Slash/Back

 Slash/Back is a winning little Canadian alien invasion yarn. Not Canadian aliens, or little Canadian aliens, though that would be something to behold- You know what I mean, stop misinterpreting me on purpose.

 Fighting the (non-Canadian) aliens this time are a bunch of very young Innuit teen girls who happen to live in Pangnirtung, a tiny town fifty miles south or so of the artic circle where the 'meatship', as it's later labeled, has the misfortune to land.

Too young to know to pine for the fjords.

 The aliens this time around are of the puppetmaster/bodysnatcher variety, taking over animal and later human hosts. This leads some of the more traditional-minded girls to compare them with shapeshifting monsters of Innuit lore... but more tellingly, one of them recounts The Thing's classic electroshock scene in detail.
 The girls first run into the aliens while out in the fjords shooting cans. They manage to shoot down one possessed polar bear when it attacks them (they just think it's sick) and quickly flee the scene... unwittingly leading the aliens back home. And as (bad) luck would have it, there's a big square dancing event that night out of town, leaving no adults available to fend off the invasion.

 There's a respectable attempt to make sense of the aliens and their actions, and despite some severe and very noticeable budget limitations, the aliens are surprisingly creepy - uncomfortably wearing ill-fitting skins and moving like broken robots; a late-film revelation of what's under the hood is a highlight.

 Beyond the low production values you also get a script that sometimes struggles with pacing, some pretty rough acting (even some of the principal characters seem to be reciting lines rather than acting at times) and a dearth of real menace.

 But despite all that the balance is pretty positive, even before taking into account this is a first time effort for a lot of the talent (including the director and the actors).

 It's a sweet, almost insubstantial slice of PG-13 adventure that gets by on warmth, charm, the unusual setting and some unexpected script choices. The mismatched foursome at the center aren't really your standard 'kids with bikes' subgenre protagonists, although the label fits the movie to a tee; for one, they don't really get along that well, and the film deals with the 'overcome your fears/rise to the occasion' trope in a more sensitive and realistic way than, say, your standard Netflix series might.

Raven's Hollow

 Using historical figures as fictional characters has a long and illustrious history - my favorite example, in both quality and quantity, would have to be Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. There's also a sub-category of this that inserts writers into stories that vaguely resemble something they might have written, a la Cast a Deadly Spell.
 Raven's Hollow does this but for Edgar Allan Poe, and in a somewhat unusual choice, mostly restricts its references and quotes to the man's poetic work* especially, of course, the Raven.

 After a cold open where a girl is chased and killed by that most terrifying of monsters -a cloud of CGI fallen leaves- we cut the titles, and then to a scene where Poe (William Moseley) runs across a crucified, disembowelled man while riding out on some sort of military drill with four other cadets. We know he's Edgar Allan Poe, because his mates use both Edgar and Poe when they address him.

 While cutting him down, the dying man whispers 'Raven' and promptly dies. The group, egged on by Poe, decide to take the corpse to a nearby settlement - the titular Raven's Hollow.

 Once there they get the obligatory folk horror passive aggressive reception from the townsfolk, and start suspecting not all is what it seems. Poe, being the inquisitive type, opts to stay in town to see if he can solve the mystery... and the movie starts falling apart soon afterwards.

 As more characters are introduced and we start learning the facts, it becomes clear that the raven is some sort of evil spirt monster, and that the town is somehow complicit in its murders. As events escalate they... well, they basically stop making sense, and the plot starts just stumbling forward in ways that don't fit well together. Dialog turns from cogent conversations to people spouting unrelated lines and exposition at one another. Poe -who, remember, wrote detective stories well before Conan Doyle came up with Sherlock Holmes- is presented as an analytical thinker, but the sort of conclusions he jumps to here are highly suspect (he turns out to be correct every time, of course.)

 At least this leads to him deducing that taking opium will protect him from the monster's mind tricks (!), which results in a scene of him tripping balls and seeing locomotive-like jets of steam come out of his horse. Finally an origin story for Poe's opium habit.

