We Heart Horror - Day 31: All Cheerleaders Die (2013)

  It's finally Halloween!  Time for candy, trick or treating, and things that go bump in the night!  It also means that we have come to the end of our horror binge until next year, so let's go out on a high note.

After her best friend is killed in a cheerleading accident, Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) hatches a plan to destroy the squad from the inside.  She pretends to be interested in cheering, makes friends with Head Cheerleader Tracy (Brooke Butler), and proceeds to break up Tracy's relationship with football Team Captain, Terry (Tom Williamson).  Unfortunately, she misjudges exactly how psychotic Terry is when he runs the car full of cheerleaders off the road to die in the river.  But Maddy's ex-girlfriend, Leena (Sianoa Smit-McPhee), isn't ready to say good-bye and raises all five girls from the dead.  Zombie Maddy still wants to take down Terry but now she'll also have to learn important lessons about sisterhood and how to Be Aggressive.  B-E Aggressive.

This is like the unholy union of Bring It On and Jennifer's Body and I am so here for it.  It's fun, funny, and builds to a really tense third act.  I wasn't completely sold on Maddy and Leena's relationship (tbh, Leena seems incredibly controlling/borderline obsessive) but I was really happy about it not being played for a joke or somehow diminished because it was same-sex.  All Cheerleaders Die is a really great movie to watch on Halloween because it was breezy, funny, but easy enough to skim so I didn't feel like I was missing anything to answer the door for trick or treaters.  Maybe that could be a knock; it's not exactly grand cinema, but who cares?  Binge it like that bag of Kit-Kats you've been saving for yourself!  Currently streaming on Amazon Prime or Tubi for free.

We Heart Horror - Day 30: Vampyr (1932)

  Here's a throwback to when vampires weren't sexy, misunderstood, tortured souls but rather just reanimated corpses that fed on the living.

Allen Grey (Julian West) is a student of the paranormal looking for an experience, and boy, does he find one.  While on vacation in a small town, he stumbles upon a family plagued by a mysterious illness.  One of the daughters, Léone (Sybille Schmitz), has wasted away with only a mark on her neck.  Though she is being treated by the local doctor (Jan Hieronimko), her prognosis is grim until one of the servants (Albert Bras) reads about a similar occurrence from years ago believed to be the work of a vampire.

Allen Grey is much less of a protagonist than he is just kind of a nosy bystander.  He is a very passive character that things just kind of happen around, which is also an unusual narrative choice.  There are some pretty neat effects for the time period and it's a scant hour and a quarter long, but I will say that it involves a fair amount of reading and the subtitles superimposed over the text of a book makes it kind of challenging.

I did think it was neat that this version was restored from French and German prints with the English believed to be lost.  Is this the most important film ever preserved?  No, but it is definitely worth watching.  It's on the Criterion channel and they also have a full length commentary that I'm sure is also great but I didn't listen to because ain't nobody got time for that this close to Halloween.

One more day!  Light your jack-o-lanterns and ready the candy!

We Heart Horror - Day 29: Cooties (2014)

  And there it is, this year's completely underrated sleeper hit.

Clint (Elijah Wood) does not have his shit together.  He is trying to write a horror novel but not even his mom likes it and he's forced to take a job as a substitute teacher for summer at the elementary school he used to go to as a kid.  Good:  he reconnects with Lucy (Alison Pill), the girl he's had a crush on forever.  Bad:  she has a boyfriend, the douchey P.E. teacher, Wade (Rainn Wilson).  Worse: mutated chicken nuggets have turned all the children into rampaging rage-zombies.

Oh, man.  This movie perfectly encapsulated all the things I hate about children and then gave me an outlet to reasonably cheer for their extermination.  If you've ever needed to see a twelve-year-old just absolutely smashed in the face by a baseball, this is your movie.  And hey, who hasn't?  I'm sure your children are wonderful, but all children?  Other people's children?  No judgement.  They're zombies.  Fuck 'em.  Aim for the head.

I laughed my ass off the entire time it was on.  A++, would definitely watch again.  It is on Hulu and it is amazing.

We Heart Horror - Day 28: Green Room (2015)

  Again, I'm not sure that I would characterize this as a horror film.  Thriller, for sue, but there were no horror elements for me.

A gig gets cancelled, leaving a punk band struggling with how they're going to get home from tour.  Their host (David Thompson) feels bad so he calls his cousin (Mark Webber) and gets the band a replacement gig.  When they get there, however, they find the audience filled with hardcore white supremacists.  Nothing they haven't handled until somebody ends up dead.  Now witnesses to a crime, the band barricades themselves in the green room while the skinheads plan to murder them.

