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Horror Films

Swifty said:
Sleepaway Camp (1983) ...

Rocker Bruce Springsteen's sister played Angela in the sequels .. I was particularly fond of the fire cracker up the nose gag in Pt 2 ..



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Just watched it yesterday. The firecracker was in part 3.
 
Sinister 2: The detective (now a PI) from Sinister continues his investigations into the slayings of families. He meets a woman with 2 young sons, who is restoring furniture in a church where a massacre took place. The Ghoul is back, this time sending ghostly children to sscreen home-films to one of the boys.

These reels show the the murder of families: hung upside down over a river, eaten alive by alligators; electrocuted etc.

Its pretty good, but I think some of the story ended up on the cutting floor. Some very extreme images. Not for the fainthearted or those planning a visit to the dentist. 7/10

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2752772/
 
Recently saw The Gift. It made me feel a bit nostalgic because it put me in mind of a string of stranger danger/stalker thrillers from the late eighties early Nineties..(The hand that rocks the Cradle, Misery, Fatal Attraction, etc)The focus on the upwardly mobile youngish couple in a new house and even the chilled ambient music took me right back.
It's a reactionary subgenre really: the subtext is `you can't trust anyone`. Anyway, I used to like them because they give you the thrills and spills of horror without need for the hocum (which I'm sometimes in the mood for, and sometimes not). The Gift somehow made a daylit room in a modern house appear scary!

Also they gave good villain roles to actors: Joe Pascali is great in one of my favourites: Unlawful Entry (the original cop-gone-bad movie).

The Gift did put a modern twist on it though,by making the psycho a lot more easy to relate to than the others and (without giving too much away) having an ending that isn't quite what you'd expect. A sociologist might make out that this tells us something about how America has changed in the meantime: it is less sure of itself now.

Quite a downbeat movie really.
 
Return to Bablyon, a silent movie released in 2013. Whilst its not a horror movie in itself, alot of the footage does contain some bizarre and frightful morphed images that were not meant to be in the movie.:eek:

1.jpg 2.jpg 3.jpg
 
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Lesson of the Evil: The real sociopath serial killer Japanese schoolteacher from Hell! By day a nice, respected teacher, by night an anti-Dexter. He has a knack for making his killings look like suicide or the work of others who then "commit suicide".

Not for the faint hearted. 8/10.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2294473/
 
Odd Thomas: Horror/Fantasy/Thriller with a vein of dark comedy; based on the book by Dean R. Koontz. Odd Thomas sees dead people, actually they come to him seeking justice. So effectively hes a psychic detective, uncovering murderers. He has other powers and can see when dark spirits gather, so he kows a dreadful slaughter is going to occur.

Good enough but it felt like a superior TV movie at times. 6.5/10.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1767354/
 
Odd Thomas was meant to be a franchise-starting blockbuster, but got caught up in various problems. You can tell because the special effects aren't too polished in the version that did get released. It did introduce me to Gugu Mbatha-Raw, so not all bad (I know she was in Doctor Who beforehand, but I didn't put a name to the face back then).
 
The legendary and excellent The Thing, Kurt Russell, 1982, full film streaming and now for your free viewing pleasure :drink:


... then visit Tod at www.outpost31.com

edit: The Thing has been taken off line.
 
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The Thing Blu-ray is a thing (hah!) of beauty. Plus you can't go wrong with a Carpenter/Russell commentary.
 
Soldiers Of The Damned: Time Slips, Spontaneous Human Combustion, The Occult Section of the SS Ahnenerbe. Yes this film is full of Fortean tropes.

Set in Russia in 1944 the Nazis are on the retreat. The commander of a Wermacht Special Forces Unit has clashed with an SS officer over the execution of civilians, shades of The Eagle has landed, This unit (accompanied by the SS officer) is now charged with bringing a female representative of the Ahnenerbe Institute into a forest behinfd Russian lines on a secret mission.

This is no ordinary forest, it has a reputation of being haunted and a company of paratroopers disappeared there in 1942. Some members of the expedition see runing figures, hear strange voices. An oddly mutilated body is discovered. It becomes clear that a previous mission into the forest following the same orders met with disaster.

Directed by Mark Nuttall, starring Lucas Hansen, Gil Darnell and Miriam Cooke. An effective Horror/Thriller: 7/10.

Duratio: 99 minutes/

DVD £7.99 Amazon.com HMV.com

http://www.soldiersofthedamned.com/

http://www.safecrackerpictures.com/
 
And talking of Russia...should you think that `Russian Horror` is a contradiction in terms, think again!

