Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

Some Guy Who Kills People (2011)

Frank Zito operates a mannequin store by day, moonlighting as a stalking serial killer at night, taking off their scalps, attaching them to mannequins in a room in the back of his residence. He becomes fixated with a photographer who could "be the one"...will she be another scalp in his collection? *****

Creepshow (1982) Oh yes, a face only a daughter could love. A belated Father's Day gift to all my readers. We should all leave our children reduced to madness, tears, rage, and murder like this scowling old geezer.

I wrote this review for my imdb account, but thought I'd share it on the blog with accompanying photographs.  imdb rating was 5/10

There are some films that kind of fly under the radar, going unnoticed. Despite the talented cast (Annette Bening, Aiden Quinn, Stephen Rea, Paul Guilfoyle, and Robert Downey, Jr.) and renowned director (Neil Jordan; The Company of Wolves & The Crying Game), In Dreams (1999) didn’t quite make any sort of impact. Compared to its significant budget for such a film as this, In Dreams is clearly a flop. Part of the reason, I guess, is perhaps the material—serial killer (played by Downey, Jr.) of little girls acting out due to a nightmarish upbringing (horrible mother leaving him in a town about to be submerged by water, creating a reservoir) with an artist (Bening) having dreams/visions that experience what he feels and sees—and that the film is more than a little intense (Bening slowly loses her mind because of her dreams; her daughter taken and killed, and her husband surprised and stabbed in the eye at a hotel, by Downey, Jr. doesn’t help her psychological state, either).

Deciding to go camping, two young women go ahead of their husbands (also buddies) to a certain wilderness outside San Diego...what the four of them doesn't expect is a psychopath and his ghost children living within the great outdoors! **

It is a rare term I ever use for a film, Hate. But I, without a shadow of doubt, no question, positively hate Halloween: Resurrection. Something about it (many things actually) just set up in my craw and flat piss me off. I had a bad taste after I left the theater in 2002 (Why did I do it? I kick myself for it anytime this abomination returns to my attention…), and I hadn’t watched it since. It came on The Movie Channel’s Saturday Splatterday, and, for the blog, I decided one last time to punish myself by watching it. I thought Halloween: H2O, while not a great film, was a nice close to the Michael Myers/Laurie Strode story, even if there were intentional in avoiding any connection to the Jamie Lloyd Halloween sequels. It was nice to allow Laurie Strode to once and for all silence this torment that had often reduced her to alcoholism. With one guillotine chop, Laurie had vanquished her tormenter once and for all. I thought the movie was also thankfully lean but not terribl

When I was a kid in the early 90s, I remember coming home to an excited brother who had rented this movie seen above, based on the box cover seen above. He was heavily anticipating it. Then he watched the movie and let's just say it didn't particularly go well. He was sorely disappointed. Just confirms that cool box art, so manipulatively awesome, was far better than the movie it was advertising. This is a lost art that I lament; sitting through the films was entirely different experience than when the eyes first catch the glimpse of the box art covers. The Forest (1982) is the first of a trio of "backwoods" type slashers to make the Scarecrow Summer Slasher 2013 (along with Don't Go into the Woods Alone & Sleepaway Camp 2), and I recall the most recent time I watched it, Code Red did a bang up job providing the film with some nice special features, an audio commentary and feature about the film's making. This is a low, low budget slasher (as many of the

Now this was a movie I hadn’t seen in a LONG time. Perhaps I should have let it remain that fond memory from childhood because tonight’s viewing (while a not too unpleasant diversion) didn’t ingratiate Firewalker (1986) into my good graces as an adult. God, did the critics hate this movie when it came out in the late 80s. It was quite a popular video rental. I remember it was of constant viewing at our birthday parties when the adults were a little lax on when to go to bed as long as we didn’t act like total hooligans. Leave it to Golan/Globus to try a buddy comedy meets Indiana Jones featuring “the lighter side of Chuck Norris”. He sits on a bar and watches as his partner, pal, and fellow adventurer, Louis Gossett Jr. (who, I think, is the member of the cast escaping relatively unscathed) continues to feel the pain when engaged in a one-sided pummeling to a local bruiser the size of a California Redwood before intervening on his behalf with a choke hold in less than a few seconds

 Gambir is a sculptor, tortured because of what lies within his specific kind of creations…pregnant women holding the aborted fetuses from his wife, Talyda (Marsha Timothy)! Talyda insists he does this because the sculptures fashioned from his talents seem to go for exorbitant prices, including one show at the end that completely sells every piece at the gallery. His agent insists he continues, knowing of the secret regarding the pregnant sculptures after one he bought broke, using this as leverage. Gambir’s torture doesn’t just reside with the fetus dilemma. He is seeing Indo script asking for his help from a little boy. He soon follows the kid’s bread crumbs to a company that offers rooms to clients with televisions that feature diabolical content not for the morally upright. One of the “shows” (perhaps a riff on reality television and our roles as peeping voyeurs who cannot resist) has a child under constant abuse from his berating mother and silent rage father (with volcanic o

Anytime we get the HBO free weekend at my house, I find myself watching The Descendants (2011) again. It’s funny, I realized that I had actually gone to the theater and seen two of Alexander Payne’s films: Sideways & About Schmidt. All three of these films deal with older men contending with emotional crises. I had returned from a nice Father’s Day dinner with my family, and Sideways was on, but I’m not the kind of viewer who really likes to come right into the middle of a film. I don’t like missing the details that might have been important prior to where the movie is currently when I arrive into it. Paul Giamatti is one of those wine connoisseurs at that stage of his life where the absence of love and a career that has stalled (he writes about wine for a living) present emotional agonies that pal Thomas Hayden Church has problems relating to. In About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson has a hard time adjusting to retirement and his daughter’s plans to wed shakes him a bit.   Th

I was kicking myself because I have to say I had a rather rollicking good time with Fast Five. I just could resist the vehicular carnage. The ending where the vault is used as a weapon to decimate buildings and policia cars (among other structures) by Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, culminating on the bridge is off-the-charts insane! I just faced the fact that movies with cars that tear it up, flip repeatedly, and smash into crashing heaps make me their bitch. The plot is some nonsense about Vin Diesel and Paul Walker “getting the band together” (or just an excuse to collect supporting characters from previous F & F films into an Ocean’s Eleven type group) to go after a drug lord’s millions of dollars, gathered up from various “cash houses” in Rio, transported to a vault in the policia’s own station. Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Jordana Brewster, Matt Schulz, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot (smokin’ hot), Tego Calderon, and Don Omar form this superteam that are united in taking every last