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The writing credits on Body Snatchers reads like a laundry list of imporant figures in cult cinema of the 70s-90s, the story was co-written by Larry Cohen, adapted into screenplay form by Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli and then finally reshaped into something more to director Abel Ferrara's liking by his usual collaborator Nicholas St. John.

And despite all those big names and talented writers, the "where you gonna go? where you gonna hide?" monologue that ends up serving as the cornerstone of the entire film was written by actress Meg Tilly who, if you'll allow me to paraphrase a little, looked at the screenplay when she'd arrived on set and went "jesus christ this scene needs some fucking work" and asked Ferrara if she could rework her character's dialogue which he, also being unhappy with the film's screenplay, was more than happy to allow.

Abel Ferrara apparently worked a lot this way throughout production, cutting scenes out, adding new ones in, allowing script-changes on the fly, etc. A major thing he cut was the original ending that has Marti and Tim effectly destroying all the pod people by blowing up a "toxin warehouse" (presumably the one we see early in the film) which causes hazardous chemicals to rain down on the entire military fort, melting every alien it lands on into a discusting pile of wriggling goo. The only problem was he forgot to have someone write a new ending and the one we end up geting is a montage of weirdly edited clips, some extremely unecessary voice-over from Gabrielle Anwar and an actual "THE END" title card. Honestly he should've let Meg Tilly take a crack at the entire screenplay, the last time he let an actress he worked with do that the resulting film was Bad Lieutenant.

Still as haphazard as that ending is Ferrara was absolutely right that the film shouldn't end happily, the exact thing that's the downfall of The Invasion (the extremly skippable 2007 remake). I just wish someone had tasked any one of the skilled writers on the crew to maybe write something a bit more effective to end the film.

That being said and bad editing aside, Body Snatchers remains weirdly effective, Ferrara manages to create a clausterphobic and tense film with themes of paranoia and conformity that feels exactly at home with other doomed-world 90s horror like In the Mouth of Madness and Candyman.

Watched on Monday June 2, 2025.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park feels like a movie that the producers made Bowfinger style where no one told Steven Spielberg he was actually directing a movie.

5 minutes into the film I know we were in some serious trouble, despite the fact that this movie cost nearly twice as much as Final Destination 3 it looked a million times worse (thanks to shooting in 3D no doubt), everything was lit like a CW show and the actors sounded like they walked straight off a soap opera set. The rollercoaster sequence that sets off the previous film is so well staged, so well shot and the sound design is so well executed that at times it feels like you're actually ON the coaster. The opening set piece here doesn't put you in the action so much as it makes it feel like you're watching said action unfold on a Nokia phone screen while half asleep in a Chili's bathroom.

One of the most "if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." pieces of media I've ever seen, vile, haunting, upsetting, and unfortunately an all-too essential modern text, cannot wait to never, ever, ever watch this again.

I won't lie and say I don't miss that feeling of being an internet during that blissful time before social media, before YouTube, when AI was just a Matrix-style fever dream and the idea of having access to every movie or book or TV show ever made a button press away was completely unheard of.

It was around this time, about 20 years ago (jesus christ I'm getting old), that my journey with The Stuff began all thanks to a little website I stumbled across when googling the original, Steve McQueen-starring The Blob. Finding Bovies.org was like opening the Ark of the Covenant for my young and very malleable teenage brain, the perception I had regarding filmmaking as an art and what kinds of movies that were and weren't important was forever altered from then on out. I spent countless hours reading and re-reading their hundreds and hundreds of reviews, reviews for movies I'd never heard of, movies who's very existance I couldn't even fathom. Every review had about 8 screenshots and one low quality 20-30 second video clip, each offering a tiny taste of some bizarre cult film I'd never heard of and the more of them I looked at the more my insatiable appetite to find these newly unearthed gems grew. I took handwritten lists to every video store I could get to on my own and came up empty handed every time. My dad, pitying me, told me he knew of one spot in the city that would definiely have what I was looking for and drove me across town to Suspect Video, one of the few spots still renting VHS tapes at that time and told me I could rent three movies. The Stuff, always top of every list I'd made, was one of those three and the degree to which I became obsessed with it was so intense that I don't even what the second and third rentals were.

A few years back I caught wind of a mythical extended cut of The Stuff, a nearly 2 hour "director's cut" that eventually got announced as a bonus disc on the Arrow Video 4K. Don't ask me how but I managed to get my hands on test copy and last night through bated breath and a racing heart I finally gave it a spin.

Now I wish I could sit here and wax poetic about how essential those extra 30 minutes are to this new cut of The Stuff, how Larry Cohen's vision is even stronger and more riviting than ever but let's just say there's a reason I put quotes around "director's cut" in the previous paragraph. Cohen himself is the one that originally excised those newly unearthed 30 minutes because he knew a movie like The Stuff should never be 2 hours and my god was he correct. That being said it was extremely fun seeing the new scenes, they certainly expand a few storylines and offer some added fun not found in the original cut, I got some major laughs from Danny Aiello's extended death scene that features even MORE of him rolling around on the ground and screeching like a little girl plus there's a ton more ultra-80s Stuff TV commercials interspersed throughout, Cohen mainstay Lauren Landon even makes an appearance in one, all and all though Cohen made the right call cutting most of that footage.

Despite the extended cut's issues the politically charged nature of the film remains unblemished and it's themes of corporate greed and dangerous, unregulated consumerism unfortunastely ring even truer in 2025 than they did 40 years previously. Cohen was a filmmaker who was always able to tap into cultural anxieties more than almost any of his low-budget, genre filmmaking contemporaries and that's exactly why people continue to revisit his films time and time again.

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

Midway through watching this I realized so little of the film was anything other than elaborate death scenes I decided to go through the film a second time with a calculator and a spread sheet because I really wanted some hard data.

Here's what I came up with:

Opening/closing credits - 0:08:20

Non-death scenes - 0:18:10

Death scenes - 1:05:50

Just give me a second here to crunch some more numbers, ok.. alright carry the three... uh huh... alright looks like all of this adds up to a... perfect sequel? Huh would you look at that.

I was 16 when Final Destination 3 came out and just at the beginning of my "I only watch SERIOUS horror movies!!!!" phase in which I discounted or ignored a ton of extremely fun schlock from this era. I being a little disappointed that this installment really amped up the silliness and that it felt more like a standalone sequel as opposed to a continuation of the first two. While I still love Final Destination 1 and 2 and would love if there was a little more of a connecting thread to this one I cannot deny that injecting a bit of camp into the franchise was exactly the lifeblood Final Destination needed.

Listen I don't want to get on here and just start praising a movie directed by one of the most problematic men in Hollywood but unfortunately Flight Risk is a major ripper. Total return to form 90s filmmaking that feels like it could've come out in the late 90s smack dab between Con Air and Turbulance.

If my review convinces you to give this movie a shot though I IMPLORE you to pirate it.

Watched this in preperation for the How Did This Get Made live show that I worked last night and at one point during the audience interaction/Q&A segment Paul Scheer approched me with a panicked look on his face when he realized he didn't know how to get from the balcony to the gallery level. Fun fact: the venue I work for was built in 1894 and designed in such a way that there was essentially a "poor people entrance" complete with it's own less glamourous stairwell up to the third floor (or the gallery) so anyone who couldn't afford tickets on the much nicer and more comfortable main floor and balcony levels would be completely segregated from the wealthier patrons. Isn't classism hilarious! For the record we haven't abided by the segregated entrances policy for decades.

Oscar is a such a curiosity, I was fully expecting it to be an extremely run of the mill snoozefest given it's complete lack of cultural cache but by the time the credits rolled my friend and I looked at each other in baffled astonishment, our mutual sentiment being something along the lines of "I think I... liked that? I mean it wasn't GOOD but I had a pretty good time I don't know what to tell you".

Watched on Friday May 9, 2025.

I don't know exactly what I expected from Death Kiss, maybe it was a little foolish of me to think it might skewer the right wing politics of the franchise it's a direct tribute to instead of fully embracing them but man oh man can you tell director Rene Perez is a Trump guy.

In fact if you want to read a little bit more about how completely insane he is: ENJOY

(it's so much worse than I thought)

I believe all queer people are born that way, sure our sexualities have ebbs and flows and aren't always defined by a single preference but as soon as we're brought into this world we're queer as queer can be.

That being said I think the Tina Turner scene in Tommy made me gay when I was 15.

kept laughing at how much sexier Laura Dern's hair would get the more trauma she had to endure

Completely baffled at the amount of scary and fairly essential story details that the filmmakers chose to remove, replacing them with an exceedingly boring storyline about the guards and scientists that you couldn't have paid me to care about. It's a fine art adapting one medium to another, much can be lost in translation but there are bountiful oppourtunities to create something new and exciting if you play your cards right, Soviet Sleep Experiment is a perfect learning experience for any young filmmaker on how badly you can fuck up an adaptation if you're not smart about it.

Great Chris Kattan performance though!

I won't argue that the ending isn't a little baffling the more I read about it the more I'm like "ok ok fine I GUESS it makes sense".

I truly believe that limitation creates the best ingenuity on a film set, I think so many directors who've tasted great success over the years have so much trouble making art with the same means as their scrappy beginnings that they get locked into making bloated money wasting nonsense for the latter halves of their career. Soderbergh clearly has no trouble pingponging between wearing a fancy suit and directing A-list actors with fancy cameras for millions of dollars on one film before rolling out of bed and shooting a single location thriller on an iPhone for another and that's what keeps his films feeling fresh after 40 fucking years of making them.

It's amazing how well this movie holds up considering how many jokes involve cultural references that almost no one under the age of 60 would get anymore. There's a gag later in the film that would require you to regonize that a character is being played by Maureen McGovern and the entire joke is "isn't it so funny that we cast the woman who sang the theme song to Poseidon Adventure in a spoof of disaster movies".

