Hoop-Tober Horror Marathon - Entry 10: Final Entry, Including Final Rankings and Awards!

HOOP-TOBER 26-29

It's taken me a further week to get the final four films reviewed, but now that's sorted here were the last few films I managed to watch before the deadline of October 31st. I finished just two films shy of the target. Meh! Still, I had a lot of fun.

Ranked Hoop-Tober movies list on Letterboxd
Original Hoop-Tober movies list on Letterboxd


26. Big Bad Wolves (2013)

Towards the end of the Hoop-Tober challenge I spent some a long weekend at my parents house. They aren't really horror fans. However, I did manage to persuade them to check out this Israeli comedy/crime thriller, with a definite horror bent. I actually wasn't expecting this much torture though.



My parents didn't think this was really their thing, but they at least found it interesting.



There's some neat horror-comedy here, though the comedy is a little mixed. You eventually realise that the film will regularly interrupt the horrific moments as a gag, so you come to expect it after a while. However, the out-of-place conversations in this unpleasant scenario are often very funny indeed.



I would have liked a cleverer climax to the film. The film knows how to build up tension, but when it all comes to a head, the conclusion isn't as surprising or shocking as I'd hoped. But this ending was far from a deal-breaker. It's actually pretty satisfying, just not outstanding.



Great atmosphere, great performances, great timing (both for tension and comedy) and very well constructed. Definitely a recommend from me.

A+




27. Hatchet 2 (2010)

I loved the first Hatchet film. Admittedly it was a little unpolished, but it was a lot of fun and it had a lot of charm.



Sadly the same is not true of the sequel. Despite giving a bigger role to Tony Todd (who is as brilliant as you'd expect) he cannot make up for a terrible script. The actress who played the last girl in the first movie, is here replaced by Danielle Harris. Harris has a long history with the horror genre mainly centred around the Halloween movies. She was a child actress in parts 4 and 5 and them.she returned in Rob Zombies movies rebooting the franchise.



Here Danielle Harris is, quite frankly, terrible. She only has a select few expressions and while her 'intense' look might work in a Rob Zombie film, it felt rather out of place here.



It's a pity that we have some poor writing and at least one poor performance, because the kills here are brilliant. If I'd been.able to get more sucked in, I would have enjoyed those sequences a lot more. As it was, I just found this dull. It was watchable, but only just, and it was a big step down from true first movie.

E+




28. The Bad Seed (1956)

My opinion went up and down on this one. In the initial scene.my response was "What in the hell am I watching?" It starts off so very 50s and I found it dated and weird.



One exchange between father and daughter had me particularly freaked out:
"Oh daddy, you're so big and strong!"
"You see my effect on women?"

What???



But even bizarre lines like this turn out to be part of a very careful structure. The central girl's mother also has daddy issues and there's an explicit discussion of Freud related to it. I still think the lines quoted above are dodgy, but at least there appears to be some deeper purpose to them.



There are many scenes which are very well handled indeed. There is fantastic tension as characters come to accept the homicidal psychopathy of the little girl at the centre of the film, or even as some continue to fail to recognise it.



I don't consider it a spoiler to talk about the very end of the film, because it has clearly been added to satisfy the Hay's code and is completely out of keeping with the rest of the film. Since the filmmakers feel unable either to have an adult murder the evil girl, nor to see that evil girl left unpunished, the film employs a deus ex machina. The girl is finished off by a direct explosive hit by a bolt of lightning. It was unintentionally hilarious. What I found rather more disturbing however, was when, having finished with a light-hearted theatre-style introduction to the cast for a final bow, we end with the mother figure quite violently and unrelentingly spanking the daughter figure. It's clearly supposed to be funny, but it's yet another very dated aspect of the film; clearly coming from an era which did not share our squeamishness about corporal punishment.



There were so many great moments and yet I regularly found the film far too strange and dated in both its content and writing style to fully lose myself in the drama. Others might be a little more forgiving.

C-




29. The Burrowers (2008)

I like the idea of period horror. While there were issues, the premise of "Exit Humanity" of zombies in the aftermath of the American civil war really impressed me.



Here the premise of American settlers facing some kind of underground monster and blaming it on the native Americans was pretty cool. Unfortunately none of the characters really had much charisma and, in spite of decent performances, never really captured my attention.



I had been inclined to view this as a case of 'your mileage may vary', but eventually had to admit to myself that the whole thing was incredibly boring. The presence of Clancy Brown in the cast could not make up for that.



There are some neat moments and the monsters are actually pretty cool. Sadly the pacing, plotting and characterization left a lot to be desired. I respect what the film was trying to achieve, but found the film never really reached its potential.

D+



Awards!