First Time Watches: October 2016

October was the month of spooky stories and twisted tales.  It was a month filled with the horrors of Halloween.  As such, I watched a bunch of horror movies.  That means that this month, all of my first time watches will be horror.  There aren’t as many as usual, since I have a few regulars that I watch every October and school is taking up more of my life.

In all, I watched 13 movies for the first time in October.  That’s an oddly fitting number that I never intended.  There was a high school reunion to start off the month, some nightmares in the middle, and a haunted house to finish it off.  I saw a contraceptive fight back, a woman have faith, and a possessed vehicle that wasn’t Christine.  It was a busy month with a wide variety of horror and I’m going to share it with you.

Most Likely to Die

The concept behind this movie seemed both intriguing and standard at the same time.  A group of old friends get together for their high school reunion.  Someone starts to pick them off in a way that relates to their description in the yearbook.  I like slasher movies, so I turned it on.  It was surprisingly effective.  It’s not the scariest movie, but it is entertaining.  The performances were stronger than I expected, particularly on the part of Perez Hilton.  Sure, he was supposed to be the same age as Heather Morris.  That’s not realistic.  It’s easy to look past, though.  The costume of the killer is visually interesting.  It’s one of those hidden gems that horror fans will enjoy when they find it.

Life After Beth

I love horror and I love comedy.  A mix of the two genres seems like something I would love even more.  In most cases that’s true.  A lot of my favourite horror movies are horror comedies.  This one didn’t quite hit those highs.  The writing killed my enjoyment.  I like the cast, but I can’t get behind a character who has sex with a zombie knowing full well that she is a corpse.  She is not living.  Her body is still decaying like a corpse would.  Yet he has sex with her.  The necrophilia of it bothers me.  There are elements of the world that I enjoyed, such as the later portion of the movie when other zombies begin showing up.  However, the core story rubbed me the wrong way.

I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle

As part of my Sunday “Bad” Movies blog, I plan every October to feature a lineup of horror movies.  This year was no different.  I chose I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle based on the name alone.  I knew nothing about it.  It was a British horror comedy about a possessed motorcycle.  The farcical jokes sometimes worked, but the movie felt needlessly long.  It seemed like it went on forever.  I wouldn’t watch this again, but I’m glad I saw it once.

The Gift

This is the closest that my October got to being not horror.  This was more of a suspense thriller than a horror movie, though some of the things that happened were quite horrific.  I only watched it because I bought it on blu-ray and my wifi was being garbage.  It was the first blu-ray I saw near me, so I turned it on.  It took a while to get into what was going on.  The movie started kind of slow, but was really effective by the end because.  It was a champagne bottle, shaken for 100 minutes, bursting in the final 8.  I loved the final moments as the twists and turns came together.  It was perfection.

Maggie

I had been meaning to watch this for a couple months.  I had seen it floating around Netflix long before I turned it on.  The rumours I had heard about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s performance were that he was better than usual.  People said that he gave a great, deep performance.  I watched the movie and agreed that his performance was good.  I didn’t like much else, though.  It felt like a short film extended to feature length without adding any entertainment value.  It’s worth watching for Schwarzenegger.

The Faith of Anna Waters

Sometimes filmmakers have a bunch of ideas and throw them all into a script to see what sticks.  This Singapore-set movie had hauntings, possessions, and a strange series of suicides that brought fairly solid horror moments.  It worked better than I had expected.  The only real problem was that the climax hinged upon the performance of a young actress who couldn’t quite hold her own.  She couldn’t bring the believability required to allow the movie to stick the landing.  The rest of the movie had a good atmosphere and an interesting story.  It made for a good viewing.

The Mummy

I wanted to like this more than I did.  The Universal Monsters was the original movie universe, a group of movies about different monsters that managed to cross over years before Marvel would pull off the same thing and be called pioneers.  They are staples that any horror fan should seek out.  Perhaps, like fellow monster movie Dracula, I’ll appreciate it more on a second viewing.  I just found it kind of boring this time around and it didn’t capture my attention until the final moments.  By then, it was too late.  I’m willing to give it another shot.  I have an open mind.  It just didn’t do anything for me this time.