About 2/3rds of the way through this I leaned to my friend and went "ok this REALLY has to be the last scene where he does something self-destructive" and then there were at least three more scenes of Jonathan Majors' character doing something self-destructive.

Magazine Dreams is a movie straight out of the Paul Shchrader handbook of "complicated male lead struggling to adapt in a world at odds with him" filmmaking that unfornately wastes too much of it's runtime driving the same point home over and over and over again as if the audience hasn't already understood it's themes from the get go. While a frustrating watch at times it remains engaging and features the kind of performance that would've won Jonathan Majors a ton of awards if he hadn't turned out to be a piece of shit, I just wish it had cribbed the whole "your movie needs to have a story too" from the Schrader handbook too.

It's amazing how good Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves nails the balancing act of having an ensemble cast wherein every actor has a purpose and well-executed character arc because man oh man is that ever not the case in Game Night.

I pretty much never care about the film's undercooked secondary leads and a lot of the character conflict, while giving good jumping boards for jokes, never feels very purposeful to the plot.

John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein are always cooking with some kind of special sauce that make their movies always stick the landing despite whatever issues I have with them though. Despite it's setbacks I couldn't help but have fun with Game Night and that's more than I can say for most modern comedies.

The thing I love about Marlon Brando is you can always count on either a good performance, an insane performance or a "please get me off this set as soon as possible" performance and despite it's middling offerings as a film The Island of Dr. Moreau manages to contain all three.

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

When Spielberg very smartly decided against making an E.T. sequel he funnelled all his ideas for it into the E.T. Adventure ride at Universal Studios Orlando and let me tell you, having experienced that ride first hand I thank the lord above every day that E.T. 2 never happened.

People are too obsessed with lore and backstory, some stories are better experienced without all that baggage and E.T. is a perfect example of that.

Watched on Saturday March 22, 2025.

I honestly think there's a correlation between how hard it is to get a film made these days and the ever increasing amount of drawn out, slow moving and overlong dramas that feel like chores to get through, I mean what plucky young filmmaker wouldn't try and make their movie as "slowly poetic" as possible if they knew there was a strong chance they'd never make another one.

A Real Pain is the kind of movie every filmmaker attempting to make a thought provoking character drama needs to sit down and watch before they write their screenplay. It's a perfect case study on how to accomplish the kind of story you're likely trying to tell in UNDER 90 MINUTES. Trust me guys, you will get thousands upon thousands more eyes on your little drama if you make it short and sweet. Please for the love of god we need more movies that're 83 minutes.

Watched on Wednesday March 19, 2025.

It's so funny to me that there's a movie featuring a killer robot and a gratuitous shot of Farrah Fawcett's boobs directed by the same man behind Singin' In the Rain.

Saturn 3 is fun but Silent Running it is not.

Suspense
noun
a state or feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen:
"come on, Fran, don't keep me in suspense!"

Suspense is something that The Gorge has in spades (until it doesn't), so much so that the clunky writing and heinously bad greenscreen never even bothered me, all I cared about was the mystery of the gorge and how it was going to play out. Unfortunately for me The Gorge assumed that I wanted answers RIGHT AWAY and completely blew it's load halfway through foreplay and all I was left with was a video game cut scene that felt like watching someone else play Fallout for an hour.

Very funny to me that Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller asked for the scenes of their characters playing chess and drumming to be removed since they felt like hacky references to Queen's Gambit and Whiplash and Scott Derrickson was like "haha no". Guess what Scott, that was a bad decision!

As we were leaving the theatre I told my partner this movie had a 5.7/10 rating on IMDb and he screamed "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!?!" at me.

DuJour means relationship goals.

Glad no one could hear the sound I made during the estuary scene when you first catch a glimpse of Jaws just before he bites the boy scout leader's leg off but for the record it went something like this "aaaauuuggghhhhhjeeesuussssfuuuccckk"

It's so funny to me that one of the biggest possible events in Star Trek lore — the great meeting of Kirk and Picard, the great ing of the torch between captains, is as bungled as it is here. A boring conversation that kind of glosses over their ideologies as captains in an effort to wrap up the story really quickly because the movie is almost over by the time it happens. Before the audience can even recon with the fact that Kirk and Picard are ing forces to defeat Malcolm McDowell's character to begin with Kirk is already dead.

Honestly the whole movie really feels like something that got made solely out of obligation in order for the TNG crew their own franchise post-Generations.

It's got some fun moments though and McDowell's performance is suitably insane, his "time is the fire in which we burn" line is an all-timer.

The fact that Liam Gallagher is a character in this is so funny to me that I howled with laughter every time he showed up on screen, not to mention the fact that the actor who played him was not only bad but couldn't do Liam's Manchester accent at all.

Anyway Better Man is a masterpiece.

Imagine Robert De Niro's career took a huge downturn in the early 80s and desperate for cash and a little recognition he agreed to starring in a TV movie sequel to Taxi Driver. Public perception about it was less excitement towards the film and more pity towards Robert that he'd have to stoop to that level just to get a job again. The writer hired mostly wrote for sitcoms and has never seen the original and the director is some journeyman talent (never considered a great auteur) that had some vaguely popular films 20 years previously and has now descended into alcoholism and frequently clashes with his cast. The film is given a modest budget but the network refuses to allow them to film on location for insurance purposes and the script is retooled at the last minute to be mostly indoors on sound stages formally occupied by a recently cancelled cop show. A 3am drunken phone call from the director to the writer insists they allocate the now available location filming funds to musical sequences and the network only agrees because one of executives owes the director a favour and figures people will watch "this piece of shit" regardless of quality. It airs on a prime time slot on ABC on Friday night and most viewers tune our halfway through, some critics champion it but most are completely confused, De Niro's career never rebounds.

Anyway that's what watching Joker: Folie a Deux felt like for me.

White Noise feels like a photocopy of a photocopy of The Ring with a few pages of The Sixth Sense screenplay thrown in for good measure, a mediocre entry into the grand canon of supernatural thrillers for adults that dominated the shelves at my local Blockbuster when I was a teenager.

That being said there's something about this movie that's always stuck with me and I think it mostly has to do with it's hesitation to lay out everything clean and simple for the audience. Now this could be entirely unintentional thanks to a poorly written screenplay or bad editing or what have you but the fact that we never fully understand how EVP works or that White Noise's big bads are never fully explained really works in the film's favour, those fleeting moments of actual mysterious horror that keeps you guessing really makes you forget how dumb almost everything else about White Noise is.

Multiple f-slurs, at least 3 songs I thought were Smash Mouth but weren't, JESSE BRADFORD.

2000, what a year to be alive.

It's been such a long time since I've seen a horror movie that legitimately left me guessing as much as this one did. Oddity treads familiar territory story-wise but it's execution is so interesting, so cold and calculated that I could never figure out what it's next move was. Go into this one blind (no pun intended).

About a Boy #2

when we got movies like this every month?

This was the first movie I thought to watch when I found out David Lynch had ed, his very sombre and quiet reflection on aging and death that really shows how deeply attuned he was to the human condition, in all its sorrowful, beautiful fragility. Wipe away the veneer of eccentricity from any of Lynch's films and at their core all his work was as heartfelt and human as Straight Story, it's what made him one of the few major weirdo artists to actually connect with mainstream audiences who otherwise would never engage with art like his.

This was a particularly meaningful watch for me, not only because I'm still grappling with the loss of David Lynch but tonight as I was setting up the projector to watch this with my friend I got a call from my mom telling me my uncle, who'd been long ill, was hours away from dying.

Life is funny sometimes.

Jessica Rothe fire your agent immediately, your performance in this should've skyrocketed you to stardom.

My only gripe with this otherwise incredibly fun movie is how poorly the twist is handled, the "big reveal" is handled so swiftly and anticlimactically it really fucks up the film's otherwise great momentum.

Two things I love most about this movie:

1) how much of it was clearly cribbed to form the basic story of Legend of Zelda

2) the fact that Princess Eilonwy isn't an official Disney Princess™ because this movie didn't make enough money

I'm not inherently opposed to rape/revenge films as a whole because when done with some semblance of intelligence and restraint they can be extremely effective. Sure it's a cheap shortcut to create a satisfying thriller but I think the main issue with these films isn't solely their use of sexual violence as a core element to the storytelling but rather when it's used it in a way that feels like a sleazy, hollow gimmick rather than a transgressive way to get audiences to think about the nature of violence or the societal issues behind it's existence.

Straightheads has a single scene that I would describe as being even remotely effective in this sense, one in which we learn more about the patriarchal rot that's infected one of the rapists brains, the kind of rot that's destroyed his life and left him an broken man who's only outlet is anger and violence. Now that could've been enough to save the otherwise very bad film had any of the revenge elements been even remotely satisfying or well crafted but unfortunately Straightheads' approach to literally everything is sad, boring artless realism. I'm sorry but if you're going to make a movie where GILLIAN ANDERSON has a sniper rifle and is trying to craft a plan to murder some dudes in the woods it should be a lot more satisfying to watch than this exercise in audience torture.

you think Bowie and Tina Turner got along so well because they both had an incredible pair of legs?

In Toys, Barry Levinson aims for the grand philosophical sweep of love versus hate, imagination versus destruction, things that clearly mean a great deal to him. Unfortunately despite his earnest swings at those lofty themes Levinson neglects some of the most basic tenets of storytelling and thus Toys crumbles under it's own weight. Robin Williams' character is barely developed and Robin Wright, who clearly should've been the lead shows up too late into the film to really guide the story along like she should've been doing from the start, offering an audience perspective to Leslie Zevo's madcap world of playthings would've been a much better way of telling the story Levinson wanted to tell but alas it is not how he went about it.

It's really too bad because Toys is truly a beautiful film in so many other respects: the costumes, the music, the insane Michael Gambon performance and most importantly it's unbelievable production design. It's the kind of movie that would play like gangbusters on mute at a party while Talking Heads are blasting out of a good stereo system.