 All this is a shame, because the movie looks very good - All autumnal landscapes and creepy, semi-abandoned townships; who'd have thought Latvia'd make a good stand-in for upstate New York? The wardrobe looks great, too, and the color coordination seems to be on-point. The direction is assured and there are some great touches here and there - I particularly like a scene where Poe's face becomes increasingly bathed in red light as he approaches a bloody tableaux in a church. None of this disguises that it's a low-budget production, but it at least puts in the effort and mostly succeeds. Unfortunately the monster itself is a major letdown, a crappily designed thing rendered in sub-par CGI.
 The acting is good, too! Besides Moseley, who manages to say a lot of nonsense and seemingly mean it, all the actors (including the awesomely named Oberon K.A. Adjepong, Kate Dickey from The Witch, and Melanie Zanetti) do a lot to help keep the tone consistent.

 Beyond it just not being a satisfying story in and of itself, it's also not particularly faithful to Poe's style; it doesn't come off like something he would ever write. There are a few references, of course: character names, minor incidents, and Poe quotes his own poetry during the movie, but it all feels pretty hollow (pun not intended), and honestly... how someone could get to The Raven from the events of this movie is anyone's guess.

The House at the End of Time (La Casa del Fin de los Tiempos)

 Wrongfully convicted of murdering her husband (Gonzalo Cubero) and son (Rosmel Bustamante), a woman (Ruddy Rodriguez) is sentenced to life. Thirty years later, she's allowed to serve the rest of her sentence in home arrest, and sent to live out the rest of her days in the house where it all happened.

 And of course, there's something spooky going on with the house. The movie jumps back and forth between two time periods: the events leading up to and including the night where Dulce lost her husband and son, and a short span thirty years later when she is returned to the house and starts working out what actually happened on that night.

 Played by the same actress under a layer of unconvincing makeup, modern-day Dulce gets an ally in a catholic priest that helps her unravel the history of the house. From there the elements start falling into place - spooky night happenings with mysterious strangers roaming the house, family secrets, a second son who died shortly before that fateful night...

 More accurately translated as The House of the End Times, La Casa del Fin de los Tiempos is a Venezuelan horror movie that set box-office records in its native homeland and got enough international attention to secure writer/director Alejandro Hidalgo a place making an English-language remake at New Line; That hasn't surfaced yet, but a 2017 Korean remake based on Hidalgo's script did.

 Unfortunately, I don't think it's a very good movie. The crew does well within the obvious budget limitations, but the script leans too heavily on melodrama, contrivance, and corny sentimentality for my taste (an extended cutesy scene with children early on sets the tone and soured me considerably to the film).
 Genre-savvy viewers will quickly catch on to what's going on, and the way things fit together is reasonably clever. But for things to fall into place plot dictates that people behave in really stupid ways; this is a movie that would go very differently if people just used their damn words and behaved as if they had half a brain.

 Meanwhile the genre trappings are pretty commonplace. The house is suitably dilapidated, and the family's poverty means that there are power cuts to justify lamp and candle-lit night jaunts, but the geography is never really clear. There's a witching-hour of sorts, a scary mysterious old man, that sort of thing. It's by no means elevated horror but it is 'tasteful', so expect a stately pace, an uplifting message and (sadly) an absence of outré elements.

 The acting is all over the place. I thought Ruddy Rodriguez was pretty good as Dulce, but her priestly deuteragonist was pretty bad - and it's not helped by corny lines about the smiles of children and shit like that. Luckily he's not in a whole lot. The kids do get a bit more screentime, and they're... child actors; let's just say they don't distinguish themselves.
 The camerawork and direction is pretty decent, but its efforts are mostly expended in making it seem like a Hollywood movie with very traditional shots - well made, but not especially memorable; Much like the movie around it.

 For all its melodrama and cheap sentimentality, I do think its heart is in its right place and it does find an effective emotional center - but all the contrivances and out-of-nowhere plot developments effectively kill off any goodwill. It's a shame, but luckily it was successful enough that we'll hopefully get to see better genre stuff from this particular director, and Venezuela in general.

1408

 Weird how memory works. I remembered 1408 as a CGI disaster, a mess of crappy, cheap looking computer effects. Rewatching it now, I realize maybe I was thinking of a short, and yes, very crappy scene of flames licking the outside of a hotel close to the end; Other than that there are a few other visual effect here and there, but the vast majority are practical- and pretty good! So I owe it an apology.
 Unfortunately, revisiting it didn't lead me to revise my opinion on the movie by much; I think I disliked it a lot less this time around, but it's still a dumb, loud, cheesy mess. A fun one, at least.