This is by the director of Blue Ruin and it has the same kind of sparse, pared down feel.  Everything is gritty, muted, and dingy and the color green is pervasive.  There are times where it is almost too much so if you are squeamish, maybe give it a pass.  There is a ton of violence and I'm sorry, Sir PatStew, not enough justification for the N-word even if you're playing a racist.

The late Anton Yelchin is in it, one of this final roles, and he is stellar.  Every time he was on screen, though, I would get so sad.  Everybody in the band gets at least one moment to shine, which is great.  I know it's sometimes hard with an ensemble cast.  If you're looking for a newer, fresher take on Assault on Precinct 13, slide over to Netflix and give this a shot.

We Heart Horror - Day 27: Dead Ringer (1964)

  Bette  Davis is a great actress but something about this movie just didn't click for me.  I definitely wouldn't consider it horror.  Maybe just a thriller and a lesser one at that.

Edie Phillips (Bette Davis) kills her twin sister, Margaret, over a lie from 20 years ago that resulted in Margaret living a luxurious life with the man Edie loved, and Edie living over a ratty bar that's three months behind on rent.  So Edie fakes a suicide and assumes the role of Margaret but soon discovers that a surface resemblance isn't enough to cut it when there's a nosy cop (Karl Malden) and a suspicious lover (Peter Lawford) sniffing around.

Unless you are a hardcore Bette Davis fan, there's really nothing here worth searching out.  The special effects are pretty decent for their time but we now have deepfake performances of dead actors so it's safe to say that the bar has been raised.

We Heart Horror - Day 26: Hellraiser (1987)

  This is another in Bethany's continuing horror education.  It's not my favorite Halloween series but I do think it's a classic.

Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) is just trying to live her life but she becomes worried after her dad (Andrew Robinson) expresses concern about his new wife, Julia (Claire Higgins).  See, unbeknownst to the rest of the family, Julia has been luring random dudes to the house and sacrificing them to her brother-in-law, Frank (Sean Chapman), who fucked around with an evil puzzle box and got torn apart by Cenobites.  Frank and Julia then came up with a plan to rebuild his body by using unwilling donors and they might have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for that meddling Kirsty.

All anybody remembers about this movie is Pinhead.  And he's in it for five minutes, tops.  The rest of the movie is just gore and body horror and that one horrifying scorpion-tailed demon thing that I legit forgot about.  This most recent viewing did show me that every single dude in this film is garbage, just an awful person, and deserved whatever happened to them.  That's my 2019 hot take on this 30+ year old movie.  Currently streaming on Prime.

We Heart Horror - Day 25: Pumpkinhead (1988)

  I don't care what anyone says.  Pumpkinhead is a classic.  Fight me.

After a group of city slickers accidentally kill his child, farmer Ed Harley (Lance Henrikson) summons the local demon to exact revenge.

That's it.  That's the movie.  It is a B-movie creature feature, sure, but the special effects are top-notch, especially for the time period and it's really satisfying to watch these snotty twenty-year-olds get terrorized.  Sometimes, dammit, that's all you really need.  Streaming on both Shudder and Hulu.

We Heart Horror - Day 24: Brightburn (2019)

  Man, this was so disappointing.  I don't really know how to make it better, either, which is even worse.  This should have been a slam dunk but it somehow just did. not. work.

Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle Breyer (David Denmen) really wanted a baby, so when one crashed in a spaceship outside their small Kansas farm, they were overjoyed.  Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn) was a great kid right up until he turned twelve and started developing a little more of a bloodlust than a normal pubescent boy.  But how do you discipline a kid with laser eyes and super speed?

When this was first announced as a Superman-as-horror film, I was intrigued.  Then reviews came in and they were... not great but I still thought it might be an entertaining watch.  Literally the only part I enjoyed was the Michael Rooker cameo over the closing credits.  And it's such a shame!  This had a great pedigree, stellar cast, interesting premise, and none of that could make it worth watching.  I've been thinking about it for a while now and I have come to the conclusion that no matter what you do, you can't make Superman interesting as a character without reducing him to something closer to human.  Brandon doesn't work as a villain because I do not care about him.  He's so overpowered it's boring to watch.  We never see him struggle against the weird Jor-El whispers from his spaceship.  We never see any indication of empathy despite being raised as human for 12 years.  It's just overnight, he's a monster, the end.  What a waste.

