Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 31 (Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers)

Boo.

It wasn't supposed to be this as the capstone, you know. I would have done the new Halloween movie that came out 12 days ago, but I don't live anywhere near a movie theater to have been able to seen it. My backup was Halloween 3, but then I found you couldn't legally grab that on either Youtube OR Netflix... a fact which really pisses me off because I SAW IT in the bargain bin at a Wal-Mart during a trip last month and thought "Ehh I'll get it digitally for Halloween night". Guess the "trick" in trick or treat is on me, huh? So, the hell with it. This is the best we've got with regards to keeping up traditions and watching a Halloween movie on Halloween night for the blog. This? Christ. You can't really be mad at it, can you? It's almost like a goddamned monkey's paw wish for everyone who bitched that Halloween 3 wasn't about Michael Myers again. Oh, you want the spooky boy in the boiler suit and Shatner mask to stab people again? HERE'S EXACTLY WHAT YOU ASKED FOR! I know we didn't get to Halloween 3, but let me be clear: I didn't love Halloween 3, but I certainly enjoyed its freshness a hell of a lot more than I did Halloween 4. Halloween 4 is... it's trying in some aspects. It really is. One more deep dive to end the spooky season, and then we're free. Well, you're free.


A weird pattern that Halloween fell into was going back to basics once a decade. We saw this last year with Halloween H20, we saw it this year in cinemas with the 2018 film... and here with Halloween 4, we sort of see it. I get the vibe that the people in charge of this were going back to what worked; spooky man goes to Haddonfield to kill family member. Yes, I know that wasn't what 1978's film was about, but Halloween 2 with the siblings reveal is the only other one of these that actually stuck in canon because it happened literally right after the end of the original. So, this one's about spooky Michael Myers busting out of captivity to go to Haddonfield and kill Laurie Strode's daughter, Jamie Lloyd. Why? I don't really know Michael's motivations at this point; he doesn't even have any baseline shamblings about teen sexhavers like Jason Voorhees. Maybe he just wants to finish the job and kill all of his family, and anyone who gets in the way. Make no mistake, though, he's no mindless shambler. Killing a power company guy by throwing him into a substation to knock out all the power in Haddonfield is calculated and plotting. There are gears turning in his head. Gears on how best to kill and intimidate folks before killing them. Things are a bit gratuitous, yes, but there are some moments of restraint where we don't see the how and why of someone dying. We could have used some more of those, but okay.


Then we come to Jamie Lloyd herself. She's just a little kid, and the child actress is doing her best. She's the key of all of this, being Michael's ultimate target, but there's much more going on here. There are little callbacks and mirrorings to the original, particularly the fact that she chooses a clown costume for herself like Michael's from the opening of the original movie. Fuck it, let's just talk about that ending, huh? Implications of Jamie Lloyd as the next vessel of the blank-faced evil which defined Michael Myers, and a horrified Dr. Loomis screaming at the sight of it. It's one hell of a downer ending... which gets basically reversed in the next movie, but we are in no way worrying about Halloweens 5 and 6. This is, in some respects, the best part of the movie. Ain't that depressing? I'm basically saying I liked it when it was over. Really, this is fine. If you were morbidly offended by Halloween 3 daring to be "the Zelda 2 of slasher movies", then this is your Link To The Past. It cemented Halloween as the story of Michael Myers trying to kill his family. Forever. Forever and ever. I hope you're happy. As for me, this marathon is a lot like Halloween 4. I liked it when it was over. That'll be a wrap for this year. Will there be a 31 Screams 4? God only knows. All I know is I have to worry about NaNoWriMo now, and in a week I'll be begging to write about horror things for 30 minutes a night. We'll see you for more Doctor Who on the blog. Enjoy Halloween. Don't eat too much candy and make yourself sick. Bye.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 30 (Trick R Treat)

Candy?

Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my GOD. We've really lit a fire under my ass in regards to enthusiasm now. No fucking around with song reviews, or dual Doctor Who reviews. This is a straight-up horror movie and I am here to tell you that it's fucking brilliant. I haven't had this much fun watching a horror thing for the blog since... actually let me check. Tucker And Dale Vs. Evil? From two years ago? I guess? I don't know how this will hold up on a rewatch, but as of right now I'm sold on it. This movie is goddamned hilarious, but it's not a comedy. Not quite. No, it's a really dark sort of humor that comes from the way it both sets up its situations and subverts your expectations at every turn. I could stop the post here and yell loudly while waving my arms, metaphorically in text of course but you've got a good mental image of it now, all about how you need to throw on this movie and enjoy it without an asshole like me spoiling all the good parts. You can get it on Youtube for 4 bucks like I did, or less if you know what you're doing. For the love of God, check it out before I spoil some of the fun twists and mechanical shit. I guess that counts as your spoiler warning, so let's go into things a bit deeper.


This movie has some vague resemblance to Creepshow, another underrated classic horror anthology film which I adore. It has a bit of an anthology thing going for it, and a bit of that comic book aesthetic. It sadly doesn't go all in on the latter, but the way it plays with anthology is interesting. There are seperate vignettes going on, but they all tie into each other in little ways. You'll see something spooky happening with someone's neighbor, and then find out what happened from their perspective an hour later... but before that you'll have the protagonist of that first story show up in a different vignette altogether. It basically almost works, as you still get a constant sense of surprise and fun at noticing all the connections. The only place it dragged on for me was the final segment, on that neighbor. It took a little too long for things to catch up to audience knowledge, and once it did there were some fun twists... but it still was a bit of glancing at the watch and waiting for the movie to catch up. Still, that and a few nasty moments are the only sour notes in an otherwise breezy 80 minute movie. Let's gush about some of the stuff I loved.


This is a movie all about Halloween, in the sense of ancient traditions and the veil between the living and the dead being thinnest on Samhain and all that shit, but it's also got the typical slasher thing of transgression going for it. The opening of the movie is basically OHH YOU PUT YOUR JACK-O-LANTERN'S CANDLE OUT TOO EARLY, NOW YOU DIE. The transgressors get punished, but it's not all just typical slasher fare of sexhaving teens. No, some of these people actually deserve what they get. More to the point, they play wild with the dark comedy. In the end I couldn't help but laugh my head off at some of the bleak turns this story took. Nasty people getting their comeuppance in darkly comedic ways. The funniest part of the movie, I think, was early on when a man's murdered a trick-or-treater and gets into hijinks while trying to bury the body in his own backyard. The end of his segment seems like it's going one way and you think "Oh god no" but then the twist happens and you're roaring with laughter because OH MY FUCKING GOD THEY DID THAT INSTEAD! Then the character shows up as a twist for ANOTHER segment, and the reveal of what's going on with those particular characters (and the grisly end of that first guy) is just incredible. This movie, y'all. This fucking movie. I ruined some of it but please. View it. I adore it now, and I hope I still do next year when I give it a rewatch for the next spooky season. Speaking of, we're right on the door of Halloween. You know what we gotta do. Yeah. We gotta watch one of THOSE again.

Another 31 Screams Day 29: Doctor Who Series 11 First Impressions: Episode 4 (Arachnids In The UK)

I used this shot because 1) no giant spiders to trigger anyone's
arachnophobia and 2) reflection in the glass.

Call it a combination of serendipity with the timing of this episode's subject matter and airing, and of sheer laziness on my part, but it's my word space so we're going to combine the 31 Screams marathon with Doctor Who First Impressions. It'll be a fun journey, and we'll get to yell about spooky giant spiders. To that end, we have episode 4 of the Whittaker era. In hindsight, by now in the Capaldi era I had a sense of what we were going for. Listen was a masterpiece, a high point of Season 8, and a welcome sigh of relief after a rocky start. Arachnids In The UK is not that, but I'm not here to make comparisons beyond that remark. This one's a clear case of the journey being more satisfying than the destination. We'll get to the destination, of course, but that journey is a real fun one for the spooky season! Aside from Tim Shaw and his random slasher-esque killing of people, this is the first outright dance with horror undertones that the Whittaker era's undergone. Last week was an uncomfortable tension that hit close to home because it was real, but this is just spooky spider shit. It's a fun kind of scary, and it's hard not to have fun on the ride. So, here's the ride. Here's Arachnids In The UK.


