Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 31: Criminal Minds s5 (2009)

  We did it!  We made it to Halloween!  Now it's just a fast, dark slide into winter.  

The Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI is busy chasing serial killers in this fifth season.  The Big Bad for about half of it is George Foyet, AKA The Reaper (C. Thomas Howell), a character introduced in season 4 as a nemesis to Agent Aaron Hotchner (Thomas Gibson).  This season also introduced a backdoor pilot for a spinoff series, Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, starring Forrest Whitaker that only lasted one season.  My girl Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness) takes a larger role and gets a spiffy red dye job, while Agent Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore) takes control of the team for a little bit.  

Notable guest stars include Gavin Rossdale, Sean Patrick Flanery, William Sadler, Beth Grant, Jonathan Frakes, John Pyper Ferguson, and Tim Curry.  

This is a comfort show for me in a lot of ways.  The Monster of the Week format is predictable, therefore soothing, the gore and violence are mostly implied (it's a network TV show, so there's a lot of shit they just can't show but they toe that line as much as possible), and the characters are familiar.  It did take me about a week to watch all 23 episodes but I made it in time, and that's all that counts.  It's currently streaming on Paramount+, Netflix, and Hulu.

Well, that wraps up my month-long journey into horror.  Adding TV was somewhat more stressful, just because it takes a lot longer to watch, but I would probably do it again.  Tomorrow we go back to our regularly scheduled nonsense and postings on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (when I can, sometimes I forget).

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 30: Don't Look Now (1973)

  I don't know that I'd call this a horror movie.  It's definitely not a "shattering psychic thriller".  Content warning:  dead child.

After the death of their daughter, John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura (Julie Christie) move from England to Venice, Italy, so John can restore a crumbling church.  Laura meets an elderly pair of English sisters, one of whom, Heather (Hilary Mason), is blind but gifted with second sight.  She tells Laura that their daughter is happy and moved on but has a message for John.  John doesn't want to hear any of this and thinks Laura is unnecessarily influenced by these two old biddies.  Laura, finally able to come to terms with her grief, sees the sisters again.  Heather warns that John is in danger and needs to leave Venice.

I can't believe how well-regarded this movie is when absolutely nothing happens in it.  It's just Donald Sutherland yelling at people in Italian (which Criterion does not translate) and Julie Christie looking frail and vulnerable while a 60-year-old British lady has a vision that looks suspiciously like an orgasm.  I fast forwarded through a lot of it.  

Somehow this is considered a classic and is currently streaming on Criterion, Kanopy, and PlutoTV.

 

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 29: Borgman (2013)

  Holy shit, this movie was weird.  What is going on in the Netherlands?  You guys okay?

A homeless man (Jan Bijvoet) knocks on the door of an affluent family and asks to use their shower.  The husband (Jeroen Perceval) beats the shit out of him and sends him packing.  The wife (Hadewych Minis) feels guilty and lets the bum into their guest house.  He slowly begins taking over their entire lives, leading them further and further away from each other.  

This is a comedy like Dogtooth is a comedy.  It is surreal and feels random yet completely expected at the same time.  He doesn't really even do anything (well, okay, he poisons a handful of people), he just lets the simmering resentment and anger of this yuppie couple do all the work (again, aside from the people he murders) for him.  Might be supernatural, might just be these people eating themselves.  It is bonkers.  There's one fast scene of gore and everything else is purely psychological.  It is worth watching, especially if you want to question everything you see from the corner of your eye for the next few days.

It's currently streaming on Hulu and Kanopy.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 28: Secret Window (2004)

  Stephen King adaptations are so hit or miss.  Content Warning:  dead pet, domestic violence.

Permanently disheveled author Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) is not having a good year.  He is in the middle of an acrimonious divorce from his wife (Maria Bello) who has moved on with her new lover (Timothy Hutton), his new novel has stalled, and some weird stranger named John Shooter (John Turturro) is accusing him of plagiarizing a story from seven years ago.  What starts as an annoyance escalates to stalking, arson, and murder.

Mort is a completely unsympathetic character, which is why I think this movie fails.  He is a petty, petulant coward and at no point are you rooting for him.  That's why the third act twist falls apart.  If you don't have any goodwill towards him, you can't be betrayed because you never believed him in the first place.  I'm not going to spoil the twist, if you want to know it's a quick Google search, but the film pretty much hammers you with it anyway.  

I did not enjoy this movie.  Like I said, the narrative structure is weak and the ending is frankly a ripoff of King's better story, Thinner.  If you must, it's streaming on Amazon Prime.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 27: Suspiria (2018)

  The remake makes marginally more sense than the original, which may or may not influence your enjoyment of it.

Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) is accepted to an elite dance studio in 1977 Berlin, during the middle of the flight 181 hostage crisis.  She is told that a previous student (Chloe Moretz) had run away, possibly because of her political leanings, and there is an undercurrent of unrest among the other dancers stemming from a schism of leadership.  Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) takes a personal interest in Susie, believing her to be a good candidate for strengthening their coven.  Meanwhile, an investigator (Tilda Swinton) looks into the missing girl, uncovering something far more sinister than he anticipated.

