October 31st - HALLOWEEN

Let Me In (2010) directed by Matt Reeves
I know it's never a hip thing to say, but I think I like this American remake as much as the Swedish original. I watched the original a couple of years ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but the movies seem to be very, very similar.  The differences are small but affect the tones of the films quite a bit.  The largest difference between the two that strikes me is that the American movie is pretty clearly a romance.  In the Swedish version, I liked to think of Eli as a manipulator: an ancient soul using her youthful appearance to ensnare a new helper when her former helper grew too old to be of any use.  The brief shot of her with an old woman's face seemed to reinforce this.  There is no such shot in this film.  Instead, Reeves has Owen reading Romeo and Juliet for school and Abby sentimentally keeps an old photo of her and Håkan (unnamed in this film) from when Håkan was a child.

A few of the scenes I felt were done better than the original.  Towards the end, I liked that Owen actually closed the door on the policeman while Abby was eating him.  It gave him more of an active roll in his first experience at helping Abby feed.  A greater special FX budget likely accounts for a more intense version of the scene in the pool at the end of the movie.  We watch from underwater as the bullies are dragged upside-down through the water while body parts float past Owen in a red storm.  It's beautiful.  Also beautiful was an entirely new scene of Håkan's final kill.  In it, he hides in the backseat of a car.  Unfortunately for him, the driver stops to pick up a friend and get gas.  Suffice it to say, when Håkan decides in a panic to try to steal the car, things don't work out well.  He gets into the most brilliant POV car crash shot I've ever seen, with a Slurpee-obscured windshield only giving us a hint of the violence going on outside of the vehicle.

Though I prefer the vampire in this tale to be an soulless schemer as she was in the original, the remake has a lot of other good things going for it to make up for that loss. (7/10)

The Simpsons: "Treehouse of Horror XXII" (2011) directed by Matthew Faughnan
Ugh.  Every once in a while, I'll watch a random Simpsons episode on Hulu just to see if the show has gotten any better.  It never has.  This remains sadly true for the once-beloved Halloween episodes as well.    In this one, there's a joke about the ill-fated Spider-Man musical and a parody of Avatar, which only serve to remind me of how slow the show is in comparison to South Park.  Also, 10-year-old Bart -- in a alien body -- loses his virginity to an alien and gets her pregnant.  C'mon, man, I don't want hear about it.


Ghoulies (1985) directed by Luca Bercovici
Here's another one of those '80s movies with tiny, toothy creatures in it that I've always meant to watch but never got around to.  I had no idea what it was about, so I was thinking it'd be like Critters and feature creatures running around biting people (probably on the butt as they used the toilet, as the poster seems to suggest).  Nope.  Turns out this is a pre-Full Moon Charles Band production, so the ghoulies are pretty much just like the toys in Puppet Master, running around a mansion killing guests at the behest of their dead master.

It's still kind of fun in a bad movie way.  By far the best part is when the ever-lovable Jack Nance pops out of nowhere dressed in a wizard's outfit and proceeds to do magic-battle with the main bad guy.  They grab each other around the necks and then take turns shooting lightning bolt/lasers out of their eyes while Nance cackles madly.  It's pretty awesome.  The rest of the movie... not so much. (5/10)

Cemetery Man (1994) directed by Michele Soavi
AKA Dellamorte Dellamore.  This was quite an interesting Italian zombie flick, completely different from a Fulci or Bava film.  Hard to pin down, Cemetery Man swings from zombie horror to romance to black comedy to fairytale.  Francesco is a caretaker at a cemetery in which the dead seem to return to life.  Unable to get anyone in town to believe him or to convince the mayor to investigate, Francesco simply finds it easier to shoot the zombies as they pop up.  When he loses the love of his life -- the widow of one of his clients -- to his own eagerness to shoot zombies, Francesco begins to leave reality behind.  Soon he's seeing visions of the Grim Reaper, attempting to get his penis surgically removed and shooting nuns through the eye.  It's a wild ride.  I'm going to need to watch this one again soon to absorb more of it. (7/10) 

The X-Files: "Home" (1996) directed by Kim Manners
Often called the most horrific of The X-Files' horror episodes, I hadn't seen this one since it originally aired.  It's essentially the story of everyone's favorite federal agents encountering The Hills Have Eyes family in a small town.  For horror veterans, this is nothing particularly shocking; we see inbred rednecks cast as monsters all the time.  But, I can imagine why the more normal sci-fi audience for this show found it disturbing.  I have to admit, the image of the limbless mother being pulled out from under a bed screaming is pretty powerful.


The Exorcist (1973) directed by William Friedkin
I'd been itching to watch my new blu-ray of this classic and Halloween seemed to be the perfect night to do so.  I'd forgotten how intense this picture is.  It builds nice and slow, like movies used to, showing us Regan's normal life before her troubles and Karras' troubled life before his sacrifice.  By the time we get to the actual exorcism, we've earned it.  We've seen how utterly horrible Regan has become and we've completely exhausted every rational explanation for her predicament and every excuse not to try the Catholic rite.  Also, holy cow, Jason Miller as Karras is absolutely amazing.   I'd probably go out on a limb and declare his performance in this film as the best in any horror movie ever made.  Haunted and skeptical and guilty and tired and angry, Karras finds unlikely meaning in his life when tasked with helping Regan.