We Heart Horror - Day 23: Phenomena (1985)

  Phenomena, the film where a girl can telepathically communicate with insects and that's the least weirdest thing in the movie!

Jennifer (Jennifer Connolly) is sent to a prestigious Swiss boarding school but no sooner than she arrives --and eats some baby food-- she is informed by her roommate, Sophie (Frederica Mastroianni), that a killer is stalking the town and murdering young girls.  Jennifer has a spiritual connection with bugs and also sleepwalks to the killer and eventually finds her way to the home of a famed entomologist who specializes in cadaver insects, Professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasance).  McGregor tells Jennifer that telepathy is actually weirdly common in bugs and that she should use her ability to follow the flies to track down the killer through his victims.  Which kind of works, but mostly doesn't.  Also, there is a chimpanzee with a straight razor.  It gets weird.

This is fairly restrained for a Dario Argento film.  Nobody gets gratuitously nude, for starters, and the gore isn't wall-to-wall.  There is really only the loosest semblance of a plot and a lot of reliance on "Women Be Crazy" to sell the whole thing, but again, fairly restrained for an Argento.

Jennifer Connolly (and her amazing, super-shiny hair) is the only reason to watch this film.  She TALKS to BUGS and uses that to SOLVE CRIME.  That is objectively the least horrifying use of that skill.  I would genuinely love a follow-on movie where an adult Jennifer uses her bugs as a P.I. It doesn't even have to be a horror movie.  Just a whodunit.  Until that happens, the original is streaming on Tubi for free or Amazon with a Prime subscription.

We Heart Horror - Day 22: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

  I loved this movie so much.  It's sure to put people off because it is both black and white and subtitled but it is honestly worth looking up.  It's a critical darling but that's generally not a selling point for most people so I'm making sure you all know it has the Lucy stamp of approval

Arash (Arash Marandi) is trying to get by without being hassled by the local drug dealer (Dominic Rains) about his father's (Marshall Manesh) heroin habit when he meets a girl (Sheila Vand) walking alone at night.  She is a vampire and Arash doesn't know it, but she is going to change his entire life.

I've been worried all month that I wouldn't get a vampire movie.  The last three I've tried to watch have unfortunately been taken off their streaming platforms.  Y'all know they're my favorites.  But Criterion and Shudder had my backs and made this beauty available.

This is not the first Iranian movie I have ever seen, but it is the first horror.  Director Lily Ana Amirpour has a master's grasp of the interplay of light and shadow, banality and horror, beauty and ugliness.  It is a stunning debut feature and definitely a new vampire classic.

We Heart Horror - Day 21: Mother! (2017)

  The only way this is a horror movie is if you are just straight terrified by Christianity.  (I'm not saying you shouldn't be, just that it's not really the go-to when you think of horror.)

The Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) wakes up to find that her husband (Javier Bardem) has invited a strange couple into the house she has spent all of her time restoring.  They are very unmannered guests but Mother is too hesitant to call them out, until they invite an actual tragedy.  Then she's able to reclaim her house for a bit.  But those pesky, uninvited guests keep showing up, especially after her husband releases a new book about love and grief.  Mother is bewildered, overwhelmed, terrified, and finally apocalyptic.

Honestly, I wouldn't be as annoyed by this film if it had been characterized correctly.  It's an interesting take on the Old and New Testaments from the perspective of an anthropomorphic Earth and pretty much what I expected from Darren Aronofsky.  The cast list is impressive but it feels like kind of a waste.  It's an interesting film but it's not a fun watch.  Currently streaming on Hulu if you're curious but you may want to have a Cliff Notes of the Bible handy.

We Heart Horror - Day 20: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

  Well, this was certainly the hardest movie to watch so far.  It reminded me a lot of Man Bites Dog.

Becky (Tonya Arnold) has left her abusive husband to move in with her brother, Otis (Tom Towles), and his friend, Henry (Micheal Rooker), in Chicago.  Otis is a gas station attendant and part-time weed dealer while Henry picks up odd jobs and uses them as cover to murder women.  Henry begins to groom Otis to help him in his murder sprees but Otis is too undisciplined for that to last long.  Becky just wants to be a shampoo girl and is blissfully unaware of what Otis and Henry do in the evenings.