I don't really like films that are Just Vibes so I appreciated the addition of structure to Argento's framework.  The focus is very much on the troupe (and shows actual dancing) with a background of actual historical events, known as the German Autumn.  There is a lot of subtext and it's worth reading the Wikipedia articles about the Red Army Faction, German Autumn, and the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.  That last one you've probably heard of.  It's where you become aware of a thing and then suddenly notice it everywhere.  Like when you buy a certain color of car and then see it all the time.  

Same thing here.  There have always been witches in the dance troupe.  You just never noticed them before.  But now that you have, you can't see anything else.

There's also the obliqueness of Things We Don't Talk About.  Susie's past, Madame Blanc's attempted coup, the lack of prosecution for high-ranking Nazis in the years after the war leading to a far-left terrorist group conducting assassinations and bombings.  Things like that.  No one likes to be reminded of unpleasantness, but you have to clean out a wound before it festers and rots you from the inside.

So if Argento's Suspiria was Spooky Feels, No Thought, Guadagnino's Suspiria is You Come Back Here and Think About What You've Done.

It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 26: Red Eye (2006)

  This is directed by Wes Craven, but it is more properly a thriller rather than a horror movie.  Still fun, though.

Lisa (Rachel McAdams) is a manager at an upscale Miami hotel.  She is calm, poised, and unflappable, even with the most irate guest; traits that serve her well dealing with a delayed red eye from Texas.  They are also very useful when her seat mate (Cillian Murphy) announces that he is planning to assassinate the Director of Homeland Security (Jack Scalia) and if Lisa doesn't help him, he will kill her dad (Brian Cox).  Lisa has until the plane lands to foil his plans.

No tricks, no twists, just straightforward Good Guy vs Bad Guy at 35,000 feet.  McAdams and Murphy always understand the assignment, the script is juuuuust plausible enough for suspension of disbelief, and there's not a single wasted shot.  You love to see it.  Unfortunately, you can't see it on streaming but you can get it on disc from Netflix.  (It might be on Plex?)

 

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 25: Better Watch Out (2017)

  You know that meme or Shower Thought that circulates the internet every year about "what if Kevin from Home Alone was the villain"?  Well, they made it into a movie.  And it is misogynistic trash.

Obsessed with his hot babysitter (Olivia DeJonge), twelve-year-old Luke (Levi Miller) sets up a fake home invasion with his best friend, Garrett (Ed Oxenbould), so he can "rescue" her.  But when she doesn't respond favorably, he moves on to more murderous plans.

Honestly, this movie was gross.  I fast-forwarded through a lot of it because hearing a pre-teen talk about sexually assaulting a teenaged girl was disgusting and I frankly don't need to listen to that.  There's zero reason to watch this, especially considering how many Christmas horror movies there are that have to be better, but if you must it's streaming exclusively on Shudder.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 24: Byzantium (2012)

  Mmm, feminism and vampires.

Eleanor Webb (Saoirse Ronan) has been sixteen for 200 years and she is tired of constantly hiding.  She obsessively writes her story, as much of it as she knows, again and again only to destroy the pages when she's finished.  Her mother, Clara (Gemma Arterton), is adamant about the need for secrecy.  She has never told Eleanor that they are hunted as abominations.  A chance encounter with a boy (Caleb Landry Jones) sees Eleanor's story turned in as a work of creative writing, prompting a health and welfare check by a concerned professor (Tom Hollander).  More deaths means more chances the vampire brotherhood will find them.

In the wrong hands, this could have been a disaster.  It's a story about an oppressive patriarchy, motherhood, coming-of-age, sex, and death.  Clara was forced into prostitution and gave Eleanor to an orphanage/convent to be raised, leading to a huge disparity in their values.  They both have to kill to survive, but their codes are different.  Eleanor only takes the old and the sick, preferring to think of it as easing their passing.  Clara attacks the powerful and the abusive.  Eleanor chafes at her restrictions.  Clara sees it as protecting her young.  Both think the other needs to grow up.  

Arterton and Ronan are perfectly cast, Arterton especially.  The production design is lush even through its grime.  It's a great vampire movie that is unfortunately not streaming anywhere.  I got it on disc from Netflix but it's completely worth buying a copy.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 23: The Eye (2002)

  I tried to watch this ages ago on YouTube but the video quality was so bad I gave up.  I finally got it on disc from Netflix.

Mun (Angelica Lee) has been blind since she was two-years-old.  A cornea transplant gives her another chance to be sighted but the costs are a little higher than she anticipated.  First, she gets fired from the orchestra she plays in because it's for the blind and she no longer meets that category, and second, there's all the ghosts.  Mun convinces her therapist (Edmund Chen) to find out about the cornea donor and uncovers a series of tragedies.