Toys' heart is in the right place though so it's hard for me to fault it too much, it's a movie I watched a lot when I was younger and it's one of those mildly fucked up "kids movies" that warped my perspective on art in all the right ways so you know what, maybe it's a masterpiece if you wear the right rose-tinted glasses and tilt your head in such a way that blood rushes into it in a mildly unhealthy manor.

weeping

Doctor Sleep is one of the few films to come out in the past decade (or longer) that makes me feel like a kid sitting in front of my dad's CRT television, eyes glued to some seminal genre film that'll alter my personality and perception of art for the rest of time

I know Mike Flanagan's stuff doesn't work for everyone but man oh man does it ever work for me.

Watched on Friday November 15, 2024.

Watched on Friday November 15, 2024.

Watched on Tuesday November 5, 2024.

I think everyone has a film or two that rests high in their mind as an important piece of the pop culture lexicon when in fact they just watched it at an impressionable age and at the right time and place with the right group of people. Bride of Chucky is one of those films for me, one that I still have to remind myself isn't something I can just reference specifics of as if it's a cultural touchstone the likes of Jurassic Park or Citizen Kane.

Watching it again for the first time in over a decade I've come to realize it's not exactly a perfect film but I'll always be completely in awe of how good Don Mancini is at keeping this franchise afloat. The slasher was a dying genre by the time Child's Play 3 came out, there was still money to be made but audiences were getting sick and tired of the same old shit. All of that would change a few years later with the release of Scream, a film that proved there was still juice in the genre if you were willing to give it a different spin and Bride of Chucky does exactly that.

I think it takes a lot of guts to take your previously (mostly) serious creation and essentially continue as a self-parody but as has been made extremely clear with the direction Mancini continues to take Child's Play in, he's always known how campy it is. It's not possible to make a movie like Seed of Chucky, the first of the series directed by Mancini, if you hadn't always wanted to go balls to the wall nutso with your beloved creation.

Now I must say, as much as it seems like I'm giving Mancini all the credit for Bride of Chucky's success I don't think the film would've worked anywhere near as well without Jennifer Tilly. While I don't always subscribe to the age old "90% of directing is casting" notion I definitely agree that there are certain things inherent to the fibre of one's being that not even the greatest actor on earth could emulate. Tilly has that same spark that Marilyn Monroe had, something the film seems to acknowledge during a scene that feels like a direct homage to Monroe's sexually frustrated character in 1953's Niagara in which Tilly (styled with Monroe-esque hair) flirts with a strapping young man within earshot of her soon-to-be husband Chucky. Like most Monroe characters Tiffany isn't necessarily a deeply complicated, multi-layered yada yada yada here's your award trophy type of character but she's one that needs to pop on screen and without Tilly's perfectly honed brand of aspirational coolness and sexuality she would never pop as well as she does. It's why I get so frustrated when people debate the talents and acting abilities of someone like Marilyn Monroe or Keanu Reeves because to me it doesn't matter how well they can pull off a complicated monologue, there's just something about them that makes them insanely compelling to watch on screen.

Anyway it was a lot of fun to have one of my oldest friends and the biggest champion of Bride of Chucky from our high school days over to watch this together, god damn do I love that almost all the Child's Play movies are under 90 minutes.

First scene in the movie is an absolute 10/10 action extravaganza of monumentally entertaining proportions, Gary Busey calls Danny Trejo a butthorn, bazookas are blasted, a game of hot potato with a grenade follows, Danny Trejo tries to escape in an ice cream truck before getting blown up in a fiery explosion, WHAT MORE COULD YOU ASK FOR?

Oh I know, for the rest of the movie to be even remotely as entertaining.

At least Henry Silva's villain character seems like he's doing an impression of Ricardo Montalban's Chrysler commercials for the entirety of his screen time, I kept waiting for him to say "rich Corinthian leather" at some point but alas it never came.

Purpose is a film that asks you to sympathize with it's rich kid tech bro lead and wants you to believe that an email petition to keep a brand new, high speed internet service an inexpensive one-time payment rather than an overpriced perpetual monthly fee would actually work.

Having lived through the rise of the internet, from the the dot com era of GeoCities and Neopets all the way to the perpetual misinformation hellscape of our current reality Purpose is a film that feels unbelievably quaint by today's standards. Not a badly made film though, just one that dates so horrendously badly I honestly believe it could serve as a case study on how poorly we all predicted the future of the internet in the early 2000s

A lot of fun seeing Mia Farrow as a cut throat tech executive though!

Since starting this list a few actors have made followups to their sole directing credits, I'll list them here as they bump themselves off:

Johnny Depp - The Brave (1997) / Modì, Three Days on the Wing of Madness (2024)

David Duchovny - House of D (2004) / Reverse the Curse (2023)

Edward Norton - Keeping the Faith (2000) / Motherless Brookyln (2019)

Joey Lauren Adams - Come Early Morning (2006) / Betrayed by My Bridesmaid (2023)

Michael Angarano - Avenues (2017) / Sacramento (2024)

Heather Graham - Half Magic (2018) / Chosen Family (2024)

Josh Duhamel - Buddy Games (2019) / Buddy Games: Spring Awakening (2023)

1. Nothing but Trouble

   Dan Aykroyd

2. The War Zone

   Tim Roth

3. Harlem Nights

   Eddie Murphy

4. Whip It

   Drew Barrymore

5. Wanda

   Barbara Loden

6. Everything Is Illuminated

   Liev Schreiber

7. The Night of the Hunter

   Charles Laughton

8. Lost River

   Ryan Gosling

9. Strays

   Vin Diesel

10. Hostage for a Day

    John Candy

...plus 273 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Exhaustive list of every movie I could with a musician in a leading or important ing role, I went with either their first or biggest starring role depending on which seemed more important.

• Purple Rain

  Prince

• The Rose

  Bette Midler

• The Jazz Singer

  Neil Diamond

• Desperately Seeking Susan

  Madonna

• Cool as Ice

  Vanilla Ice

• One Trick Pony

  Paul Simon

• Vibes

  Cyndi Lauper

• The Man Who Fell to Earth

  David Bowie

• UHF

  Weird Al Yankovic

• Performance

  Mick Jagger

...plus 363 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

bonus points if they're wearing a cowboy hat

• How the West Was Fun
• O Pioneers!
• Morning Glory
• Operation Dumbo Drop
• A Weekend in the Country
• Lily Dale
• Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
• The Man in the Moon
• Hard Promises
• Paradise

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Not too many cinematographers have made the successful transition to directing, here's a list of the most notable examples I could find.

Exceptions are a few co-directing credits or cinematographers with almost as many directing credits as they have DOP credits (i.e. Gary Graver, Massimo Dallamano)

• Transcendence

  Wally Pfister

• Creepshow 2

  Michael Gornick

• The Escape Artist
• Circle of Iron
• Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves

  Dean Cundey

• Homeboy
• Father Figures

  Lawrence Sher

• China Moon

  John Bailey

• Windows

  Gordon Willis

• Slayground

  Terry Bedford

...plus 60 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I find the best way for me to watch a lot of movies I've been "meaning to get to" for years is to make it a challenge, originally I said I'd do 5 movies for each year of the 70s but why not make it more fun and tackle 10. Wish me luck. UPDATE: it's now 25 from each year because there was too much I wanted to watch

• Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

  Keenan and His 90 Minutes of Whoooooooaaaaaaaaaaa.

• Patton

  I am not going to assign a star rating to Patton because I think it's probably a good movie but I was so fucking bored out of my skull trying to sit through it I don't think I absorbed even 1/100th of it, it is so definitively not a me movie I don't really feel like my opinion is necessary, it'd be like asking Joe Rogan to review Moonlight.

• Mark of the Devil

  Outrageous.

  Felt very Euro-Hershell Gordon Lewis in all the right ways, as soon as I heard early screenings of this offered barf bags to the audience I was sold immediately and 100% not disappointed.

  Udo Kier has such a pretty face.

• Tristana

  I know this is stating the obvious but Luis Buñuel is just so good at making the ordinary seem intensely bizarre, erotic, disgusting, etc. Tristana is a totally normal drama on the surface but jesus christ is it ever off-putting. Imagine flipping through channels and landing on a random episode of Twin Peaks without any prior knowledge of what it was and thinking it was a standard TV soap until scene after scene something would happen to make you uncomfortable, that's Tristana.

  I mean sure it's no Belle Du Jour or Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie but it's pretty fascinating seeing Buñuel attempt something so seemingingly... normal?

• Diary of a Mad Housewife

  Now I'm not just saying this because every shitty male sitcom character from the 90s owes just about everything to Richard Benjamin's performance in this but Diary of a Mad Housewife honestly feels like the most sadistic Larry David script ever written.

  Well not really because if Larry David wrote this I think Carrie Snodgress' legitmate pleas for understanding would be played for laughs, "haha the nagging wife is nagging so much!!!". Frank Perry is a great director but it's pretty evident he needed a lot of help portraying even semi-complicated women on screen, all his best movies (this one included) were written by his ex-wife Eleanor and when their partnership ended the quality of his output slowly but surely declined. Hearing that the studio twice rejected Christina Crawford's own script for Mommie Dearest and went with one Perry (who'd never written a film before) and producer Frank Yablans put together leads me to believe that maybe Faye Dunaway shouldn't be the only one to blame for how ludicrous that film turned out.

  Diary of a Mad Housewife is so unrelentingly upsetting it made my head throb. After creating one of the most nightmarish portrayals of suburbia in The Swimmer Frank and Eleanor Perry decided to tackle snooty Manhattan socialites and boy oh boy do they ever take that lifestyle to the whipping post. I spent the whole movie waiting for one, just ONE nice thing to happen to Carrie Snodgress and the best we get is her lambasting her shitty husband for his poor party planning skills.

