October 14th

Casper (1995) directed by Brad Silberling

We made it through just 20 minutes of Spooky Buddies yesterday before my oldest freaked out and left the room.  A Disney movie starring talking golden retriever puppies and featuring goofball Harland Williams as the bad guy was too much stress for the poor 4-year-old.  So, I wasn't expecting to make it very far into this one today, either.  Surprisingly, outside of some swearing I wish wasn't there, this one's pretty harmless and the girls got a kick out of it.

As an adult, I thought it was definitely a step above the aforementioned Buddies movie.  The Looney Tunes-like ghosts were pretty funny and the cameos kept me entertained.  I love Father Guido Sarducci -- what ever happened to him? -- popping up as an exorcist and Dan Aykroyd appearing for 5 seconds as Ray Stanz.  Plus, Clint Eastwood, Rodney Dangerfield, Mel Gibson and the Cryptkeeper showing up in a mirror when the ghostly uncles possess Bill Pullman was unexpectedly cool (and weird as hell).  Not a bad kids' Halloween movie.

Watched: bootleg (if it were available to stream, I would've rented it.  You lose, Universal).

Day of the Dead (1985) directed by George A. Romero

Always my least favorite of the original dead trilogy.  Partially, this is because of the setting.  The underground shelter built into a mine, especially when compared to a mall, is pretty boring.  It's not a place I can relate to.  I've been in small farmhouses and malls; I can imagine the challenges of being barricaded in those.  Underground facilities: not so much.  The story doesn't have too much going for it, either.  The film ends with the zombies taking over the facility, the asshole army guys eaten, and some of the good guy civilians escaping.  You can more or less predict this all happening after the first time we meet the not-so-nice military guys underground.  But: Bub, Dr. Logan and Tom Savini.  Two fictional characters and a special effects guy make the movie entertaining for me.

When I think of "zombie," Bub is the face that comes to mind.  Sherman Howard does a great job giving Bub personality and manages to make the undead killing machine sympathetic.  Also, a lot of his movements look ape-like; I swear I've seen a nature special in which a gorilla plays with a phone in the same way that Bub does.  I wonder if he was doing this on purpose?  It's a great fit with the idea of trying to civilize / evolve the zombies.

Speaking of, you've gotta love nutty Dr. Logan and his wacky experiments.  I don't think it's necessary to explain anything about how the zombies work in these films -- they aren't, or at least shouldn't be, the point of the story -- but I can't deny it's some fun stuff.  You've got a zombie with everything in his head gone except for a still-living brain, a zombie with all of his internal organs disconnected who still wants to eat, a severed head that still blinks, and a zombie baby submerged in water.  Also, though it's not remotely subtle, I like the fact that the only thing civilizing Bub really accomplished was to give him the ability to kill people with a gun instead of his teeth.

In Day, Savini is at the top of his game when it comes to the gore.  Some of stuff at the end, in which the zombies are tearing the army guys to pieces, even had me wincing a little.  Dr. Logan's experiments are beautifully accomplished.  When the zombie sits up and all of his internal organs spill onto the floor... now that's horror poetry.  Even the traditional zombie neck bites are done extremely well, with the zombies somehow looking like they've bitten a chunk out of the actor's neck.

A sometimes fun zombie movie, but not at all in the same class as Night or Dawn.

Watched: blu-ray from Anchor Bay.

The Walking Dead 2.01: "What Lies Ahead" (2011) directed by Ernest R. Dickerson & Gwyneth Horder-Payton
Not having cable, I'm always going to be a year behind with this series as I catch it streaming on Netflix every October.  That's fine with me; I'm in no rush.  This first episode of season two picks up with the gang on the road after the disaster at the CDC in the final episode of season one.  This is more of what I thought the later parts of season one might be like: traveling in the camper and running into trouble on the road.  Quests to scientific facilities happened way too early.

