Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

Fred Dekker might have been hurt career-wise by his two films' lack of box office success, but sometimes, as John Carpenter can attest, the future can often be more kind than the audience of a particular release date. As we know now of "The Monster Squad", Dekker's output, as minuscule as it is, the two middle 80s films, have since their time developed favorable statuses. Asking me to choose between the two is difficult but "The Monster Squad" (1987) slightly edges out "Night of the Creeps" (1986). That's not to say "Night of the Creeps" isn't a delight I appreciate from a favored era of my youth and well watched sci-fi/horror through the late 80s and early 90s. Most of that is Atkins, of course, as a grizzled cop with a traumatic past, having walked up on an old flame being hacked to death by a lunatic from a mental institution. Later admitting to Lively's Chris he hunted down and shotgunned the escaped nutcase, the film c...

This will be an addition to a fresh revisit tonight. User comments from October 2008 Events that occur in 1959 come back to haunt a campus of college kids, in 1986, when a cryogenically frozen body with alien crawlies inside his brain is accidentally released by pals, Chris(Jason Lively)and JC(Steve Marshall)trying to fulfill a fraternity prank. An escaped lunatic/ax murder in 1959, killed by young cop Ray Cameron, will haunt him years later as he has progressed into a much older, bitter, alcoholic Detective(Tom Atkins, in one of the signature roles of his career) called on the case to solve the mysterious deaths of open faced corpses which explode the alien leeches after their incubation cycles have completed. Once these alien crawlies enter into the mouths of their hosts, the human ceases to live, only becoming a host for the leeches to grow within the their brains. It's love-at-first-sight for Chris who falls head-over-heels for Cynthia(Jill Whitlow), quite a virginal cutie...

Boy, that ceremony in St Bartolph's when the luscious Munro is bathed in blood while Neame's Satanic rites are propelled inside the sanctuary as music from tapes on a player emit a certain vibe while the brood in attendance seem lost in some cult fix stirring up Dracula's return is the very epitome of cringe. Setting the film in 1972 might have seemed like a novel idea I'm sure. But Lee remains in the condemned church, set to be demolished, and so besides the fresh batch of young victims Neame's Alucard provides Dracula making up the British youth scene of the time and a modern Van Helsing played by Cushing in London this particular sequel doesn't ever capitalize on what a vampire in 70s London might have looked like. And there is only so many times Dracula can fall on a stake, turn to ash, with his dried blood and deteriorating bones leaving behind few remains until it just doesn't thrill anymore. But Neame is a great secondary heel, and he just seemed bor...

Ralph Bates' Lord Courtley proposes to three gentlemen of high society quite the experience unlike any other if they are willing to sell their soul and drink from the blood of Dracula, collected at the sight of the Count himself by a buyer and seller of antiquities, odds and ends, items of peculiarity and the like. The cloak, clasp, signet ring, and dry blood all of what remains of Dracula, Lord Courtley fully prepared with payment from the "circle" to resurrect the Count through Satanic ceremony. The men, not quite aware of what they really are part of, embellish Courtley but after he drinks from the blood, they just can't do it. They attack him as he demands they follow him in the blood drink ritual, leaving Dracula, resurrecting from the body of Courtley, to seek revenge for his "fallen disciple". The scholarly Secker, sweaty, nervy Paxton, and bossy, scruff Harwood just couldn't drink the blood. But their canes and kicks made sure Courtley woul...

One last time on the blog. The Hammer Dracula series could whip up some doozies to bring the Count back to torment families, wreck lives, and bite the delicious necks of plentiful women, particularly the young voluptuous European beauties of the time. Monsignor Ernst exorcized and added a golden cross at the door of Castle Dracula. Unfortunately he left behind a weak, easy-to-henpeck local priest with very little faith. Amazing what the castle's shadow could even do...leave a lady dead under the cathedral bell in the tower. But as powerful in the faith as Ernst is, Dracula has his Catholic minion to do his bidding. What does Ernst have? A niece as quite the candy for Dracula to taste, potential new member of the family in his niece's beau who happens to be a fit atheist studying to be a doctor, and a sister who is no match for the sinister vampire. Zena, quite an eyeful often subject to the playful fancies of the local tavern boys, is the perfect folly for Dracula...

