After a really busy year, I've been gradually catching up with my reviews. Now the October horror marathon is once again upon us. It has been dubbed "Hoop-Tober" on Letterboxd, even for those not including Tobe Hooper films (and I drained that lake dry already). But I still have a bunch of horror film reviews to post which have been a long time delayed. So here goes...
Possession (1981)
Fairly low budget arty horror piece starring Sam Neil. This actually gets pretty Lovecraftian and I really liked that aspect. Unfortunately the film goes from slow-paced and frustrating to fast-paced and completely bonkers.
The final scene suggests all sorts of possible interpretations but none of them seem to fit terribly well with the rest of the film.
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There are some wonderful ideas here and some creative visual techniques establishing the presence of a malign supernatural force. And naturally Sam Neil is awesome as always.
However, overall the film is just a mess.
D+
Slasher House (2012)
A very low budget project has characters with no memory in some kind of strange prison.
There are some parts which are a lot of fun and others which are slow-paced and poorly handled. The dialogue isn't great, the acting isn't great and the film generally looks very amateurish.
The second half is better than the first half and this could have been a lot worse, but nothing here really made it worth the effort.
D-
Dracula (1958)
Somehow I ended up seeing this movie's follow-up, "Prince of Darkness", first. I remember that the best bit seemed to be the recap at the beginning. Van Helsing (played by Peter Cushing) is in a proper showdown with Dracula (Christopher Lee). It seemed like a really exciting confrontation. "I wish I were watching THAT movie!" I thought.
So imagine my surprise when Dracula (sometimes known as "The Horror of Dracula") turned out to be even duller. All the way through I was thinking "The final confrontation will make it all worthwhile." But no! It turns out that without the exciting music from that recap, that 'exciting' showdown is distinctly less gripping.
Turns out that I preferred "Prince of Darkness" to the original Hammer Horror Dracula, but my favourite Hammer Dracula movie so far is "Scars of Dracula".
D-
Dr. Moreau's House of Pain (2004 Video)
A friend of mine had picked up this low budget flick cheap and yet it felt wrong that he'd spent any money on it at all. Highly amateurish. Terrible acting, story, production values, costume design, you name it. Just generally appalling.
U+
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
The more I've been exploring the horror genre in recent years, the more heavily entrenched my love of horror-comedies has become. But I was still a little unsure about a horror comedy based around slasher flicks. Even having completed Jason's Friday bloodbaths, Elm Street's Nightmares, and the various chainsaw massacres in Texas, I still feel like a bit of an outsider to the genre, like perhaps I don't enjoy these movies in the way 'true fans' do.
So I take great pleasure in revealing that I loved "The Rise of Leslie Vernon". It's made clear early on that this is not just a psychopath. Leslie Vernon is a slasher killer. He has perfected such talents as keeping up with his victims while seeming to only ever be walking.
There's also a rather cool cameo from Robert Englund, playing what Leslie Vernon refers to as an "Ahab" (which I only later recognised as a reference to "Moby Dick"). Ooooh, also for any Poltergeist fans out there, Robert Englund isn't the only cameo by a horror movie star...
The Rise of Leslie Vernon is a proper treat for horror fans who enjoy the campy fun of the slasher genre.
A+
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Admittedly this looks rather dated now, but Anthony Hopkins' performance is still as haunting as ever.
While categorised as a psychological thriller, a genre often viewed as more high-brow than horror, "Silence of the Lambs" is actually an almost inevitable result of the slasher movie craze. A fictional world in which psychopaths are like evil superheroes whose fiendish intelligence and brutality can enable them to solve complex crimes and to escape from seemingly secure confinements. These psychopaths are like vampires, seemingly set apart from ordinary mere mortals with their own twisted connections with one another.
Perhaps this interpretation is a stretch, but there is no doubting that the world of Hannibal Lecter fascinates audiences (continuing to do so in the recent tv series). And who can possibly look at those creepy moths fluttering through Buffalo Bill's lair and still think "this is not a horror movie"? Nonsense. It's flipping terrifying!
A+