I only remember the good ones.
It’s not a perfect movie by any stretch, I feel Cronenberg is a lot like early William Gibson in not knowing how computers work and just making things up because it sounds good. I’ve worked in telecom for thirty years and I can guarantee, that even with psychic powers, there is no way a pay phone will explode like that unless you pack it with C4.
For an older movie, the effects hold up really well. The story has some pretty big holes if you start thinking about it, so it’s best not to get too analytical and just enjoy the ride.
In 52 years, I have watched a lot of movies. Some of them have been very bizarre. I’ve seen The Forbidden Zone, A Clockwork Orange, Killer Klownz from Outer Space and most everything David Cronenberg has directed. Possession is right up there as one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever watched.
The people in this movie act weird, they stand too close, they don’t look at each other when they talk, they flail against the walls, they say the most bizarre stuff that nobody else in the scene reacts to, their characters are inconsistent from one scene to the next and I’ve watched Sam Neil sit in a chair in plenty of other movies, so I know he can do it without looking so manic, so this all must be intentional on the part of the director.
It has to be an art style I’m unfamiliar with. A film student could probably tell us it’s part of the neo-brutalist-hyper-realism school or something, but it just confused the hell out of me. Judging from the high ratings on almost every platform, 74% on The Movie Database, 7.2 on IMDB, 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, I’m one of the few viewers who didn’t understand it.
The blurb for this movie describes it like this “A woman starts exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior after asking her husband for a divorce. Suspicions of infidelity soon give way to something much more sinister.” So you’re probably thinking what I was. She’s possessed. It’s going to be a film about demonic possession (I mean it’s in the title, right?) that sounds cool. No. That’s not what it’s about at all. I’m still not sure what it WAS about. The closest I can come is that it is an allegory for the possessiveness we feel towards people we are in a relationship with. Maybe. I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about it most of the night and I’m still baffled by what I watched.
I just spent about ten minutes trying to explain to my wife all the strange and incomprehensible weirdness that is Possession, but I’m not going to do that here. Why? Because despite everything I’ve said so far, I didn’t hate this movie. I’m not going to say I liked it, or that I’ll watch it again, but I also don’t want to deprive anyone else of the experience of watching it unspoiled. It is bizarre and hideous in a fashion that makes you unable to look away.
I want to start of by saying, the movie is not as bad as the Rotten Tomatoes score would indicate. I mean, it’s nowhere near as good as the first movie, but it’s not terrible. I think people were just disappointed when they compare it to the original, and they used the rating system to reflect that.
What went wrong with this movie? Well, nothing really, or maybe everything. You can’t say the effect were bad, they weren’t. You can’t say the acting was bad, it wasn’t. The story wasn’t terrible, although it was just a little harder to believe than the first one. I think it’s more about the crew behind the cameras, and how they changed almost everyone involved from the first except the cast, the head writers and Jerry Goldsmith.
Gone are Steven Speilberg and Tobe Hooper, which are probably the biggest changes and had the most impact, but it’s also a different cinematographer, different editor, producers, production designer, set decorator, makeup, when I compare IMDB credits side by side, not a single person in the art department was in both movies. Film-making is a collaborative effort and when you change so many of the people involved in it, you’re going to wind up with a very different outcome, even if you keep the same actors in front of the lens.
What would I have changed about this movie? If they were going to change so much of the crew, I hate to say it, but I would have changed the cast as well. Make a clean break. Make the story about a new family, maybe focus this time on the researchers going to a new house, or maybe put Tangina at the centre. More Zelda Rubinstein would have been a good thing in my opinion, she’s in far too little of this movie. As much as I loved the cast, Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams are great and Heather O’Rourke a treasure taken way too soon, it’s hard to believe *SPOILER ALERT* their house was built on a DOUBLE graveyard. Seriously? This type of movie requires some healthy suspension of disbelief already, but to ask people to buy that there was a cave with more bodies underneath the cemetery that was already hidden is pushing it in my opinion. Especially when you add that, not only is this family unlucky in where their home was built, but Diane, her mother and her daughter ALL have strong psychic abilities? Pick one, either the land is cursed or the people are the reason the poltergeists are attacking them and following them, asking us to believe both is a little too much for me.
Some of the world-building I didn’t buy into. The first one, the spirits were spirits, they acted by moving and possessing inanimate objects. In this one, there is a lot of physical manifestations. I get wanting Julian Beck in as many scenes as possible, he’s the best thing about this film, but if he can appear and walk around whenever he wanted, why did he need Carol Anne? It seemed like the effects people had cool ideas they wanted to try (the braces attacking Robbie, the mescal worm) and the writers found a way to try and work them into the story, instead of the effects being needed to tell the story.
I hate that is sounds like I’m bashing the movie, that’s not my intention, I think, like a lot of the people voting on RT, that I had such strong feelings about the first film, being let down by the sequel makes you just a little angry about what could have been.
