Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 8 (Plan 9 From Outer Space)

Sorry for this one being a day off, I actually went out to a spooky movie night the local town recreation committee was hosting. It was a studio movie, so I can't say anything about that, but the experience itself was certainly something. I made the mistake of sitting in the front row, quite close to the central surround sound speaker. That's one advantage of watching a film in your own home: being able to control the damn volume. That was a very loud movie laden with many a jumpscare and loud noise, and ow did my ears hurt. This, of course, has nothing to do with the movie I watched at home a few hours earlier. Oh yeah. It's this shit.

What does one say about Plan 9 From Outer Space? Well, they usually start with the fact that it is not a very good movie. This is an assessment that I agree with: Plan 9 From Outer Space was not a very good movie. I knew it had this reputation going in, but I was expecting a legendary "so bad it's good" picture, the type where the joke was that it got made and you could laugh at the absurdity of such a thing being filmed and distributed. There are parts to that, I'm sure: lots of people will make fun of the airplane cockpit set or the flying saucer effects or the silly acting. The one amusing line read for me was the alien invader Eros berating humanity and "YOUR STUPID MINDS! STUPID! STUPID!". Beyond that, this is... Well, it'd almost be unremarkable if not for its reputation.

That in itself is a bit of interesting alchemy. This film is a bit of cinematic shlock that was left forgotten, the detritus of the B-movie age, for 20 years until some guys in the 80's dug it up and declared it The Worst Movie Of All Time. For good measure, they wrote it in a book, and so they made it true for a legion of moviegoers. It will be, now and forever, the legacy of Ed Wood Junior. Yet here I am, ages in the future, struggling to agree. Not a very good movie, certainly. But the worst of all time? I don't know about that. It isn't morally outrageous, it's not [[that]] technically incompetent, and its acting is not [[that]] bad. I have had worse experiences with cinema. Hell, I'd watch Plan 9 again over V/H/S. 

Now maybe, if I had a huge knowledge of 50's sci-fi/horror films, I would have better criteria to judge Plan 9. As it stands? This doesn't look any worse than any non-classic of the era. Dig through the detritus of history and you could find dozens of films at least this bad, if not worse. Of that I'm certain. The only reason we're still talking about this one is that some folks who wrote a book dug through the detritus of history and deemed this one the worst. I don't know if I agree. It's a film so unremarkable aside from its history that I have little more to say on it. Moving on.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 7 (Sweet Home)

PART 1: THE GAME

This has been a long time coming. I've wanted to play and cover this game for years on these marathons, but never got around to doing so. Part of this is procrastination, and part of it is intimidation: The mere thought of survival horror being a genre with risk of unwinnable fail states kept me off it. Fitting, then, that I finally give this a try in the year where I conquered my fear of Resident Evil. The two get compared quite a bit, this being the spiritual ancestor to Resident Evil and both sharing certain elements. In both you're trapped inside a deadly mansion of supernatural terrors, solving puzzles and piecing together clues about what happened here from disparate scraps left behind while carefully managing limited resources, both in quantity and what you can carry around at any one time.

For all their similarities, they are different. Treating Sweet Home as just the rough draft of Resident Evil would be doing it a disservice. The experience of playing Sweet Home was just as unique as my experience playing Resident Evil, and I will try to convey my main takeaway from going through the game. If anything, it's one of dissonance. I was dreading it a little, wondering just how mean the game would be... and it was not that bad, overall. At times, it's more generous than most survival horror experiences: Being able to save anywhere you like effectively means that you can be extra cautious and not encounter any real loss from stumbling into a trap, and removes the extra sense of tension Resident Evil attempts to give you by making saves a limited resource as well. Indeed, for the cautious hoarder player like I am, there's also the nature of the RPG and overleveling; you can just run around an explored hallway and fight enemies you know you can take on to make the stronger ones trivial as well.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 6 (Love Everlasting)

(Spoilers for the comic follow. I urge you to check it out yourself and go in blind for maximum effect, as I did.) 

What is love? 

There are two animes which have love as the ultimate motivator of awe-inspiring power. In Symphogear, the titular transformation pendants activate by tapping into the part of the human brain which is the source of love and affection. In Madoka Magica Rebellion, love is a power source greater than either hope or despair which rewrites the universe itself upon the whim of one fucked-up magical girl who captures God herself. Love has multitudes. It can be a thing of beauty which brings about the best in us. It can be a bloodstained banner in which terrible things are done in the name of it. Love is at the center of what I read today, and what I will talk about in brief with you. 

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 5 (Haunted Waters)

That ongoing strike has necessitated a shakeup or two for the spooky marathon this year, so here's one of them. Rather than use a slot on some studio horror film, I am instead throwing a curve and talking about a book of folkloric scary stories from my home island of Newfoundland. It's a different tact for analysis, to be sure, but trust me. I can get in and out of here and pique your interest. I'm sure this is true of many places, but it feels especially true for Newfoundland: this island has a secret history, only able to be told by the old stories passed down from the generations. The nature of folklore and an "old yarn", as they call it here, is very much a thing that thrived here back in the old days when most people lived in isolated little coves and fished all day. By night, some of those little coves were haunted, and a few of these stories are in this book.

This is not the grand master narrative of the history of our fair island. This is a microcosmic set of stories passed down and collected by a professional folklorist, archived for our intrigue and reading pleasure. They span a great length of history, some taking place long ago and others in modern times in modern cities. All of them have haunting in common, an encounter with a ghost. Some are spooky tales of terror which frightened these people on one terrible night. Some are benevolent spirits, of loved ones long gone. They span not just history, but all across the island. Even here, where I am down south, are mentions in the book of shipwrecked ghosts and hidden pirate treasure trapped within deep rock walls. 

Frezno's Criterion Challenge: September 2023 Trip Report

Alright, here we are again. It's a bit late this time, and you have my apologies. Between the end of month vacation shenanigans, and getting through things for the Halloween marathon, I've struggled to find the time to get this out there. I've carved a nice window here, and we will use that window to talk about a handful more artsy films from the Criterion Channel. After the first, we go on a bit of a theme this month! Isn't that exciting? You'll find out just what the theme is, but first we must discuss...

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 4 (We're All Going To The World's Fair)

This is... quite the film to talk about. It's one of the ones that got recommended to me, picked in this case by my pal Sean. As such, I went into it knowing not a thing about what it had to offer. That sense permeated the rest of the film, as it's a mercurial thing that refused to exactly define itself for me. Not only did it have some sense of ambiguity in its horror, but it was subversive enough that it managed to pivot to being about something else entirely. Or maybe I was just slow on the uptake and the movie was actually about this all along. Either way, I went along with the movie instead of being bitter and resistant that it wasn't giving me what I wanted (What? No, this has nothing to do with Halloween Ends trending on social media and the same closed-minded whinging about that film coming back like a vengeful ghost), I let my perceptions change and really sit with what I felt the film was trying to say.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 3 (Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead)

This is an interesting well to come back to, of sorts. I have a little bit of a history with anime involving zombies, which a cursory glance back at the archives will inform you about. This isn't subversive in the same ways as that, as it's telling a story about your traditional zombie apocalypse. It's the way the tale is told that made this a standout for me, though. I have not seen all of the show (it's still airing weekly as I write this) but I watched the first four episodes in a row and treated it as a mini animated movie about the end of the world via zombies. Even that's doing the show a disservice, as this thing is doing some wonderful work with not only its visuals but its storytelling.