This is a stark look at people who live on the fringes.  Becky is poor and been abused one way or another since she was 13.  Otis is stupid and has no concept of boundaries, happily opportunistic with regards to sex, violence, and petty crime.  Henry is a true psychopath, constantly searching for victims, smart enough to change his methods with every one to keep the police from linking them together, and completely incapable of truly feeling any emotion.

This film doesn't have a lot of gore and you don't really see Henry torture any of the victims, just their corpses after, except for the home invasion which is very graphic but still one step removed by use of a camcorder.  Because we never see Henry commit any of the most violent acts, it's easier to maintain sympathy for the character, a very dangerous thing.  I would think this needs to make a resurgence as one of the top horror films about serial killers.  It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

We Heart Horror - Day 19: The Possession (2012)

  This wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be, despite the cast.  It's really hard to do a good possession film.  Still, it was nice to see something non-Catholic-centered.

Ten-year-old Emily (Natasha Calis) finds a carved wooden box at a yard sale.  Her dad, Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is confused but thinks it's harmless.  He's much too busy trying to further his career to pay attention anyway, and her mom (Kyra Sedgwick) is distracted by her new boyfriend (Grant Show).  So the possession is pretty far along before either parent knows what's happening.  Clyde takes the box to a professor at the college he works at and is referred to a community of Hasidic Jews.  A man named Tzadok (Matisyahu) agrees to perform the exorcism.

I think this movie went wrong making most of the conflict about the dad.  Morgan spends 90% of the runtime completely baffled and hurt by why he can't get his adolescent and teenage daughters to be exactly the same as when they were small.  He is a man clinging to the past, whether it is sports fame or the remnants of his marriage, and he doesn't want anyone to be able to move on.  It's an annoying frame and has no purpose in the narrative.  In fact, in any other movie, he would be the antagonist for Sedgwick to overcome and move on to a soundtrack of Motown hits.  She's not given very much to do here so maybe she should start looking at that rom-com remake.

The other major complaint I have with the movie is the sound.  Dialogue is muted for background noise, like it was recorded underwater, only to fade back in and be super loud.  Also, I've never seen a Jewish exorcism but I don't know that I expected quite so much yelling.  I would have liked to maybe see more about the rituals and how they differ from the Catholic versions, but that's something I can look up on my own.

Bottom line:  this is yet another "clueless dad clueless because he refuses to listen to women in his life yet somehow still the hero of the story" film not enlivened by swapping Catholic rituals for Judaic.  Pass.

We Heart Horror - Day 18: Annabelle Comes Home (2019)

  This was such a fun movie!  Ugh, it's so nice to see a horror movie (much less an entire ass franchise) devoted to having a good time.  There have been a couple of missteps, sure, but the Conjuring extended universe is really setting a high bar.

Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) have taken possession (ha!) of the evil doll Annabelle and installed her in a shielded case in their room of cursed objects to prevent her malevolence from infecting her surroundings.  Then they promptly left on a business trip, happy and secure in the knowledge their daughter, Judy (McKenna Grace), was being watched by a responsible babysitter, Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman).  What they don't know is that Mary Ellen's friend Daniela (Katie Sarife) is fascinated by the Warrens' no-no room and also super desperate to talk to her dead dad.  Hilarity mayhem ensues.

You guys.  This was like the office pool from Cabin in the Woods made into an entire movie.  Daniela manages to awaken every single cursed object, turning the normal suburban house into a haunted nightmare.  There's a decade's-worth of spin-offs just in this movie alone.  There are werewolves, killer brides, one of those always-evil clapping monkey toys, and even a goddamn haunted board game.  A BOARD GAME.  Called FEELY-MEELY.  Coming to theaters in 2023.  (Probably.)  This movie made me so happy.

We Heart Horror - Day 17: The Amityville Horror (2005)

  This is not the original, which I have previously blogged about, but the just-as-good remake because if you can combine a horror movie with a mostly shirtless Ryan Reynolds, why wouldn't you?

The Lutz family think they've hit the jackpot when they score an enormous waterfront house on Long Island but soon discover that the price tag was hiding a sordid history.  The previous residents were murdered as they slept by one of the sons (Brendan Donaldson) who claimed he heard voices that drove him to kill.  As Kathy Lutz (Melissa George) grapples with her husband and children's altered behavior, she digs deeper into the history of the house and uncovers a dark and bloody history.

So this adds a shitload of unnecessary backstory as to why the house is haunted which leads to some disturbing imagery but not really a lot of plot relevance.  I'm not mad at it, though, because the visuals are really well done.  Stellar work by Isobel Conner as creepy dead child Jodie.  Reynolds has always been very good at switching between comic and dramatic parts and he is definitely the star of this show, even without the abs.  They don't hurt, mind you, but he didn't need them.