Why not kick it off with the Yaz focus? With three companions this series, it's obvious that a bit of shuffling was going to happen with the focus. Ryan and Graham are the main dramatic players in Ghost Monument (on account of losing Grace), then Ryan and Yaz in Rosa (on account of race), and now it's Yaz on account of glimpses into her family life and roping her mom into the adventure. You do get a better sense of Yaz as a character by way of her family life, and it's a sense that she's a bit of a loner with a somewhat overbearing family. People have nitpicked that she doesn't react to anything by virtue of her police officer background, and I suppose that's valid but it didn't pull me out of the episode. She's got some great interactions with her family and her mom, and I appreciate her all the more thanks to this one. The show has to work a little harder with Yaz's beats, I feel, since she doesn't have the same family relationship that lets Ryan and Graham work naturally together, but in this case I'd say they nailed it.


Okay then. Spiders! What's refreshing about this is how it seems tailor-made to be a continuity reference story, but then isn't. Giant spiders? Oh, that's just Planet Of The Spiders with Jon Pertwee. They grew giant thanks to toxic waste in a coal mine? Oh, that's just The Green Death also with Jon Pertwee. I gather Chibnall is fond of the Pertwee years, then... but we don't get any wink wink nudge nudge about it. We did get a Venusian aikido reference two weeks ago, but this is a remarkable bit of restraint. The man has to have known about those two episodes when plotting this out, and yet he doesn't come out and say it. If you binged most of 45 year-old Doctor Who like I have, you know it and the show doesn't need to say it. If you haven't, then it just seems like an original and new idea. It's a basic spooky thing, but it works. There are spiders. Spiders are inherently scary, giant ones even more so. The bit where a spider breaks through the bathtub is particularly effective in this regard. They're not even evil spiders, they're just unfortunate mutations brought about by bad negligence... which leads us to the end of the ride, and the problem.


The problem is Jack Robertson. He's a jerkass rich man who refuses to take any responsibility for the problem. You're not meant to like him, and he's basically a Donald Trump expy. He sucks, but he's an effective antagonist in that regard; he's there to get your blood boiling and be an obstinant obstacle to the Doctor and friends, and he excels at that. My problem comes from the abruptness of the ending. He shoots a defenseless giant spider who was dying anyway, the Doctor gets mad at him for it, and... he just walks away and that's the end of the conflict. For Doctor Who, this is lacking. This is a show that's shown us a Doctor who, over multiple incarnations, will tear down people like this. It's become such an essential and satisfying part of the show for me that its absence actively lowers the quality of the show for me. He just gets away with being irresponsible and violent and going against the Doctor's wishes without so much as a "don't you think he looks tired?". I don't like it. Maybe he'll come back and get his comeuppance, but as of right now I am dissatisfied with the way things ended. One may argue it's more realistic that sometimes the bad person gets away with it, and if that's your view of Doctor Who I won't fault it... but it's not mine. The Doctor Who I love has the bad person get their karma in the end. I can't get behind it. It's a crucial misstep in an otherwise fun hour of giant spiders and spooky stuff. Still, we'll see how things play out. For now, while I can't claim Arachnids In The UK is the finest hour of the Whittaker years so far? I can say that it's still a fun ride. We'll just have to have faith and see where it takes us next.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 28 (Michael Jackson's Thriller)