If I have any complaint at all, it's that I can't figure out how these events were described to Lt. Kinderman in a way that didn't make him immediately throw someone in jail.  Two people died on the steps outside of Regan's window and one person died in her bedroom.  Regan has cuts all over her body and bruises from being tied up.  Her bed is padded and covered in vomit.  From the outside, it's looking like the butler or maid went insane and terrorized the family.  I don't know.  Maybe Kinderman was Catholic? (9/10)

Halloween (1978) directed by John Carpenter
My 13th Halloween watching Halloween.  In recent years -- I suppose ever since Scream -- it's been hip to analyze slasher movies in terms of conservative values asserting themselves against rebellious youth.  We all know the score: the kids who smoke pot and have sex are the ones to die at the hands of the monster.  The virginal innocent is the one to defeat the monster and survive to the end.  Halloween is often pointed to as the originator of this theme, but I really don't see it in this film.

It is true that Michael seems to have a problem with sex.  He began his career as a murderer by killing his post-coital sister and continued 15 years later by killing Lynda, Bob and Annie after or right before they had sex.  However, Michael is also fixated on the non-sexual Laurie just as much (let's not get into the long lost sister BS from the sequels).  Laurie, we should remember, is not quite so innocent.  Right before going to the Doyle house to babysit Tommy, she shares a joint with Annie.  Babysitting stoned would be a death sentence in an '80s slasher, but not quite so here.  Not-so-innocent final girl Laurie also does not defeat Michael.  All she does is  manage to hide from him long enough for Loomis to shoot him.  She does stab him a couple of times, but this doesn't slow him down. Nor do Loomis' bullets.  In Carpenter's universe, morality has nothing to do with it: evil exists, it will always be here, and it'll come for you whether you've gotten laid or not. (9/10)

The Real Ghostbusters: "Halloween II 1/2" (1987) directed by Masakazu Higuchi & Richard Raynis

I ended the night and the Six Weeks by popping in a childhood favorite.  The Real Ghostbusters is one of those things that helped form me into a horror fan.  This episode was the sequel to the popular "When Halloween Was Forever" episode that introduced Samhain, the pumpkin-headed spirit of the holiday.  While this one is not as good, it's still some fun with dozens of goofy ghosts gathering at the transformed firehouse to help Samhain on his quest to make every day Halloween.  Can the Real Ghostbusters, Slimer and the Junior Ghostbusters defeat him and return things to normal?  

I had a good Six Weeks.  I watched 61 1/3 movies and 27 TV episodes this year, not a bad effort.  I got to go to two different horror cons and had a blast at each.  I got to take both of my daughters out for some major trick 'r treating this year.  There was pumpkin pie and apple cider and Halloween cupcakes to eat.  My Freddy sweater kept me warm at work.  It was a good Six Weeks.

Squirrels chewed my eyes!

6WH: October 13th

Låt den rätte komma in (2008) directed by Tomas Alfredson
Let the Right One In, I kept reading online, is one of the best vampire movies ever made. Needless to say, I was really looking forward to watching it. I like a good vampire flick. I'd peg Near Dark as my favorite, with Martin a close second. Sadly, after watching it, I won't be adding Let the Right One In to my movie collection, much less considering it a favorite.

It's a cruel thing to write, but LtROI is a bit of a pre-teen Twilight. It's no where near as bad a movie as that piece of crap, but it certainly shares some plot similarities. A pair of lonely souls find each other. One happens to be an old vampire, and the vampire has to struggle not to eat the young human. The pair share lots of plaintive, silent glances with each other. They enjoy sexlessly sleeping next to each other at night. In the end, the vampire defends the human's life from other evil people and they go off to live happily ever after (maybe).

The major difference between the two films, I think, is the bullying plot thread in LtROI. I think this, in part, accounts for the strong love LtROI is getting from the online community. Being made up of more geeks than the average population, folks online can relate to being bullied as kids (note: I'm not excepting myself from this). And, in the film, except for the very last bullying incident, it's portrayed very realistically. Oskar takes the punishment, hates it, wishes he could harm his bullies, but never tells anyone. That's pretty much what kids do -- or did when I was his age, anyway. It's kind of an easy button to push to gain sympathy for your main character, but it does allow us to understand why Oskar has so little problem with Eli murdering people for food.

The crotch shot scene should've been cut. Among other reasons I can think of, it's unnecessarily confusing to anyone who hasn't read the novel. It's supposed to show that Eli is a castrated boy, which is supposed to make Oskar's love for him more remarkable. What I saw was a set set of rubber legs lacking any genitals and with what looked like a horizontal scratch south of the belly button. Logically, not having read the book, I concluded that vampires in this universe don't have private parts at all. I was waiting for this to tie into something in the movie later on, but it was ignored. I had to go online to find out what the hell the point of the scene was. Perhaps not a great adaption choice on the part of the screenwriter.

In the movie's defense, it allows itself to be read a couple of different ways, which I love. You can see the movie as a simple romance: despite their great differences, Oskar and Eli found love in each other and hold onto it no matter what. I read it differently. Eli, we can't forget, is much older than he looks. The movie actually reminds us of this in one scene, where Eli's face briefly transforms into that of an old woman. As such, I think his relationship with Oskar is selfish and manipulative.

I think that Håkan was Eli's previous Oskar. Years ago, he was probably someone Eli seduced/bonded with in order to get human help. Stockholm has 18 hours of daylight in the middle of summer. A vampire there is going to need a regular human to make sure no one opens any curtains on them while they sleep, etc. Håkan also kills people for Eli. This is a task you can see Eli grooming Oskar for, as he first encourages Oskar to hit his bullies harder than he thinks possible and later speaks to him about killing people. I think picking a human on the verge of puberty, close to his apparent age, is an easy way for Eli to gain the help he needs for 50-60 more years. Evil perhaps, but I don't think bullied and lonely Oskar minds so much. (7/10)