My Personal Horror Film Festival, Part One: The Beginning
October is upon us, which for me means two things - rolling my eyes at the proliferation of "pumpkin spice" flavored shit flooding the market, and a month-long binge of horror movies leading up to Halloween.
I THINK this is a joke, but the thing is, I'm honestly not sure.
All month long, as is my tradition, I'll be scouring the internet for lists of horror movies I haven't seen and watching them in the hopes of literally scaring the shit out of myself. As I've been indulging my dark side in a cinematic orgy of depraved violence and contrived dialogue, I've taken some notes, and would like to share with you my thoughts.
The Conjuring 2: A poor successor to the original. "The Conjuring" may not be the best example of a haunting/possession movie, but it was a solid contribution to the sub-genre. The sequel failed to build the same tension or even to replicate any of the scares which the first one did. Somewhere in the realm of a third of the movie was superfluous, making the film too dull to hold my attention properly. I'd give it 3/10 ripped-up Bibles.
The Green Inferno: Eli Roth has consistently proven that he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing when it comes to making movies....I struggle to call anything of his "horror," because at this point I'm fairly certain that they're all intended to be comedies. There's no way that my reaction to "The Green Inferno" was meant to be FEAR. Having said all that, from an objective perspective, it's a garbage film. On the other hand, in the state of inebriation in which I watched it, I laughed my ass off (whether I was supposed to or not) and got a fair amount of entertainment from it. I'm giving it 6/10 severed heads on a stick.
The Descent: A party of young women enter a cavern in a spelunking expedition, and bad shit goes down. The film makes excellent use of a sense of claustrophobia, and maintains a feeling of suspense by not showing too much of the creatures. Overall, I'm going to give this one 7/10 ill-timed cave-ins.
The Descent, Part 2: An unnecessary, but not altogether disappointing follow-up to the above, taking up right where the first movie ends (despite the fact that the first one ends pretty strongly, in my opinion). In the spirit of "Alien" and "Aliens," this one errs on the side of showing the creatures more and showcasing much more action. It may not quite live up to the original, but for what it is it's not bad. I'm giving it 5/10 subterranean humanoids.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: It's no secret that this is a classic of the slasher genre. This is the first installment (and only good one) of the saga that gave us the Sawyer clan and that lovable rogue, Leatherface. It has everything...a van full of clueless youths, screaming young women, a hillbilly family of psychopaths, and gratuitous psychological horror. 9/10 chain saws.
Texas Chainsaw 3D: Jesus Christ. What can I say about this sack of shit that's even worth your time to read? This film picks up literally minutes after the events of the original, disregarding the other existing sequels and reboot. And it pretty quickly devolves into contrived bullshit. What does it say about me that I sat through all of it? And to think, this is arguably the SECOND BEST of the Texas Chainsaw movies. (As a side-note, I did get about halfway through 1986's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, but tapped out when I realized my time would be better spent slamming my head into a wall) I'm giving it 2/10 dried and cured human face masks.
House of 1,000 Corpses: I wanted to like this movie a lot more than I did. It's not that it's not good, necessarily, but it does have a certain amount of notoriety and I wanted more from it. It's bad, occasionally, but not REALLY bad, and it's good occasionally, but not excellent. I'm giving it 6/10 fishboys.
Thus ends part 1. A week hence, I'll be checking back in with you to reveal my thoughts on what other horror films I've been watching. Until then, sleep well and stay safe.