  It's a shame this one was stuck in music rights hell for so many years because of the one Alice Cooper scene, thank Christ it's gotten a proper restoration because Diary of a Mad Housewife deserves to be seen.

• Original Cast Album: Company

  "Sing? I can't SPIT this time of the morning"

  Much to my partner's disappointment and the shock and chagrin of all the other theatre gays I've known over the years I've never been into stage musicals. There's a certain magic in them that I guess I'm blind to, I've seen Wicked, a show I do not like and have never liked THREE times because it's my partner's favourite and every single time I find myself focusing on all the things you're not supposed to focus on. I'm fascinated by how the stage is constructed, how stagehands turn a rock around between scene changes and suddenly it's a couch! (or some other object), noticing a member of the chorus suddenly playing a different character, mentally zooming in on the microphones glued to everyone's head, doing whatever I have to do to keep myself entertained because no matter how poweful your rendition of Defying Gravity is I just don't care.

  Maybe that's why Company completely works for me, it's the CONSTRUCTION of the shows that's always seemed like the most interesting part of a stage production to me. Watching Elaine Stritch try to nail a vocal take of The Ladies Who Lunch while Stephen Sondheim bithces in the background feels more authentic than anything I've ever seen on stage, it's incredibly visceral and exciting. I wanted to watch this whole thing over again as soon as the credits rolled.

• Cowboy in Sweden

  Lee Hazlewood's cowboy psychedelia has always spoken to me, ever since hearing Some Velvet Morning as an impressionable teen he's always been my wandrin' honky tonk prophet of choice. Cowboy In Sweden a mostly plotless excuse to showcase his music (along with Steve Rowland and George Baker Selection of all people) but good god damn if it isn't a beautiful trip.

• Catch-22

  I think I loved Catch-22 on a scene by scene basis, I haven't read the book but from what I understand it functions similarly and while I appreciate the dedication to the text I don't really think this works as a movie.

  Parts of it were really enjoyable and Nichols direction is predictably fantastic but it was too easy to disassociate from the plot when I wasn't able to follow what the fuck was going on, I can see Buck Henry's script feeling really edgy at the time but now it just feels overambitious. Thank god the cast is so stacked though, anytime I felt myself drifting off suddenly it'd be like

  "oh shit Orson Welles.... wait Anthony Perkins is in this??? Charles Grodin?!?! RICHARD BENJAMIN!!!!"

  Yes I'm aware I'm part of a dwindling and microscopic part of the population that gets excited to see Richard Benjamin but there are dozens of us, DOZENS!

• And Soon the Darkness

  Felt like the blueprint for Stranger By the Lake, a really breezy, atmospheric horror that works so much better set during the day, the idyllic rural French landscape becoming more and more horrifying as Jane begins to question her safety.

  And Soon the Darkness never QUITE becomes the edge of your seat thriller the tagline promises but it's still pretty effective when it needs to be. It's particularly good at taking these little mundane moments that might feel insignificant in other films and making them feel really big, which when your movie is as sparse as this one is pretty important.

  Robert Fuest could've been a much bigger name in horror had The Devil's Rain not completely squashed his chances but at least we'll always have this.

• Joe

  I watching an interview with Mary Harron where she mentioned how many guys came up to her shortly after American Psycho came out to tell her how cool they thought Patrick Bateman was and her reaction was always shock and confusion. Surely people must've seen through his words and actions that he was a deeply troubled and shallow individual the audience was supposed to dislike, right?

  Of course to some Joe was a hero to the working man, they cheered on as he made friends with the capitalist big wigs and shotgunned hippies in the back despite how clearly the movie tries to tell you how wrong he is. Joe blames his problems on minorities "abusing the welfare system" but has no issue befriending a murderous CEO who makes more than 10x Joe's salary per year, the exact kind of CEO who's able to be so rich by employing people exactly like Joe for bottom of the barrell wages. If this were made today people would think the "KEEP AMERICA GREAT" tagline would be too on the nose.

  You could remake Joe today and barely change a single line of dialogue and it'd still make sense, history is doomed to repeat itself again and again and again.

...plus 109 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

list in progress

• Phantoms
• Dreamcatcher
• The Black Dahlia
• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Everything I've ed from the website of the same name, mostly a list for me to what's on my hard drive.

1. The Day Time Ended
2. Future War
3. The Babysitter
4. Generation X
5. The Touch of Satan
6. Yonggary
7. The Mangler Reborn
8. Dancin': It's On!
9. Lovers Lane
10. Skyscraper

...plus 661 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Hitman's Run
• Hard Time
• Bloodmoon
• No Way Back
• Spitfire
• Dead Man
• Executive Target
• Gonin
• Steele Justice
• Nighthawks

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Chairman of the Board
• Mr. Wrong
• Welcome to Mooseport
• Trial and Error
• A Million to Juan
• Walk Like a Man
• Opportunity Knocks
• It's Pat
• Fat Albert
• Up Your Alley

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is my list of titles I'll be watching in order starting October 1st at Midnight 🎃

--- 1890 - 1919 OPTIONAL - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1912)
--- 1920 - The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
--- 1930 - White Zombie (1932)
--- 1940 - The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
--- 1950 - Dementia (1955)
--- 1960 - What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969)
--- 1970 - Scalpel (1977)
--- 1980 - Hospital Massacre (1981)
--- 1990 - Children of the Night (1991)
--- 2000 - Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005)
--- 2010 - Boar (2017)
--- 2020 - Talk to Me (2022)

Watch films in at least three languages:
--- Cure (1997) / Japanese
--- (Second language), (insert title)
--- (Third language), (insert title).

Watch a film starring:
--- Andrew Prine -
--- Any Carradine -
--- Christopher Lee -
--- Julian Sands -
--- Peter Cushing -
--- Samara Weaving -
--- Sarah Michelle Gellar -
--- Sharon Farrell -
--- Treat Williams -
--- Vincent Price -

Watch a film directed by:
--- Mario Bava -
--- John Carpenter -
--- Piers Haggard -
--- Ruggero Deodato -
--- William Friedkin -

SCAVENGER HUNT - Watch films that satisfy the following 31 requirements:

--- 10th Anniversary: A 2013 horror film -
--- 10th Installment: The 10th in a series/franchise -
--- 100th Anniversary: A film from 1923 -
--- 3 Women (3 films directed by women) -
--- Abbott & Costello Meet -
--- Amicus -
--- Blob (Any) -
--- Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) -
--- Corman Says (2 Corman-Directed Films) -
--- Frankenstein Monster (Any) -
--- Folkloric or mythic critters (Dragons, elves, fairies, gnomes, trolls, etc) -
--- Gill-Man (Any Creature from the Black Lagoon film) -
--- Ghost -
--- Karloff & Lugosi (Starring together) -
--- Mummy -
--- Not Quite Universal Monsters (3 of the non-Big 5 Universal Horror films) -
--- RIP George Barry -
--- Shot by: Dean Cundey -
--- Tigon -
--- Vampire -
--- Werewolf -
--- When I Was 10 (2 horror films from the year you turned 10) -
--- Witchcraft -
--- X Marks the Spot (X is part of the title) -
--- Year of: 1986 -

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

  SPOOKY SEASON BEGINS

  This short is fine.

• The Fall of the House of Usher

  It's unbelievable how quickly filmmaking progressed from dinky silent shorts that were impressive at the time but could easily be recreated with a barely functioning smart phone by a bunch of 12 year olds in an afternoon to THIS.

  Fall of the House of Usher is one of the most insanely ornate and unbelievably gorgeous films the 1920s had to offer. I can't give Luis Buñuel all the credit for how ahead of it's time stylistically this was, though he did write and do additional directing on it, but knowing he was involved suddenly the experimental nature of the film and the mood heavy storytelling makes a lot more sense.

  Put this on in the background at your Halloween parties this year.

• White Zombie
• The Curse of the Cat People
• Dementia
• What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?
• False Face
• Hospital Massacre
• Children of the Night
• Hellraiser: Hellworld

...plus 49 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Exorcist
2. The Exorcist III
3. The Devils
4. Prince of Darkness
5. Rosemary's Baby
6. The Omen
7. Angel Heart
8. The Day of the Beast
9. Alucarda
10. Race with the Devil

...plus 114 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Swimfan
• Gossip
• Disturbing Behavior
• Cruel Intentions
• Fear
• The In Crowd
• The Skulls
• Wild Things
• Tangled
• Antitrust

...plus 52 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Re-ranking as I rewatch, if you're seeing this message consider this list unfinalized.

1. Affliction
2. The Card Counter
3. The Comfort of Strangers
4. Cat People
5. Forever Mine
6. The Walker

The first 15-20 or so are ones I either had to meticulously reconstruct from available elements or design myself because original posters didn't exist or were of low quality, way too many hours spent on photoshop for some of these.