The place where horror films become classics are often as or almost as iconic as what happens there. I think that's never more true than in "The Evil Dead" (1981). The film opens with a pleasant enough ride to the cabin, friends in a beat up Olds just readying for a fun stay over a few days. When the film arrives to the cabin, after Scott nearly hits a truck and two fishermen wave at them, there's a presence in the woods, and the swing bops the side of the building. Join us! Soon the rickety cabin, clearly a disregarded place left to rot in its isolation, becomes an unsafe location. No safety indoors or out, the bridge upended, retreating through the wilderness or a trail not an option. This film gives us quite a misbegotten refuge for the evil to congregate. They are called by an incantation, a former visitor to the cabin, his voice on tape reading from the Book of the Dead. The cool knife with the skull handle doing some damage, as severed hands com...

I totally get why "The Evil Dead" (1981) may not be every horror fans kind of flick. The demon tree violation of Cheryl alone might be enough to turn off some horror fans. Linda's demon giggle is appropriately obnoxious and grating. There are technical issues such as when Ashley is smashing Linda outside with the plankboard and you can see her makeup and wig change scene to scene. The amount of blood that splashes Ashley is outrageous with even a basement pipe bursting with a cavalcade of red just splattering him. And this happens over and over so I get it. This was made by hungry, very talented college kids with a passion that is so obvious. The number of gaffes and botches are there and glaring but the imagination and creativity in how he shot the demons, the way they die, various angles in and out of the cabin; Sam Raimi visually displays a lot of that mad genius despite the opposition of growing and development as a young filmmaker. Shelly in the...

 I was snatching away my 2009 user comments from the IMDb account for the 2007 anthology, "Trick 'r Treat", when I just scanned other users' comments for the film. It astonished me, although I shouldn't be surprised, how mixed the reaction was for the film. Lots of 1/10, with the question, "Worst film of all time?" I'm not a snob who takes folks to task for not liking something I do. But this is too well made to ever be sentenced to the same league of rotten as "Children of the Living Dead" (2001). It's like to make an outrageous point folks rate a film as low as possible. As obnoxious as those ratings are, I am all for the freedom for them to attack any all films even if I couldn't disagree more. Boring and pretentious and a waste of time are thrown around quite a bit. Yes, I think that QT style of storytelling was definitely influencing Dougherty with how he told his anthology. So he's considered pretentious. The tales involve...

 F our tales of terror are weaved within the tapestry of a modernized anthology, the various stories inside an unknown city and it's specific suburban neighborhood shot in the Tarantino-like method where we see certain characters, and their stories represented in shuffled form, alternating between past or present, a disheveled but coherent(amazingly)presentation that defies the anarchy which might oftentimes occur in such a dizzying format. A principal(!), Steven(Dylan Baker),actually poisons candy, burying kids that annoy him in his back yard! Oh, and he allows his boy child in on his grisly activities. While her sister and girlfriends scour a new city for "fresh meat", Laurie(Anna Paquin), dressed, interesting enough, in her little red riding hood outfit, is a "virgin" on the lookout for her own potential suitor, and it appears her life could be threatened by a vampire. But, who is actually preying on who? An "idiot savant", named Rhonda(Samm Todd)is...

 I remember feeling at the time I first watched this that it was almost on par with the first film. It gives you the same location, features and bumps off Tunneler and Leech Woman, does more with the beach and ocean locations, gives Blade more chance to cut and gash, even introducing the memorable Torch, surprisingly hints at the death of a kid with a whip imitating Indiana Jones, gives us a different side to Andre Toulon that is more sinister and obsessive, offers a nice bit of back story to before we first saw Toulon in the original, and is a trivia footnote for Full Moon fans due to stop motion effects dynamo David Allen as director of this second Puppet Master film. User comments from September 2010

 I had these user comments from late October 2006. It seems I must have watched an edit from cable television.

 Sort of similar to a few years ago when I watched an AMC edit of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), I decided to throw on a SYFY repeat of Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) tonight after recording an evening showing. I watched some of it off SYFY last night. It's just not a film I feel anything towards, honestly. Just rather an empty calories kind of overall experience. It's too long, too dreary, too dark, the camera shakes and placements often frenzied and histrionic (and off-kilter) to excess for a particular "raw" effect, and Zombie just had to give all his crew small parts.. The SYFY edit uses, obviously, the escape involving Easterbrook, Towles, and Moseley as security guards he annihilates during a botched transfer. Excised is the Lew Temple rape in Michael's hospital room. This viewing, without the profanity and nudity, absent [some of the more excessively] descriptive sexual language, and carefully avoiding prolonged gore (Forsythe's slit throat i...

