10/31/16

Hallowed Be Thy Ween

I had planned on my next entry being a music review, but I wanted to post something horror-centric today.  After all, it's Halloween.  That reminds me; HAPPY FUCKING HALLOWEEN!  It feels good to be alive and dead inside.  Since I'm a lifer, I'll still be celebrating through Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I do enjoy the latter holiday a teensy bit, but fuck Turkey Day.  Fuck it and the snowflake potatoes it skeeted on.

Here are my succinct, hastily arranged thoughts on a few flicks I've taken in over the past couple of weeks.  I wish I could review everything that I watch, but if I did, I'd be mentally spent (moreso than usual).  Thanks to a penpal for the title.  Satan knows I'm not that clever.

Axe Body Spray has seriously recalibrated their promotional campaign.

Somehow, 1982's Pieces had escaped my prying peepers until just recently.  I expected an absent-minded bloodbath, and by (Christopher) George, that's exactly what was presented to me.  The gore effects are top-notch.  The pace is rapid.  I mean, the prologue is followed immediately by a chainsaw offing...in broad daylight, no less!  Now, I will forgive the villain for using Leatherface's weapon of choice, but only because Pieces came out eight years after my movie truelove.  This would be a good place to link to my review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Consider it recommended reading.

Wednesday?  Shit, I'll have to DVR Lucha Underground.

As much as I claim to love made-for-TV fright fritters, I had not seen 1973's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, possibly the most lauded of them all.  I have seen the remake, and from where I sit, it edges out the original by a slim margin.  Heresy, I'm aware.  Look, I wasn't a kid when this aired.  I didn't view it from behind a sofa and have nightmares about the little archfiends who want to shanghai Kim Darby.  Speaking of those pee-wee pests, I didn't find them to be creepy in the slightest.  Maybe it was the shot of them stumbling up the stairs, or maybe it was their traffic cone scalps.  I don't know, but they didn't do it for me.

That's not to say Don't Be Afraid of the Dark antagonized my senses.  It's still a fun chiller, the perfect genre treat to pop in on a drafty October night.  The opening credits.  Dude.  There is more eerie atmosphere packed into those frames than...well, I was going to insult modern horror filmmaking, but I know better than to generalize.  The credits are killer.  That's all I need to type.

This.  This is my soul.

I revisited Halloween III: Season of the Witch.  Even though I had this serotinal favorite stored in the ol' memory banks, I had only ever doted on my VHS copy.  No joke.  This gave me a reason to finally pull out my Halloween Blu-ray box set (alright, I may have pulled it out a time or two before).  It felt like a fresh viewing.  It's amazing to me how much this sequel's reputation has been rehabilitated in the last 15-20 years.  No longer is the cheesy, yet disturbing tale of a pagan warlock flogged as a whipping boy for the sins of low-grade slashers.  Fans figured out that this is a cool spectacle.  That's justice.  Street justice!

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