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halloween movie fest 2017 is here (and not a moment too soon)!

By • On • In another day. another movie., movies, scott, vampires, zombies • 2 min read

You wouldn’t know it from the weather in Brooklyn, but the time has come for another Halloween Movie Fest. Or, as my great-great-grandather always used to say, “Thank God, it’s Halloween Movie Fest!” Or, TGIHMF. (How would I trademark that? I feel like it’s definitely going to catch on with a wider public.)

HMF is my favorite annual glorious waste of my own time. I really need it this year, because the world is falling apart and depression is a fucking asshole.

I am so ready for this excursion into the familiar world of Halloween and its related cinema, a tradition that began for me in 2009.

I love Halloween, with its deep reliance on story and myth. For me, it’s like an entire holiday dedicated to telling ghost stories around a fire on a chilly autumn evening. HMF has come to be a means of extending that feeling throughout more of the month.

For previous fests, I would select a specific number of films and watch a movie a day. [That’s always the format for Another Day, Another Movie]. However, this year I’ve chosen 31 films, one for every day of the month, and I’ll get through as many as I can. I hereby promise all four people who read this blog that I will watch no fewer than 21 films. However, I doubt my schedule will allow me to watch a movie a day for the entire month of October. I’ll be damned if I’m not going to try, but odds aren’t great.

The 2017 list includes some straight scary fare, a few horror comedies (because obviously), some lighter Halloween-friendly films, and Room 237, a documentary about interpretations of The Shining and the intense devotion to the film’s many mysteries (I might be stretching my own premise a bit with that last one).

19 of the 31 are films I’ve seen before, so obviously I’m leaning into some favorites I’m in the mood to rewatch. Many are films I loved after seeing them for the first time during previous Halloween Movie Fests.

Here are the films, in no particular order:

  1. Shaun of the Dead
  2. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
  3. The Shining
  4. Room 237
  5. Under the Shadow
  6. Don’t Breathe
  7. The Void
  8. XX
  9. 28 Days Later
  10. What We Do in the Shadows
  11. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
  12. Tetsuo: The Iron Man
  13. It (2017)
  14. The Haunting
  15. House
  16. Phantasm
  17. Beetlejuice
  18. Dead of Night
  19. Pet Sematary
  20. Housebound
  21. Pontypool
  22. Cabin in the Woods
  23. The Babadook
  24. Let the Right One In
  25. It Follows
  26. The Evil Dead
  27. Evil Dead II
  28. Army of Darkness
  29. Coraline
  30. The Devil’s Backbone
  31. Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some movies to watch.

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night two: ‘cronos’. [halloween movie fest, 2016.]

By • On • In another day. another movie., hmf16, scott, vampires • 1 min read

ensminger-cronos-splsh

“I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I think it’s better if we stay together.”

The second night of HMF and I’m revisiting a favorite from nights of Halloween past.

Guillermo del Toro’s debut feature has all of the themes he comes back to again and again. Del Toro himself said:

“To me, Cronos contains the essence of what I want to do … a sincere declaration of how I view the world.”

Both literally and figuratively, this is vintage del Toro.

His best work uses and subverts genre trappings and fantastical horror to showcase the beauty and monstrosity of humanity. The horror of the monsters in the del Toro canon always pale in comparison to what humans are willing to do to one another in a quest for power, money, or youth.

Del Toro said of Cronos, “I do what I’ve done in Devil’s Backbone, what I’ve done in Pan’s Labyrinth, etc. Which is, I take the central monster figure and I make it the saddest figure in the tale.”

This is a story of the inherent tragedy of vampire lore. One of the central themes in many vampire stories is the loss of humanity in the pursuit of immortality. The inability to accept the reality of death results in a half life. Vampires are immortal, they reject death, but only by becoming death. They live forever, but only in darkness, only by consuming life itself. #fucktwilight

These stories are often about the destructive potential of the human quest for immortality. Thus, Guillermo del Toro is the perfect storyteller for the genre, and it in turn is a perfect playground for his first feature.

Cronos is arrestingly grotesque and beautiful, often at the same time. A monster story about what it means to be human. A horror film about love, family, redemption, mortality, and sacrifice. Or to put it more simply, Cronos is Guillermo del Toro at his best.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? Most definitely. As is easily seen above, Cronos is included amongst my very favorite Halloween Movie Fest films from the seven years I’ve done it.

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night one: ‘near dark’. [halloween movie fest, 2016.]

By • On • In another day. another movie., hmf16, movies, scott, vampires • 1 min read

 “Boy, you people sure stay up late.”

“We keep odd hours.”

