5th Annual N&G 31 Days* of Halloween (2023)

It's been a flurry this week with an overnight work trip to Texas, but the movies and costume production has been ongoing. I took off tomorrow and Tuesday to celebrate Halloween to the fullest. Hoping to wrap on construction tomorrow for an evening photoshoot.

Given the backlog of movies to share, I'll bundle them up in order of increasing enjoyment and save the posters for the goodies.

The Bad:

  • The Fourth Kind (how did this get made?)
  • Kids vs. Aliens (obnoxious af)
  • Troll 2 (bad but funny)
  • Hell Comes to Frogtown

The Mid:
  • Psychophonia
  • Heartland of Darkness

The Fine:
  • Cigarette Burns (John Carpenter's Masters of Horror episode)
  • Silent Scream
  • FNAF
  • Plank Face
  • Shaky Shivers
  • CRABS! (liked the escalation of crab forms a lot, not so much for a lot of the humor)
  • Superstition (1982)

The Good
  • Double Walker: A lean and intriguing indie piece where a murdered eight year old comes back in a new ghostly form to reap revenge.
  • The Manster: An oddball US/Japan co-production that owes plenty to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and features
  • Killer Klowns from Outer Space: So much dang fun. A rewatch for roomie exposure.
  • Nightbreed: Another rewatch for the roomie and S.O.' sakes. Underrated Clive Barker subterranean monster society goodness.
  • Diabolique (1996): A mildly campy update to a classic.
  • Arachnophobia: Good old fashioned creepy crawly fun.
  • B&B: A taught thriller about a gay couple revisiting a bed & breakfast they previously sued for discrimination.
  • False Positive: Pregnancy horror that has good buildup and performances but
  • Slotherhouse: Absurd and well done. 100% delivers on what it sells.
  • Sweet Home: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's haunted house jam that led to the famicom game that inspired Resident Evil. Fun 80's effects a la Poltergeist (and makeup by the artist behind The Exorcist?!). Interesting to see one my fave director's earlier work, though it lacked his later signatures.

The Great
  • Sanctuary: Kinky and witty. This psychosexual thriller flips its power dynamics in delightful ways.

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  • Disembodied: UM, this was dang good! Dare I say visionary? For Henenlotter fans, but serious and artsy.

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  • I Was a Teenage Serial Killer: Punk-as-fuck feminist short of sexist comeuppance.

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23. Jennifer's Body 💀💀💀
Overall I think this movie is not bad but kinda generic. Its a bit funny in some places but I don't think it stands out enough which is a bit disappointing because I've read / heard otherwise and had high hopes.
 
#15.

Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010)
💀💀💀🦴

Started this up and had it playing on the TV while I played some Diablo 4. It's a fairly decent documentary on the series.


#16.
Living With Chucky (2022)
💀💀💀🦴

I hadn't planned on watching this as i'm not a huge fan...but it was on Tubi and started playing when Never Sleep Again ended. It's better than most of the Chucky movies.

And I forgot to take pics of the title cards.
 
Today was my final blitz on costume prep. I ended up simplifying a few things which let us get to our photoshoot today instead of pouring over into the final day of spooky festivities.

Caught up on several YA-oriented horrors on Netflix:
  • The Curse of Bridge Hollow was pleasant Halloweeny fun.
  • Nightbooks brought some camp value and creep factor.
  • Vampires vs. the Bronx was stylish and had some intriguing themes around gentrification, though I missed a lot while setting up photo equipment and playing set assistant.

We also watched The Visit which certainly had its share of Shyamalanisms but was surprisingly solid.

Also checked Fear, Inc. off my watchlist, which was good in concept but a bit obnoxious in execution.

With dinner, I queued up one of my few remaining HoopTober picks: Calvaire. Definitely not one for the faint of heart. A singer/performer finds himself stranded in a rural village and finds fewer and fewer means of leaving the longer he's made to linger.

We then snuck in another ep of the latest GGBO season before the Dragula premier. Def shaping up to be an extra stylish season of drag, filth, horror and glamor!

Have a handful more movies queued up for my vacation day tomorrow as well as the Silent Hill Ascension interactive streaming series premier in the evening.

Oh! And here's the results of more than 2.5 months (and many background movies) of costume work:

 
I will share my final films of the October Horror binge tomorrow (pub quizzing tonight) but in the last minute I was able to pack in a couple more to knock my total over 31 and the 1-per-day-average I was aiming for.

Thanks @LeeVing for setting this up. Its been fun!
 