Both Amityville Horrors are currently streaming on Hulu.

We Heart Horror - Day 16: Children of the Corn (1984)

  I completely forgot to post yesterday.  So now you get two.

A couple (Linda Hamilton and Peter Horton) driving through Kansas have a car accident and head for the nearest town only to discover the children of said town have fallen under the influence of a demagogue named Isaac (John Franklin) and have been sacrificing any handy adults to the corn for the last three years.

Conceptually, a cult of bloodthirsty children is solid gold.  The execution, however, strays into the goofy.  The special effects have aged poorly, the protagonist is kind of a douche, and the voiceover is incredibly annoying.  I would be in favor of a remake since we seem to be having a Stephen King resurgence.  All you'd need to do would be update the couple dynamics because yikes are they dated, cut some of the trying-too-hard comic relief, slap some decent effects in there and you're ready to go. You could even get Courtney Gains to cameo as a throwback.

I do still consider it a classic but every once in a while, it could stand to be updated.  It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

We Heart Horror - Day 15: The Orphanage (2007)

  You guys, October is halfway over already.  That sucks.  But, alternatively, only 16 more days until Halloween!

This is one of my favorite ghost stories.  It's a Spanish film produced by Guillermo Del Toro and if you get the chance, you should absolutely check it out.

Laura (Belén Rueda) is very excited to bring her husband (Fernando Cayo) and son (Roger Princep) to the orphanage she grew up in.  She plans to revitalize the old place and turn it into a home for special needs children.  But on the day of the grand opening, her son goes missing.  Laura is desperate to find him, so desperate that she is willing to turn to anything that will help, including the supernatural.

I love this movie.  It's surprisingly poignant with a total gut punch of a third act.  In that way, it does remind me of Pan's Labyrinth but the supernatural elements are much more understated.  It's currently streaming on Hulu.

We Heart Horror - Day 14: The Omen (1976)

  Children are horrifying.  Always have been, always will be.  Especially when they are the literal spawn of Satan.

Richard Thorn (Gregory Peck), the U.S. Ambassador to Italy is devastated when he is told that his son died stillborn and is therefore very suggestible to the idea of immediately adopting another child whose mother died in childbirth.  For a few years, everything seems great.  Thorn gets a dream posting as Ambassador to Great Britain, his wife (Lee Remick) is happy, and Damien (Harvey Stephens) is a cute, normal little boy.  Then the nanny (Holly Palance) kills herself at Damien's fifth birthday party and things just go downhill from there.  Thorn slowly becomes convinced that there is something very wrong with Damien but does he have enough time to stop it?

This is an absolute classic and you should definitely watch it.  Unfortunately, it's only streaming on AMC right now and the remake is on Starz.  So if you have cable, you've got a better chance of catching it.

We Heart Horror - Day 13: Rosemary's Baby (1968)

  It has been another educational weekend for Bethany.  This time, I went with a theme of "evil children" since I ended up showing almost all slasher films last time.

Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), get a lucky break when they find an open apartment in the historic Bramford building, despite the building's rather gruesome reputation.  Their neighbors are a little intrusive but Rosemary writes it off as them just being nosy old people.  Everything changes when Rosemary gets pregnant, however, and well-intentioned but annoying turns into a sinister plot to steal her baby.  As the pregnancy progresses, Rosemary's trust in those around her plummets even as they close tighter and tighter around her.

The true horror of this film is not the Satanic cult but the constant gaslighting and enforced isolation Rosemary experiences.  From the beginning, she is told that her pain doesn't matter, her thoughts are confused, her feelings are unimportant.  Someone controls what she eats, what she drinks, who she sees, and she --a polite Midwestern girl-- goes along with it because she was raised not to make a scene or put herself first.

It works as a horror film and also as a reminder that we haven't progressed as far as people like to think since the 60s.  It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime and Hulu.

We Heart Horror - Day 12: Cockneys vs Zombies (2012)

  It's just not Halloween without a zombie film.

Two construction workers break open a vault sealed in 1666 and release a flood of zombies into modern London's East End.  Meanwhile, two brothers (Rasmus Hardiker and Harry Treadway) decide to rob a bank in order to get enough money to save their grandfather's (Alan Ford) retirement home from being destroyed by the same construction group.  Now, these would-be bank robbers, their hostage (Georgia King), their cousin (Michelle Ryan), friend (Jack Doolan) and local psycho (Ashley Thomas) have to rescue the old-timers before they are eaten by the walking dead.