This is a lot like The Ring in that it's really about uncovering the sins of the past.  The Eye is a bit more hopeful and with less eldritch terrors from the deep.  It's a solid ghost story, no real gore or violence, more atmospheric.  Unfortunately, it is not streaming anywhere so you have to be vigilant and/or track it down on physical media.

Scare-a-Thon Day 22: Santa Clarita Diet season 2 (2018)

  I love this show.  Unlike some other zombie shows I could name, Santa Clarita is bright, fun, and colorful.  

Sheila (Drew Barrymore) and Joel (Timothy Olyphant) have weathered Sheila's turn to the undead and managed to create the serum that stops her from deteriorating.  All is not roses, however, as the string of murders Sheila is forced into for sustenance are bringing the cops closer and closer to their trail, a pair of professional rivals (Joel McHale and Maggie Lawson) threaten to take their realty listings, and their daughter Abby (Liv Hewson) roasts them constantly.  Oh, and Sheila's not the only zombie game in town. Can Sheila and Joel discover what's behind the zombie outbreak, stop those bitches Chris and Christa from getting their development deal, and be good parents/people?  After all, killing Nazis is practically community service, right?

This is a super quick watch, only ten episodes at a half hour each.  It's funny, bloody, heartwarming (and eating!) with one of the most perfect casts in television.  It's streaming through Netflix.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 21: Hex season 1 (2004)

  I only made it through three episodes.  

Cassie (Christina Cole) finds a voodoo artifact at her plush boarding school which unlocks previously unknown magical abilities but also de facto promises her soul to Azazeal (Michael Fassbender).  She has to uncover the secrets of the previous owner, Rachel McBain (Jessica Oyelowo), before Azazeal kills all of her classmates.

Witchy shows are hard for me.  I get really judge-y about them.  Worse, Hex is just kind of boring.  You only have six episodes in your season, why are you wasting Michael Fassbender by making him just stare broodingly from across a field while your idiot protagonist plays high school popularity games?  Some of the dialogue is funny and I loved Thelma's fashion sense, even if I hated her eyebrows, but it was not enough to keep me interested.  Plus, it was weirdly skeevy about her sexuality.  The good news is that it's not streaming anywhere and is only available by disc from Netflix.  I watched it on the server, which I burned from Christy's DVDs.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 20: The Walking Dead season 4 (2013)

  Ah, The Walking Dead.  The show that bravely continues to ask "what if the worst people you know were the only survivors of an apocalypse?"  I actually started watching this between Maggie and It Follows and I had all sorts of jokes about zombies ganging up on you but it took so long to get through the season, I had to stop for a bit and watch movies instead.

Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) has made a home for himself and a thriving community for people in the prison of season 3 and hopes to basically retire from leadership so he can focus on raising crops and attaining a small measure of peace.  A virulent strain of flu and the return of an old enemy put paid to that idea and soon the full cast is split into twos and threes, each group trying to make their way to a mysterious beacon called Terminus.

The first half of the season was fine but as soon as they brought back The Governor (David Morrissey) I lost all interest.  The second half I just started fast forwarding through anything I found boring.  There are a lot of speeches in this show and a lot of people staring meaningfully at each other.  I just find it harder and harder to care about any of the characters.  If I want to see a bunch of depressed, traumatized people wracked with survivor's guilt, I could just go to the VFW.  

It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 19: Tigers Are Not Afraid (2018)

  This was a beautiful ghost story.  I can see why it made a bunch of top ten lists when it came out.  Director Issa Lopez is one to watch.

Estrella (Paola Lara) is gifted three wishes by a teacher, mostly to calm her while the cartel shoots up their school.  She returns home only to find her mother disappeared by the same cartel.  A wish to bring her back is granted, but in the worst possible way.  Now haunted by her mother's ghost, Estrella joins El Shine (Juan Ramón López) and his child gang.  The five children are in possession of a cell phone with incriminating evidence on it and the cartel will stop at nothing to get it back.  Estrella has two wishes left, but will they do more harm than good?

Ugh, I cannot get over what a great movie this is.  It's very reminiscent of Guillermo Del Toro's dark fairy tales.  There's a little Pan's Labyrinth, a little Devil's Backbone, with a layer of Peter Pan to it as well.  Just excellent on all levels.  The child actors are great, the effects work is good, and the pacing is extremely lean at 84 minutes.  If you are sensitive to children in danger, maybe take it easy here, but otherwise the gore is pretty minimal.  It's streaming on Shudder and it is absolutely worth your time.  

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 18: Society (1989)

  It's like Get Out if it was made in the late 80s/early 90s.  