I absolutely didn't make my goal of 1 per day :( but I plan to hit 31 anyways.

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24. Five Nights At Freddy's 💀💀💀
It was not bad, it had a decent back story. I've never played the game so i'm not really sure if the movie is true to the game series but I thought it translated pretty well into a movie.
 
zomgbear said:
I absolutely didn't make my goal of 1 per day :( but I plan to hit 31 anyways.

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24. Five Nights At Freddy's 💀💀💀
It was not bad, it had a decent back story. I've never played the game so i'm not really sure if the movie is true to the game series but I thought it translated pretty well into a movie.
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I really like the actor from this. Future Man was hilarious.
 
Hitting 3 days in a row the first three days of October, I thought foe sure I was going to topple my 5, maybe 6, from last year but NOPE!

I have a huge list of stuff I want to watch, but just couldn't convince myself to spend the time doing so when I could play records AND read, which feels like twice as much bang for my leisure hour buck.

Gonna try for a better showing next year.
 
zomgbear said:
I know it's outdated but i know him as Peeta from Hunger games lol
And yeah he's great in this!
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I know him only from Bridge to Terabithia. But also if you’ve never played the game how do you know if it translated well to a movie? Are there other mediums? I did see the creator of the video game wrote this screenplay so that’s a good start.
 
#17.
The Exorcist (1973) 💀💀💀💀💀

My favorite horror movie and easily in my top 5 of all time favorite movies.

I got the new-ish 4K release a bit ago, and finally watched it - hadn't seen the theatrical version in a while, so I went with that.

The 4K looks good to me - they lessened the blue tones they had previously added to the film in recent blu ray masters, but it's still there some. Some HDR issues with the dark scenes, but all in all I like the 4K release.

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Melt Face Molly Drop said:
I know him only from Bridge to Terabithia. But also if you’ve never played the game how do you know if it translated well to a movie? Are there other mediums? I did see the creator of the video game wrote this screenplay so that’s a good start.
Click to expand...
Translate might be bad wording here. What I mean is as a video game movie, it works as opposed to a lot of them that don't. I have no idea how true to the source material it is
 
Relished the last of my Halloweekend staycation yesterday with an overall solid slate of movies.

Now that we'd seen FNAF and had previously watched Willy's Wonderland, our morbid curiosity led us to one of the other recent studio litmus tests for "animatronic" horror: The Banana Splits Movie. It wasn't good, y'all.

With that mess out of the way, we moved on to one I've been saving up for a while now with Something in the Dirt. After the minor disappointment that was Synchronic, it's good to see creative duo Moorhead & Benson return to more obtuse cosmic horrors in their signature lean yet polished style. This one's going to require a few watches, but I really dug it.

We then switched gears to what may prove to be my favorite film of the year: When Evil Lurks. This new offering from the director behind Terrified (Aterrados) delves into a world plagued by demonic possessions. It's got the creeping dread of It Follows and some of the most putrid practical effects I've seen in quite some time. If you're familiar with and enjoy Robert Kirkman's Outcast comic series, you'll love this! (I much prefer Outcast to The Walking Dead.)

boxd.it

A ★★★★ review of When Evil Lurks (2023)

My introduction to Demián Rugna's work began just last year with a pre-Halloween viewing of Terrified (Aterrados). While I loved the ideas and visual execution, I felt shorted by its choppy, tangled storytelling which left me wishing the rich ideas and characters were given room to breathe in a...
boxd.it boxd.it

We then popped on over to the Silent Hill Ascension interactive streaming premier, but that was a mess. I'm not going to entertain that any further. It's planned for daily 5-15 minute episodes, but it's riddled with micro-transactions and the free track really gets punished with limited gameplay.

To close out our festivities, we queued up Sinister which largely delivered on its solid reputation for spook factor.
 
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25. Winnie the Pooh Blood & Honey 💀🦴
Haha this was not a good movie! All the characters are terrible. Especially Christopher Robin - he was so whiny and all this is actually his fault. And he lived... Some of it was just really dumb that you can't help laughing. It was worth watching to ruin my memories of Winnie the Pooh.
 
Here are my final films of October that I didn't get a chance to share. A great ending to a horror-filled month....for the most part.

31. Slice .5

An abysmal film that was made all the more disappointing considering the cast list was quite impressive. Really sloppy writing and terrible jokes.

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32. The Babadook 💀💀💀

I really enjoyed this film and was surprised that I hadn't seen it before. A fantastically simple premise executed really well.

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