 Based on a short and much simpler Stephen King story, 1408 follows Mike Enslin (John Cusack), an occult writer who goes around staying in supposedly haunted places and writes up reviews for them. At least ten years before the glut of  movies about paranormal investigators getting more than they bargained for that are all over the place these days; Mike's a writer, though, so that means it's not found footage.
 Mike catches wind of a haunted hotel room in New York, and his interest is piqued when the hotel manager refuses to allow him to book the room. Oh, it's on: next thing you know he's at the lobby of the hotel, and Gerald Olin, the hotel manager (Sam Jackson, making a big impression with a very small role) is giving Mike the rundown on room 1408 straight from a thick file full of scene-of-the-crime pictures. Turns out, 1408's got an impressive bodycount: people go there to kill themselves, or just die of 'natural causes' which include drowning in a bowl of chicken soup. It is, as Olin explains, an evil fucking room. Mike is unimpressed, convinced it's all a hoax, so Gerald ends up relenting and lets Mike in, reckoning he won't last an hour.

 The room itself seems unremarkable at first - there's a bunch of good lines lifted straight from the story about the nature of hotel rooms, and Cusack makes Mike's gruff scepticism and dickishness very entertaining to watch. There's a very effectively creepy scene early on - probably the best part of the movie - as Mike investigates the scenes of old deaths in the room and gruesome pictures of the corpses from Olin's file are superimposed over old bloodstains. Very cool.
 It doesn't take long before strange hotel-themed supernatural stuff starts happening; mints appear on pillows, toilet rolls are magically replaced - you know, classic horror! And then The Carpenters (gasp!) start blasting on the radio, which is cliché Hollywood horror code for shit's gonna get spooky.

Watch out, goofy hammer maniac's gonna gitcha!

 The haunting keeps getting more and more punishing; Injured, seeing ghosts jumping out windows and hallucinating both traumatic scenes from his past and attacks from a silly-looking hammer maniac, Mike's ready to check out after only a few minutes. But he's trapped in the room, and his attempts at escape keep getting foiled in increasingly surrealistic ways; I liked the bit where a floorplan of the hotel floor just shows room 1408, surrounded by darkness.

 Once things start moving they go over the top pretty quickly. There's a bit of psychological horror as the room forces Mike to confront a pretty horrible family tragedy (completely absent in the original story) but mostly it's a series of reality-bending attacks on Mike's sanity. The movie invests a lot of energy on some of these with quick, roving camera moves and making poor Cusack jump around like a mad man, but for me at least the gamble doesn't fully pay off - instead of the spookablast impact I they were going for, these overactive scenes feel manic and forced, and end up making everything feel faintly ridiculous instead. More Jan de Bont than Reimi. Some of the practical effects are pretty good, though, especially when the room starts destroying itself.
 Cusack gives a game performance, overacting and randomly doing mundane actions with additional athletic flourishes as if he was trying to overthrow Nic Cage - it's not a good performance, exactly, but it's very entertaining to watch, and it adds to the films weirdly endearing cheesiness.

 Despite all the gruesome happenings in the room over the years, there is next to no blood and guts on display, which is a surprisingly restrained choice for a movie that otherwise goes for Poltergeist-levels of supernatural mayhem (and would be completely justified in indulging in a bit of gore, given how many people met grisly ends in the room; Poltergeist certainly didn't have that excuse, but Hooper's gonna Hooper).
 The plot is nonsense and full of dumb developments and clichés - from bleeding walls to evil doppelgangers to a hallucinated fake-out of a successful escape, but it does have fun ideas and ends up with a satisfying conclusion*, and there's enough weirdness on display here and there that I can't really hate on it too much. This is one of King's favorite adaptations of his work, which, given how poorly so much of his stuff was treated in the '90s and '00s, makes sense. He was even happy with how well the added backstory to the main character turned out. I wouldn't go that far, but it's understandable why they felt the need to add it.
 ...Yeah, I definitely don't hate it. Glad I gave it another chance. Good job everyone involved, I guess, and sorry I didn't appreciate the effects more the first time around.

 *: there's a Director's Cut with an alternate ending that's a bit darker and a whole lot better. It's available on youtube.