• Heart of Darkness
• Backstage
• How Awful About Allan
• Go Ask Alice
• Mrs. Reinhardt
• Medium Rare
• Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls
• On a Moonlit Night
• The House of God
• Jiggery Pokery

...plus 243 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is my list of titles I'll be watching in order starting October 1st at Midnight 🎃

Watch one film from every decade of film history:

--- 1890 - 1919 OPTIONAL - A Nightmare (1896)
--- 1920 - The Hands of Orlac (1924)
--- 1930 - The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
--- 1940 - The Beast With Five Fingers (1946)
--- 1950 - The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
--- 1960 - Midnight Lace (1960)
--- 1970 - Microwave Massacre (1979)
--- 1980 - Nightbeast (1982)
--- 1990 - The Addiction (1995)
--- 2000 - Skinned Deep (2004)
--- 2010 - All Hallows' Eve (2013)
--- 2020 - Hellraiser (2022)

Watch films in at least three languages:
--- The 4th Man (1983) - Dutch
--- Schramm (1993) - German
--- The Untold Story (1993) - Cantonese

Watch a film starring:
--- Linda Blair - Sorceress (1995)
--- Corey Feldman - Voodoo (1995)
--- Clu Gulager - Uninvited (1988)
--- Anne Heche - Nothing Left to Fear (2013)
--- William Hurt - The 4th Floor (1999)
--- Sandra Peabody - The Last House On the Left (1972)
--- Debbie Rochon - Santa Claws (1996)
--- Jill Schoelen - When a Stranger Calls Back (1993)
--- Fred Ward - Cast a Deadly Spell (1991)
--- David Warner - Hostile Takeover (1988)

Watch a film directed by:
--- Jeff Burr -
--- Roger Corman -
--- Veronika Franz -
--- Leigh Janiak -
--- Mickey Keating -

SCAVENGER HUNT - Watch a film in each of the following sub-genres / types:
--- Anthology -
--- As Above, So Below: 1 Each Top & Bottom Scoring Films (2) -
--- Based On: Anne Rice -
--- Bugs Bugs Bugs -
--- Canadian tax shelter movies (2) -
--- Composed By: Charles Bernstein -
--- Country of Origin: Mexico -
--- Cryptid That’s NOT Bigfoot -
--- Documentary -
--- Halloween Specials (3) -
--- Hometown Horror -
--- Horror Comedies (2) -
--- It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown -
--- Killer Plants -
--- Musical Meat Loaf -
--- Nano Challenge: American Regional Horror Films (5) -
--- Remake and Original (2) -
--- Queer Horror (2) -
--- Takes Place in: Space -
--- True Crime -
--- Written By: Curt Siodmak -
--- Video Nasty -

• A Nightmare

  I love trick photography.

• The Hands of Orlac

  Had I realized this would be one of the most beautiful examples of German Expressionism from the master Robert "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" Wiene I probably would been a lot more enthusiastic from the get go but like all silent films I have to stare at myself in the mirror, splashing cold water in my face as I whisper to myself "you gotta do it, you can't call yourself a film nerd if you don't watch this" before I throw them on.

  Hands of Orlac is the earliest example of one of my favourite horror micro-genres, the evil hand. Body Parts, The Hand, Idle Hands, The Crawling Hand, all treasured classics that owe everything they have to Hands of Orlac.

  Thankfully unlike most of the pretty forgettable leads in those films (except Devon Sawa of course) this film stars the incredibly expressive Conrad Veidt, or as I like to call him The Sexy Peter Lorre, who spends most of the film contorting his face and hands into increasingly disturbing shapes. This guy is so hell bent on showing the most emotion humanly possible through his sunken and wide eyes I can't even imagine ever needing to hand this guy a script with dialogue. Just let him tell the entire story through his bug eyed stare.

  Anyway this really could've benefitted from sharing Cabinet of Dr. Caligari's 75 minute runtime but at least anytime I felt bored I could just zone out and just stare at how beautiful the sets and shot composition were.

• The Most Dangerous Game

  I was wondering why the jungle scenes in this were both exceptionally good looking and oddly familiar and apparently in a very Roger Corman-esque "these are perfectly good sets, why put them to waste!" move this and King Kong were filmed simultaneously, Kong during the day and Most Dangerous Game at night with most of the same cast and crew. I wonder if Fay Wray was even allowed to sleep?

  Anyway when this movie isn't long uninterrupted takes of people in a room talking for what feels like an hour it's a lot of fun, the action is oddly good for a film from this era and thanks to the stacks of cash put into building those jungle sets it looks great.

• The Beast with Five Fingers

  After watching The Hands of Orlac I figured I might as well throw on another evil hand movie on since I guess it's my new favourite subgenre.

  It might be hard to believe someone as weird as Peter Lorre was a legitimate star in his time but when you see him act circles around everyone else in the film it's pretty clear why he was so popular. I actually forgot he was in it til his bug-eyed mug showed up on screen and I practically leapt out of my seat in delight, I just wish I hadn't seen quite so many Looney Tunes parodies of him because it's kind of hard to ever take him completely seriously.

  Anyway The Beast with Five Fingers is no lost masterpiece but it does feature some remarkable special effects, I'm not sure how they pulled off the severed hand running around strangling people and playing piano but it sure looked great.

• The Incredible Shrinking Man

  Not to be dismissive of the directing or acting performances from science fiction but I really do feel as though it's the writing that really defined a lot of the greats from this era. There's so much about The Incredible Shrinking Man to love but Richard Matheson's words really leap from the screen and turn what easily could've been a total cheesefest into a genuinely affecting story.

  Of course huge credit to Jack Arnold for demanding the studio keep the ending and for directing the fuck out of the action scenes in this. When Grant Williams first encounters the glowing mist that causes him to start shrinking it was so ominous and creepy I immediately recognized why a movie seemingly so goofy got the Criterion treatment.

  Whatever happened to April Kent? She's so cute and bubbly in her brief appearance in this, I thought for sure she had a prolific acting career based on her performance here but nope, other than this she had 3 bit parts and disappeared off the map.

• Midnight Lace

  If I'm being perfectly honest I was fully expecting a very boring, super dated thriller that I'd probably regret watching but turns out Midnight Lace is actually not half bad!

  Sure it's basically a watered down Hitchcock movie that's 20 minutes too long but it's got STYLE mostly thanks to cinematographer Russell Metty who shot Spartacus, Touch of Evil, The Misfits and all the best Douglas Sirk movies. Despite it's corniness I actually found it quite gripping even though it's painfully obvious who the unseen villain is, they barely throw the audience a red herring or two. Something about Doris Day in anything other than a goofy comedy is always camp gold, see also: Storm Warning.

• Microwave Massacre

  When I was applying to the arts high school I ended up attending many moons ago I had to give some examples of what I wanted to pursue there and for one of my illustrations I recreated the poster for Microwave Massacre with pencil crayon.

  I'd never seen the movie but I was certainly obsessed with the idea of it, in fact it'd take me *sigh* TWENTY years to get around to it, i.e. tonight. I'm turning 33 in a month and that statement made me feel like fucking Methuselah.

  Microwave Massacre is quite the experience, it's tone and truly bizarre attempt at comedy put it into this surreal nightmare zone where it feels like you're watching a movie made by aliens. On the making-of featurette on the Arrow blu-ray the filmmakers spoke about knowing absolutely nothing about movie making and as obvious as that might be in the finished product it's exactly that charm that makes Microwave Massacre so enjoyable.

• Nightbeast

  Regional horror is a special thing, a group of 80s moustachioed entrepreneurs gathering whatever small pile of cash they can and creating art. I can't imagine there were too many places to rent film equipment in Baltimore during the 70s and 80s so I love imagining Don Dohler and John Waters fighting over who got to rent what every weekend. Do you think they had some lowly PA bring lighting rigs over from a location shoot of The Alien Factor to the set of Desperate Living after Don and John formed a truce? In my headcanon this happened.

  Anyway it's amazing watching a gorgeously restored blu-ray of this courtesy of our friends at Vinegar Syndrome, nothing feels more special than watching a movie that was never supposed to look this good look THIS good. Nightbeast is a cut above so many other horror movies of it's ilk by the sheer amount of love and care clearly put into it, and by love and care I mean Don Dohler filling every frame with as much death, lasers, explosions, aliens ripping heads off and T&A as possible.

  In other words this movie is a lot of fun.

• The Addiction

  Nobody shoots NYC like Abel Ferrera.

  People like to shit on horror movies a lot but The Addiction is a perfect example of how you can really use the genre to drive a point home. Nothing is scarier than a seemingly inescapable addiction and while dozens and dozens of TV movies try and try again to scare you away from the horrors of drugs none of them have the lasting power of a stylishly shot genre film that uses vampiric allegories to say the exact same thing.

  Lili Taylor is a secret weapon in 90s movies, an atypical lead that can deliver the kind of quietly intense performance where it seems like she's always hiding something behind her eyes.

• Skinned Deep

  There's a lot about Skinned Deep to love, mostly it's extremely stylish aesthetic that feels like Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Freaked with a little Mad Max sprinkled in for some extra spice. Gabriel Bartalos is a Screaming Mad George-esque auteur of the special effects make-up world and used every available tool in his toolbelt to create a bombasticly fun piece of exploitation cinema.

  The only issue is that as a director.... he's not great.

  Ok maybe that's a bit of an oversimplification, what I mean is that when it comes to storytelling or directing actors Bartalos seems to actively put those aspects of his job on the back burner in favour of the more visual components. When a horror movie has bad acting and I actually notice it's generally QUITE bad and let me tell you, the only person that leaves this film unscathed is Warwick Davis, everyone else is middle school play level bad. There's also an ungodly amount of bad ADR, bad sound mixing and awkward editing that turns what could've been a much better movie into something a lot more amateurish. With a little more time and money in the editing suite, and also better actors to dub over every non-Warwick Davis performance Skinned Deep would've probably been a lot more well ed.

...plus 50 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I rewatched the entire Halloween franchise this month and I have some FEELINGS and OPINIONS.

1. Halloween
2. Halloween III: Season of the Witch
3. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
4. Halloween II
5. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
6. Halloween II
7. Halloween: Resurrection
8. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
9. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
10. Halloween

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest
2. Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering
3. Children of the Corn
4. Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice
5. Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror
6. Children of the Corn: Runaway
7. Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return
8. Children of the Corn
9. Children of the Corn: Revelation
10. Children of the Corn: Genesis

1. Unmasked Part 25
2. The Birthday
3. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne
4. Monkey Shines
5. Carnival of Souls
6. Willard
7. Baxter
8. The Fan
9. Inside
10. Who Can Kill a Child?

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Nothing is weirder and more self indulgent than playing yourself in a biopic about your life.