Again, like I said last time. We're really stretching shit thin here in the final days. To that end, we're really going to try and get a couple hundred words out of a 13-minute music video for a spooky pop song. Yes, really. I could try and fill shit up by doing my usual stalling, much like I'm doing right now by extending the point out juuuuust long enough to drag things out. But I won't. Aside from that last sentence. And this one. Well, what can we say about this? Let's leave the song itself alone for now and focus on the actual music video aspect of it, since that's easy enough. I'm no music critic, but I can try. I can also comment on what the man put on screen to accompany his music, and we're going to do that. I oddly get the same vibes from the beginning of this as Stephen King's It. That seems crazy, but hear me out. There's that same 30 year-cycle of nostalgia thing happening for old 50's monster movies. One only needs to look at Michael Jackson in his cool jock letterman jacket, or the way his girlfriend's dressed up, to really see it. And then he turns into a werewolf. We haven't covered John Landis's An American Werewolf In London, but suffice it to say that the movie had some fucked up body horror werewolf transformation in it which made Michael Jackson go "HEY MAN TURN ME INTO A FUCKED UP WEREWOLF FOR MY MUSIC VIDEO". So they did. So they did, and it's just as fucked up and horrifying even though he kind of looks more like a cat. Oops, it was all a horror movie! Yeah, Thriller's got layers. I guess we're in the 80's now and then the music starts up. Pointedly, it's not structured at all like the actual single. You get all the verses from Jackson first as he dances around his girlfriend trying to spook her, then Vincent Price raps, THEN Michael Jackson is a zombie and we get dancing and THAT'S when you get that killer fuckin' chorus of 'CAUSE THIS IS THRILLER. Holy shit. In music video form, they build up to the damn thing. You thought a 90-second buildup in the song itself was enough? Try this on for size.


Yes, let's try and analyze the song. It's very, very good, isn't it? I'm not some weird contrarian on this either, as millions of people seem to agree. I'm fairly sure that Thriller was the best-selling album of all time until recently, when it was dethroned by, of all things, The Eagles' Greatest Hits. Which got spun a shitload in our house back in the 90's, much more than Thriller ever did. I am inclined to frown upon my family's musical tastes for this. Being a pop song, it is of course catchy and absolutely killer. That funky goddamn synthy bass line is what makes it, and when you get to that chorus things just go into full overdrive. With all the spooky werewolf howls and other noises, it's as if the audio itself is haunted as you blast through it. Of course, we have to talk about Vincent Price's bit. It seems wild on paper: "yo what if we got a horror icon to do some spoken word spooky stuff as the climax of the song?". It absolutely should not work, but coupled with those funky tunes and spooky noises? He pulls it off. The whole song pulls it off. Forget your goddamned Monster Mash, this is actually a banger and should be blasted for the Halloween season, as loud as you can without pissing off your family, pets, and/or neighbors. I think that will do it. I'm going to groove out to this song until a spooky Doctor Who episode about spiders airs. It should be entertaining! See you tomorrow for that.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 27 (More Angry Video Game Nerd Halloween Episodes)

As we get closer and closer to the end of the month and Halloween proper, there's always a desperate sense of "oh dear Jesus just do a final few entries on dumb shit to fill out the marathon". That mentality will be prevalent for the next few days, I'm sure. Take today's, for instance, where we once again try to talk semi-seriously about a man's exaggerated parody of yelling at Nintendo games. Say what you will about James Rolfe, but the man has a passion for horror media and it shows in his Halloween-themed episodes of The Angry Video Game Nerd. Of which I viewed three more. These are all older episodes, but fairly good ones. Well, good for a show about yelling at Nintendo games, anyway. Let's dive into whatever the hell this is.

This and the next one are fun because they're a bunch of games tied around one theme; in this case, Dracula games. No Castlevania, but he would do a 4 part video series on the older games for one spooky season. The whole gag with fucking around with an old text adventure parser is what you'd expect from the Nerd, but it's still amusing enough and something we all no doubt did in our youth. I had actually forgotten that Drac's Night Out existed before I loaded this one up again, and looking at the video it seems that may have been for the best. Then again, I like a lot of games he doesn't (CASTLEVANIA 2 CASTLEVANIA 2) so who can say for sure? The most interesting thing in this one, for me anyway, is his look at the games based on the Coppola adaptation of Dracula from the 90's. I remember a friend of mine had the Game Boy version, and its title theme is burned in my mind. The NES game's nonsense music is actually a strange and shrill mix of what I assume is European PC composition and just sheer chaos on purpose. It sets an odd mood, and I kind of dig it. This is also where his joke about "Fred Fucks" comes in, which... well, that got co-opted by a certain game designer a few years later. That's a horror we're not ready to unearth again, so let's go to another video.