And we’re off! Night one kicks off with Kathryn Bigelow’s cult classic about a guy who tries to convince a young lady to engage in some casual sex, and as these things often go, she turns out to be a vampire. Our young cowboy finds himself thrown in with a gang of asshole vampires who terrorize bar-flys, truck drivers, and hitchhikers along remote portions of Texas and Oklahoma highway.

The film is pretty to look at, and it’s easy to see the DNA of a directing style that would eventually win Bigelow a ton of awards for The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. 

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Critics liked Near Dark, and as I already mentioned, it became a cult classic. In some ways, I can see why. The idea itself was an interesting take on both vampire movies and neo-westerns, and at times it delighted in its own violent mayhem. It also featured a synth soundtrack by Tangerine Dream that had some great moments.

However, overall, this one was just too nonsensical in all the wrong ways for me. The writing and story just didn’t hold together at all. It was erratic and silly, but to me it didn’t seem to be so intentionally. Everyone has the sorts of holes and weaknesses that prohibit enjoyment, and Near Dark had too many for me.

If anyone wants to have a specific conversation about what didn’t work for me in Near Dark, I’m game. I just didn’t want to go on and on bitching about it in this post. That’s just not what I want RtM to be. I’m also totally down if someone who loves this movie wants to enlighten me concerning its virtues. I would genuinely enjoy learning to see it through a fan’s eyes.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? No. There’s definitely something I’m missing. It’s got a big following of folks who love it and rewatch it, so I’ll leave them to it.

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halloween movie fest 2016!!

By • On • In another day. another movie., hmf16, movies, scott • 1 min read

 

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Sing it with me!

/ It’s the most wonderful tiiiime of the year. When the zombies are lurching and vampires and slurping so we live in feeeeaaar. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. / It’s the hap-happiest season of all. With the slashers all stalking and spirits all walking down your bedroom haaaaallll! /

Absolutely terrible adaptations of Christmas songs aside, October is back and the Halloween season is upon us. For my money, it’s right on time. I mean, it’s always right on time, but this year it’s even righter on time. Yup, it’s so perfectly timed I’m not even using well constructed phraseology anymore.

It’s been such a crazy year for me since Halloween Movie Fest 2015. We live in Brooklyn now, a very recent development, and I miss Seattle terribly. I’m surrounded by strange new things, thousands of miles from my friends and the home I grew to love over the course of nearly a decade.

What better way to feel something familiar than to slip into the tradition of Halloween Movie Fest? I hope it will be the movie-watching equivalent of putting on a perfectly aged sweatshirt on a chilly, rainy afternoon.

This year, there will be an ‘Another Day, Another Movie’ (ad,am) festival within HMF16. Some Inception-level shit. The first 10 of the 20 nights of HMF16 will be a vampire themed version of ad,am. More on that in the post for the first portion of the (mostly) one man movie festival. For now, the important thing is that bloodsuckers will make up half of this year’s list.

what-we-do-in-the-shadows

Here are the movies:

Movement 1 – The Vampires

  1. Near Dark
  2. The Lost Boys
  3. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
  4. What We Do In the Shadows
  5. Nosferatu the Vampyre
  6. Martin
  7. The Horror of Dracula
  8. Cronos
  9. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  10. Trouble Every Day

Movement 2 – Everything Else

  1. The Witch
  2. A Tale of Two Sisters
  3. They Look Like People
  4. We Are Still Here
  5. Attack the Block
  6. Kill List
  7. The Hallow
  8. The Invitation
  9. Berberian Sound Studio
  10. Pontypool

we-are-still-here_dagmar

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the walking dead. [trailer park.]

By • On • In nerd candy, scott, trailer park • 1 min read

A nice, long trailer for AMC’s upcoming show The Walking Dead, based on the graphic novels by Robert Kirkman which I’ve already discussed at length here.

And fear not, even though the second minute is a bit misleading, this isn’t just a slow zombie, American version of 28 Days Later.

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the walking dead. [graphic content.]

By • On • In books, graphic content, nerd candy, scott • 3 min read

Have you read The Walking Dead yet? If not, you are in for a big treat my friend. It’s a fantastic comic series written by Robert Kirkman about life after the zombie apocalypse. The main character is a police officer named Rick Grimes who gets shot in the line of duty, goes into a coma, and wakes up after the proverbial shit has hit the fan (a la 28 Days Later). It is the perfect way to introduce the series, because it’s about life after the zombie apocalypse, so using the coma technique is a clean way of allowing us to adjust to the post zombie world along with our hero.

The comic book/graphic novel medium is perfect for exploring this subject matter, because the story goes on and on, and thus it can take us so much deeper into the questions and metaphors inherent in the zombie genre.

