Scream-O-Rama 2023 Day 7: Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

  This is considered one of, if not the, worst horror movies ever made and it's still better than Who Can Kill a Child?.  Content warning:  blood

Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) becomes convinced a Great White shark is deliberately targeting her family after her son, Sean (Mitchell Anderson), is killed in Amity harbor.  Her other son, Michael (Lance Guest), thinks she's losing her mind and convinces her to visit him in the Bahamas while he works on his grad school project of tagging conch snails, and most importantly, the waters are much too warm for Great Whites.  Ellen eventually starts to relax, helped along by garrulous pilot Hoagie (Michael Caine), but Michael begins to believe her crazy theory when a Great White shows up and starts attacking his boat.

Everything about this movie is bad.  The script is terrible, it cribs way too much from the original Jaws without improving in any way, the timeline makes no sense, they stuck Mario Van Peebles with a bad Bahamian accent, and the foam rubber shark is laughable.  You can literally see the string used to move the fin in one scene.  There's no actual footage of a real shark, not even stock footage, in the entire movie.  It would have made just as much sense to have Hoagie actually be the shark in disguise and probably more entertaining.

 And yet.  At no point during watching did I actively hate anyone involved.  I didn't wish doom upon their houses, yea, unto the seventh generation.  I wasn't frantically Googling to make sure I hadn't missed some reason why this was considered a classic.  If I had a thought at all, it was "damn, I wish I could spend Christmas in the Bahamas."  Oh, yeah, it's a Christmas movie. 

Unrelated, but this is also the debut film of Judith Barsi, one of the saddest stories in child acting.  For my fellow 80s kids, she was the voice of Ducky in The Land Before Time.  At the age of ten, she and her mother were murdered by her father, an abusive alcoholic.  There's a little real-world horror for you.

All the Jaws films are currently streaming on Netflix.

Scream-O-Rama 2023 Day 6: Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)

  The first eight minutes of this movie are archival footage of Auschwitz concentration camp, the India-Pakistan partition, the Korean War, the civil war in Biafra, and the Vietnam war with a focus on the damage done to children.  I am so serious when I say please be aware before you begin.  

Content Warning:  concentration camp footage, medical experimentation, malnourished/starving children, amputees, war footage, self-immolation, napalm-burned children, child death

Weirdly, nothing else in the movie lives up to the real-life horror shown over the opening credits.  Everything else is just red paint.  The "dead bodies" even breathe.  We are not talking a commitment to realism here.

British tourists Tom (Lewis Fiander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome) are vacationing on the coast of Spain.  They decide to visit a locals-only island only to discover the island's children have collectively murdered all the adults.

I absolutely hate to give Stephen King any credit but Children of the Corn is a much better execution of this concept.  I have no idea what point the filmmakers here were trying to achieve.  The opening credits are about how children are unintentional (or purposeful) casualties in adult conflicts with grim footage and stats, but the movie is children killing maliciously which would seem to undercut the opening.  Are they innocent victims or cold-blooded perpetrators?  It seems like it's trying to be anti-war but it forces Tesco-brand-Donald-Sutherland to use violence to survive.

Also, this movie weirdly fetishizes children as 'not people' which I will chalk up to its time period.  Kids are also human beings.  They're just smaller with less general life experience.  A toddler with a gun can still kill you just as dead as an adult, so this idea that they're somehow paragons of innocence conflates ignorance with moral purity.  I'm just saying, nobody who ever baby-sat wrote this script.  I don't know that they've ever even seen a child except in books. 

Somehow this is a cult classic that is praised by critics.  Fortunately, it's really easy to avoid by not being available on any streaming services.

Scream-O-Rama 2023 Day 5: True Blood season 5

   Is this the season that's finally shitty enough to make me stop my absurd need for completion?  Nope!  Content warning:  gore

Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) continues to deal with the fallout that is her life and learns more about her Fae heritage.  Bill (Stephen Moyer) and Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) are arrested by the Authority, a vampire ruling council, and tasked with finding Russell Edgington (Denis O'Hare) or be killed themselves, only to discover they are actually pawns within a religious schism.  Meanwhile, back in Bon Temps, Jason (Ryan Kwanten), Hoyt (Jim Parrack), and Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) try to navigate their broken relationships with each other, a new hate group is targeting shifters, and Terry's (Todd Lowe) past from Iraq catches up with him.

This show remains the junk food of vampire TV.  It is so bad, but when you are in the mood, just satisfying enough to make you hate yourself later.  This is probably the most disconnected season and felt the furthest removed from its beginning.  Almost nothing revolved around Sookie's magical faerie vagina and which buff super-dude gets to have it.  That's kind of an improvement, if it wasn't immediately replaced by Hot Vampire Ladies in Your Area.  It was like someone at HBO was going to die if there wasn't a naked woman on screen every 10 minutes per episode.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-nudity but this show has always had a problem with how Male Gaze-focused it is.  At least they finally let Rutina Wesley be hot instead of constantly dialing her down.

