Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

Damn, Epps as Detective Denver can take a lot of stabs! They are Trick and will continue to grow unless Reyes and Adair follow behind, with Epps riding shotgun, and stop them. So this sets up a sequel. Why would I go ahead and say that, you might ask? Because it is a slasher film with Farmer and Lussier clearly hoping Trick could be a potential franchise. Sort of a variation on The Strangers, where folks in town thrown on face paint and skull/jack-o-lantern masks and represent Trick (Niemann), stabbing locals in Benton, New York. Epps is so perplexed because it appears no matter what he (or other cops) do to (Pa)Trick, he keeps returning time and again to stab more and more locals, Halloween after Halloween, seemingly stemming from "spin the stabby knife" where he was to kiss a high school guy. I thought to myself, "Surely, this isn't the reason Patrick would go ballistic!" Just don't kiss the guy! Fucking hell. Each person stabbing Epps at the end, while Ni

 What I was thinking of while watching this was how it is just the perfect kind of designed horror film. You might ask, why. Because there are scenes designed specifically for us to yell at the screen, "Noooo! Don't fucking go down there! What do you think you are doing?! Don't do that! Go the other direction! Leave!" And, of course, they do exactly what we scream at the screen not to do.  Never ever never ever walk into that dark room in a basement. And even if you do that, never ever never ever go down the cavernous dark tunnel further into whatever it might lead. If Keith decided to be a stupid idiot and do it doesn't mean you have to.  I love how AJ curses and everyone is taken aback by him. He's just a scumbag who works in Hollywood and debates raping a costar for a sitcom pilot. He just makes things more and more worse, even calling her while drunk. They tell him to lay low and he ends up at a rental property in Detroit, this lone Airbnb among a downtrod

Fargeat paints the whole movie red…talk about a movie that BLEEDS. This bad boy gushes red all over the place. I will tell you what got me…the scene in the cave where Jen (Lutz, who has one hell of an arc) needs to tend to a nasty torso wound with a tree stick protruding. She took some swigs of a Mexican Beer taken from the first scumbag she knife stabbed in the face/eyes, opened up the aluminum, lit it up over an open fire, and planted the heated and opened can to her wound. That was after Jen was able to barely swallow down some strong, hallucinogenic peyote, make heated knife cuts on the flesh around the stick wound, and pull the stick from the wound. I think Fargeat was like, “Rambo III, Shmambo III. I’ll take it to the next level.” Well, she are hell did.  I get that the opening 20 minutes will irk those who feel the camera lusts over Jen’s body, with lots of closeups that just worship her. She’s all pretty, glam, and Instagram ready. Then at like the 69 minute mark, the camera do

The scene where the I-90 killer pulls his van in front of an SUV with people in it and Kathy doesn’t just barrel her car into the sonofabitch lost me. What I did think was interesting was the idea of the killer “remaining dormant” from like 1991 until 2018-ish (or so we are led to believe; does a killer ever really stop?), that homicidal psychosis triggered by Slasherman comics left behind at a ratty service station in the middle of nowhere by the very mind responsible for “detailing” his activities. The script provides the contrivance of that I-90 killer happening to be at that service station not long after Todd and his buddy, Ezra (responsible for publishing the comic books), left issues on an empty spinning rack, but without that there wouldn’t be a slasher film I don’t guess. Baruchel (who gets his head shattered by the killer’s machine fire through the backseat window) and Chabot include a flashback and horrible memory where the I-90 killer, who works as a welder, his helmet pull

Because I want to keep my Letterboxd review short, I have been adding additional comments. I want to try and put all that together in my much neglected (here lately) blog here. I actually typed up notes while watching Ti West's prequel to "X" this year and will leave all of them here. That monologue by Pearl to "Howard", encouraged by Mitsy, who had no idea what awaits her is just an incredible piece of acting from an astonishing performance by Goth. She's the real deal. But I just know she'll get the Collette Hereditary treatment while those of us horror fans know why she was robbed come award time. Goth is that fucking good. But, phew, I was going to see Barbarian today and I'm drained. This is right out of the theater. That smile during the credits gradually darkening into tears and this break is almost as incredible as the monologue. These are from my notes: "Are you still in there?" Pearl wants what seems to exist out there while her m

When I first got Shudder right before the Pandemic, this was on one of their channels late at night. I had seen this in one of those Mill Creek 100 or 50 movie packs of public domain titles but never had I seen <b>NIght Tide</b> in this good a shape. So for me personally, the film's appeal really isn't as much about the story -- sailor on leave decides to spend some time in Santa Monica, California, falling in love with an enigmatic young woman named Mora who portrays (or does she?) a mermaid in a sideshow near an amusement park surrounded by pier -- as it is the location/setting at that particular time of 1960 and a young Dennis Hopper, so young, soft-faced, and healthy. It's crazy to think Hopper has been gone 12 years now. He was just a fresh-faced kid of 24 when he starred as the young sailor, Johnny Drake. I think I just find myself captivated by time and place more than anything else. Watching Hopper do nightly Santa Monica pier walkabouts, the little apar