Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 7 (A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child)

It's the end of an era here on the Halloween marathons. Each year for quite a while now, we've been revisiting a Nightmare On Elm Street film sequentially. Well, except for that time I jumped ahead and did Wes Craven's New Nightmare, but you'll understand that one is its own weird metafictional beast. We've still got one movie in the tank for next year, should we do this again, so this isn't the last Frederick Krueger movie we're covering. No, instead this is the last Nightmare On Elm Street movie I watched that I hadn't seen since first watching it in 2004 or so, in college, when I watched all of them sequentially as a fear-conquering exercise. Going in here years later, all I remembered were some of the unique kills. What, then, do we make of The Dream Child after all this time?

Holy fuck, guys, I do not fucking know with this movie. This is the one Nightmare movie I don't especially vibe with. The particular things I have enjoyed about this spooky dream murder series are the surrealist creativity of its dream murders, and the deeper interesting theme running through each movie that one can hang their critical analysis hat on and go "Yep, that's one fine hat hook this picture's got going-- Jesus Christ did that kid's muscle fibers just get turned into puppet strings? That's fucked up.". Let's shotgun through them real quick! Nightmare 1: the sins of the parent haunting their children. Nightmare 2: Fears and anxieties over one's own homosexuality. Nightmare 3: Mental health care is bullshit and doesn't help people in need. Nightmare 4: Grief and loss and how we remember those who we cared about who we've lost. With that in mind, what's Nightmare 5's cool hat hook? I... don't know. Oh, there are some at play, but I think the reason I didn't vibe with the movie is quantity over quality; instead of one big thematic hook that runs through the whole movie, there are like two or three half-formed hooks which only hang on parts of the movie. It's my job to talk about those shoddy hooks, apparently, so let's.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 6 (Return To Oz)

Friends =)

This one has been literal years in the making. A friend of the blog who likes this movie has really wanted it covered in the Halloween marathon. Well, here you go. This is going to be an interesting one, considering this isn't a traditional bit of spooky media... but we'll get to that. First, a confession. Until last evening, when I saw it as research for going into this? I had never seen the original 1939 Wizard Of Oz. Yes, I know. It wasn't available to rent in my little town, it never came on TV when I was a child, it just sort of passed me by. Watching it finally, it's fine. I can see how it's a cultural touchstone and a beloved nostalgic movie for many. I'm coming to it decades too late to really really vibe with it, but it's a good movie. The nearest I can come to understanding its appeal is that it reminded me of Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, a movie that has the same childlike wondrous visuals and musical nature that I did see when I was a child and vibe with nostalgically. So, you know, to people who love it, I can get where you're coming from.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 5 (Metroid Dread)

(Hi there! Given that this is a whole serendipitous bit of current event writing, it only feels right to give you all a spoiler warning heads-up. This game just came out yesterday and I'm going to talk about a bunch of stuff it does, especially story stuff, so if you're playing through it you'll want to wait until you finish before reading. Hope you've been enjoying the game, if you're playing! On with the show.)

BEEP BOOP IT'S MURDER TIME

There's just a bit of good timing at work here. Not only does Metroid Dread fit a spooky marathon perfectly, but I also spent most of my day yesterday playing the thing non-stop and I really want to talk about it. In the end, you gotta love stuff like this that gives me a good excuse to use a spot on something current. It's not like I can go to a theater and see Halloween Kills in three weeks anyway, so this is the most current events you're going to get. With that out of the way, let's see if I can be concise in talking about Metroid Dread.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 4 (John Carpenter's Christine)

[VFX: car on fire]

Okay. What do we make of John Carpenter's Stephen King's Haunted Car: The Movie? There's actually something I can really jam with in here, but we gotta build up to it. Unfortunately since it involves the titular Haunted Car, I am going to really have to stretch. No worries. No worries, y'all. If you know me, you know I'm good at stalling out a point and rambling. For God's sakes I'm doing it right now, even. I don't think I'm going to get a paragraph here before I actually have to talk about it, but I'm damn close. Let's talk about the book a little, then, since this is an adaptation. I'm not sure what drew John Carpenter to this King work, specifically. Oh. I literally just did a Wikipedia glance and it turns out this was just a "well I got nothing else going" kind of deal and Carpenter actually wanted to direct an adaptation of King's novel Firestarter. Interesting factoid. Okay. Let's talk about the book. Christine, not Firestarter.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 3 (Zombie Land Saga Revenge)

Idol stuff, man.