A little messier, this one, since there's less material to cover. The whole "Frankennerd" idea is goofy and dumb, but it does what it needs to do. I assume it's Mike Matei under there, but who knows. Well, the credits know, but I didn't look and I'm making a point to not look now. The two SNES games he covers here are pretty brief dives, and don't look too remarkable. The Bandai Frankenstein game almost looks passable, challenging, and fun. He does, of course, have his gripes, but this looks like a flawed but fun gem on the surface. You almost want to ask James Rolfe about his actual opinion on the game. Yeah, you can't use the satire excuse completely when it comes to the man, but I'm sure some of it is played up. Could be fun to check out a longplay of this game after I'm done writing all of this. The finale, with the Frankennerd choking the Nerd to death while the Nerd desperately tries to beat his bad Frankenstein NES game, is a total chaotic mess that still manages to be funny. Yeah, not much to say on this one. A decent watch. Which leads us to...

Oh yes. The big one. The game that helped make the Nerd character into a popular thing, and a source of trauma for the character (and James Rolfe, no doubt) that had to be embellished upon and explained. This is where the influence of the Nerd on retro gaming culture can be felt most; load up any Top 10 List of the worst or hardest NES games, and there's a chance you'll see Jekyll and Hyde on there. As it's not a ubiquitous childhood-scarrer like, say, Battletoads or Ninja Gaiden or something, I have to put this down to the James Rolfe effect. Is it a bad game? Hell if I know. I played some of it and just found it sort of dull, really. You walk to the right and jump over the occasional thing. Then again, I know the general idea of what to do thanks to this video. If I really wanted to, I could beat the fucker... but there's no drive to. This, then, is a personal exorcism from James Rolfe. Using his character to vent frustrations over a bad game that stuck in the mind as a child. In that regard, it's brilliant. The bit at the end where he goes all avant-garde and calls it a secret masterpiece which represents the duality of man and Victorian societal attitudes is the best part for me, as that's the kind of shit I unironically love doing when I write. That's Nintendo Project level shit, and it speaks to me. Good or bad, this one's an iconic bit of AVGN canon which actually has influenced how people think about these old games. The video itself? It's fine. The ending's goofy, sure, but AVGN always has that level of dumb crudeness to it. That'll do it for tonight. Four more to go. We'll bullshit our way through this.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 26 (Doctor Who: Midnight)

"And now I'm mirroring you"
      "And now I'm mirroring you"

I promised you your Doctor Who writeup, and here it is. This was, for the longest time in my memory, the single scariest episode of Doctor Who ever. Most people would cite Blink, and Blink is pretty good at it and has a neat concept. Midnight, though? This stuck with me for all these years. Ten years on and I still remembered it vividly. What about Midnight makes it work? Let's start with the ambiguity, I guess. Steven Moffat, as much as I've adored the things he did with the show when he had a hand in it? He did kind of make the Weeping Angels less scary after a point. Oh, their two-parter in the first Matt Smith season worked (mostly) but after that? Not really. Familiarity breeds a sort of reliability. Oh, thank God. It's just the Weeping Angels, don't blink and we'll be out of this one. Midnight, though? We don't know what the holy fuck the monster was. We never will. Russell T. Davies never took another crack at it, and he shouldn't. Explaining this away would take the magic out of it. It's remarkably fresh for this particular era of the show, where the Doctor was a bit of a mythic know-it-all... but that's really what makes the episode effective. This is an episode of Doctor Who all about human paranoia and fear, and it's also an episode where being Doctor Who is not only a bad thing, but the worst possible thing. Any other day, being the mythic know-it-all is what makes the Doctor the hero. Here it makes him suspicious and drives a further wedge between him and everyone when the shit hits the fan, and he fails to save the day. The situation is actively made worse by his attempts to be the dashing Doctor who saves the day, and an extra person dies because of it. This shit is grim.