Barbarian

 A young woman (Georgina Campbell) arrives at a rental house in a horrible neighborhood only to find that it's been overbooked. The guy who's already in it (Bill Skarsgård) seems nice, and invites her in out of the rain while they work out a solution to the problem, but all of the interactions are understandably fraught.
 It's a great setup for a thriller, very believably played by the two leads; Skarsgård in particular treads the line between likeable and possible psychotic threat very well. As the night goes on the tensions diffuse somewhat and they start bonding.
 But we know it's not a thriller or a romantic comedy: it's a horror movie. The film knows that we know it's a horror movie. Things will end in bloodshed, because of course they will.

 Barbarian playfully mines tension out of that knowledge, and eventually delivers on it with memorable brutality. Left alone, that first half hour would make for a killer short film. There's more, though, and the story carries on in unexpected ways.

 This is a movie that you don't really want to hold to very high expectations and is absolutely best experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible. So talking about it is hard without spoiling a little of what makes it fun, but pointedly not talking about it maybe makes it out to be a lot more than what it's trying to be.

 So what is it trying to be?
 It's a take on a traditional horror story that's been around for ages. It doesn't reinvent the wheel or anything, but it has a huge amount of fun playing with form and structure.
 There's got a huge vein of black humor running throughout, not as jokes (though there are a few great ones); rather, it uses subversion and twists that are not overtly humorous, but are pulled off with impeccable comedic timing. Despite touching on some very current issues, it deals with them with a relatively light touch and never gets dark enough with its themes, events, or gore that they drag the movie down into serious grimdark horror territory.

 The main thing is not to expect any major Malignant-style what-the-fuckery. As energetic as Barbarian is, and as willing as it is to use our genre literacy to play with us, it's not really out to try and map out new territory, and it never really gets that crazy. And that's fine! This is a really good movie, I'm just trying to temper expectations here.

 The script is great, with a ton of clever touches. There are a lot of small 'why didn't she...' or 'shouldn't this have happened?' moments - all easily forgivable and well within genre standards, but they stand out because of how well-written the movie is in general. Most importantly, it's proper creepy and has a few memorable scary bits.
 All the actors are really good, too. Campbell and Skarsgård really sell their situation, and Justin Long joins the cast in the second act as a great, memorable douchebag.
 Director Zach Creggers is a comedy guy, part of the Whitest Kids U know troupe, and he's done an admirable job here of making a horror movie that's very funny without ever crossing over into horror comedy territory. In what's turning out to be an exceptionally good year for the genre, Barbarian stands out for all the right reasons.

Baskin

 A bunch of cops gathered at a greasy spoon talk about gambling, football and whoring well into the night - a well written scene, with a good ear for dialog; I've had to endure very similar conversations at work while I lived in Argentina, and this didn't exactly bring great memories. You get a good sense for the characters, including the boss (Ergun Kuyucu), the rookie (Gorkem Kasal), and the asshole (Muharrem Bayrak). Well... the biggest asshole, anyhow - when he goes all Joe Pesci ('What do you mean I'm funny?') and turns on an innocent bystander, the others actively encourage him or look on. 'This guy, you know, he's such a joker,' even as he beats the shit out of a kid who made the mistake of getting too friendly.

 Baskin is a 2015 Turkish horror film that does not expect you to root for its characters.

 Soon the gang is responding to a backup request from an abandoned building in a 'cursed' part of the boondocks. Their designated driver, who's already had some sort of panic attack, crashes the van, and after some more misadventures they make their way to the derelict building where the call originated and find that it's been taken over by some sort of satanic cult; they get captured, and much torture ensues.

 But Arda, the Rookie, keeps going back to a nightmare where he's chased by the ghost of a childhood friend, there's frogs everywhere, and wasn't the creepy monk-like guy who's torturing them at the building also providing meat at the diner where the movie begins? And, and, and...

 There's a lot going on in this movie, and its elements do not come together in a satisfying way. Even as surreal horror, it's not concerned with tying its themes together coherently (other than everyone's in hell maybe?) or providing any mysteries to work out. The story's just there to provide a string of horrific setpieces.

 It's great in the early going, when the deliberate pace is buoyed by a sense of dread you could cut (and slit, and stab, and gouge, and disembowel) with a knife; director Can Evrenol and cinematographer Alp Korfali do a brilliant job with lighting, creating beautiful looking scenes with bright, lurid colors.

