Tuesday, October 03, 2017

October Horror Viewing Days 1+2

So, here's the first couple days of Halloween Month movies. Some random thoughts/reviews of each movie and TV show I watch.

Son of Dracula - Lon Chaney is Count Alucard from Hungary. Despite being Hungarian Lon doesn't even attempt to do any kind of hacky Lugosi ripoff accent, he sounds like a guy from Oklahoma. Because he's from Oklahoma. Chaney is a bit miscast as a vampire, but it's a solid movie with great atmosphere and a wonderfully downbeat ending. Louise Allbritton has like 4 hairstyles in this movie - at the same time. Noteworthy for being the first movie to actually show the effect of a vampire turning into a bat.


Son of Godzilla - A group of scientists and a journalist turned cook are doing weather experiments on an island that contains the egg of Godzilla's son Minilla. Soon they join up with island girl Saeko (if you're wondering, Saeko is really cute, she can steal my Hawaiian shirt anytime) while Godzilla shows up to protect his little dude from evil kaiju. 

Little Zilla is pretty goofy looking, but I did like the design on the villainous kaijus - some big-ass Praying Mantises called Kamacuras and one big motherfucker of a spider called Kumonga. This thing really was pretty huge, the puppet took like 20 dudes to operate. 


Son of Kong - Slight but entertaining sequel to King Kong that hit theaters 9 months after Kong. I'm sad I missed this as a kid, I used to love dinosaurs when I was younger and this has a ton of them. There's an Archaeopteryx, Styracosaurus, a Nothosaurus and a Cetiosaurus, I would've loved this.


Son of Dr. Jekyll - This was funded and released by Columbia Pictures in 1951, but this is quite obscure apparently. I don't believe it's ever had a DVD or even VHS release. It's no lost classic or anything, but it's certainly a pretty enjoyable mystery with good performance from Louis Hayward. 


Don't Kill It - Dolph Lundgren hunts a demon that jumps around from body to body. So you can't kill it because if you kill the person who is possessed, you become possessed. This is fairly derivative stuff, and most of the actors not named Dolph or Kristina are kind of distractingly terrible, but Dolph seems to be having a hell of a time here though and his performance and some great gruesome gore effects (minus a poor CGI deer antler kill) make this quite fun.


Evil In Us - This starts off with an absolutely goddamn awful song called Big Beast Eat Little Beast that was so bad I actually muted the TV until the credits were over. For some reason I thought this was a movie about demonic possession, but it's about some government created form of Super Cocaine that makes you go apeshit and kill everything. This is another pretty derivative "possession" movie, but certainly watchable enough. Sure most of the characters are obnoxious dildos, but that's expected in a "friends in a cabin" horror film like this. The gore is pretty well done, very vicious kills with faces torn up, legs snapped off and plenty of guts eaten, and a character at the end that looks like a black Toxic Avenger. The Blaxic Avenger? No, that's not very good. It's kinda hard to come up with the black version of horror characters. Probably why they stopped with Blacula and Blackenstein. Doesn't work with mummies, or zombies, or werewolves. Well, maybe werewolves. Blackenthrope perhaps? I'd watch a movie called Blackenthrope.

Sorry, I got sidetracked there. Unfortunately for The Evil In Us it takes a weird political turn at the end that I felt came off pretty goofy opposed to the biting satire they were going for.


Silent Rage with Rifftrax commentary - Not sure this quite counts as horror, but I think it's more slasher than not, so I'm counting it. This is an odd movie, it alternates between being a slasher, a Chuck Norris karate movie, and a comedy with Flounder from Animal House eating and being an idiot in every scene because he's a fat idiot.* One of those movies where a nutzoid scientist takes an already aggressive person - in this case an axe murderer - and experiments to make him invincible as well. Why? Because. How could this backfire? Oh, he gets loose immediately and kills everybody. That makes sense. Probably should've seen that coming. The Rifftrax commentary was quite funny and made this goofy movie even more fun than it already was.


*No offense to Stephen Furst who died a few months back. The character was a fat idiot, not Stephen.

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