Viy (1967) is often touted as the first (and maybe only) Soviet horror film. Indeed, with it's mad but seductive witch, flying coffins and troop of demons it's a bit like the more extravagant end of 60's Hammer horror flicks. In fact it is a dark fantasy fable taken from a Gogol story. It is very absorbing: well photographed and tightly scripted and full of black humour.

Then there is Psychosis (2009). Three young Muscovites stay at a remote dacha which once belonged to the grandmother of one of their party - who was a witch. If they can stay three nights there then they get to keep the place. This features a lot of serious creepiness - drawn out nightmare scenes filmed through colour filters, and a possession scene acted with horrible conviction. This is supposedly based on a true story!

Both films can easily be streamed on Youtube, with English subtitles.
 
A classic (and not to be confused with the crapfest remake):



Goofy but fun shlock from the drive-in era:

 
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Blood Moon: A Werewolf Western. Bank robbers bushwack stagecoach passengers little knowing that the keeper of the rest station they had stopped at was just killed by a Werewolf (called a Skinwalker by Indians). Now passengers and robbers come under siege by the creature.

Meanwhile a Town Marshall and an Indian tracker (who knows a thing or two about Skinwalkers) are in pursuit of the robbers.

Good Horror/Western. 6.5/10.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3529110/
 
My favourite line in The Omega Man is the one about Cheston living in a "honky paradise". Ah, the 70s. Also, It's Alive is typical Larry Cohen silliness, but John P. Ryan plays it like it's Hamlet, and makes it really engrossing.
 
GNC said:
My favourite line in The Omega Man is the one about Cheston living in a "honky paradise". Ah, the 70s. Also, It's Alive is typical Larry Cohen silliness, but John P. Ryan plays it like it's Hamlet, and makes it really engrossing.
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People say that Heston emptied the submachinegun before he drove into the garage. (And he did.)
But watch the scene again.

Time index 1:01 -- Two fresh magazines on the passenger seat.

Time index 1:23 -- He leans down for a fresh mag.
 
H8RZ: An explosion and fire in a school lab at night, three dead, one seriously injured, one student with superficial wounds. The survivor is questioned by a School Board lawyer in the hope that the school will be absolved of any liability for the incident.

A strange tale emerges in flashbacks. A group of students had cheated on a test but were caught. To make up for this disaster they then hacked into the school computer to alter their grades. All seems well.

But then they start to get texts and emails, apparently from a student who had committed suicide over a year ago.

A good Horror/Thriller, a few implausibilities prevent it from being a great one. 7/10.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3382888/
 
The Stranger: Vampirism as an illness. been done before but this has an interesting. THe Stranger arrives in a Canadian town looking for his wife to find that she is dead and buried. He runs foul of local thugs annd is killed but rises again and deals with thugs who now attack those who helped him.

Good Vampire film. 7/10.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2238470/?ref_=nv_sr_2
 
Last Shift: A rookie cop turning up for her first night on duty is left in charge of a police station which is being closed down. All call are supposed to be diverted to the new station but she keeps getting calls from a girl who is in danger. An odd street person wanders into the station, strange noises, objects fly around.

It turns out that Mansonite cultists committed suicise at the station after being caught at a murder scene..

Yes, its Assault On Precinct 13, with Evil Spirits. 7/10.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2965466/
 
New Polish horror movie Demon was starting to get a buzz on the festival circuit, and then, a few days after the premiere, it's 42-year old director was found dead in his hotel room :(
What makes yesterday’s news that Marcin Wrona was found dead in a Portland hotel room especially stinging, though, is that the Polish filmmaker was clearly on the verge of becoming a major player with a bright future. He was only 42.

“Demon hinges on a dybbuk, the spirit of a dead person who according to Jewish mythology haunts the living. The film, Wrona’s third, was an unconventional approach to Poland’s coming to terms with the Holocaust.”

The trailer for Demon (below) is both chilling and captivating with detectable shades of Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski with a dash of Lars von Trier—and it looks fantastic!
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http://www.theblood-shed.com/demon-director-found-dead-in-portland-hotel/

Trailer NSFW:

 
Should you want a reminder that made-for-TV films can be very bit as effective as their big screen counterparts, then take a peek at Disappearance (USA, 2002).

It begins like a IHTM type tale: a family en route to somewhere else pay an idle visit to an old mining ghost town in the middle of nowhere. Their car stalls, and moblie coverage is down, and so they have to stay the night. They stumble on a left behind cam corder shot made by a family that had previously been marooned there in a like manner. It doesn't look good....

The all-American family at the centre of it all are initially a bit annoying (by dint of that very fact), but become more sympathetic as the events unfold. The production values and score are all up-to-the mark.The premise is hardly original but it transcends that failing in the end.

There are no gore shocks here:it's a puzzler, and one which doesn't tie up all the loose ends for you.
 
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