And thanks to Hollywood’s love of the genre (cheap production + big profit = never-ending output), you’ve got plenty of choices to create your own little fright-fest.
Of course, the problem with horror flicks is that they vary widely in quality, so The Video Guy will try to steer you along the scariest course.
A HIDDEN TREAT
There’s something about horror that makes the anthology film a perfect fit, and the latest example is the criminally dissed TRICK ’R TREAT (R, 3 stars), which sat on Warner Bros. shelves for more than two years before finally getting released on DVD in time for Halloween.
I’m shocked that this never got a proper theatrical release, given the rapturous word of mouth from the blogosphere and strong showings at festivals across the country.
Writer-director Michael Dougherty intricately weaves four tales of murder and mayhem into a seamless package. It could have gone wrong, but it’s a testament to his passion for this project that it all comes together.
The stories revolve around a local principal (Dylan Baker), who likes to have a little too much Halloween fun with his son; a young woman (Anna Paquin) who seems to have trouble with guys; a group of kids making a pilgrimage to the site of a bus crash; and a grumpy old man (Brian Cox) who receives a most unwanted trick-or-treater.
Without revealing too much, “Trick” is the rare (recent) horror film that doesn’t feel the need to punish the viewer with torture devices and grim brutalization. Instead, the movie wants to give us good, old-fashioned scares. It’s the kind of movie that you can watch without feeling the need to take a shower after, or figure out the complex mythology behind a serial killer’s motives.
The fact some people you’ve actually heard of – good actors who have real careers – signed up for the project and seemed to have fun with the work is a welcome relief from the generic 20-somethings that normally populate horror films.
Dougherty originally envisioned this as a film that could have multiple sequels, spinning off different little tales, but given its history, he’ll have to be satisfied with the original becoming a Halloween staple for years to come.
GONE WRONG
I’ve been an ardent supporter of the “Wrong Turn” franchise – I thought the first one was surprisingly effective for a major studio release and the second was an off-the-wall hoot helped by a bizarre performance from Henry Rollins.
But I’ve got to draw the line at WRONG TURN 3: LEFT FOR DEAD (R, 1 1/2 stars), which doesn’t skimp on the blood and guts but delivers a plot and characters that are sleep-inducing.
Look, I don’t come into horror movies hoping for complex characterizations, but I’d like to think that the folks behind these films are actually trying to do something artistic.
But all hopes of that are lost within the first five minutes, when a buxom young woman takes off her top for no reason at all and then remarks about the quality of said bosoms before – wait for it – taking an arrow right through one of them.
From there, the film devolves into a splatterfest ruined by poor computer graphics, and the main plot, which concerns the transport of a group of prisoners hijacked in the West Virginia (actually Bulgarian) woods and menaced by mutated hillbilly Three Finger.
Any time there’s a movie about prisoners, there’s a primary bad guy, a secondary bad guy, a good guy and the guards, and you get those stock characters here. They are all uniformly bad, and all seem to be struggling to hide their European accents.
All the creativity seems to have gone into the dispatching of these characters; I would be all for that, except the budget strings are evident when everything is done through computers. This renders most of the kills with such a fake vibe that it ruins the whole mood. I don’t know, maybe I’ve seen too many horror movies, but this is my No. 1 pet peeve about the genre.
If you’re really looking for a good hillbilly horror movie (and who isn’t?), skip this one and stick with part 2.
CLASSIC FUN
One of The Video Guy’s favorite films as a youngster was the 1986 horror classic NIGHT OF THE CREEPS (R, 3 1/2 stars), which seemed destined to live in obscurity because it wasn’t available on modern home video formats. (I still have my taped-off-HBO VHS copy.)
But thanks to fan input, the film is finally getting a proper re-release on DVD and Blu-ray just in time for Halloween, which gives you a chance to catch this fun homage to horror.
No, this is not a high-quality film. It proudly wears its B- movie status with plenty of winks and nods to other films. Director Fred Dekker (who also made the cult classic “The Monster Squad”) seems to be more interested in eliciting chuckles than scares, but both are here in great supply.
When two nerdy college kids take part in a fraternity stunt in the hopes of impressing a girl, they accidently unleash an alien parasite that just so happened to crash land in the same place in 1959.
Upon its release, the alien begins to run rampant on the college campus, turning its victims into zombies. On the case is Detective Cameron (Tom Atkins, in a classic role), who was a rookie cop in 1959 and has spent the remainder of his career in some sort of time warp, grumbling about today’s kids and speaking like an old gumshoe.
Cameron has some of the film’s best lines, and Atkins is clearly having a blast playing this character. The cast doesn’t have a lot of big names otherwise, but they all seem to get what Dekker is doing and play their parts appropriately.
One of the bonuses on this release is an informative commentary from Dekker, who delves into what he was thinking with the project, a great wealth of information for people like me who have loved this film for years.
But if this is your first time, get ready to have a lot of fun with the kind of horror movie they don’t make anymore.
SMALL FRIGHTS
Yes, ORPHAN is another evil-kid flick, featuring two good actors in Peter Saarsgard and Vera Farmiga. No, it doesn’t make it a good movie. … SPLINTER is not for the faint of heart, as a parasite starts to break down the body parts of those who touch it. … A mother makes the off-kilter decision to keep her stillborn fetus and raise it as a baby in GRACE. … In the mood for some disturbing horror from France? Then MARTYRS is your movie.
