Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

What am I getting myself into? Well, I already know this will be AWFUL thanks in part to the mercilessly droning narrator talks about juvenile delinquency (???), and there's this laughably sparely furnished police station with an Ed Wood picture hanging on the wall (why???). An old couple screech about something nightmarish (that old wife actress is especially wretchedly dreadful) before being led out of the station. Later, after something regarding "those crazy kids and their delinquent ways" (dancing about outside a Sonic drive-in: to shame!), a mauling where a group of bullies pound some unfortunate joker before snatching his cash while some girl watches in boredom (!), and a car wreck (with a shot of some driver dead outside a window; this is Ed setting up a "poignant artistic shot of tragedy"), there's the finale of a bad date where the girlfriend slaps the boyfriend for trying for a little nookie. The boy runs after the girl while some "gho

 ** ½ Here’s the thing about The Houses October Built: it gives away the horror before the whole shebang gets started. When you see a damaged beauty tossed in a trunk with a camera recording her awakening from unconsciousness, the gig is up before the buildup can even start. So we immediately know that whatever happens to the gaggle of RV-traveling friends isn’t going to end well. The whole premise builds on the embracing of, demand and desire for danger…something “extreme”. You can just hear, “Be careful what you wish for” rolling around in your mind as this found footage effort (sort of a document of the six days to Halloween, interviewed subjects who work at and are customers of scare houses, as friends who grew up together take a trip to various haunts across Texas and eventually into Nawlins) unfolds. That’s not to say I didn’t like it. I found it quite creepy (when our group finally encounter what they are looking for, they get more than they bargained for, including a

 * ½ Welcome to the cursed earth, Jack. Sadly, it takes a whole 65 minutes to get to the Pharaoh Mummy, so I’m not particularly endorsing the first killer tomb mummy movie that seems to have come down the pike in a while. At least it isn’t overblown with CGI bugs and Brendan Fraser mimicking Indiana Jones, but Day of the Mummy   doesn’t exactly set off a 4 th of July fireworks display of awesomeness either. One thing I got pretty tired of after a while was Danny Glover and his demands in Egyptologist/archeologist Jack finding a particular stone. Glover’s face is a constant, showing up in a frame to the lower left hand corner of Jack’s glasses requesting over and over, ad nauseum, a diamond of priceless worth believed to be with the body of a long lost Pharaoh reputed to have finally been discovered by a missing archeologist. I was worn down by Glover’s face and his expectations in Jack acquiring the stone that the film became taxing for me.