• Out on a Limb
• The Greatest
• The Ann Jillian Story
• Call Me Anna
• Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story
• Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story
• Livin' for Love: The Natalie Cole Story
• Viva Knievel!
• To Hell and Back
• Private Parts

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Intimate Stranger
• As Good as Dead
• The Amy Fisher Story
• Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?
• Illusions
• Twisted Desire
• The Courtyard
• I Can Make You Love Me
• The Babysitter's Seduction
• A Face to Die For

...plus 232 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Re-ranking as I rewatch, if you're seeing this message consider this list unfinalized.

1. The Thing
2. Assault on Precinct 13
3. Halloween
4. Prince of Darkness
5. The Fog
6. Escape from New York
7. They Live
8. Christine
9. In the Mouth of Madness
10. Body Bags

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Favourite Dramas:
1) Red Rocket
2) Pleasure
3) The Novice
4) Boiling Point
5) The Card Counter
6) Mass
7) Help
8) Sweat
9) Medusa
10) Beans

Favourite Genre Films:
1) Benedetta
2) Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time
3) Annette
4) Malignant
5) Lapsis
6) Last Night In Soho
7) In the Earth
8) Mad God
9) The Beta Test
10) The Night House

Trash I Loved:
1) Bad Girls
2) The Reckoning
3) Psycho Storm Chaser
4) Karen
5) Pom Poms and Payback

ABSOLUTE WORST:
1) 2025: The World Enslaved By a Virus
2) Apex
3) Cinderella
4) The Matrix Resurrections
5) Malcolm & Marie

1. Benedetta
2. Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time
3. Red Rocket
4. Pleasure
5. Annette
6. The Novice
7. Boiling Point
8. The Card Counter
9. Mass
10. Help

...plus 110 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Sonny Boy
• Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff
• Breaking Glass
• Normal Life
• Get Rollin'
• Blume in Love
• Natural Enemies
• Marlene
• The Woman Chaser
• Flexing with Monty

...plus 143 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Heartbreak Kid
• The Watermelon Woman
• Secrets & Lies
• Clearcut
• Diary of a Mad Housewife
• Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff
• Death in Venice
• The Woman in Black
• Shadows in Paradise
• Donkey Skin

...plus 49 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This list includes some 2019 titles given a wide release in 2020.

1. Malignant
2. Possessor
3. The Invisible Man
4. PG: Psycho Goreman
5. Shadow in the Cloud
6. Alone
7. In the Earth
8. Bad Hair
9. The Vigil
10. Cyst

...plus 43 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Mask Up, and Let's Go!: ROHMC 2021
This is my list of titles I'll be watching in order starting October 1st at Midnight 🎃

Watch one film from every decade of film history:
--- 1890 - 1919 - The Infernal Cauldron (1903)
--- 1920 - The Man Who Laughs (1928)
--- 1930 - The Mummy (1932)
--- 1940 - Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
--- 1950 - Macabre (1958)
--- 1960 - Eye of the Devil (1966)
--- 1970 - Alucarda (1977)
--- 1980 - The Mutilator (1984)
--- 1990 - Ticks (1993)
--- 2000 - The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007)
--- 2010 - The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)
--- 2020 - The Night House (2020)

Watch a film for each rating:
--- G - Phantom of the Megaplex (2000)
--- PG - Jaws 3-D (1983)
--- PG-13 - The Hole (2009)
--- R - In the Earth (2021)
--- X / NC-17/ Unrated - The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974)

Watch films in at least three languages:
--- Japanese - Pulse (2001)
--- Turkish - Baskin (2015)
--- Korean - Forgotten (2017)

Watch a film starring:
--- Nancy Allen - Forced Entry (1976)
--- Robert Englund (NOT a NoES) - Night Terrors (1993)
--- Hal Holbrook - Girls Night Out (1982)
--- Daria Nicolodi - The Sect (1991)
--- Kevin McCarthy - Eve of Destruction (1991)
--- Christopher Plummer - Dreamscape (1984)
--- Vincent Price - The Last Man On Earth (1964)
--- Barbara Shelley - Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
--- Joe Spinell - The Undertaker (1988)
--- Julie Strain - How To Make a Monster (2001)

Watch a film directed by:
--- Al Adamson - Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971)
--- Terence Fisher -
--- Kim Jee-woon - The Quiet Family (1998)
--- Antonio Margheriti - Alien From the Deep (1989)
--- Hideo Nakata - Chatroom (2010)

SCAVENGER HUNT - Watch a film in each of the following categories:
--- All the Haunts Be Ours: 2 films from the Severin folk horror compendium - Clearcut (1991)
--- Based on a Novel or Short Story - The Lottery (1996)
--- Bigfoot / Sasquatch / Yeti - Sasquatch (2002)
--- Death By: Sex - The Wasp Woman (1996)
--- Eco Horror - Mutant Species (1995)
--- Face/Off: 2 films in which different actors play the same character - Oxygen (2021)
--- Found Footage - The Last Broadcast (1998)
--- Haunted House - The Woman In Black (1989)
--- Holiday Horror - Black Friday (2021)
--- Horror Comedy / Spoof - Cyst (2020)
--- Killer Inanimate Object - Blades (1989)
--- Location: A Body of Water - Crocodile (2000)
--- Monster Mash: One each Chocula (Dracula), Frankenberry (Frankenstein), Boo Berry (ghost), Fruit Brute (Werewolf), and Yummy Mummy (Mummy) films - Depraved (2019), Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (1988), Late Phases (2014), Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy (1998)
--- Nation of Origin: Canada - Whispers (1990)
--- One Word Title! - Shivers (1975)
--- Pick a Number: Title includes a number (NOT part or volume) -
--- Psychological Thriller - Intensity (1997)
--- Slasher - Blood Beat (1983)
--- Title Includes “Death” - Deathrow Gameshow (1987)
--- Therianthropy: Any were-creature EXCEPTING a werewolf -
--- We Were Here First: 2 Native American horror films -
--- Witchboard -
--- Year of: 1971 -

1. The Infernal Cauldron

   1890 - 1919 -

   Somewhere up in heaven Georges Méliès is looking down at Tiktok Teens using trick photography in their videos and smiling.

2. The Man Who Laughs

   1920s -

   The most interesting thing about The Man Who Laughs is despite all the nightmarish photos of Conrad Veidt's character and his ever-prescent ghoulish grin that've littered the internet for as long as I can his character isn't actually supposed to be scary, in fact this movie isn't even really supposed to be scary, it's gothic romance more than it is a horror, Veidt is a sympathetic, Hunchback of Notre Dame-esque character that you kind of love. I almost feel sorry for all the Joker bros who watched this because of what it's probably most famous for in 2021, inspiring the look of the original DC comics Joker, who knows maybe this got some of them into silent films, one can hope. I can see why this is one of Del Toro's favourites though, it's so lush in it's execution and the production design is through the roof, I'm sure he watched this over and over while in pre-production for Crimson Peak because you see touches of it everywhere in that movie. Paul Leni's untimely death a year after directing this is one of silent cinema's greatest losses, would've loved to see what else he was capable of.

3. The Mummy

   1930s -

   Probably my least favourite of all the Universal Monster movies I've seen, there's just soooooo muuuuuuccchhh taaaaaallllkkiiinnnggg..... I kept waiting to see Boris Karloff in full Mummy regalia slowly walking towards a scantily clad screaming woman but it never happened. That being said Karloff was pretty great in this, it's one of those "ooh THAT'S why they were such a big deal" level performances. Are there any good Mummy movies other than the Brendan Fraser ones?

4. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein

   1940s -

   Maybe if the Tom Cruise Mummy movie had starred Key & Peele it could've anchored the failed Dark Universe franchise like it was supposed to. How many other movies from the pre-Avengers era tried to combine characters from multiple franchises into a single film? I'm genuinely curious because watching this felt kind of otherworldly. Not only does it jam most of the iconic Universal monsters into one movie but it's also a comedy which is maybe the only way this could've truly worked. It's too bad Bela was in the middle of his morphine addiction when he made this because you can tell from his performance he's not quite firing on all cylinders, it's still great seeing him as Dracula one last time though.

5. Macabre

   1950s -

   It's pretty amazing how many movies William Castle made before his career really took off, 40 directorial credits in he finally finds that Hitchcock-esque formula that really clicked with audiences and despite a bit of a rocky start with Macabre it's still a lot of fun. Macabre is maybe the most provocative of Castle's prime era of filmmaking, there's casual sex, cheating, bloodied corpses, implied child murder, you name it! It's back and forth flashback heavy narrative is a little clumsy but not enough that it ever really bothered me. It's not his best work but for the movie that really catapulted Castle into the world of horror it's kind of odd how rarely it's mentioned even among genre nerds.

6. Eye of the Devil

   1960s -

   Eye of the Devil feels like the bridge between a more classic horror film like The Haunting and a New Hollywood horror like Rosemary's Baby, an awkward rickety bridge that feels like it could collapse at any moment but a bridge nonetheless. It has some very ahead of it's time ideas but a somewhat dull execution that keeps you wanting more. Eye of the Devil boasts some great cinematography and a chilling atmosphere plus very notably a debut performance from the one and only Sharon Tate in a role that sees her playing a hypnotically stoic and somewhat menacing side character who may or may not be a witch. What the film lacks though is the tension needed to pull off an effective finale, J. Lee Thompson seems like he was a workhorse director, the kind the studios loved because they could always turn in a movie on time and on budget but that maybe didn't have quite the creative spark necessary for any of those films to remain in the public consciousness for much longer than they played in theatres. Granted he did direct my favourite Planet of the Apes sequel so I'll give him that much. Eye of the Devil remains more of a curiosity than a forgotten classic but it isn't without it's charms, if you just watched Deborah Kerr's much better "helpless woman is trapped in a remote manor while supernatural things occur around her" movie The Innocents and you need to scratch that itch again maybe give this one a shot.