 It's a bit unfortunate that the movie goes a bit downhill once the monsters make themselves known. There are some cool bits of dream-imagery, a few servings of decent gore, and a very laudable mean streak and willingness to push things pretty far; but by the end it doesn't feel like it's enough even with Kasal indulging in a bit of Bruce Campbell-style overacting. Without anyone to root for, and the tone too grim to enjoy our heroes' comeuppance. all I had left to look forward to some sort of cool explanation or twist that never really comes. I'm glad I watched it, but after a very strong start I felt it lost its way.

This is Gwar

 Gwar, Gwar never changes.

 Oops, sorry, my bad- Gwar's always changing; Gwar is fucking chaos.

In the grim dark future there is only Gwar. And Joan Rivers.

Gwar, for those not in the know, is a metal band that is (in)famous for going out on stage wearing cool, oversized prosthetics and costumes and rocking out with their (prosthetic) cocks out. I've never really listened to them, but as anyone with an interest in metal music I was aware they're famous for putting on theatrics during their shows that make Alice Cooper seem utterly tame in comparison. Heads get chopped off, on-stage fights erupt, giant butts get impaled with crosses; Simulated body fluids of all (yes, all) sorts are sprayed on an enthusiastic audience.

 This is Gwar is a behind the music-style documentary that covers their whole history starting with their founding back in 1984 from the mixture of an art collective trying to put out a home-made science fiction movie and a punk band frontman who got them to make props for his shows. With full access to all the living members of the band, a bunch of people who slave away (no, literally - they work for peanuts and are referred lovingly as slaves) to make the props and effects that power Gwar's incredible live shows, and tons of archival footage, it's a fascinating oral history of the ups and downs of a band that's alternatively moving, riotously funny, and shocking.

 Seriously- these folks have been through a lot over the years. It would be interesting to see this just for the logistics behind their incredible stage props; The movie opens, very appropriately, with a roadie explaining the hydraulic setup that allows them to shoot jets of blood and jizz. But the story behind their creation, the conflicts between their very... highly idiosyncratic band members, the censorship issues you'd expect and a couple of deaths (and one near-fatal shooting!) - there's so much going on here.

 It'd just be worth it for all the concert footage, which is hilarious and shows a ridiculous amount of talent and effort expended just on the stagecraft, but despite the rigidity of the music doc format their history is so full of incident and wild twists that it makes for a ridiculous compelling viewing.
 I might still not be a fan of their music, but after watching this I can honestly say that Gwar fucking rules.

Terrifier 2

 At the end of Terrifier, Art the clown (spoilers!) comes back to life after shooting himself and goes after the mortician examining him. It's a surprising scene, as the movie had up to that point resolutely avoided any supernatural trappings (unless you count Art's tendency to pop up out of nowhere like Droopy Dog.)

 Terrifier 2 picks up from there, literally and figuratively. We get a continuation of that scene where our favorite clown goes to town on the poor mortician's face with a tiny medical hammer - teeth and blood flying everywhere. It's an impressive and disgusting bit of practical effects that easily tops anything from the first movie, and maybe unconsciously carries on the theme of undersized tools causing outsized damage (remember that time when Art cut a girl in half using a one-handed hacksaw?)

 In any case, the sequel rolls with that resurrection, turning Art into more of an otherworldly threat complete with a ghostly sidekick and his own clown-themed pseudo dimension over the course of the story. If the first movie was (in part by necessity) a grungy video-nasty-style slasher flick, Terrifier 2 is a bona fide horror extravaganza that doubles down on the nastiness from the first movie but adds likeable characters with an actual arc, fantasy elements, and some very funny pitch-black humor. It's a welcome return to All Hallow's Eve more eclectic horror offerings, and makes it (for me) a markedly more fun movie than its predecessor, even as it ramps up the gore and suffering.

 The bigger budget is very noticeable - not just in the effects, as the movie expands to more locations, manages much more dynamic shots and a wrangles a much larger cast to accommodate the more ambitious script.

 After a (very funny) bit of business where Art, who is still every bit the hateful asshole, goes to a laundromat to wash his blood-stained clown duds after a messy resurrection, the retrowave-drenched credits roll and we're introduced to our new protagonist.