"These are the eyes of a psychopath."  Rob Zombie's "Halloween" (2007) wasn't on my schedule at all in the coming weeks, or even months, but SYFY was showing it so I gave it a spot. Look, this to me is a serial killer movie. I have personally divorced it from the Carpenter film or any of others following it. Rob doesn't go for anything Shape related or "force of evil" or "the Boogeyman". Michael is a product of shitty home environment and an urge to violently massacre cats and a douchebag bully who ends up on the wrong end of a nearby tree stick. The rotten mommy boyfriend, slutty sister, baby not yet able to fully understand the hell her domestic situation could (but wouldn't) become, and stripper mom who loves him but can't seem to find a decent man not a complete asshole; the home front isn't exactly ideal. With lots of noise, shouting matches, cancerous attitudes, and descriptive profanity, the family mornings certainl...

  ***/***** This is a brief 60+ minute thriller from early era Lugosi, who often would go studio to studio, consistently working even as his star power wasn't rewarded despite the name value. This was a Columbia picture, set mostly at the mansion of a murdered Richard Rhinehart (Tully Marshall), while the reoccurring subplot involving a scientist, Arthur Horsnby (George Meeker), preparing a suspended animation experiment along with being buried alive is given importance, too. But there is also a maniac on the loose (fascinating trivia tidbit I read was that the actual actor behind the part is not credited or known) stabbing victims in the back with a sharp knife and leaving behind a newspaper piece with his front page headline for cops (or anyone discovering the bodies) to find. There is a clever twist at the end to coincide with the maniac (Edwin Mitchell) on the loose, essentially dressed as a vagabond, with dirty face and missing teeth. The very final scene with Mitchell address...

  So after watching "Creepshow" (1982), Hal Holbrook being in it and all, I just had to revisit "The Fog" (1980) and while preparing for it, I couldn't help but decide for a fun Saturday night and early Sunday Carpenter marathon. I have been wanting to revisit "Someone's Watching Me" (1978) anyway. I knew I wouldn't be able to get it in October this year due to other plans, so why not tonight? There are little things about "The Fog" I'll mention but I see no other reason to go into the meat and potatoes anymore. I've done that. I think one of the reasons this is such pleasure for me beyond its cast and the fog and lighthouse as characters themselves is the various California locations. This reminds me of just why many who lived there being taxed to death are so reluctant to leave. Carpenter can just point out into the ocean, so blue and comforting, with the wide scope of the aspect ratio capturing a great length of beach when ...

  It was 1990, summer camp, and my camp counselor was really cool. He let the boys who were older teens smoke and curse, and one night we even got the chance to watch horror movies. Well, then I had my reservations about scarier horror films. I watched a few "starter horror films" like "The Gate", "The Monster Squad" and "The Lost Boys". But "Creepshow" (1982) was a whole other animal. I wasn't quite ready for a human eating monster in a crate or the decaying and incredibly strong corpse of a homicidal grouch twisting his ancestor's head  completely around. I did eventually get around to sitting through it. Then again and again and again. Surprisingly I hadn't until yesterday a physical DVD copy, only a rather so-so VHS which I keep around boxed up. Before the VHS copy, I would notice it on AMC or borrow the HBO recording from my uncle. You could find it on cable or a satellite premium channel. "Creepshow" certainl...

  I didn't want to move on to something else without concentrating a little energy on the zombies and elaborate gore. Using a shovel to separate half a head with the eyes still moving or a body leaning over with entrails spilling out or a severed head with connecting wires giving pained expressions leave definite awe...and definite shock. But a hand reaching into a victim's eye socket as he screams when a zombie is prying apart his face, neck flesh pulled from the neck by zombie teeth on multiple occasions, a victim's entire head to his neck while crying out in agony is ripped slowly by zombies from the body, and while being held down, a victim's lower torso is opened with all the organs and intestines torn away; "Day of the Dead" (1985), with John Harrison's score seemingly fitting with the zombie carnage expectedly closing the film, wasn't about to lag behind its predecessor in terms of unloading graphic violence on the audience without detailing the...