7. Alucarda

   1970s -

   Knowing that Alucarda is just "A Dracula" spelled backwards should give you an idea of how subtle this movie is. Two girls fall in love, sell their souls to satan and gain unholy powers that they use to kill the tyrannical nuns and priests that run the cultish convent they live in. There are maybe 3 or 4 scenes in this entire movie that don't involve someone screaming at the top of their lungs, there's death by fire, decapitation, vampire bites, there's a wedding officiated by the literal devil, I don't know what else you want in a movie. Juan López Moctezuma got his start in the film industry producing Fando y Lis and El Topo and let me tell you, it shows.

8. The Mutilator

   1980s -

   For whatever reason I went into this thinking it'd be a low tier studio flick, not a "I refinanced my house to pay for this" regional horror movie but here we are. The Mutilator is a highly rewarding watch if you're into truly excessive, out of this world looking gore effects combined with acting performances that would feel at home in a bargain bin porno because plot-wise it's pretty thin. A very by the numbers slasher movie with a boring ass villain who really needed a cool mask or a hidious scar or something because he's literally just some dude. I think my favourite part of The Mutilator though is it's hilariously inappropriate theme song by someone doing their best Billy Joel impression that goes on for way, way too long.

9. Ticks

   1990s -

   I don't know what's less believable Clint Howard accidentally creating an army of mutant ticks with his experimental marijuana steroids or Alfonso Ribeiro playing a streetwise tough guy. For someone who's made a bunch of pretty wild FX-heavy genre films I feel like Tony Randel doesn't get the respect he deserves, It seems like every director tasked with making a sequel to a horror classic is cursed with c-list fame forever, Rick Rosenthal, Steve Miner, Jack Sholder, John Lafia, Richard Franklin, etc. never made it as big as the franchises they helped carry along which is honestly too bad. While Ticks might not be as well ed as Hellraiser II it still brings the same crazy energy to the table. If while watching this you're ever feeling like Ticks might be too by-the-numbers just wait for the finale when Tony Randel plays all his Evil Dead-homage cards and things gets real funky.

10. The Hills Have Eyes 2

    2000s -

    Hills Have Eyes 2 follows the exact same formula as Aliens, or would've had Wes Craven's original idea of Emilie de Ravin's character from the first film returning to lead a group of soldiers to eliminate the remaining mutants come to fruition. I mean the concept is still fairly intact minus Emilie de Ravin, aside from that the Aliens comparisons stop because this movie blows. You know I don't the 2006 Hills Have Eyes being particularly groundbreaking but it seemed to understand what worked about the original and made a fun, though sometimes nauseating story that I was compelled to watch from beginning to end on multiple occasions. Say what you want about Alexandre Aja, the man knows how to entertain.

...plus 55 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Dagon
2. Lake Mungo
3. Halloween II
4. Jennifer's Body
5. The Mist
6. Dead Silence
7. Wrong Turn 2: Dead End
8. The Cave
9. Halloween: Resurrection
10. Halloween

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Watchers II
2. Watchers Reborn
3. Hideaway
4. Intensity
5. Watchers III
6. Watchers
7. Whispers
8. Phantoms
9. Mr. Murder
10. Frankenstein

1. Wrong Turn
2. Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings
3. Wrong Turn 2: Dead End
4. Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines
5. Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead
6. Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort
7. Wrong Turn

• Dressed to Kill
• Phantom of the Paradise
• Body Double
• Carrie
• Scarface
• Raising Cain
• Blow Out
• Sisters
• Carlito's Way
• ion

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Student Bodies
• A Cat in the Brain
• There's Nothing Out There
• Man Bites Dog
• New Nightmare
• Scream
• Funny Games
• The Last Horror Movie
• Feast
• Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

...plus 9 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Caves, sewers, tunnels, mines, subways, oh my.

• The Descent
• The Descent: Part 2
• The Cave
• Catacombs
• Sanctum
• The Dyatlov Incident
• As Above, So Below
• The Pyramid
• The Devil Below
• Creep

...plus 61 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Found these lists (twelve total which I've compiled) a couple years back and they slowly became my bible for weird or interesting movies to watch. All credit goes to Listal Jay Trotter (https://jaytrotter.listal.com/lists) who originally made them, I've included his original reviews as well.

1. Possession

   If David Cronenberg, David Lynch and John Cassavetes teamed up to make a drama/horror blend about a divorce of epically fucked up proportions, this would be it. A genius work of pure psychosis. Don't watch trailers. Don't read any more about it. Just watch it.

2. Miracle Mile

   Tagline - "Be prepared to be blown through the back of the theater!"

   Bout right.

   Avoid all plot summaries, hell don't even look at the poster to your left, SERIOUSLY. Go into this as ignorant as possible. It'll add a ton to the viewing experience of what I say is one of the most underrated films of all time.

3. Bad Boy Bubby

   Like a beautiful, supremely warped version of Being There.

4. Wake in Fright

   A phenomenal Australian film with one incredible sequence, shot, character, etc. after another plus Donald Pleasance showing up as an alcoholic outback doctor. Considered by many to be the best film to come from Down Under. A true masterpiece of unknown filmmaking.

5. Cockfighter

   Warren Oates might've been the coolest person to ever live. Same goes for this movie.

6. The Holy Mountain

   "I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs." - Alejandro Jodorowsky

7. Let It Ride

   My favorite comedy of all time. Dreyfuss is KING.

8. The Cat

   Some of the most fantastic crazy trash Asia has ever produced. Actual dog vs. cat choreographed fight scene is beyond awesome. OFF ITS ROCKER FILMMAKING.

9. Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist

   The story of Bob Flanagan, the man who holds the medical record for living the longest with cystic fibrosis, 43, who also happens to be a masochistic performance artist. Roger Ebert called it one of the most agonizing films he's ever seen and I call it my favorite documentary of all time.

10. Brewster McCloud

    Robert Altman's weirdest and perhaps most imaginative film. Love it so.

...plus 590 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• What Lies Beneath
• Bless the Child
• Urban Legends: Final Cut
• Pulse
• Ghosts of Mars
• Bones
• Sleepless
• Soul Survivors
• Down
• How to Make a Monster

...plus 53 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Samurai Cop
2. Cool as Ice
3. Miami Connection
4. The Room
5. Empire of the Dark
6. Never Too Young to Die
7. GetEven
8. The Astrologer
9. Fateful Findings
10. Death Spa

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I watched every single one of these in the same one week period.

1. A Friend to Die For
2. Co-ed Call Girl
3. Alibi
4. Awake to Danger
5. Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?
6. Mind Over Murder
7. The House Sitter
8. Perpetrators of the Crime
9. Deadly Pursuits

• China O'Brien II
• Honor and Glory

• Species II

  Alien DNA from Mars turns astronaut into super horny alien hybrid who wants to bone Natasha Henstridge to make super babies and take over the world.

• Ghosts of Mars

  Natasha Henstridge has to deal with evil Martian space ghosts interrupting her trying to bone Jason Statham. Greatest feminist space western ever made.

• Back in Business
• The Operative

I counted the Three Colours Trilogy as one film, if you don't like it sue me.

1. Total Recall
2. Brazil
3. Kiss of the Spider Woman
4. Opening Night
5. Ed Wood
6. Showgirls
7. The Thing
8. Three Colours: Blue
9. Three Colours: White
10. Three Colours: Red

...plus 192 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My dad worked on Descent with Michael Dorn back in 2005, I him coming home from set and telling me "Michael Dorn looks really weird without his Klingon make-up on"

• Safe House
• Dad Savage
• King of Texas
• Mysterious Island
• The Midnight Man
• Alien Autopsy: (fact or fiction?)
• Dying to Live
• Brothers of the Frontier
• Firestorm: 72 Hours in Oakland
• Yesterday's Target

...plus 76 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Favourite Dramas:
1) Nomadland
2) Minari
3) The Nest
4) Small Axe: Mangrove
5) Sound of Metal
6) I'm Thinking of Ending Things
7) About Endlessness
8) Promising Young Woman
9) Driveways
10) Let Him Go

Favourite Genre Films:
1) Possessor
2) Vast of Night
3) Bad Hair
4) Invisible Man
5) Promare
6) Shadow In the Cloud
7) Alone
8) PG: Psycho Goreman
9) Survival Skills
10) VFW

Trash I Loved:
1) Deadly Mile High Club
2) Assassin 33 A.D.
3) Unhinged
4) Capone
5) Army of One

ABSOLUTE WORST:
1) Last Days of American Crime
2) Verotika
3) The Grudge
4) Scoob
5) The Prom

1. Nomadland
2. Minari
3. The Nest
4. Mangrove
5. Sound of Metal
6. Possessor
7. About Endlessness
8. I'm Thinking of Ending Things
9. Promising Young Woman
10. The Vast of Night

...plus 101 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Ravenous
• Ghostwatch
• Pet Sematary II
• The Rage: Carrie 2
• Critters 3
• Slumber Party Massacre III
• I Was a Teenage Serial Killer
• Mirror Mirror

...plus 61 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Malone
• Stick
• Raven
• Shamus
• Hooper
• Gator
• Navajo Joe
• Dan August: Once Is Never Enough

I took on the fruitless task of ranking all 250 horror movies I've seen from the 1990s, why? Who knows!