 A full year has past since the Miles County Massacre. Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) is a young girl who's putting the finishing touches on a warrior angel costume which, we'll later learn, is based on a character her late father created for her. She lives with her mom (Sarah Voigt) and little brother (Elliott Fullam) and is preparing the costume for a Halloween party she plans to attend with her friends. 

 There's some real sweetness to their relationships, which immediately makes the stakes feel that much higher than with the thinly sketched bunch from the first movie. That night, as Sienna goes to sleep, Art appears in her dreams in what's easily the weakest element in the movie, a purposefully stilted dream sequence that is unimaginatively portrayed as some sort of kid's show. Oh well, at least it has some impressively chunky squibs going off once Art inevitably turns murderous...
 The flames from her dream spread to her real-life bedroom when she wakes, establishing that we're playing by Nightmare on Elm Street rules here, and that there's some sort of connection between Art and Sienna. Oops!

 Comparing notes, Sienna and her brother notice that her father had known about Art the clown even before he went on his rampage. There are some shards of a mythology strewn throughout the movie, enough to allow you to draw some conclusions, but it's all left incomplete and mysterious; I can get behind that. There's room for sequels to explain things to death, but I like this more indirect approach.

 The body count starts mounting on the following day. Sienna and her brother have run-ins with Art in town, who's having a busy day of butchering random people while he's not harassing the Shaw family: This includes one of Sienna's friends (Casey Hartnett) in a scene that's almost as sexualized, and way more disturbing that the scene that had everyone in a tizzy from the first Terrifier. There's a terrific joke in there that got a huge laugh out of me, and immediately made me feel a bit guilty about it. Top marks! And if the misogyny worries you, don't worry. The movie's response to being charged with sexualized violence is to basically double down on it, and then add a scene with a dude (Charlie McElveen) getting his own sexualized and very nasty dose of ultraviolence.

 Events escalate, as they are wont to do, and it all builds up to a satisfying (and satisfyingly over-the-top) climax at an abandoned carnival. There's also a hilariously bizarre mid-credits setup for the now-inevitable sequel.

  So... yeah, if you couldn't tell by now, I liked this one a lot. It's a batshit insane movie in all the best ways, showing commendable ambition and craftmanship, and reclaiming extreme gore from the more dour horror movies that have been the norm since the early 00's.

 The only thing keeping me from loving it, besides the dream sequence, is that it's a bit too self-indulgent, there's a bit too much flab. Not as much as on recent too-long movies, but by the end I was getting a tiny bit impatient.

 Still, I'm very happy it's been so successful; Here's hoping we get to cheerfully discuss in a decade whether the Terrifier series jumped the shark at Seed of Terrifier or on Terri Firmer.

Terrifier

 Terrifier's a nasty, no-nonsense slasher with gruesome, drawn-out kills. Running a lean eighty-four minutes, there's just enough scene setting for the cat and mouse games that will ensue as two friends and a handful of bystanders are stranded in an abandoned building with a killer clown, to be picked off one by one.

 Besides the uncompromising tone and excellent gore effects, the movie has a not-so-hidden ace in its villain Art the (killer) clown (David Howard Thonton). Writer/director Damien Leone reused him from his earlier anthology movie All Hallows Eve (an equally nasty and fun compilation of stories assembled from earlier shorts tied off with a wrapper story, released back in 2013), and he's a great psycho: distinctive, assholish, and channeling that mime energy in a way that's eminently punchable; Very memorable.

 First introduced here applying clownface and working on his implements of torture (in a very 2000s-style horror scene, complete with alternative-rock soundtrack), Art never utters a word, choosing to communicate by mugging, pantomime, and stabbing. He toys with people, annoying and pushing buttons with lame humor before the knives come out... just an all-round hateful piece of shit. 

 Art the Clown is of a piece with a dark, comedic energy that runs throughout Terrifier, and helps keep it separate from the more joyless extreme horror movies of the last couple of decades. The kills are very gruesome and at least one of them, a bit of heavily sexualized violence, gets pretty uncomfortable, but they're also ridiculously over the top and Art's constant mugging helps keep a distance. Things are unpleasant enough to give this unapologetic horror movie a healthy dose of queasiness, but they also don't really feel like a wallow though misery - more like an accomplished team of craftsmen showing some justified pride in the work they've accomplished with latex and red food coloring; If they can gross you out, all the better.

