General Spoopmas Film Discussion

[Purple]

What is happening in Phantasm? I watched it today, and cannot wrap my head around anything other than the Cerebral Bore from Turok 2 and “Boy!”.

The main thing going on in Phantasm is that...

Spoiler

a mysterious weirdo who definitely gets a detailed backstory and I think even a name in the 4th movie but everyone always just calls him The Tall Man is traveling around the U.S. taking over funeral homes so that he can steal all of their corpses, fill them with yellow goo to turn them into zombes, and compress them to jawa size so that their muscle density is higher and they are better suited to laboring on a high gravity planet he is not native to but teleports to, for reasons. He also sometimes transforms into a hot girl to seduce guys, which I don't feel needs any further explanation. Don't kinkshame. It's also strongly implied that he kills the general populace when nobody's using for maximum corpse collecting.

He is opposed in this by Some Kid (or BOY! if you will), his sketchy older brother who raised him, and said older brother's friend who runs an icecream truck.

In addition to being just kinda jacked and weirdly magical, and having the aforementioned zombie jawas, The Tall Man relies a lot on flying death spheres, which more than anything else actually get a lot of exposition in the sequels I shouldn't spoil here.

Past that a lot of weird stuff also happens, or maybe doesn't, as we are intentionally really damn vague on what is or is not a dream. And also early on the kid goes and sees an old fortune teller who just straight up gives him the gom jabar test from Dune just kinda for the hell of it, and this is never really brought up again.

 

[Pombar]

I watched the original Night of the Living Dead this week! Was like a more tense and bleak Twilight Zone episode, with the occasional bit too gory for that show. Fully enjoyed it.

 

[Voncaster]

Its been a while since I've rewatched Night of the Living Dead, but it feels like a documentary film to me once it gets going. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the other film that feels like a documentary to me. They are effective in how real they feel.

I think one of the creepiest scenes I can think of in any movie is when the teenagers are exploring the outside of the house in TCM.
There is a generator running for I don't know what reason (its a rural house?) and then one of the teens runs her finger along the house siding and a tooth falls out (I don't remember if its human or animal). It creeps me out big time. Every fiber of my being is telling me to get away from the house.

***
Suitable Flesh (2023)
Who do you think you are!

A tribute film to Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and From Beyond.

Dr. Derby (Heather Graham), a female psychiatrist, encounters Asa Waite (Judah Lewis), a male patient, whose problems are beyond the norm...because his problems are H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos cosmic horror problems. Dr. Upton (Barbara Crampton), a doctor at Miskatonic University, tries to help her friend Dr. Derby from getting too deeply involved with her strange new patient.

Suitable Flesh is a fun movie that I will probably be revisiting in future spooky seasons.

The movie does a lot right. Heather Graham and Judah Lewis are great in the lead roles. The set decoration is consistently great and sets the mood well. Similar to Re-Animator, there is a small cast of characters that have stumbled onto a large otherworldly problem. The Cthulhu Mythos elements are hinted at in the film through book illustrations, dialog, and camera effects. The shape of the cosmic horror is left up the viewer's imagination, which works in the films favor.

Sex is a large theme in the film and sex is both compelling and horrifying at times in the film. I feel like this theme is in line with Re-Animator as well.

Suitable Flesh has some Stuart Gordon easter egg stuff but the easter eggs are not intrusive.

I have only two slight gripes with the film. First, Suitable Flesh does not feel like transgressive horror to me. In contrast, both Re-Animator and From Beyond feel like transgressive films. There is a danger to those films (I imagine some people and critics find them offensive) that I think is largely absent in Suitable Flesh. Second, there are some camera effects that are overused. There is a 360 camera rotation that happens over and over in the film and its tiresome.

Minor gripes aside I think most Stuart Gordon fans will like Suitable Flesh. Suitable Flesh is a Halloween treat.

Rating (out of 5):

 

[FelixSH]

I watched The Faculty. Years ago, probably still in the 00s, it introduced me to Body Snatcher style movies. When remembering it, I didn't remember what I watched, so I went with the one from the 70s. Which was great, but it wasn't what I had watched way back. All I remembered was, that in the movie I watched, there were teenagers.

So yesterday, I watched the Faculty. First, the cast is pretty great. There is a young Josh Hartnett, a young Elijah Wood, Bebe Neuwirth (who played Lilith on Cheers and Frasier), plus a lot of other people I don't know, but who seem to be well-known actors too (that's on me, I don't know many actors).

Aside from that, it was pretty fun and creepy. Like Body Snatchers, it's creepier in the first half, where no one knows what's up. It plays in a high school, and starts with the football coach being taken over by some creature. And we get a scene in a school at night, with no one but the principal and the coach, who is hunting her. A school building at night, with the lights out and no one there, is inherently creepy, and it worked very well for me.

Then we continue on with teachers acting weird, and a bunch of students realizing that something is up. It actually reminded me, structurally, a bit of the Simpson Halloween special, where the teachers eat the students. We get a fun group of students, all well realized with good dialogue, and tension that never really stops.

I think talking about more would be spoilery (what I mentioned happens at the very start, so I hope that's fine). I enjoyed the movie a lot, even though it was a bit too gross at two or three points. Like, the beginning has a character getting a pencil rammed into her hand. But if this is no problem, I think it's a movie well worth watching.