Bill (Bill Warlock) has never felt comfortable around his parents and sister (Patrice Jennings).  He is plagued by thoughts that he is adopted, that they don't really care for him, that they are raising him for a sinister purpose but he can't get anyone to care.  Everyone is too focused on the next party and who's who on the social hierarchy to pay attention to Bill.  Until he hears a tape his sister's ex-boyfriend (Tim Bartell) illegally recorded of her debutante party/orgy, confirming all his nebulous suspicions.  But Bill has no idea exactly how far the elites will go to protect their hideous appetites.

It is extremely 90s Beverly Hills excess all the way.  Subtlety is a dirty word in this movie.  Everyone is rich and white with the most punchable faces ever gathered together on celluloid.  I don't think a single Black person has a spoken line in this.  That's a product of the time, certainly, but feels egregious in a movie based specifically on how the 1% exploit the lower classes for fun and profit.  Like, they're so exploited, they're invisible.  Even the maids are white and you never even see their faces.

For all of that, it still works as a commentary on the 1%.  Which is sad.  It has all the gratuitous nudity you expect from this time period and a Slither amount of gory creature effects that hold up okay.  All in all, worth a watch but with a caveat about inclusivity.  It's currently streaming on Shudder, which I get through Amazon.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 17: Ringu (1998)

  Ah yes, the movie that launched a thousand memes.  I'd never actually seen the original and while I knew it was massively popular and had at least two sequels and an American remake, I had no idea exactly how popular.  According to Wikipedia, there are eight Japanese films, three English remakes, a Korean remake, two video games, six novels, seven comics, and two TV series.  

Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) is a reporter investigating the story of a viral videotape that supposedly kills the viewer in seven days.  Her niece, Tomoko (Yûko Takeuchi), and four of her friends died on the same day after a trip to a resort cabin.  Asakawa finds the tape, watches it, and immediately shows it to her ex-husband (Hiroyuki Sanada), a university professor.  These two proceed to investigate the shit out of this tape, following the breadcrumbs back to a superstitious island and a long-unsolved crime.  

It's a relatively simple story, which just goes to show that you don't need a lot of bells and whistles, just a grainy VHS and a really long wig.  Truly, Sadako is such a great villain because she's implacable.  There's no bargaining, no bribery, no protection.  It puts her up there with Jason Voorhees, Michael Meyers, and Freddy Krueger, all of whom have spawned their own franchises.  It's currently streaming on Kanopy (no ads) and Tubi (ads).  

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 16: Hatchet II (2010)

  Finally, some fun horror!  No philosophy, no analogies, just straight up gore.  You love to see it.

Final Girl Marybeth (Danielle Harris) escapes the clutch of Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder) and makes her way back to New Orleans to question Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd).  She learns that her late father and two friends were the ones who set fire to the Crowley cabin, indirectly resulting in the death of Victor.  Reverend Zombie has a hunch that if Crowley is able to take his revenge on the surviving perpetrators, he will be able to rest and Zombie can expand his swamp tours.  To that end, he puts together a hunting crew and persuades Marybeth to include her Uncle Bob (Tom Holland).  Of course Crowley tears through the cannon fodder in various inventive ways with an impressive variety of power tools.  

Turn off your brain.  Feel the calm emptiness that comes from having no critical thinking.  Ignorance is bliss.  Now watch Hatchet 2 streaming on Amazon Prime.  Isn't that nice?  Just an hour and a half break from having to make sense of the world.  Like a spa day but with chainsaws and rednecks.  

There's a perennial trend where we discuss Is Horror Art? and people go around and around.  See also genre fiction vs Literature.  It's all just gatekeeping bullshit by people who want to feel superior for their subjective taste.  Hatchet 2 is not art.  It is, however, fucking fun and I hope they keep making them.  Bonus!  This one includes a reference to Behind the Mask, one of my favorite horror movies of all time.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 15: It Follows (2015)

  Well, we have a contender for Worst Horror of the year.  Yeesh.

Jay (Maika Monroe) has sex with a dude she thinks is her boyfriend, only for him to tie her up, tell her that she's now going to be haunted by some sort of specter that only she can see that will kill her if it touches her, and the only way to get rid of it is to pass it to (i.e. have sex with) someone else and hope that person doesn't die.  Then he bounces.  Jay now has to decide whether or not to burden someone else with the monster.

Some dude really said "What if The Ring but with genitals?" and got it made into an actual thing.  The audacity.

Jokes aside, this is just scaremongering about teens having sex.  It's dumb 80s propaganda and has no place in a civilized world.  Worse, it's a really boring movie.  There are long stretches where some girl reads Dostoyevsky and it's supposed to be profound.  So maybe if you're like 13, this is a mind-blowing film, but as an adult?  Hard pass.  It's currently streaming on Peacock for free with ads but I wouldn't recommend it.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 14: Maggie (2015)

  More zombies!  This one is much more of a meditation on AIDS than previous entries.

Wade (Arnold Schwarzenegger) decides to bring his infected daughter, Maggie (Abigail Breslin), home instead of taking her to a government quarantine to live out her last days before becoming a zombie.  In this universe, the Necroambulism virus takes 6-8 weeks after initial infection to claim a victim.  It's only contagious through a bite so the infected are harmless until the final stage where they get all murder-y.  