There are tons of reasons why zombie stuff is great, but one of the more important reasons is that it is rife with metaphor at the heart of American culture. It wasn’t an accident that Romero set the sequel to Night of the Living Dead at a shopping mall.

At the moment, our culture is in the midst of this bizarre war where a huge portion of the population refuses to let go of American mythology from the 50’s. We have these ideas of what it means to be American, of what “real America” looks like, and while that ideal never existed, it is even more dangerous now because it should have died a long time ago, it’s alive and kicking even though it shouldn’t be, it is undead now. Actually, Bill Willingham used this as a tiny portion of his Fables storyline, and it was utterly brilliant, but Fables must be left for another post.

Zombies represent something terrifying because they are us. They are our fear of death, our fear of our appetites, our fear of the nagging thought in the back of our minds that we are our own worst enemy, that we will bring about our own destruction.

Yet, what are we left with on the other side of that? We play with the zombie genre, and lets say we make it to the other side of the cataclysm, doing our best to survive long term in a world overrun with a horde of the undead. Then what? Well, that’s what The Walking Dead offers a potential answer to. It’s a band of survivors trying to make life work, trying to keep their children safe, trying to fall in love and find a reason to wake up each day. If everything that we think makes up our world is taken from us, where do we go from there?

Kirkman’s writing is fantastic; tense, well paced, and constantly engaging. I almost always buy what characters are doing, how they are treating each other, etc. That’s rare.

Also, it just may be the best panel work I’ve seen. The art is all black and white, and the way Kirkman and Tony Moore, followed by Charlie Adlard, lay out the panels is perfect. It’s sparse, often with very little going on within each page, creating a great relationship between the story and the art. Also, they avoid the common pitfall of accidently giving away a big moment by placing a full panel event on the right page. What I mean is that so often I accidently learn something I don’t want to know when I turn the page, because as your turn a page you see page 35 on your right before you look back to 34 on your left. If there is this huge, full color death scene (or whatever) before my eyes as I turn the page, I can’t help but see it, so even though I haven’t read the stuff on the left, I know what happens on the next page. In The Walking Dead I am consistently impressed that they build up the big moment, and then make you turn the page to see what happened. It seems like it would be a simple, obvious thing to make work, but it is rare in my experience. They take the medium seriously, and realize what the reading experience will be like.

I really love this series. In the coming world, post Z-Day, the undead won’t be our only enemies. Other humans in the world, people in our own group of survivors, even our own sanity and grip on reality becomes tenuous and dangerous. Kirkman engages the potential for story in this realm with great attention to detail, honesty, impressive character psychologies, and gifted artistic help. You should read these! (And watch the show on AMC when it finally arrives in October).

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plants vs. zombies.

By • On • In gaming, nerd candy, scott • 2 min read

Like most awesome people, I’ve thought a lot about things that would come in handy during a zombie apocalypse. Little did I know that all this time, my plans have been way off base. While I was mentally listing things like bottled water and a deadly but easy to wield melee weapon, I have been totally unaware of how important plants are in staving off the undead legions.

Thankfully, those wonderful folks at Pop Cap have released a game to make clear that plants won’t just make Z-Day survivable, they’ll make it downright fun.

The title is as straightforward as they come, there is no wondering about what you are going to get out of a game called Plants vs. Zombies. Although, for those concerned about gore, you will find none, so play away!

I’m telling you, you should play this game. It is loads of fun. Insanely addictive.

Basically, you need to stop the zombies from making it across your lawn and into your house. You do this with a variety of plants. To grow new plants, you need to collect sunshine. Basically, it all comes down to creating an effective strategy with your with your army of greenery; some plants are purely defensive, some plants shoot spores of various kinds, and some plants give off extra sunshine to give you an added advantage, and that’s just to name a few.

As the game progresses, you need to fight various kinds of zombies as well, from zombies with traffic cones on their heads to zombies driving zambonies. There is even a Michael Jackson zombie.

The difficulty also progresses as you play in different sorts of environments, a backyard with a pool offers new challenges, especially when some zombies ride dolphins (that’s right, some of the zombies ride dolphins!).

That is only sampling of what this game has to offer, I have seen lots of variety and I’m only on level 4-6(ish).

If you have an iPhone or iPad, just go download the game from the app store immediately. It only costs $2.99, and it is worth every penny. If you don’t have either of the aforementioned devices you can play the game on your computer as well, but the price tag is a bit heftier, at $19.95. However, you can play the game for free for a bit on the website to see if you like it before you fork over the dough.

However, while I give the game a hearty seal of approval, to be fair I should make clear that there is a downside. That is, of course,  the lost relationships, jobs, etc. caused by the neglect stemming from you becoming addicted to fighting the good fight against those damned zombie bastards.

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