 Terrifier feels doomed to be praised with qualifiers (it's good for what it is!) mainly because despite some agreeable weirdness, the story doesn't really surprise at any point - it saves all of its energy for its inventive death scenes. The script does a better job than expected of balancing the carnage with some tension building, reversals and narrow escapes, but the two-dimensional characters coupled with game but sometimes amateurish performances don't really get you to invest in anyone's fate.
 The low-budget friendly derelict building in which the bulk of the movie is set isn't that interesting to look at either, and there's no clear sense of geography to it; characters just run into each other (or the remains thereof) seemingly at random. The cinematography is serviceable, and I did like how the stark blacks of digital video bleed into the black in Art's monochromatic clown suit.

  It's a fun, unpretentious movie done in a way that seems unfashionable these days, where there's an unspoken rule that nastiness needs to be about something to justify itself  Sometimes nasty is all there is, innit? And anyhow, it's way better and more entertaining than a no-budget killer clown movie had any right to be.

You Won't be Alone

 In a small nineteenth-century Macedonian village (not that you would know from watching the movie) a mother looks towards her child's crib and finds a withered, burnt hag leering over her baby.

 She haggles and deals with the apparition - a wolf-eateress, a witch she recognizes as Old Maid Maria (played by Anamaria Marinca), and manages to convince the intruder to leave her child be for sixteen years.
 Maria agrees, but as a parting gift she takes the baby's tongue.

 As soon as the hag leaves the house, the mother takes the child to a cave and raises her there. For sixteen years Nevena (played by Leontina Bainović as a teen) only sees the outside world through two tiny flues on the top of her cavern, and her only contact with humanity are her mother's sporadic visits.
 It's all for nothing, though: Old Maid Maria, who is also a shape shifter, finds and comes for her anyway.

 After a bloody ritual Maria turns Nevena into a witch, giving her black talons and the ability to change forms. Her intention is to take her under her wing, but the teen proves to be too stubborn, and Maria too ill-suited to teaching. Annoyed, she sets Nevena free near a town, to teach her what she trusts will be painful lessons.

 Nevena stumbles around and discovers the hard way she can only take someone's shape by devouring them, stuffing their innards into the same wound Maria inflicted on her to turn her into a witch. She will take on several lives this way, living them out herself as she tries to sate her fascination with mankind. And all the time Old Maid Maria's watching balefully from afar, full of scorn at this upstart that aspires to a normal life that was denied to her.

 You Won't be Alone is a folk tale, sometimes grim and often beautiful, about an outsider trying to figure out humankind. Nevena is almost feral at the outset, and never does speak even after she grows back a tongue- but her lust for life and experience is very endearing.
 Because she takes the places of adults, she's thrown into the deep end of life and can never really fully enmesh herself into the lives of the villagers that surround her. So she continues trying; taking lives in more senses than one.

 Rural life looks unchanged from the middle ages -brutish and short- and Nevena never really got to learn the finer points of morality, so there's no shortage of ugly and violent incidents; She is a witch, after all, and the movie does not shy away from getting raw and bloody. But it's really not a horror film, even despite having a honest-to-goodness Freddy-Krueger-look-a-like villain in Old Maid Maria. Don't expect any scares here, but the gore is used in memorable ways. I especially liked how old meatball-face Maria off-handedly discards the remains of her former skin as a disgusting trail of shambles as she walks down a hill.

 The various actors that play Nevena in her different incarnations (including Noomi Rapace) collectively manage to portray a compelling character, and do a good job in getting you invested in her journey to rejoin humanity. Old Maid Maria gets a back story too, and is a good foil for the protagonist - kind of relatable but still an absolute dick.
 Director Goran Stolevski chose to go with a squared aspect ratio; The cinematography is excellent, he and his DP compose very dynamic shots that maximize the amount of countryside and natural lighting captured whenever possible.

 It's a very contemplative, sometimes slow movie. We're privy to Nevena's thoughts, which she expresses in a poetic muddle, often while meditatively walking through staggeringly pretty Serbian natural and rural landscapes.
 Yes, the Terence Malik vibes are very strong in this one.