Action icon Schwarzenegger, Academy Award nominee Breslin, and acting dynasty legacy Joely Richardson make this the most prestigious cast for a zombie movie you'll probably ever see.  Like I said, it's more of an extended AIDS metaphor than a horror movie.  If you're not really a big horror fan, this might be more your speed.  There's very little violence and not a lot of gore.  It's currently streaming on Kanopy.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 13: REC (2007)

  Found footage is an abomination.  It adds nothing to realism.  It's just shaky, seizure-inducing garbage.

Local news reporter Angela (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman (Pablo Rosso) are filming a puff piece on firefighters and are allowed to tag along on a routine distress call about an old woman who has fallen.  Things quickly turn to the weird as the old lady (Martha Carbonell) is pretty upright and spry when they find her.  Spry enough to take a chunk out of a cop's (Vicente Gil) neck anyway.   Then the health authorities seal the building with no explanation, trapping the reporters and the firefighters in with the building's residents as a mysterious disease begins to take hold of the recently dead.

This entry from Spain is pretty standard "fast zombie" right up until the last ten minutes of the movie, which add a little twist.  The story is fine, like I said, it's bog standard.  The effects are good, nice and gory, but everything (for me) is ruined by the shaky-cam footage.  It is nauseating.  There were times where I had to block the TV with my hand and just read the subtitles because it was giving me such a headache.  If you are one of those lucky souls who isn't bothered by a camera jiggling everywhere, REC is streaming on Plex.  I got it from Netflix, though.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 12: The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

  I was sleeping on this one.  I really thought it couldn't live up to the hype so I just dumped it into my queue.  Now I'm invested.

The Crain family bought Hill House as a fixer-upper, a project to flip in a summer to make a tidy profit and build their forever house.  The house had other ideas.  Twenty years later, the survivors have found various ways to cope, or not.  Steven (Michiel Huisman) wrote a "fictionalized" account and made an assload of money writing a series of ghost stories he doesn't believe in, Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) runs a funeral home, Theo (Kate Siegel) is a child psychologist, Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) is a heroin addict, and Nellie (Victoria Pedretti) is desperately trying to keep her family from fracturing even further.  Another tragedy brings them back to face the house and their own demons once more.

Each episode focuses on one member of the Crain family, exploring the same events through different perspectives, unraveling the trauma over a slow burn of ten episodes total.  It is a masterclass in how to do horror.  Every positive thing critics said about it is absolutely true.  The cast is spectacular, the writing is top-notch, and the cinematography is *chef's kiss*.

I have one quibble.  And it's not even specific to this show but a trend I've noticed over a couple of horror movies.  It is kind of spoiler-y so I'm going to put it in white just because if you are not bothered by this, I don't want it to ruin the whole show for you.

**SPOILER-ISH TALK FOLLOWS**  Okay, so there is a thing recently where ghosts aren't remnants of the past but premonitions of a future.  I don't like that and here's why:  it's too literary.  It feels like the ultimate foreshadowing, like an English teacher's assignment, too neat, too pat.  In that sense, it's almost smug.  Also, it raises discussion of predetermination and fate versus free will, which again feels pretentious and smug.  It's that kind of philosophical circle jerk every asshole brings up at least once in college.  Most damning, it echoes Greek tragedy.  The defining feature of Greek tragedy is that the protagonist knows exactly what their downfall is and does nothing to change it, or can't do anything to change it.  It's already decided.  Which is both nihilistic and smug.  So much smugness.  **END SPOILER-Y RANT**

That one tiny issue aside, this was an excellent show from start to finish and well worth watching.  It's streaming on Netflix.

 

Scare-a-Thon 2021 - Day 11: World War Z (2013)

  Tyler told me yesterday that he doesn't consider "fast zombies" to be real zombies.  It's Romero or nothing, as far as he's concerned.  So now we know who's going to survive a zombie apocalypse.  

Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) is reinstated to his previous position of investigator for the United Nations after a mysterious plague breaks out, infecting most of the world, and turning the bitten into raging zombies.  He travels across the ravaged world, looking for a source, a patient zero, that will help them find a cure.

This bears almost no resemblance to the book it's based on and that's okay.   It also hits a little differently when you're watching it from inside a pandemic that has killed over 4.5 million people worldwide as of now.  These zombies just try to bite you, not spam your Facebook with stupid anti-vaccine articles written by Russian spambots.  I guess that's an idea for the sequel.

It's not a great zombie movie.  It owes a lot to Contagion and Outbreak more than 28 Days Later.  If that's your thing, give it a shot.  I couldn't find it streaming anywhere but my phone says it's currently on Paramount+.  I got it on disc from Netflix.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 10: Teen Wolf season 1 (2011)

  It's werewolves so it counts, even if it is more of a Riverdale/Vampire Diaries teen show.  

