Sober Horror Fan

Day 90 of Sobriety.  This is another film that has been on my radar for a while. It is a portmanteau horror movie comprising five short films all connected by a wraparound story. All of the films are shot in “found footage” format. Recently, while watching (in some cases re-watching) the Paranormal Activity series, I have come to realize that I actually really like the found footage format, provided it's done well. One of the main reasons is that it often manages to get under my skin and actually scare me. In addition to the Paranormal Activity films (particularly the first couple), the original Blair Witch Project would be a good example of that. I did not, however, find that to be the case with V/H/S, a lthough I thought the film as a whole was OK. Each of its segments was made by a different director and production team, and as might be expected from that patchwork approach, the result, while interesting, is also a bit patchy. As some general comments, I would say...

Day 89 Of Sobriety.  Well, this was a pleasant surprise—although I’m not sure if the word “pleasant” is wholly appropriate, considering how disturbing some of the scenes in this movie are. I heard about this film when it was mentioned in passing on the excellent Discover the Horror podcast. It is generally described as a “horror western,” and that seems about right. Set in the late 1900s in the “wild west,” the plot concerns a three-man posse led by an elderly sheriff who go to rescue some townspeople (including the wife of one of the posse members) from a clan of Native American cannibals. I had never heard of the film, or the director, S. Craig Zahler. This was his first feature, but I see that he has directed several others that generally seem to be in the exploitation/crime/horror vein, and after watching Bone Tomahawk, I am really looking forward to checking them out. One of them is an entry in the Puppet Master series (none of which I have ever seen). I’m guess...

Day 86 of Sobriety. I went to see Talk to Me in the movie theater. The last film I saw in the theater was The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023), back in mid-September, about a week-and-a-half before I started this blog. I didn’t think much of  Last Voyage of the Demeter at all. On that occasion, I had drunk more than a dozen beers the night before, and I thought that spacing out in the movie theater would be a good way to spend the morning. I guess it was—even if the film wasn’t up to much. I didn’t actually drink anything in the theater when watching Last Voyage of the Demeter , but in those pre-sober days it was pretty typical of me to take half-a-dozen cans of beer in with me and drink them all while watching the film. (My bladder would usually be bursting by the end of the movie!) Well, times have changed, and all I had to keep me company while watching Talk To Me was a large bucket of caramel popcorn. And that was just fine, because not only do I love move theat...

Day 85 of Sobriety.  Also known in its truncated form (minus all the blood and nudity) as Land of the Minotaur , The Devil’s Men is a very strange Greek production from 1976 starring Donald Pleasence and Peter Cushing. The goofy plot is about an Irish priest living in Greece who enlists the aid of a New York detective and a young, nubile archeology student to investigate an evil Minotaur-worshiping cult that is abducting and sacrificing tourists. At first, probably due to the presence of Peter Cushing, I thought this was going to a passable stand-in for a similar period Hammer production, but I was stripped of that delusion pretty quickly. This movie is pretty dumb and schlocky. The plot is absurd, as is most of the dialogue. I think it is dubbed, but Donald Pleasence delivers his lines with a very hammy Irish accent, and Peter Cushing just seems like he wishes he was somewhere else. I was pretty surprised that two stars of their caliber were in a movie like ...

Day 82 of Sobriety. Absurd was apparently originally developed as a sequel to director Joe D’Amato’s film Anthropophagus , which came out the previous year and also starred the physically imposing George Eastman. Looking at D’Amato’s filmography on Wikipedia, Absurd was one of ten films that he directed that year. Judging by the titles, almost all of the others seem to be porn movies. Absurd does rather look like the product of a director with heavily divided attentions. It is not a particularly polished film by any stretch of the imagination. Apparently George Eastman was so unimpressed by the original “ Anthropophagus 2 ”-themed screenplay, that he completely re-wrote it, modelling it largely after John Carpenter’s (then) recent hit Halloween (1978). In Absurd , Eastman plays a psychopath with supernaturally rapid healing abilities, who has escaped from the church-sponsored medical lab that gave him his superhuman regenerative capabilities as part of an experimental tre...

Day 80 of Sobriety. I watched this the day after watching the first Paranormal Activity film, so I guess this is really a comment on both of them. I wont say much about the plots, because I imagine that most people are familiar with these films by now, but they are both "found footage" films that document the intrusion of a malevolent evil presences on two different households. I had seen them both before, around the time they were released, but that was over a decade ago now (fifteen years in the case of the first one), and I couldn’t remember much about them at all. I did remember that had I found them pretty scary back then, though, and feeling like I wanted to actually be scared by a film for the first time in a long time, I bought some extremely cheap ex-rental blue rays of the first five films in the series. The only thing that had stuck in my mind with any clarity was the very final scene of the first movie, but this time I watched the “alternate ending”...