The first time I watched this movie I was fairly young. So young that I didn’t realize until this re-watch, that it wasn’t a normal cigarette that JoBeth Williams’ character was smoking in bed. Sometimes, as an adult, when you watch a movie that you have fond memories of as a child, the experience isn’t as good as you remember. I had this happen with a few films, Highlander, The Crow, The Last Starfighter and I was worried that would be the case here. I was very happy to learn it was not. This movie still surprised me, shocked me, scared me, for a story over thirty years old, it holds up remarkably well.
I always thought Steven Speilberg directed this movie. He produced it, and he co-wrote it based on his own story, but it turns out Tobe Hooper directed it. Yes, that Tobe Hooper. Texas Chainsaw Massacre Tobe Hooper. I guess I was surprised because for a guy who is best know for a movie about a family of cannibals, and who’s signature character wears a mask made of human skin, he does an amazing job of being more subtle here, reminding us of what it felt like to be a child in our bedroom at night, afraid of clowns, lightning, monsters under the bed and in the closet.
I like how the movie is structured most of all. It starts out spooky and the family passing off Carol Anne talking to the TV in the middle of the night as just a child maybe sleepwalking. Then they think it’s fun when strange things start happening with the furniture and eventually becomes more menacing and malevolent. Then when you think everyone is finally safe, you find out they aren’t. It’s a roller-coaster that is aided significantly by Jerry Goldsmith’s music.
Some of the green screen and stop motion isn’t as convincing in a high def transfer, especially when you are used to modern CGI, but it isn’t glaringly bad and the scenes that are dated are brief. Modern TVs don’t show static like that anymore, so it may puzzle younger first time viewers, but overall the makeup and effects are done well enough that they still look good. I’ll admit, I was still repulsed and a little freaked out when that guy rips off his own face.
Also, I can’t not mention Zelda Rubinstein. That woman adds sooo much atmosphere and character when she shows up, the movie would not be the same if any other actor had been in that roll.
If you’ve never watched it, or it’s just been a long time since you have, I would strongly recommend it this Halloween if you’re in the mood for a great ghost story.
A product of the Roger Corman factory that produced incredibly successful directors, Joe Dante has made some of my most loved movies. Gremlins, Innerspace, Explorers and the underrated Tom Hanks masterpiece, The Burbs. Until now though, I had never watched The Howling.
I don’t think it’s giving away anything to say this is a werewolf film. I mean, the title is The Howling and just look at that poster. What’s cool about this movie is that it starts off making you think it’s about one thing, but transforms (like a werewolf, get it?) as it goes into being something else. Bottom line is I enjoyed The Howling, but I can’t discuss it more without spoiling things sooooo.
SPOILERS BELOW
Things I loved. Reporters. A lot of monster movies are about people in their teens and early twenties who inadvertently wind up victims of atrocities no one would ever believe. The main characters in The Howling are journalists who actively seek out the facts. That was a nice change.
I also like that it begins leading you to believe the story is about a werewolf serial killer, when it was more about a serial killer who just happens to be a werewolf, and part of a larger community of wolves.
My biggest complaint about the film is that I wish it had been longer, as I have a lot of questions that either weren’t answered, or maybe I just didn’t understand. The killer, for instance. How did the community feel about him? Was he an anomaly? Were they upset that he drew so much scrutiny down on them? His actions are never really discussed. You get a small glimpse that there is a schism developing between the traditionalists and “The Doctor’s” way of thinking, but it’s very brief and we aren’t shown much of their way of life. Why did the old man want to throw himself on the fire? Was he lamenting the loss of their traditional way of life? Was it dementia? Was he just a drunk who seeks attention by doing this all the time? Why did Patrick Macnee’s character bring Karen and Bill there in the first place? Was it to convert them, because they later plan to just kill Karen and make it look like an accident. I know that theatres didn’t like long movies back then, but I would have loved another thirty minutes to really flesh out the wolves and their story.
The special effects were good, but… An American Werewolf in London came out that same year and their werewolf transformation scene was mind blowing in comparison.
The ending was fantastic. I know I put a spoiler warning up already, but if you really haven’t seen the movie yet… no, you know what, I was going to tell you to stop reading and instead I’m just going to end the review. Go watch the movie.
You can’t go wrong with a John Carpenter movie. Halloween, Christine, Escape From New York, Big Trouble in Little China, Dark Star (okay maybe not Dark Star), Prince of Darkness, They Live (campy but fun) and my personal favourite horror The Thing.
This one just didn’t click with me though, and I’m not sure why. There’s nothing I can put my finger on that really stands out. It’s a cool ghost story, which is a nice change from zombies, demons and vampires. It has a great cast, may be the first time I’ve ever seen Jamie Lee Curtis and her mother in the same movie, the dialog is natural and all the characters behaviour realistic. Maybe the cast was too big? It didn’t seem to have an anchor character and jumped around a lot. I assumed it would be Adrienne Barbeau, but she spent most of the film alone.
I think the issue this time was me. I was really tired and not in the mood to watch a movie, but did it anyway for the challenge. I think I’ll need to see this film again on a day I’m in a better mindset. Maybe I’ll do a John Carpenter marathon.
Despite the good rating on Rotten Tomatoes, The Fog doesn’t seem to be in high demand. I could only find it on Amazon and Apple TV.
Late to the party, as usual 