Scott (Tyler Posey) is just an average high schooler when he is bitten in the woods one night.  He turns into a werewolf, becomes a lacrosse star, and catches the eye of the hot new girl, Allison (Crystal Reed).  All good.  Except Allison's parents are werewolf hunters and the werewolf that bit him is a killer on a path of revenge.  Scott has to navigate his interpersonal relationships with his mom (Melissa Ponzio), his best friend (Dylan O'Brien), and the antagonistic captain of the lacrosse team (Colton Haynes), as well as other werewolf Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin) whose motives remain inscrutable, while not getting caught by the cops, or killed by hunters or werewolves.  And he's failing chemistry.

This is very much a teen show.  Your mileage will vary based on your tolerance for such but I found it surprisingly palatable.  O'Brien's fast-talking best friend is easily the most entertaining character, with Holland Roden's Lydia a close second.  There are a lot of half-naked dudes in this show.  Posey especially seems to never be within reach of a shirt.  All well and good, except they are all supposed to be teenagers so it's a little squicky.  Except for Hoechlin who is very age-appropriate eye candy.

All six seasons are currently available on Hulu but I'm stopping at one.  Got over half a month left to go, after all.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 9: ABCs of Death 2 (2014)

  Same concept as the first ABCs of Death: 26 directors each make a horror short for a letter of the alphabet to wildly varying degrees of quality.  Out of 26, I only liked nine of them.  Which is better than the first movie, actually.

I'm not going to run down the plots of all 26 shorts.  I'm just going to give you the highlights.  "D is for Deloused" is probably the most genuinely horrific of all of them.  Very Cronenberg type of vibes.  There were a handful of funny ones ("A is for Amateur", "B is for Badger", "I is for Invincible"), and others that thought they were funny but were just dumb ("P is for P-P-P-Scary").  There were the inevitable gross-out ones, a couple of good concept, bad execution ("L is for Legacy", "W is for Wish"), and some that were just boring.  I've not yet found an anthology that was all winners.  I will say that it is a diverse crop of filmmakers and I appreciated the different cultures on display.  

It's streaming on Tubi, Vudu, and PlutoTV, all three with commercials, but only Tubi didn't have ad breaks after every segment (Vudu), or in the middle of segments (PlutoTV).  If you're interested in finding new horror directors, this is not a bad place to start.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 8: Thirt13en Ghosts (2001)

  I think I saw this when it premiered, or on TV shortly after but I remembered very little about it.  Time has not improved it.

Arthur (Tony Shaloub) has had a rough time recently.  His beloved wife (Kathryn Anderson) died in a fire, leaving him with a mountain of debt and two kids to raise.  Fortunately, his ghost hunting Uncle Cyrus (F. Murray Abraham) has also just died and left Arthur his enormous glass mansion.  Just before he can sign the paperwork and celebrate this good fortune, a self-proclaimed medium (Matthew Lillard) and a ghost emancipation advocate (Embeth Davidtz) both show up inside the house with dire warnings.  The house is not a house, she says, it's a machine from Hell to give someone insight into the future.  It's full of evil captured spirits, he says, which are slowly being released in order to torment and kill the inhabitants.  And they can only be seen via special light-up glasses.

Truly, this is one of the dumbest horror movies to ever get a greenlight.  Nothing makes sense.  The writing is lazy and muddled, probably because there were five screenwriters (including an uncredited James Gunn), there's almost no characterization, and none of the motivations hold up.  For instance, first shot of Arthur is him in a large book-filled room, talking through a window into a large backyard with his wife, while his kids play.  Then it segues to Arthur and the kids in an apartment with a wall of past due notices.  But they have a live-in housekeeper/nanny?  So he didn't have property insurance?  His wife didn't have life insurance?  Medical bills wiped him out?  Nothing really explains going from affluence to poverty except that the script required he be desperate enough to accept his uncle's house no questions asked.

The whole movie is like that.  It skips along from chase scene to chase scene, hoping you'll be so distracted by the dozen ghosts blinking in and out you won't ask any questions either.  A garbage film in all respects, but it's streaming on HBO Max if you're interested.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 7: Maniac (2012)

  This is a remake of a 1980 film of the same name that I've never seen.  Usually, I try to watch the original first but sometimes I just don't get to it for various reasons.  This is one of those times.

Frank (Elijah Woods) restores antique mannequins by day and hunts woman as a serial killer by night.  He meets Anna (Nora Arnezeder), an artist who is doing a gallery show featuring mannequins.  It is love at first sight.  For Frank.  Anna is just trying to create art.  Frank is looking for a substitute for his mother and trying to overcome his deep-seated fears of becoming a mannequin himself.  Sigmund Freud has a lot to answer for.

The film is shot mostly first-person.  You only see Frank in reflections and delusions, which I thought might be kind of irritating but works surprisingly well.  I love Elijah Wood in horror.  He's great in every single project he picks but I especially love that he chooses a lot of genre fare.  