 

[jpfriction]

Rare instance of Jon Stewart actually acting.
Even rarer instance of him being stabbed in the eyeball.

 

[Pombar]

I watched The Faculty at a birthday sleepover in the 90s and we were all pretty convinced it was a bad movie, a daft alien slasher type deal. So has been weird seeing it considered pretty solid in the years since - but I guess we maybe had no real metric for actual badness yet at that age.

Tonight - having a friend over to watch Carpenter's Halloween, should be a good time.

 

[FelixSH]

I tried watching Children of the Corn. Gave up after 30 minutes, or so, I just felt bored.

 

[Pombar]

Did Halloween as threatened. In a crowd that mostly found it daft and hilarious but I felt some genuine menace throughout at least. It has perhaps suffered from decades of iteration and parody, though.

 

[FelixSH]

Hmm, I still need a movie for today. Maybe I should finally watch Halloween. That or Friday the 13th. Haven't seen either one, and it feels like I'm lacking a bit in the pop-cultural department, because of it.

 

[YangusKhan]

Did Halloween as threatened. In a crowd that mostly found it daft and hilarious but I felt some genuine menace throughout at least. It has perhaps suffered from decades of iteration and parody, though.

I think Slashers more than any other genre, and Halloween specifically, are the hardest movies to imagine watching at the time of their original release. It really is astronomical how parodied and referenced the Slasher genre became by the 2000s, and I think that makes it difficult to appreciate the cultural context of something like Halloween or the original Friday the 13th.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Hmm, I still need a movie for today. Maybe I should finally watch Halloween. That or Friday the 13th. Haven't seen either one, and it feels like I'm lacking a bit in the pop-cultural department, because of it.

Both are good in their way. Halloween isn't the first slasher but it's the most influential one, though few are as smart about it (very little blood in Halloween). Friday the 13th is the opposite, a fun popcorn movie that experiments with onscreen gore.

It's interesting about how the genre begins being about urban legends. I mean, that's remained common but those two in particular.

 

[Adrenaline]

Halloween is a good movie with a bunch of bad sequels. Friday the 13th is a bad movie with a bunch of bad sequels.

 

[FelixSH]

I generally prefer no gore, so I'll go with Halloween. I generally don't watch horror movies, and never liked these parodies much, so it might work pretty well for me, I guess.

 

[jpfriction]

Friday the 13th is a bad movie with a bunch of bad sequels.

And one oscar worthy sequel where Jason is blown up by a sex robot and rebuilt by nanobots into cyber jason.

 

[Torzelbaum]

Halloween is a good movie with a bunch of bad sequels.

But not 3, right?

 

[YangusKhan]

I generally prefer no gore, so I'll go with Halloween. I generally don't watch horror movies, and never liked these parodies much, so it might work pretty well for me, I guess.

Halloween takes itself seriously and is incredibly subdued in comparison to the rest of the genre it spawned. It's a "classic" movie, but it's also a classic movie for the right reasons. If that makes sense.

 

[Voncaster]

But not 3, right?

Correct. 3 is not a bad sequel; its an amazing sequel. Its up there with Empire.

Halloween 3 was the first R rated movie I ever saw. It was at a friends house for a sleep over. It left an impression!

***
On the 80s horror franchises. Nightmare on Elm Street was, is and always will be my favorite 80s (favorite period?) horror franchise.

I've always felt Micheal Myers and Jason Voorhees are vastly inferior to Freddy Krueger. Freddy has personality that the other two icons lack.

I appreciate how pure and simple Myers is in the first film. He is a random terror that hits Haddonfield with no rhyme or reason and that is scary. It feels unfortunately current as well with random gun violence.

F13 feels the most trashy; which I also enjoy. Combine kills and nudity and kids will pay for it. Jason takes Manhattan is a personal favorite of mine because I feel like VHS covers would often oversell the product. Jason going to Manhattan for like 5 minutes at the end of the film feels in line with VHS covers overselling their contents. I also enjoy the gonzo ending of that film: NY city flushes its sewers with acid nightly?

 

[Johnny Unusual]

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is about what I expected. Not in a bad way. I remember not being into the songs divorced from the source, slowly warming to some of them. I like it a lot more now, overall that I've seen it in it's entirety and while everyone is doing well, it really is Tim Curry who kills it. He really did need to be in more musical films rather than "generic but fun and over the top" villain roles that he often got (look he still got lots of great parts but there's a lot of filler in the man's career) and did his best with. I will say that a musical often explains a lot in the songs but I couldn't always parse what was happening in the lyrics, so I feel like I'm missing a lot of character stuff (I'm still not sure why Frank is relieved to go home to space in his last musical number). I mean, most is not hard to intuit but I feel like there is intended nuance (yes, in this movie) to motivations that I'm missing.

I loved Phantom of the Paradise. It's such a weird, fantastic movie that goes to some wild places. I thought I knew what to expect and for better and worse, I was NOT prepared for Beef. God, the Phantom is such a cool looking character (even if he's a rube) and Paul Williams wrote some amazing songs for the film (and was the Phantom's singing voice. Everything in the production design and set pieces is just over the top cool. It's not perfect but it's such fun and a great way to cap off Halloween.

 

[Torzelbaum]

So Spooky Season is over for this year but I have stumbled upon a horror movie title that I know nothing about but feel compelled to check out - once the time of year is right.

And that movie is:
Flesh for Frankenstein