I always end these marathons with some variant joke on how the real horror before me is NaNoWriMo in November. This right here is a horror lurking in the future for me. This season of Japanese cartoon television, aired in the summer of this year, was good and resonant enough that it practically demanded I do a patented Frezno-brand deep dive project about it. It pissed me off and terrified me because of the work I'd have to put into it, but honestly? It won't be as long as Symphogear. I can live with that. So, consider this a rare moment of brevity before I give into my excesses and tell you fucking everything about this show and how it made me cry. First, though, a primer. Two years ago, in preparation for another spooky marathon, I took the first season of this show with me on vacation. You can read those thoughts right here. Two weeks ago, I blasted through it all on a rewatch on vacation in that same place. Here are some thoughts on that.

With Zombie Land Saga Revenge, it's a cemented fact: Zombie Land Saga is now my favorite piece of zombie media. It ain't even close. Sorry, Shaun Of The Dead. Woe be to World War Z. In fact, I'll lay a little groundwork for me to pick up on in like six months or whenever I get at this. Zombie Land Saga is the Symphogear of zombie media. "Oh fuck, did you drop a good one there, past me". I'll be saying. Zombie Land Saga, in its first season, was all about healing from trauma; the psychological trauma of one's anxieties/fears/regrets, and the physical trauma of literally having died and finding oneself to be the living dead. In short, ZLS Revenge runs on that theme to even greater effect. The main arc of the season is Japanese idol group Franchouchou, in secret composed entirely of the decomposed living dead, plotting a revenge concert at a massive venue in which they previously performed and totally bombed at. The first season was Franchouchou's rise, in between they fell, and now they're going to rise again. They're the undead, it's what they do best.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 2 (Llamageddon)

Good lord. What do you say about something like this? I guess you start with the mindset you have to have going into a movie like this. Some movies give you exciting thrills. Some give you insightful allegory. Llamageddon is not one of those movies. Llamageddon is the kind of dumb fucking movie you throw on with friends to have a chuckle at. There are all sorts of movies like this, but Llamageddon at least feels like it's laughing with you. It knows it is a dumb fucking movie about a killer llama, how absolutely gonzo that premise is, and just goes hog wild with it. Movies like Sharknado and its ilk are big budget variations of what Llamageddon manages with some cameras shooting at a house in the country for the weekend, and that's kind of impressive.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 1 (Gremlins 2: The New Batch)

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU'RE AT SOUP???

The spooky month has descended upon us again! It is time, once again, for the real horror to blight me; the constant non-stop writing rush between now and early December. God help me, the snow will be coming by the time my fingers stop moving. Ironic, then, that the inaugural subject for our new and brevity-improved Sixteen Screams marathon is the sequel to a Christmas movie. Yes, Gremlins is a Christmas movie and that's why I'm not covering it here. God help me if I ever wade into the debate about which marathon The Nightmare Before Christmas would belong in. It would help, before we begin, to talk a little about that original movie and what I remember it doing. Certainly I never saw it until I was a teen. As a child, a cousin had the Gremlins 2 game on Game Boy. Its cover art with the Mohawk Gremlin spooked me, but I liked the game. One summer while visiting I found the Gremlins 2 NES game at a flea market. Same cover, but I picked it up. Time has proven that it was a much better game than the Game Boy version. Oh, God. I said I was going to talk about the movie and then I went on a tangent about the Gremlins 2 video game. That was, uhhh, setup for going into talking about the movie. Yeah.