I was all geared up to talk about how the nudity is gratuitous but the more I think about it, the more it leads back to the mannequin angle.  For Frank, there's no difference, although that could just be the amount of bug spray he inhales.  

Unfortunately, this is not streaming (for free) but you can rent it from Google Play or Amazon Prime.  I got it on disc from Netflix.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 6: Stranger Things season 3 (2019)

  Finally caught up on Stranger Things, and only two years late!  Of course, there's no telling when I'll get to season 4 but that's a different story.

It's 4th of July weekend in Hawkins, Indiana and a lot has happened to the gang.  Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) are an item, as well as Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Max (Sadie Sink), leaving Will (Noah Schnapp) feeling left out.  Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) has his friendship with Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) to fall back on, while Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) intern at the local paper.  It seems like just a summer of growing up and moving on, but of course it isn't.  An accident sees Max's brother Billy (Dacre Montgomery) become a host for the Mind Flayer, trapped on this plane after Eleven closed the gate in season 2.  It quietly begins building an army of hosts to take down Eleven.  Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Hopper (David Harbour) are investigating why all her magnets became demagnitized, which leads them down a rabbit hole of Russian invasion.  An invasion already discovered by Steve, Dustin, and co-worker Robin (Maya Hawke) at the new mall, which is concealing a massive facility dedicating to re-opening the dimensional gate.  The bonds of friendship and love will be sorely tested in this new battle against the otherworldly.

Not only is this a good show on its own merits, it's also filled with Easter Eggs for other 80s movies like The Terminator, Aliens, Jaws, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, a little True Lies, a little Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters 2, and probably a lot of others.  I'm pretty sure the hospital logo is the exact same as Halloween 2's Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, but that may be just because I've seen it so recently.  Anyway, season 4 is supposed to be coming out in 2022 so if you need to catch up, you have time.  The seasons are only eight episodes each, so if you haven't started, you have time.  It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 5: American Horror Story: Coven (2013)

 Yes, I'm including TV this year.  There are a ton of horror shows and frankly, I'd never get to any of them if I just waited.  Unfortunately, this one sucked.

Zoe (Taissa Farmiga) is a young girl who's just learned she comes from a line of witches.  She is packed off to an exclusive boarding school in New Orleans for other witches, run by Cordelia Fox (Sarah Paulson).  Delia's mother, Fiona (Jessica Lange), is the Witch Supreme, but despairs over her own mortality until she hears about Madame LaLaurie (Kathy Bates), a woman cursed with everlasting life as a punishment for her cruelty.  Fiona decides to track down Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett), who laid down the curse, and cajole/threaten/bribe/bully her into putting it on Fiona.

Honestly, I only made it two episodes before giving up.  I've now tried to watch three seasons of this anthology and I couldn't make it to episode three on any of them.  I just don't get the point of this kitchen sink approach to storytelling.  It's not shocking or horrifying.  There's no humor.  I was incredibly bored and I hated all of the characters.  Also, the first episode centers on a gang rape, which is unnecessary and gross.  

For some ungodly reason, this is streaming on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.  I don't get the appeal.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 4: Fear (1996)

  Yikes.  Well, we've hit our first skeevy horror movie.  

Steve Walker (William Petersen) has a beautiful home, car, and family.  It seems like a perfect life until his teenaged daughter (Reese Witherspoon) starts dating David (Mark Wahlberg).  Suddenly, David is involved in every facet of Steve's life, making out with his daughter, flirting with his wife (Amy Brenneman), playing with his dog (Banner).  Steve tries to establish some boundaries but that only makes David seem more appealing.  When David does reveal himself to be a violent manipulator, Steve can't even get help.  The police need actual evidence, not just a father's hunch.  Steve decides to take matters into his own hands, which backfires spectacularly, and leads to a deadly showdown.

Every frame of this movie was written for and filmed for men.  It's supposed to be about Nichole, the daughter, and her realization that her first boyfriend is an abusive asshole, but it's not.  It mostly follows the dad and his insecurities and fears about the women in his life.  It very much treats Nichole and Laura, the wife, as Steve's property that is threatened and must be defended.  Even though Steve mostly sucks at it.  And his stupid posturing almost gets his entire family killed.  In fact, it is Laura, Nichole, and Laura's son Toby (Christopher Gray) who act rationally and save themselves.  So you could read the last ten minutes as the triumph of feminism over toxic masculinity, but that's an extraordinarily generous take.  This is Fatal Attraction by way of Cape Fear (the remake with DeNiro, not Savalas).  And we're not even going to talk about how Witherspoon and Alyssa Milano are shot in nothing but micro-minis, bikinis, or underwear.  

Fear is tacky, tasteless, late 90s garbage and should be avoided at all costs, and yet it's streaming on HBO Max.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 3: The Machine (2013)

  I would have missed this one because I thought it was straight sci-fi but I saw it on Shudder and I was like ???.  And it does have strong horror elements, so well done Shudder.  A hidden gem.

