Prom Night -- It's Not Very Good, But...

You know, just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s good. Prom Night’s a good example of that. All the ingredients for a classic horror flick are here: genre staple Jaime Lee Curtis, a group of teenagers ready and willing to have promiscuous sex, smoke weed and die and the tragic death of a child, the truth of her demise buried — or so it seems!!! — by a bunch of scared kids.

Prom Night’s formulaic, its chief differentiator being the setting (thus, the name) and a killer who’s actually not very good at his primary job of killing. That’s actually the most interesting part about Prom Night. Typically, the killer’s prey doesn’t last a moment or two before the knife finds flesh, but there’s a long (we’re talking 10-plus minutes) attack sequence where the killer fails to take out the intended target. Eventually, you wish the person would just die already, but the idea of a crappy killer is a noteworthy spin.

Apparently they remade this one recently, too, but sorry: one real night at the high school prom and this movie is more than enough for me.

(…there is a sequel, though…)

Hallowthon (or “Shocktober”) is a month-long attempt by my girlfriend and me to watch a horror movie every night in October. This is movie #11.

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Drag Me To Hell -- Drag Me To Awesome

Sam Raimi, I’ve missed you. Seeing him guide the Spider-Man series to great heights was success deserving for a man of Raimi’s talents, but Peter Parker robbed the world of a master horror director. Who knows what Raimi would have brought us if Spider-Man hadn’t dropped in his lap? If it would have been a few more movies like Drag Me To Hell, I anxiously await the time travel device arrives that lets me visit this parallel raimiuniverse.

Drag Me To Hell feels like Raimi just picked up where he left off a decade ago, delivering a movie written and directed by someone who understands what gets under your skin. Raimi knows what to show, when to show it and when not seeing the monster around the corner is scarier than having it appear at the front door. Given that Raimi could limitlessly fund his own movies these days, Drag Me To Hell shows remarkable restraint.

In a cinemascape where showing is telling, Drag Me To Hell’s a breath of fresh air specifically because it keeps terror cloaked in darkness, lurking silently, unexplained to the viewer. And without spoiling what happens in the end, if you’re expecting a typical ending, well…you don’t get it. I thought we’d figured out the movie’s twist a good 30 minutes before the finish line only to find out Raimi had been dangling a red herring the whole time.

Too bad we probably won’t see another movie like Drag Me To Hell anytime soon because people like myself didn’t show up at the movie theaters to prove our faith. Why should Raimi make horror movies when he’s given a bigger, better canvas elsewhere? We’ve demanded he return to horror for years and when he finally does, what do we do? Praise him after the fact.

Sorry, Sam.

Hallowthon (or “Shocktober”) is a month-long attempt by my girlfriend and me to watch a horror movie every night in October. This is movie #10.

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Alice, Sweet Alice -- Aka Brooke Shields Dies

It’s not snobbery to proclaim the best horror was produced before my time, but that’s actually not a big deal, it just means I have piles and piles of gold to discover from the gold mines of the 70’s and 80’s. Alice, Sweet Alice, a story about an evil child around the time stories about evil children were becoming passe, has one thing it can hold high above its competition:

A scene where a very young Brooke Shields is brutally murdered by her own sister, sliced with a knife, stuffed in a box and lit on fire. On fire.

Movies with demonic children remain en vogue, but have become socially tamed to the point of boredom. These days, the kids are psychic, kills happen off camera or something mysterious explains why everyone’s dying. In Alice, Sweet Alice, the kid is a sadistic bitch. There’s no supernatural copout; she’s murdering because she’s fucked up in the head. That’s it.

It’s constantly striking how straightforward movies used to be. Every cultural step forward, we seem to take a few back to keep pace. You’d never see a movie like this today, a sentiment not meant to be conveyed with bleary-eyed nostalgia; it’s just not culturally acceptable anymore. Children just don’t act like this in movies, at least not on their own volition or without outside influence. Kids can’t just be “bad” anymore. Now, they just play video games.

(Note: Yes, I’m aware how the twist changes the movie’s events.)

Not a great movie, but a solid one. It’s a warm, fuzzy, bloody throwback.

Hallowthon (or “Shocktober”) is a month-long attempt by my girlfriend and me to watch a horror movie every night in October. This is movie #9.

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The Best Halloween Movie You Haven't Seen

It’s not often a Halloween movie makes a lasting impression. True, I can find something to appreciate in just about anything horror, having watched more than enough to appreciate the work involved, even if a final product doesn’t actually click. Trick ‘r Treat, though, is a film worthy of applause, deserving to join the ranks of The Nightmare Before Christmas, A Nightmare On Elm St., Halloween and others as movies that should be watched every October with a circle of friends, candy close by, in communal appreciation.

Trick ‘r Treat employs a sadly forgotten narrative device in movies: the interconnected short story. It riffs on Stephen King and George A. Romero’s Creepshow, but a little more elaborate, as the threads connecting the stories are not scenes in-between each arc but an unseen needle moving between everything before culminating in a final “a-ha.” But Trick ‘r Treat is clearly a heartfelt love letter to genre-definers that came before it.

What’s more, Trick ‘r Treat doesn’t rely on any one horror schtick to keep you guessing what’s next. Sometimes it’s tension over the genuine unknown, other times it’s your typical blood ‘n guts dump, but it’s always in service of the larger story, paying service to the movie’s big payoff. When it does indulge in violence, it’s enough to make you wince in acknowledgement, but remains respectably restrained, self-aware the movie’s not about that.

It’s hard to deliver a movie steeped in cliche that’s this damn clever. Trick ‘r Treat is a rarity, a film deserving of more praise from more people.

Hallowthon (or “Shocktober”) is a month-long attempt by my girlfriend and me to watch a horror movie every night in October. This is movie #8.

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