I don't usually go for that shit when it comes to this show. I like my Doctor Who to be generally uplifting and full of hope. The fact that Midnight is one of the few forays into the pure despair and nihilism of "the Doctor doesn't save the day" actually makes it stand out. If the entire show were like this, it would be utterly dire. Hell, the episode after this, Turn Left, is also an episode that shows what happens when the Doctor doesn't save multiple days on Earth. Turns out the planet gets nuked and falls into a police state with concentration camps and shit. It's bad news, but it's not horror. No, in context of the series in which this aired, this is a string of episodes set to put the Doctor and his companion at their lowest points before rising up and saving the day in the finale. Well, we know the narrative cost for Donna Noble, but LET'S NOT GET INTO THAT. Let's talk about the actual horror. A bunch of people trapped on a space train, and one of them gets possessed and starts repeating everything the others say. It's simple. It's genius. It's almost Moffat-esque in how things play out with the rules of the monster; I could see something like this in his era for sure. The tension only builds as the repeating escalates, soon becoming outright mirroring happening simultaneously... and then stealing the Doctor's voice and reversing shit. Any and all attempts by the Doctor to do his usual thing and save the day backfire due to the intense paranoia the people have. Indeed, he doesn't stop them from throwing the possessed woman out in the end; all he's done by refusing to let them do it in the first place is create a scenario where the hostess of the train dies as well. It's a nasty piece of work, this one, but that's what makes it an effective piece of horror. It's grim and uncomfortable, and sometimes that's worth more than any strobe light shots of Weeping Angels.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 25 (A Quiet Place)

Shh.

Did I hype up a Doctor Who episode for this one? Too bad, spooky movie time. I say that and all, but believe it or not A Quiet Place manages to carry some of the same themes and emotions as Heaven Sent did, and be a really proper tense horror film. I certainly wasn't expecting what I got when I fired the thing up, but I can't say what I got was bad in any respects. No, like Heaven Sent, this is a movie about loss and grief and hope in the face of total despair. The total despair this time is the end of the world, or as close to it as we can tell. I kept expecting to see an extended flashback to when the shit went down, but by about 20 minutes in it became clear that the movie wasn't interesting in telling that story. No, there's just spooky monsters which are ultra-sensitive to sound that have brought about worldwide devastation, according to some newspapers we can see. This isn't a movie about the end of the world, it's one about coping with a post-apocalypse. It's a survival movie, both survival of actually staying alive and the survival of the one family who's our focus. It's hard, of course. Their youngest son, ripped to shreds in the cold open so suddenly. Loss and grief and guilt permeate the proceedings, but there's also that tension. Very quickly we learn that these monsters are fuckin' vicious when it comes to sound, and something as simple as glass breaking will make the little bastards hustle to investigate and kill whatever in fuck made the noise. Peter Capaldi just had to outrun a monster every 82 minutes.. This poor family can't talk above a whisper or a speedy jackass with scythe arms will cut off their heads. This leads A Quiet Place to be... well, a very quiet and thoughtful little film about this family. When noise comes and shit happens, though, you feel it. Holy hell do you feel it. I hesitate to call its use of jumpscare loud noises in any context that actually scared the shit out of me, but they are the most effective at changing the tone.


Then there's the whole climax, of course. I'm gonna spoil the movie in this part, and since it's recent-ish I will plop down the spoiler warning. Bail out now if the idea of this movie appeals to you. Still here? Okay. So, the family's oldest child is a deaf girl, which is not only great for representation but also makes things a lot easier for communication; the family can just use sign language to talk in the quiet moments. This also makes the monsters her dark mirror: she can't hear, whereas they can super hear. Dear Dad was working on making her a new hearing aid out of stereo parts, but now he's dead and gone after sacrificing himself to save the kids. How will we get out of this one? Turns out the feedback from her non-working hearing aid, when amplified, really fucks up the monsters. I love this idea a lot. Going into it, I thought this would just be a grim affair with no real hope to it, just a family surviving. This gives us a sliver of hope, as they kill one of the monsters at the end... and with more coming, Mom raises the shotgun and pumps it. Fade to black. Fuck me. Sound, their greatest asset and their greatest weakness. You could poke at that and ask about the outside world, but we're not meant to know about any of that. Maybe people in big cities figured this shit out ages ago. It's not the concern of this movie's focus on one family out in the middle of nowhere. Either way, I really enjoyed this one! The tension was high, the premise pretty unique, and it had that crunchy emotional shit I adore. A real winner. Tomorrow will be Doctor Who. Promise.