1. Candyman
2. Army of Darkness
3. Cube
4. Perfect Blue
5. Scream
6. Night of the Living Dead
7. Ghostwatch
8. The Exorcist III
9. The People Under the Stairs
10. In the Mouth of Madness

...plus 240 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Stay 6 Feet Under: Your Socially Distanced ROHMC 2020 is here! This is my list of titles I'll be watching in order starting October 1st at Midnight 🎃

--- 1890 - 1919 (OPTIONAL) - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913)
--- 1920 - The Last Warning (1928)
--- 1930 - The Invisible Man (1933)
--- 1940 - The Uninvited (1944)
--- 1950 - Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)
--- 1960 - Kill, Baby...Kill! (1966)
--- 1970 - The Evil (1978)
--- 1980 - Schizoid (1980)
--- 1990 - Afraid of the Dark (1991)
--- 2000 - Severance (2006)
--- 2010 - Prevenge (2016)
--- 2020 - 12 Hour Shift (2020)

Watch a film for each rating:
--- G - Tower of Terror (1997)
--- PG - Phase IV (1974)
--- PG-13 - The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)
--- R - Shredder (2001)
--- X / NC-17/ Unrated - The Toolbox Murders (1978)

Watch films in at least three languages:
--- Japanese - Noroi: The Curse (2005)
--- Italian - A Quiet Place In the Country (1968)
--- Spanish - Julia's Eye (2010)

Watch a film starring:
---Yvonne de Carlo - American Gothic (1987)
---Danielle Harris - Inoperable (2017)
---Olivia de Havilland - Lady In a Cage (1964)
---Kane Hodder (but not as Jason/in a Friday the 13th!) - Born (2007)
---Maika Monroe - Villains (2019)
---Kelly Preston - Love at Stake (1987)
---John Saxon - Blood Beach (1980)
---Howard Vernon - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981)
---Max Von Sydow - Hour of the Wolf (1968)
---Patrick Wilson - engers (2008)

Watch a film directed by:
---Larry Cohen - Pick Me Up (2006)
---Marina de Van - Dark Touch (2013)
---Stuart Gordon - The Pit and the Pendulum (1991)
---Joel M. Reed - Bloodsucking Freaks (1976)
---Robert Wise - The Body Snatchers (1945)

SCAVENGER HUNT - Watch a film in each of the following sub-genres / types:

---2x2: 2 Franchise second installments - Hollow Man 2 (2006) / The Birds II: Land's End (1994)
---2 Black horror films (Black director & predominantly Black cast) - Asunder (1998) / Bad Hair (2020)
--- Atom age horror - Donovan's Brain (1953)
--- Body horror - Feed (2005)
--- Cats! - Eye of the Cat (1969)
--- Coffin Joe - This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967)
--- Documentary - Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)
---Hagsploitation - Dead Ringer (1964)
--- Happy Birthday to You! (Film from the year of your birth, month if possible!) - Unmasked: Part 25 (1989)
--- Hausu - Hausu (1977)
--- Location: NYC - Vampire In Brooklyn (1995)
--- Location: Theater - Messiah of Evil (1973)
--- Miniscule monsters! - Black Devil Doll From Hell (1984)
--- Movie based on a TV show - Tales From the Crypt: Ritual (2002)
--- The Other Hammer: A non-Draculastein Hammer Film - Kiss of the Vampire (1963)
--- Salute Your Shorts: 3-5 short films (20m or less, for a total of at least 65m) - One of Two Evils (2015) / Chainsaw Maid (2007) / The Blue Door (2018) / Scratch (2016) / Bobby Yeah (2011)
--- Soundtrack by: Ennio Morricone (NOT The Thing!) - Blood Link (1982)
--- Strip nude for your ROHMC - The Hills Run Red (2009)
--- Title includes “Daughter of” or “Son of” - Son of Dracula (1974)
--- TV anthologies (3 episodes of a classic TV horror anthology series) - Tales From the Crypt - Til Death / Three's a Crowd / The Sacrifice
--- Unholy horror! (Religious evil) - The Craft: Legacy (2020)
--- Wilhelm scream - Zombie Strippers! (2008)
--- Zombie! - The Video Dead (1987)
--- BONUS: To celebrate the 7th year of the checklist challenge, watch a 7th installment in a franchise! - Hellraiser: Deader (2005)
--- BONUS: Just pick something you want to watch as a way to end this challange on a high note (I just made this one up) - Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

  Watch a film from 1890 - 1919

  I mean it is what it is, a silent short film adaptation of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde from 1913. I usually start this challenge with a wacky Lumiere or Lumeire-esque short but for whatever reason this time around I decided to go the more straightforward route (bad idea). I mean it's well shot and Dr. Hyde looks like Jerry Lewis so that was funny but otherwise it's preeeeeeeeeetty boring.

• The Last Warning

  Watch a film from the 1920s

  Look I didn't know what the hell was going on half the time other than the plot is a vague Phantom of the Opera rip-off (it even used leftover sets from the 1925 Phantom adaptation) but holy jesus fuck did this movie look good, the cinematography was so ahead of it's time I could barely believe it. I certainly wasn't shocked to learn director Paul Leni was a major player in German expressionism who'd been imported to America to make a handful of films before his sudden and untimely death. The way Leni uses his camera is unlike anything I've seen in North American films from this period, it's rare that a few seconds go by without some wild framing or a drastic angle change.

  Easily one of the fastest paced, dynamic and dialogue heavy silent films I've ever seen, can't believe this one isn't talked about more.

• The Invisible Man

  Watch a film from the 1930s

  Y'know If I'd known how funny this was I'd probably have watched it a lot sooner, like you could've added the Three Stooges to this without changing anything else about the script and it still would've made sense. Practically every scene without something funny is filled with special effects or visual gags, many of which hold up way better than I was expecting. When Claude Rains goes on his rampage through town, riding bikes, pushing people over, stealing hats, I was transfixed, both because I was impressed with how good it looked and because I couldn't stop laughing.

• The Uninvited

  Watch a film from the 1940s

  There's some great locations and cinematography, beautiful costumes by Edith Head, eerie ghost effects and an interesting mystery but the acting was soooooooooooooo distracting, it's the most over the top old timey acting filled with endless expository dialogue I've seen in a while, the performances felt like they belonged in a screwball romance over a serious horror film. I appreciate all The Uninvited brought to the genre, being one of the first haunted house movies that didn't have a Scooby Doo level twist about it all being some kind of ruse but man it was hard to follow sometimes, I kept drifting off during all the endless dialogue scenes. I definitely had to look at the Wikipedia plot summary more than once.

• Attack of the 50 Foot Woman

  Watch a film from the 1950s

  I mean I get why this movie gets so many negative reviews, there sure isn't enough 50 Foot Woman and it never really lives up to it's amazing poster but I feel like if this was your intro to low budget 50s creature features you'd probably think it was kind of a stinker. For me though Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was very familiar territory, turns out I've already seen FOUR movies by director Nathan H. Juran (who knew!), I have extremely fond memories of forcing my friend to watch The Deadly Mantis with me in seventh grade so obviously I've been at this for a while.

  I liked this one a lot, it's got a lot better dialogue and cinematography than it needs to, plus the giant fake 50 Foot Woman hand is never not hilarious. When she finally gets her time to shine in the last 10 minutes of the movie it's a lot of fun. Definitely could've used a little more "a woman scorned" but it still works. Double-bill it with an Ed Wood movie and it'll look like a masterpiece.

• Kill, Baby... Kill!

  Watch a film from the 1960s

  Look I'm not even going to pretend I was able to follow what was going on in this other than the basic premise, I'm nursing a wicked hangover and Italian horror cinema from this era has always been a little heavy on the style, light on the plot. I like Mario Bava a lot because the man knew how to shoot a movie, his stuff looks better than almost anything made today, every single frame is packed with beautifully crafted details so even when your brain is mush (like mine is tonight) you can still appreciate at that aspect.

• The Evil

  Watch a film from the 1970s

  Holy fuck this movie was ALL OVER THE PLACE, it's a pretty straightforward Amityville-style haunted house movie until the first act ends and it becomes an all out goof-fest. Multiple scenes of people on fire, electrocution, spooky ghosts, Richard Crenna overacting, the literal devil, a hilarious finale that felt straight out of The Visitor. The Evil felt so comfortable bathing in it's own excess it was hard to believe it was an American production, everything about it screamed coked up Italians and I mean that as a huge compliment.

• Schizoid

  Watch a film from the 1980s

  Ah yes, a THINKING man's slasher, my favourite kind!

  But not really.

  Schizoid is ok, it has a few things going for it, Klaus Kinski playing a sex maniac and it's cinematography are the main ones. But mostly it's pretty boring. I confuse this endlessly with Pete Walker's Schizo, which I also found boring and now I know that Schizo and Schizoid are similar in both name and execution zzzZZZzzz...

• Afraid of the Dark

  Watch a film from the 1990s

  Super dream-like and frightening story about a young boy going blind and getting lost in his own delusions from the stress and anxiety of it. Afraid of the Dark deserves a million eyes on it ASAP, very much a companion piece to Reflecting Skin with touches of Australian New Wave and Biritish Kitchen Sink drama. VERY unfair that Mark Peploe only directed two movies.

• Severance

  Watch a film from the 2000s

  Felt kind of like a British comedy version of Wrong Turn, it has it's moments, the script is solid and there's a few good jokes but Christopher Smith really a very dynamic director, not that that's necessarily a bad thing but I feel like had this been a bit punchier it would've helped some of the funny parts land better. Talk about a solid resume though, Chris Smith is like Ben Wheatley-lite and I'm into that. If you're going to watch any of his movies watch Triangle, that one rules.

...plus 55 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1-26 : Legitmately good and Halloween appropriate

27-41 : Maybe not the greatest but definitely spooky fun

42-58 : Legitimately good but maybe not the most Halloween-y

59-100 : Campy, funny, goofy, etc.

Each category vaguely ranked by my personal preference.

1. Lady in White
2. Rituals
3. The Fan
4. Lake Mungo
5. Three... Extremes
6. Angel Dust
7. Shadow of the Vampire
8. Spellbinder
9. Race with the Devil
10. The Dark Half

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Yesterday's Target
• Bodily Harm
• Fallout

• Tail Lights Fade
• The Third Wheel
• Good Advice
• I Do (But I Don't)

Title says it all, I combined details from a couple lists and scoured the deepest depths of Letterboxd to find the rest, If there's anything I missed let me know.

• Pet Sematary
• Near Dark
• The Slumber Party Massacre
• Humanoids from the Deep
• Slumber Party Massacre II
• Blood Diner
• Spookies
• Sorority House Massacre
• Celia
• A Night to Dismember

...plus 53 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.