Octaman

This is one of the worst made movies I’ve seen in a while.  There was no sense of proper lighting or action.  You couldn’t see the monster most of the time, since they shot at night and didn’t adjust anything to be able to see.  The camera picked up a lot of dark nothingness and left noises as the main basis for entertainment.  The noises weren’t entertaining.  They were growls and grunts.  They were the most basic monster sounds.  There were a few moments, including the ending, where the action happened during the day.  These were okay.  Had the rest of the movie stuck to shooting like that, it could have been a fun environmental monster flick.  But it wasn’t.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

This was the final of the three big slasher franchises where I hadn’t seen every entry.  I decided that this year’s Spooky Season (as the great Matt Curione would say) was the time for me to finally watch them all.  Somehow, the third installment had slipped by me.  I don’t know how, since it’s a brilliant movie and great addition to the franchise.  It was darkly comedic in ways that worked perfectly.  It didn’t stray too far into lunacy but it also had fun.  The deaths were iconic.  The cast was solid.  And that Dream Warriors song.  Oh yeah.  It’s a close race between this and the first for which is the best of the franchise.  This might slightly edge the original, even if it wasn’t directed by Wes Craven.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

After the third installment of the franchise, the movies seemed to get increasingly dumb.  The fifth movie involved Freddy attacking the real world through the unborn child of the main character.  There were, of course, some good kills.  The climax which came right out of an M.C. Escher painting was visually intriguing.  But it was lacking a certain something that the two previous entries had.  Maybe it was a sense of grounded fantasy.  This one stretched how much you could believe with the situations.  Some of it was great, but some of it fell really flat.

Killer Condom

At an hour and fifty minutes, it may seem odd that a movie like this could be entertaining.  Well, it was.  It was one of my favourite watches of October.  For one, it was a horror comedy that was equal parts of each and never felt like one of the two was out of place.  It was a movie about a gay detective trying to find a batch of condoms that were attacking people in the Hotel Quickie.  It’s all the right kinds of crazy, and it makes perfect sense that Troma distributed it to American audiences.  It’s their type of movie.  It’s clearly schlocky low level horror, but it has a message (equality), and tells it in an entertaining, if off-kilter way.  I give it two thumbs up.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

Wes Craven released Scream in 1996, which I think is one of the best meta movies.  New Nightmare was the precursor.  It didn’t work quite as well.  It was messy in areas.  What really worked was how it became tough to tell what was a dream and what was reality.  That’s something that the series managed to consistently do.  The line between reality and dream only became more muddled with the final installment in the original Freddy Krueger series as it was set in real Hollywood.  With the script for a new Nightmare on Elm Street movie being presented to Heather Langenkamp, she became engrossed in another Freddy story.  Was it real?  Was it the script? Was it a dream?  By the end, you aren’t entirely sure.  I liked it, but it was messy.

House of Purgatory

I’m quite pleased that this was the final first time watch of October.  It was a perfect beginning to the end of Spooky Season.  It took place on Halloween.  Even if that wasn’t a big part of the movie, it was a nice touch.  The movie was about a group of friends who headed out to conquer the scariest haunted house they’d ever heard of.  When they got there, they found out that the horrors were manifestations of their worst secrets, and that they would not be able to escape them.  It was an interesting concept but took too long to get there.  The first half felt like people walking through a haunted house and nothing more.  It needed added tension to it to make it more entertaining.  By the end, I enjoyed it.  The movie nailed the second half.  I just wish it had been like that the whole time.

That puts a close to October.  There were some good movies and some bad movies.  It’s like any month.  The big difference was that the movies in October were all horror movies.  Well, they at least had horror elements.  It was Spooky Season, after all.  It’s a month where horror reigns supreme.

I’m sorry that this post is going up so late.  It was my intention to get it out to you guys in early November.  Clearly that didn’t happen.  Once my mid-term break ended, the work at school piled up.  Scripts, editing, essays, and such needed to be completed.  School has to come first.  I prioritized it above this post.  But now that I’m done for the term, I’ve decided to finish up and get this uploaded.  Hopefully the delay doesn’t make this irrelevant.  You should still be able to enjoy it.

As we’re currently halfway through December, I can say that there will be a November post coming out as well.  It’s a whole other month of first time watches.  There weren’t too many in November though.  School ate away the time for movies as well.  I can tell you that I’ll be writing about Doctor Strange, True Memoirs of an International Assassin, and Waffle Street.  That should be exciting, and there are a few other surprises as well.  Come back in a couple days, and I’ll have that ready for you.