It's refreshing to see a zombie movie clearly aware of zombies.  None of this "what are they?" "What do we do?"  "What's wrong with Grandma?" bullshit, just straight up "Oh, zombies.  Okay, aim for the head and don't let them bite you."

Cockneys vs Zombies doesn't rewrite the zombie movie formula but it is a really fun watch.  It's currently streaming for free on Tubi or on Amazon Prime if you're fancy.  Keep an eye out for former Bond girl Honor Blackman as well.

We Heart Horror - Day 11: The Lure (2015)

  Horror musicals are awesome.  Killer mermaids are awesome.  A horror movie about killer mermaids who sing?  Sign me the fuck up.

A pair of sirens, Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Golden (Michalina Olszanska), are added to a Warsaw cabaret show by Krysia (Kinga Preis) and her band as a new, exotic act.  The girls are open to new opportunities but Silver soon sets her heart on Mietek (Jakob Gierszal) while Golden is more of a dine-on-hapless-men-and-dash kind of girl.

My favorite part of this is how no one in Poland blinks at having monsters in their midst.  These two broads sprout tails as soon as they get splashed and nobody so much as blinks, much less questions it.  My second favorite part is the opening credits, which are gorgeous and creepy.  I would hang stills of them on my walls.  The music is good and there's a decent amount of gore.  Also, there is a lot of nudity.  Like, 90% of the time, these chicks are naked so maybe don't watch it in front of children or old people.  They're so impressionable.

Best movie of the month so far.  It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

We Heart Horror - Day 10: The Last Days (2013)

  Another Spanish-language horror!  This one comes from Spain and checks the box for apocalyptic horror.

A mysterious plague has overtaken the world.  People are suddenly struck with agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces, trapping them in whatever building they happen to be in at the time.  Marc (Quim Gutiérrez) was at work, across the city from his girlfriend, Julia (Marta Etura).  After three months, the office workers are able to break into the subway line and Marc is determined to find Julia again.  He makes a deal with Enrique (Jose Coronado), the efficiency expert that in brighter days would have had Marc fired, to use a stolen GPS to get back to Marc's apartment.  Marc and Enrique slowly learn to trust and rely on one another as they make their way through the underground of a city --a world, really-- gone mad.

It's a pretty standard post-apocalypse road movie but that's not to say it isn't well done.  I think the point of the movie is more to do with the increasing fears of people who feel like the world is changing too fast.  Studies show that we are more connected but also more isolated than ever.  'Climate grief' - the fear of a global catastrophe caused by climate change is a real thing that people are feeling, especially younger generations who have to inherit a less hospitable planet.  The Last Days taps into all that very deftly, if not subtly.

I can see why people would have classified it as a horror film, but there's nothing particularly frightening in the movie.  No zombies, no cannibals, and the ending is really more heartwarming than anything else.  I'm a little sad that so far my horror fest is turning into just a movie marathon but I'm still hopeful to find at least one good pants-wettingly terrifying movie this month.

The Last Days is currently streaming on Hulu.

We Heart Horror - Day 9: We Are What We Are (2013)

I'm having some technical difficulties right now because my computer decided to update and take forever so I'm on a borrowed laptop.  I'll get the poster up tomorrow.  

No, this isn't a repost.  This is the American version of the Mexican cannibal movie I watched last week.  Turns out the American version is streaming on Amazon so all your cannibal-watching desires could be fulfilled.  There are some striking differences but we'll get to them in a minute.

After their mother (Kassie Wesley DePaiva) dies, teenage girls Iris (Julia Garner) and Rose (Ambyr Childers) are left to bear responsibility for "Lamb's Day" where the family ritually kills and eats someone.  The town doctor (Michael Parks) is suspicious when boiled bones wash up in his creek and begins to pressure the local deputy (Wyatt Russell) to trace them back to their source.

Aside from the gender swaps of the surviving parent from female to male, and the swaps from male to female for the two oldest children, this remake takes the action from an urban environment to a rural one, adds an unnecessary backstory about cannibals in the frontier days, and draaaaaags out the conclusion.  Where the original ran for a lean 89 minutes, this clocks in at just under two hours and really doesn't add anything in that time.

It's got higher production values, nicer costumes, and Kelly McGillis but if you want a true thrill, skip it and stick with the original.