Watching this right after Day of the Dead, I was bothered more than usual by the CGI gore in the show.  I hate computer-generated blood and guts.  It always looks like a cartoon and it's never animated right.  I get that it's a huge time- and money-saver, but it still makes this part of the show look worse than a low-budget movie from 1985.  On the other hand, I can't fault the zombie make-up jobs the crew is doing.  The zombies look great and would not look out of place in a real zombie film.  I particularly liked the horribly thin actor they cast as the zombie who terrorizes Andrea in the camper.

I don't think this episode needed to be extra-long -- it kind of dragged a bit -- and parts of the show are too soap opera-y for my taste, but I'm still curious to see where they take things next.

October 22nd

Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) directed by Scott Derrickson
A definite improvement over III and IV.  In Inferno, Pinhead's no longer trying to take over the world, or put us to sleep with speeches, or wants to kill everyone he meets.  Hell, he's only in the movie for a few minutes.  Impressive.  Maybe IV's failure taught the execs to keep their hands off?  Instead, the film focuses on Detective Thorne (played by Nightbreed vet Craig Sheffer), who's investigating a case involving a mysterious gold box, some chains, and the messy remains of a person.  One things leads to another and he ends up solving the box shortly after screwing a hooker.  From that point onward, though we're not told explicitly until the end, he's in a Hell that closely resembles his life.

Suspiciously like Jacob's Ladder, he begins to see demons and other weird things out of the corner of his eye.  Soon, his life seems to get worse and worse, culminating in the deaths of his wife and daughter.  Then the cycle restarts, and he's right back to the hotel room where he'd solved the box to do it all over again.  Once he knows that he's no longer living in reality, it's hard to see how repeating the cycle would count as torture.  Who cares if pretend versions of his family are killed?  Why even go through the motions of real life if it isn't real?  I guess he does shoot himself during cycle #2, only to wake up again like he's trapped in Groundhog Day, so that method of defiance doesn't work.  Still, it seems like this torture idea would be worn out quickly.

My big problem with the movie is that Hell is again depicted in the traditional sense.  While there are no flames or pitchforks, Pinhead seems to be punishing Thorne because he was a crappy person.  Or, he's punishing himself due to his guilty conscious.  Either way, I'm not seeing how this is in any way "exploring the further limits."  I suppose it's slightly clever that the filmmakers are having Thorne torn apart emotionally instead of physically, as we've seen in other Hellraisers, but the judgmental part of it simply doesn't belong in the series.  Perhaps some of the blame lies with Peter Atkins, writer of II, who invented Frank's personal Hell of a mental torture.  This small idea has seemingly de-Barkered Hell for everything that followed.

I do dig the Cenobites in this one.  The Wire Twins are the first sexual female Cenobites we've seen and their under-skin massage of Thorne's chest is probably the only Barker-style Hellraiser scene in the whole film.  Torso is a disturbing version of Chatterer without a lower half who makes for an effective vision of horror when seen in brief glimpses.

Unforgivably, the movie ends with Thorns looking upwards and yelling, Darth Vader-style, "Noooooooooooooo!" at the top of his lungs.  I wanted to do the same thing.  The film starts strong, but really falls apart as we learn where it's taking us.  (6/10)

The Walking Dead: "Tell It to the Frogs" (2010) directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton

This episode is pretty talky and lacking in zombie action, but this didn't bother me too much.  I liked the character interactions well enough and I'm hoping this is simply a lull before another zombie storm (something the comics do all the time).  This episode spends most of its time at the camp, where Rick is reunited with his family at last.  Here, we get a glimpse of the dynamics of the camp and meet more of the people living there. Traditional divisions of labor have emerged -- men fixing cars and hunting, with women washing clothes -- and the women aren't happy.  Lori gives former lover Shane the very cold shoulder.  Ed is shown to be a wife-beater.  Squirrels make good food.

Despite his joy at finding his family, Rick, true to his counterpart in the comics, decides he can't morally let Merle die on the roof.  Along with Merle's brother, T-Dawg, and Glenn, Rick ventures back to the department store roof, only to find Merle's amputated hand and nothing else.  I'm guessing budgetary reasons prevented us from seeing the zombie hordes in Atlanta again, so we're disappointingly left to imagine how it was that the group made it back to the department store.  Still, they have to find their way out again in the next episode, so there's that.