 The constant narration is fine; I found it a bit annoying at first, but it grew on me, and as she gets more experience, her musings become more articulate and better composed. "Fires... Fires... What soft fires." she says of children playing. I like it.

 She'll often matter-of-factly describe horrible things about the people around her, chronicling the ways they hurt each other or the suffering they endure. But she always ends them with the same refrain: "And still... and still..."
 Which could serve as the heartfelt thesis for this beautiful movie.

Halloween

 The original 1978 Halloween has launched exactly a dozen sequels and remakes since it was released more than forty years ago. Its success arguably spawned the whole slasher genre, even if it didn't invent it.
 It remains the best.

 Because it was made before the slasher genre it helped popularize solidified its rules, Halloween seems like a more normal, more respectable movie than your Friday the 13ths and whatnot (and yes, I know the first F13 movie is much more of a respectable thriller than its reputation would lead you to think, but it's a bit of an outlier).

 Halloween begins in Haddonfield, Illinois, 1963, with a wonderful scene where a voyeuristic camera is nosing around the Myers family home, Black Christmas-style. The unseen assailant picks up a knife and kills a big-breasted 'teen'. When the parents arrive and the camera pulls back, we find out that the murderer is a cute six-year-old boy in a clown costume.

 It's a genuinely upsetting scene with carefully built tension that highlights just how much thought and craft director John Carpenter, already in the middle of an unimpeachable run of genre movies, put into the horror elements; Next year's underrated The Fog would illustrate this beautifully as well.

 Fifteen years and an iconic title scene later, we cut to a couple of medical professionals making their way to a remote sanitarium. One of them is Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) who will sort of act like Michael Myers's hype man throughout the movie, talking about just how Michael is 100% pure concentrated evil to anyone within earshot.

I should just start using this for all Halloween posts.

 When they get to the facilities, they find all the inmates wandering around free. Michael Myers steals their car and drives off into the night.
 The good doctor has Myers's number (666-6666, presumably) and knows his hard-on for evil will lead him back home where he can kill more people. Dr. Loomis will be in the periphery of the movie, doing some slight Giallo-style investigation into EVIL's movements and trying to whip Haddonfield's law enforcement into some sort of response.

 But here the movie starts focusing on its true protagonists - high-schooler Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis when she was nineteen) and her friends. She does look a bit old for the role, but consider her (also supposedly high-schooler) friends Annie (Nancy Kyes) and Linda (P.J. Soles) were both pushing thirty at the time. Anyhow; Laurie is the virginal, straight-laced final girl, Annie is the assertive mean girl, and Linda is the party girl, but they're all more rounded, funny characters than you'd get later on with the bigger ensembles future slasher movies would require to ensure a higher body count.
 Their dialog is a bit stilted but relatable, and there's a lot of focus on their adventures and misadventures before Michael finally comes home.

 As Halloween night (and EVIL) arrives Laurie and Annie are babysitting kids in houses across the street from each other, and Linda has plans with her boyfriend to come in for a visit later. When the carnage finally starts it's good, with lots of fakeouts and some good scares. Very good use of the background, always leaving space for Michael to pop up at any moment.
 It's extremely tame compared to what will come later; the bodycount is pretty low, and the movie isn't really built around the murders as much as the other films that will follow in its footsteps. The concept of 'kills' as a cool gore-drenched setpieces is nowhere to be seen here, but there's plenty of gruesome kicks (Mike can get pretty playful with his victims) and a whole lot of stalking.

 It's got its problems, sure. My main issue is that as menacing as Myers is (played by Nick Castle - future director of The Last Starfighter!), he's got a bit of a glass jaw and goes down very quickly when attacked. He does get back up eventually, though. Guess this had a lot more impact before we knew The Shape as an unkillable, relentless hulk.
 There's also the common issue with older movies where the genre has evolved beyond them; as mentioned before, this movie can seem downright quaint and a little slow in comparison to most modern horror. And a little stilted in general to modern eyes.

 Still, there's so much to like here!
Jamie Lee Curtis's very believable dread and terror. The little touches that serve to humanize the characters peppered throughout the script (my favorite being the hilarious bit where stuffy Dr. Loomis loosens up and decides to give a few kids a scare). Dean Cundey's crisp cinematography, which looks great to this day. Carpenter's immortal score and patient screw-turning.
 It's an exceedingly well crafted movie that has every right to be considered a classic