Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

Well, this year I thought I would try a different approach to my horror reviewing during Halloweenmonth in October, resembling diary entries. A lot of us really just want to watch movies without having to build one long review after another. I already have a "shortlist" developing of the films I want to watch this year. I have already decided I will kick October off with The Wolf Man, using it as my banner for 2013. I'm already anticipating this month with more than a bit of excitement. It'll be here (and over) before we know it. Good times ahead, just the same.

As you can see by the title featured in James Wan's take on the whole 'demonic possession/paranormal' activity' craze flooding the marketplace of horror for the last six years, this is quite the old school, traditional attempt at causing girls in the theater to shriek (and a few guys, as was the experience in the theater I saw this film) and a steady, long-term dread built as something perhaps hides within a clothing cabinet or in the darkened area behind a bedroom door, down in the cob-webbed, spider-infested cellar, inside a crawlspace used as a hiding place from terror (the irony of this is that it was once used as a place of refuge but soon becomes an area of fear). Wan doesn't shy away from the techniques available to him today (like the scene where a sheet flies off a clothing line forming a human figure, heading towards a window, revealing the witch's demonic spirit from inside one of the girls' rooms), and he (probably at the urgings of the Hollywo...

I’ll be talking in depth about this film, so exact spoilers will be acknowledged…like in most of my reviews, the proverbial cat is out of the bag (well, like in April Fool’s Day, and so many horror films, there’s a cat popping up to scare somebody and in my reviews spoilers are like that cat: to talk about films in depth, spoilers come with the territory). Every one or two years, I will watch certain movies. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but certain films—films that aren’t exactly great or spectacular—just seem to go down rather easily, not demanding much from you. I think you could watch April Fool’s Day (1986) almost intact on television with little censorship. I can’t call this a slasher. To me, April Fool’s Day isn’t any more a slasher than Student Bodies (1981). Primarily because there’s no real killing, and the “clever” ruse (if you don’t see that twist at the end coming a mile away even when watching it for the first time) at the end says the slasher genre is a...

 A young woman, in a car with girlfriends that accidentally drives off a bridge when they're racing some cocky guys, walks from the lake in one piece, in a daze and off kilter. As she attempts to get back to life, something seems to be missing, a personality and a desire to rejoin the human race. When she starts to see the creepy figure of a white-faced ghoul, this woman might have to examine his purpose for constantly appearing to her...could it have something to do with that crash? *****

On a trip at a cabin, a group of young adults come under attack from a demonic force desiring to possess their souls could arise to power on earth. A certain book, with specific incantations, if read can release the demonic force; can any of them stop the hell certain to be unleashed on them all? **½

A schoolteacher awakens after a car crash on the slab of a mortician who informs her of her demise. He seems equipped with the ability to talk to the dead. But is she actually dead and does this mortician truly have such a gift? Or is she alive and simply held captive by a lunatic? ***½

There are times where I just have to step back and take in the beauty. I mean, we admire the ocean waves at sunset or sunrise, the big, bright moon in the sky as the clouds dissipate, and the autumnal age of dying leaves as the summer slumbers away. Christina Ricci, as I was watching After.Life (2009) in preparation for an upcoming review for the blog, has a moment where her whole face engulfed my computer screen, and it was one of those breathtaking moments that resembles how I feel regarding events as described above.

Well, you sure picked a pretty shit-poor time to man-up, Rick. When skipping class for the hell of it because of a fire drill at school, JT and Rickie are out and about, locating the derelict mental institution, just screwing around, eventually finding the body of a young woman, wrapped in plastic, soon realizing that she's not...quite...dead. **½ To say I’m a bit exhausted after revisiting Deadgirl (2008) would be the understatement of the week. God, to say the protagonists made me sick would certainly be an apt statement. I cringe at the thought that this could happen. It is as much a study, I think, about how far alienated loners, cast to the side, on the bottom rungs of the high school ladder, might go in order to gain access to pleasure, achieve a sense of power and control--to be the rulers of their own private universe, so to speak--and attain their own private nirvana absent the pitfalls that come with unremarkable lives…through this, they fall into such an im...