The entire series is streaming on (sigh) Max.  This was a massively popular show a decade ago.

Scream-O-Rama 2023 Day 4: The Phantom of the Opera (1989)

  Hey, look!  It's an actual horror film of Phantom of the Opera instead of the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical!  I haven't seen one of those since 1925!  Content warning:  blood, gore, self-surgery

Christine Day (Jill Schoelen) is looking for the perfect piece of music for her audition and finds an obscure, unfinished opera deep in the archives of a library.  It is the lost work of Erik Destler (Robert Englund), a composer and serial killer from Victorian England who had grown obsessed with the career of a young soprano (also Jill Schoelen) and would stop at nothing to see her star rise.  Horribly disfigured from a deal with the devil, Destler hunts fresh victims for their skin, the only way he can appear semi-normal to Christine in order to woo her.

This was weirdly soothing to watch, especially after the crapfest that was yesterday's movie.  It does kind of feel like a Nightmare on Elm Street prequel but that's probably just because it's Robert Englund in a whole bunch of facial prosthetics.  Bill Nighy also appears as one of the theater owners, so that's fun.  I very much enjoyed this.  It is a little hard to track down but it's worth it if you're into classic horror.

Scream-O-Rama 2023 Day 3: Children of the Corn 3: Urban Harvest (1995)

  Day three and we're knocking out an unnecessary sequel!  Content warning:  gore, bad VFX

Joshua (Ron Melendez) and his little brother Eli (Daniel Cerny) are fostered by the Porters in Chicago after their father (Duke Stroud) is murdered by corn.  Joshua attempts to assimilate, making friends with the neighbors, trying to get along at school, but Eli resists.  Mrs. Porter (Nancy Lee Grahn) discovers that Eli has been sneaking off to the abandoned factory next door to tend his corn.

I cannot overstate how absolutely shitty this movie is.  Everything about it is awful.  The dialogue is bad, the acting is wooden, the plot makes zero sense, it's weirdly racist and misogynist despite having a predominantly Black cast (eau de White Savior sprayed all over), and the special effects are laughable.  The only reason to watch it is if you are a die-hard completionist.  There is a small cameo from a baby-faced Charlize Theron near the end (one of the crowd scenes) but that is absolutely not an endorsement to watch.  Everyone has to start somewhere.

It's currently streaming on (sigh) Max with all the other Children of the Corn movies.  Maybe 4 is better?  I have no idea.

Scream-O-Rama 2023 Day 2: Lake Placid (1999)

  Do creature features count as horror?  Let's say they do.  

When a Fish & Wildlife officer is disemboweled in Black Lake, paleontologist Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda) is dispatched to rural Maine to look at a tooth found in the victim's remains.  For reasons of her own, Kelly is disinclined to return to New York immediately and joins Sherriff Keough (Brendan Gleeson) and replacement Fish & Wildlife guy, Jack Wells (Bill Pullman), in their search for the murderous animal.  They are joined by rich eccentric mythology professor Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt), who is convinced a crocodile has found its way to the freshwater lake.

The dialogue in this movie remains as crisp as McDonald's Sprite.  Quip after quip, jokes building up to skyscrapers of humor.  I am appalled this isn't universally beloved.  There's some gore, some body parts and gross-out decomp, plus a couple of jump scares.  It's great and you should see it.  Unfortunately, it's only available for rent or buy but it's absolutely worth the money.  If you're looking for a horror comedy that's tween-appropriate, Lake Placid is it.

Scream-O-Rama 2023 Day 1: Rapture (Arrebato) (1979)

  Welcome to Spooky Season!  We're starting off with the weirdest vampire movie I have ever seen.  Now, I love vampires.  I love movies about movies.  So a movie about the vampiric nature of art creation should be something I enjoy.  Wrong!

José (Eusebio Poncela), a struggling filmmaker, receives a reel of film and a cassette from a weirdo he met with an inexplicable connection, much more avant-garde and experimental, but a shared love for the transcendence of art and also heroin.  The film and soundtrack detail Pedro's (Will More) documentation of himself sleeping.  An accident at first, but when he notices a section that's blanked out in the middle, a mystery to be solved.  But the missing sections keep growing the longer the camera is on him, and he fears that he is losing more than just film.

If the only Spanish movies you ever saw were this and Pain and Glory, you'd think that every single Spanish person was a bisexual heroin addict.  

It is an interesting movie but not one I enjoyed.  It's a lot of commentary on unhealthy obsessions in relationships, work, and recreation, the consuming power of art, and of course, drugs.  There are no real scares, everything is basically Vibes, there's no gore, very very little blood, and the main actor looks way too much like Riffraff from Rocky Horror.  It is currently streaming on Criterion.