We Heart Horror - Day 8: Horns (2013)

  This is teetering into not-really-horror but that may be because I am a filthy heretic, so what would I know?

Ig Perrish (Daniel Radcliffe) has a problem.  Everyone in town thinks he murdered his girlfriend Merrin (Juno Temple) and now he's begun to grow actual, literal horns.  The horns inspire every person he meets to tell Ig all their darkest impulses so he starts pushing back to try to find whoever really killed Merrin.

The worst part about this movie is how clever it thinks it is while being as stupidly obvious as possible.  It's like that drunk dude at a party who thinks he's using the subtlest innuendo when he's really just shoving his finger into a circle he's made of his other hand and winking a lot.  That being said, if you're willing to overlook how on the nose it is, it's not the worst movie I've ever seen.  Sole credit for that goes to Radcliffe who is definitely slumming here in an attempt to let the Harry Potter image go for good.  He got naked on Broadway, and played a farting corpse in Swiss Army Man, slapping on some Hot Topic horns is practically tame.  Stay tuned for his next film where he has guns bolted to his hands like a slapstick Videodrome.

(That is a real thing and it's called Guns Akimbo.  You're welcome.)

So if you're in the mood for a Radcliffe no-fucks-given performance, Horns is streaming on Netflix.  Be drunk, it'll probably help.

We Heart Horror - Day 7 - Ghost Story (1981)

  This is a surprisingly solid ghost film.

Don (Craig Wasson) returns to his quaint Vermont hometown after the death of his twin, only to find his father (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) upset and unwilling to discuss it.  Then his father takes a nosedive into a frozen river, and the family doctor (Melvyn Douglas) also dies mysteriously.  Don starts sniffing around into his father's past and discovers an old crime, long unpunished, that has come due.

It helps that the cast has about 150 years of experience between them.  Fairbanks, Douglas, Fred Astaire, and John Houseman are legends and this could feel like a slight offering from them if it were not for their comportment.  This movie belongs to Alice Krige, however.  She steals every scene she's in and she is luminous.

There is some 80s cheese with the exposition fairies of Gregory and Fenny Bate (Miguel Fernandes and Lance Holcomb, respectively) but overall, the concept of old, rich men facing judgment for their crimes against women, and leaving the younger generation to be the voice of morality rings pretty current.  The creature effects are good and well-utilized but this isn't one that is going to leave you gasping for breath.  It's a fun, easy-to-watch New England campfire tale, though.

We Heart Horror - Day 6: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

  Okay, this is cheating a little bit because I actually watched this on Saturday as part of Bethany's continuing education but I'm sticking to my "one a day" format to give myself a little breathing room in case something comes up during the week.  We also watched Psycho and Trick 'r Treat, which are also classics of the genre that I've previously reviewed.

Nancy (Heather Langencamp) has been having strange dreams.  As her friends die one by one, she becomes convinced that the sinister man she sees in her nightmares is real and he has targeted her for a very specific reason.

This one might only be better with nostalgia.  I watched it when I was in the fifth grade, maybe, so like 11 or 12, and I didn't sleep for a week.  I taught myself lucid dreaming as a way to handle the nightmares.  Watching it now, I'm amazed that I ever felt so strongly about it.

It's obviously a highly successful franchise and the time might be right to try another reboot with updated effects.  We could talk about why the 2010 one failed but some other time.  At any rate, you should be showing this to your children/younger relatives around the 10-13 mark for maximum psychological damage.

We Heart Horror - Day 5: Halloween (1978)

  It's part of my on-going mission to make my friend, Bethany, watch every classic horror movie and tonight we're starting with an absolute classic.  People, show the younger members of your family this gem as soon as they are able to appreciate it.  Don't let them make it to their mid-20s having never experienced the silent stalking of one Michael Meyers.

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) takes a babysitting job on Halloween night, unaware that she has inadvertently drawn the attention of an escaped murderer named Michael Meyers.  Fifteen years previously, Meyers had murdered his teenage sister on Halloween night and has been patiently waiting for opportunity to strike again.  His psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), desperately searches the town for him, hoping against hope that he can stop Meyers before he kills again.

This film holds up extremely well, considering its age, and part of that is due to the simplicity of design.  Michael Meyers doesn't need a complicated backstory or origin movie.  He's like a shark, zeroing in on his prey with no feeling, no remorse.  He's completely implacable.  There's no reasoning with him, no justification.  He kills.  And it's beautiful.