Day 75 of Sobriety. The Boogeyman is based on a Stephen King short story from 1978. I have never read the story, but having read a synopsis, it seems to have been greatly expanded for this movie. The plot concerns a family of three—a father and two daughters, who, while struggling to come to terms with the mother’s recent death, find themselves being preyed upon by a malevolent supernatural entity—the eponymous Boogeyman. The Boogeyman, as the name suggests, is the “monster under the bed” that haunts our childhood imaginations. As the protagonists in the movie discover, however, this Boogeyman is real. I think I am going to go off on a bit of a rant here, so please forgive me. I am kind of fed up with films like this—and it seems like so many of them have been made in the past couple of decades, and continue to be made. I’m talking about movies that are very competently made all round, with good acting, that start with a reasonably interesting premise and generate a good...

Day 75 of Sobriety.  Too long. Far too long. So, so long! There, that’s that out of the way. A Cure for Wellness is about a young and highly ambitions corporate executive who is sent to retrieve his company’s CEO from a mysterious health facility in the Swiss Alps, where he disappeared apparently after having some kind of breakdown. Upon arriving at the facility’s remote mountain location, the young businessman finds that there is something strange and disturbing afoot. The film was directed by Gore Verbinski, who made the 2002 US remake of The Ring , and several of the films in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Unsurprisingly, therefore, this film is a mega-budgeted affair, and it certainly looks like one. It is gorgeous to look at, particularly the spectacular depiction of the remote Swiss Alps and the elaborate gothic castle that the health facility is housed in. All of the acting is solid. Mia Goth, who plays a mysterious and　disturbed young resident of the ...

Day 72 of Sobriety. Cold Light of Day is based on the real-life British serial killer Dennis Nilson. I was curious about the film because had read a couple of things describing it as a British version of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), and because it was released by Arrow Video, who put out a lot of excellent films. Even when I don’t particularly like a film, I usually try to find some redeeming feature about it that I can appreciate, but that was difficult in this case. One remarkable thing about Cold Light of Day is that its director, Fhiona Louise, was a twenty-one-year-old acting student when she made the film. There is no doubt that directing a fully-fledged feature film at such a young age is very impressive, but unfortunately, it really does play like a student film project. Nearly every aspect of Cold Light of Day is markedly amateurish, including most of the acting. (Although from what I understand the acting roster does include a few reasonably we...

Day 69 of Sobriety. Based on Dark Places ’ credentials I was very much looking forward to it: A 1973 haunted house story directed by Don Sharp, the man at the helm of Hammer classics like Kiss of the Vampire (1963) and Rasputin, the Mad Monk (1966), as well as the nutty occult biker horror film Psychomania (1973), and starring Christopher Lee, Joan Collins, and Jane Birkin??—count me in! The plot is about a man inherits a dilapidated mansion from a mentally ill acquaintance who dies in a psychiatric hospital. Having moved into the house and begun its renovation, he starts to look for a large sum of money that he knows is hidden somewhere therein. However, he is not the only one who knows about the money, and various scheming locals are also making their moves. Further to this, the house holds a dark secret, and the remnants of its tragic past begin to have a dire effect on the new owner’s mind. It was not a bad film, but it did not nearly live up to the promise of its ac...

Day 66 of Sobriety. In the interview that is included as the only extra on the UK blu-ray of Lamb , the director is asked if he considers it to be a horror film. He says that he doesn’t, and I can fully understand why. However, it is widely considered to be one, and I can understand why that is too. Specifically it is often referred to as “folk horror”—a sub-genre of which I am a quite a fan. I won’t describe the plot, as it is definitely a case of  “the less you know the better,” but in support of the director’s stance, I think it is fair to say that for the bulk of its running time, the film is not trying to frighten its audience. It is, however, a strange, surreal film—and it is unsettling. For me personally, that, and the unexpected denouement, make it fair game for the “horror” tag. The film plays out like a kind of dark fairy tale, and it is actually a very touching story. Although it is a supernatural tale, it is also very concerned with themes such as family, ...

Day 65 of Sobriety. Mill of the Stone Women is an Italian gothic horror film from 1960. It was directed by Giorgio Ferroni, who apparently only directed only one other horror film, but lots of action movies, including many “sword and sandal” movies. I guess the production companies must have been Italian too, but it is set in Holland and the bulk of the cast are either French or German. Despite its multinational qualities, however, it’s considered something of a classic of the Italian gothic cannon, so it has been on my radar for a while. The plot concerns a young journalist who is writing a story about an eccentric sculptor who lives in a windmill. In the course of his work he becomes infatuated with the sculptor’s mysterious daughter. The sculptor only produces grotesque representations of historical female figures in the process of either being executed or committing suicide—for example, we have Joan of Arc about to be immolated, Cleopatra holding the asp to her breas...