Sam’s End of the Halloween Season Horror Movie Roundup
I love horror movies, and have done since I was a teenager. Every year in October, I try to watch as many as I can. Here are five I loved that you may or may not have seen, that I can recommend for better or worse!
- The Dead Zone
This movie really impressed me. The root of many a trope about psychics in movies and TV, we witness Christopher Walken get many a headache, gripping hands to tightly and falling over a lot. But, in this original movie, it doesn’t feel overplayed. It’s a tense adaption of a Steven King novel that is given even more gravitas by Walken’s odd and stilted performance. I found this to be an enthralling and interesting psychic melodrama, with a satisfying and un-guessable ending.
2. The Babadook
I’d heard a lot of buzz around this one before I sat down and watched it. It’s a tried and tested premise (The Babadook is a Sleep demon) but executed well and is genuinely creepy. Like many a good horror, it isn’t ‘Really’ about a sleep demon, and is much more about how a family struck by tragedy cope with grief and mental illness, and try to deal with the real world. It somehow seems to manage to be full of horror movie clichés, and still be spooky and unnerving. Big additional props to the child actor in this for doing a great job as ‘Standard Creeped out Haunted Child Horror Character #319’. Mr Babadook might be the best sleep demon since Freddy. Speaking of:
3. Freddy Vs Jason
This is a glorified monster stand off movie, in the vein of ‘Godzilla vs Anyone’. The supporting cast are forgettable and cliché, act like idiots and get murdered, as is tradition. Kelly Rowland (from Destany’s Child!) is in it, and does a noticeably awful job, even by ‘teenagers only in a film to be hacked to death’ standard.
The thing that makes this one a winner is the monsters themselves. The make up and physicality on both characters is great, the reason for them to meet is imaginative, and there are some seriously gorgeous cinematic shots used to frame them both (Freddy cinematically leaping from the lake in slow motion is a shot worthy of a much better movie). We get a return to a less sarcastic and more scary Freddy, we get the unblinking savagery of Jason, and plenty of top notch and well executed kills. Is it citizen Kane? No. Is it a perfect topper to many, many years of exploitative, violent and all out fun slasher movies? You betchya!
4. Inbred
This one took me by surprise. I put it on expecting absolute pure crap, and found a bit of a hidden gem. This is an exploitation splatter movie of a surprisingly high calibre. If you’ve ever thought to yourself ‘What If the Texas Chainsaw Massacre happened in Rural Yorkshire?’ This is the movie for you.
Achingly low budget, the cast deliver surprisingly great performances and the monstrous townsfolk are both believable and genuinely intimidating. Double points are awarded for the imagination surrounding the manner of death for most involved. I’ve never before seen a ferret based jump scare, and I loved it. If you are in the mood for an ultra violent but satisfying British splatterfest, give this a little look.
5. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
This movie is straight up amazing. Released in 1978, it has some of the best physical FX I’ve seen in any movie. You think of the 80s as being the prime time for monster effects, but this one looks absolutely stunning. Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy and a very young Geoff Goldblum all deliver amazing performances. This movie is tense, claustrophobic, paranoid and wonderfully serious. It’s freaky in all the right ways.
The premise is a simple one. Everyone you know and love is being slowly replaced with alien replicants, who are calm and unfeeling. They do only what’s best for them, then try and convince you you’re missing out by not being one of them, and life would be better if they were in charge. It’s one of the most fitting analogies for the Conservative party ever put to screen.
There you go! If you fancy a scare other than the one of the impending threat of Corona Extinction, have a watch of some of these.