It's currently streaming on Shudder, which I get through Amazon.

We Heart Horror 2019 - Day 4: The Visitor (1979)

  This is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.  It is Mystery Science Theater 3000 levels of bad.  A bad script filled with atrocious dialogue that blatantly cribs from much better, much more famous movies that inexplicably stars two Oscar nominees, John Huston and Shelley Winters.

Long ago, the evil Sateen escaped from a spaceship to Earth.  He was finally killed by the benevolent Commander Yahweh but not before Sateen managed to propagate.  Over the many years, a child will sometimes be born with Sateen's evil abilities, a spawn of Sateen, if you will.  Katy Collins (Paige Conner) is that child for 1979.  An agent of Yahweh (John Huston) is sent to put an end to Katy's evil doing but what he mostly does is hang out on the rooftops and streets of Atlanta as Katy terrorizes her mother (Joanne Nail) into having another spawn.

Honestly, I don't even know where to begin with this movie.  It's like if you took The Omen, The Bad Seed, The Birds, and a book of racist stereotypes, put them in a blender, added some cheap LSD, gave it a lobotomy, and then set it loose to shamble along the streets of Atlanta with a cup for spare change.

Do not watch this sober.   It's streaming for free on Tubi and I still think it cost too much.

We Heart Horror 2019 - Day 3: The Wicker Man (1973)

   I'm noticing a trend so far this month.  Islands are bad news.  Don't go to any remote islands filled with insular populations by yourself.  That's your PSA for this year.

Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) has been summoned to Summerisle by name to search for a missing girl.  He finds the islanders uncooperative and close-mouthed, which is normal because they are Scottish, but also espousing dangerously heretical views on maypoles, sex education, and proper maintenance of holy sites.

Frankly, this shouldn't be considered a horror movie any more.  In 1973, when the Establishment was clutching their pearls over free love and John Lennon going barefoot, sure.  The Horror.  But today?  When the planet is on fucking fire?  Sacrifices to the Earth Mother start to seem pretty reasonable.  In fact, in light of this state of affairs, I propose a new summation of the film as follows:

Close-minded religious zealot and puppet of authoritarianism harasses peaceful, environmentally-sustainable farming community in attempts to force his own political and moral viewpoint and reaps the consequences thereof.

There.  I fixed it.

No, we're not going to talk about the Nicholas Cage version.

The original is streaming on the Criterion Channel.

We Heart Horror 2019 - Day 2: We Are What We Are (2010)

  This is much more like it.

When the patriarch of a family of cannibals dies unexpectedly, eldest son Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro) finds himself struggling to fulfill his new duties of hunting down victims for the family to eat.  Not from any, like, moral reasons but mostly just incompetence.

I was a little surprised because I had apparently been looking at the poster for the English remake from 2013 which features a dad and two daughters so when the Spanish version started playing with a mom, two sons, and a daughter, I was confused.  That English version will probably show up a little later this month now that I know that there are two of them.

I didn't find this super horrifying, I guess because cannibals don't really scare me, but it maintains tension all the way through, which I liked very much.  There's a great parallel between the corruption of the family being mirrored by the corruption in their society that someone smarter than me could turn into an essay.  I'm gearing up to watch another horror movie, though, so I'll leave it to them.

We Are What We Are (2010) is currently streaming on Hulu.

We Heart Horror 2019 - Day 1: Bedevilled (2010)

  Okay, well, Horrorthon 2019 is not off to a great start.

Hae-won (Seong-won Ji) returns to her childhood home, a remote island inhabited solely by one family, after a series of professional and personal setbacks.  She is initially looking forward to reconnecting with her childhood friend, Bok-nam (Yeong-hie Seo), but soon discovers that Bok-nam is being abused by her husband, brother-in-law, and extended family.  Hae-won has turned a blind eye her entire life and been privileged enough to do so, but Bok-nam is tired of suffering and wants out.

I am so tired of the "snapped" woman counting as horror.  I didn't like it in Delores Claibourne when I was twelve and I don't like it now.  It positions women's suffering as something to be borne, something normal, and any kind of retaliation against an abuser is deviant, a horror.  There's no catharsis, it's not somehow inspirational to see an abused woman fight back.  The whole idea is bullshit, a way to fetishize women's pain and then balk at any pushback with "but she gets revenge!  Isn't that what you broads want?!"

Hard pass but hey, it's streaming on Prime if you don't want to take my word for it.