Dr. Vincent McCarthy (Toby Stephens) is trying to save his daughter from a rare degenerative condition by perfecting an artificial intelligence for the Ministry of Defense.  When his partner, Ava (Caity Lotz), is killed, he uses her brain scan to make the leap from computer to consciousness, creating the perfect Machine (also Caity Lotz).  But his boss, Thomson (Denis Lawson), doesn't want the Machine to be a person; he wants it to follow orders and kill people.  

This does play a little like a full-length Black Mirror episode, but that may be just because of the accents.  Lotz is doing a lot of work here while Stephens just kind of looks brooding and conflicted.  Her physicality is a joy to watch, though.

The horror here comes less from "killer robot" and more from "government overreach" sectors, especially the use of armed service veterans with traumatic brain injuries as guinea pigs.  That shit's just rude.  The effects are decent, a lot of practical, with little touches like the reflective eyes to be unnerving but not over-the-top.  CGI is not intrusive.  All in all, not a bad way to spend an hour and a half.

The Machine is currently streaming on Shudder, which I get through Amazon.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 2: Kiss of the Damned (2012)

  Christy recommended this to me ages ago and I tried to watch it last year but just didn't have the attention span for it.

Djuna (Joséphine de la Baume) is a vampire who falls for Paolo (Milo Ventimiglia), a human screenwriter, and decides to turn him.  Then her chaotic sister Mimi (Roxane Mesquida) shows up and refuses to leave.  Djuna doesn't drink human blood but Mimi does, so you can see where that might cause some conflict.  Parties are attended, philosophies are shared, blood is spilled, and relationships are tested.

If Only Lovers Left Alive were less arty and more Cinemax, you'd have Kiss of the Damned.  It's not a bad vampire film, but it is a lot of very tired tropes.  Mostly, I think this film exists to have very pretty people fucking while wearing vampire fangs.  There's some gore but overall it's pretty mild.  It's currently streaming on Kanopy.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

  A temporary disruption in the horror parade but I did manage to see Venom 2 last night, which was still September so it doesn't count.

Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) has a lot of problems, the least of which is a rude semi-permanent houseguest in the form of an alien symbiote named Venom.  Venom feels like Eddie ignores his needs just because they happen to involve murder.  Meanwhile, serial killer Cletus Kassidy (Woody Harrelson) wants Brock to publish a message for him in exchange for info about Kassidy's unrecovered victims.  Brock thinks it's typical sociopathic narcissism but Kassidy is actually reaching out to his One True Love, Frances (Naomie Harris), locked away for being a dangerous mutant.  An accidental transfer sees Kassidy infected with his own symbiote, Carnage, facilitating an escape for himself and Frances.  Venom and Eddie have to work out their relationship issues in time to save the entire city.

This is the rom-com I have been waiting for.  Man and tentacle beast in harmony.  The first Venom was all about coming to an arrangement in pursuit of a common goal but now, it's a long-term dependency which comes with so many more rules and accommodations on both sides.  

Also, it's fucking hilarious.  The dialogue is so fast and Hardy's "Venom voice" is so weird, it might actually take a couple of viewings to get all the one-liners.  Wait until it comes out on streaming and then turn on subtitles.  That's my plan.  Also, huge shout-out to Peggy Lu as the incomparable Mrs. Chen.  A star.  

As of right now, Venom 2 is exclusively in theaters.  Give it about a month and it'll probably drop onto HBO Max or Amazon.

Scare-a-Thon 2021 Day 1: Halloween II (1981)

  It's finally October!  And we're starting with a sequel.  

It's still Halloween night in Haddonfield.  Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has managed to escape from Michael Meyers (Dick Warlock*) and has been taken to the hospital for treatment of her injuries.  Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) is frantically searching for Meyers, who he no longer believes is human.  Nobody thinks to check the hospital, though, and the bodies start piling up as Laurie once again is targeted.

It's not a bad sequel, as these things go.  It picks up immediately and follows a more or less logical path with a few WTF off-shoots.  First off, Samhain is not pronounced like it's spelled.  It's pronounced SAH-win because Gaelic.  Second, this is the movie where they retcon Laurie's backstory.  Originally, she was a target of opportunity, fixated on by a very dangerous man.  In the sequel, she becomes the long-lost sister, hidden away (in the same town, two doors down from the Meyers house) with a new name to avoid the scandal, as well as some claptrap about autumnal rituals of human sacrifice.  It's borderline Satanic Panic and in my opinion, far less scary.  You've gone from "this could happen to anyone" to "only blood relatives (and bystanders) need worry" and that's a much smaller pool.  

* I know.  He's actually done more credits under Richard Warlock, but come on.  Dick Warlock is hilarious.  Also, he has over 200 stunt credits ranging from 1960 to 2002 so throw some respect on that Dick.