movies

It was a rainy Halloween here in Chicago so my usual program of manning the front door, blasting creepy sound effects records and watching old (mildly) kid-friendly horror movies was cut a little shorter than usual. I did manage to watch Mario Bava's Baron Blood. Not his best work but it has its moments. If you think burnt pilgrims are scary, this is the movie for you.

I also re-watched Four Flies on Grey Velvet. This is another Argento film that gets better with every viewing (I gave it a 7 when I first saw it). The plot is full of holes and has a vital clue that relies on such phony, crap science that it's hard to suspend disbelief at all. But this is another Argento that is filled with humor, stunning visuals and another great, experimental Morricone score. So, if I were to rank Argento…

Each year around this time I always tell myself that I am going to watch a different horror movie every night in the lead-up to Halloween. I never seem to get around to it and end up cramming two or three films in at the last minute’usually Halloween evening while the rest of the family is out trick or treating. Well, this year I have managed to be a little more on top of things. Especially now since we have a DVD-ready laptop positioned in front of my treadmill. There's nothing like a bit of Fulci close-up gore to motivate the fat burning.

Speaking of which, this evening I completed Zombi 2 which I gave a rather terse review some time ago. I forgot just how creepy the zombies are in that film. It's very bleak and dread-filled and has some really gross and disturbing effects. Modern zombie…

Well it's the first day of the New Year. This day means different things to different people. For my wife it means washing off the post-New-Year's-Eve-bash Sharpie moustache that she woke up with this morning. For me it means it's time to assess what I thought was the best of the media I consumed this past year.

Movies

Like last year, there really wasn't anything that truly amazed me this year. My best rated films were Moon and The Maltese Falcon. I watched more T.V. than I have in recent years, so I suppose I could add Lost, V or The Walking Dead as honorable mentions.

Books

Towards the second half of the year I started reading a bit more than usual and found several books truly grabbed me in ways that no movie or show did this year. If I had to pick a favorite from this year it would be…

My Halloween movie fest continued last night with a re-watching of Mother of Tears, the third film in the Three Mothers trilogy. When I first watched the film I pondered if it would get better on rewatching. Nope. It was actually more painful on the second viewing. What a rambling mess of a film with awful acting and dialogue all around. No screengrabs for this film. It doesn't deserve that level of respect.

My Halloween movie fun-run continues with Mario Bava's Kill Baby, Kill. Not really his finest work, but it is memorable for the scenes of the ghostly child at the windows:

This is a very creepy still, but, in the context of the movie, it doesn't come off as eerie as it could. I'm probably the 9000th person to post this screenshot on the Web, but any Kill Baby, Killpost must include it.

The film is filled with more great compositions such as this one in which a young girl is compelled to impale herself with a sconce.

Italians sure do love their spiral staircases. As a note to budding architects who work in cities with high counts of maniacs and vindictive ghosts: a simple straight flight of stairs is probably a bit better in emergency situations. Oh, and avoid the metaphysical endless room…

My plans to watch a bunch of horror movies in the run-up to Halloween have not been going to well. I did manage to re-watch Dario Argento's Inferno the other day. I have always considered this to be one of Argento's weaker films of this era, but the more I watch it, the more I like it. It has much of the wonderful colored lighting, expressionist sets and dynamic compositions that made Suspiria so great. Also, despite the flawed and incoherent plot, there are plenty of memorable scenes.

For some reason I especially like this scene where our hero, Mark, gets bewitched during his musicology class by The Mother of Tears...

This is only a brief cameo from the third mother, but it's very effective. Too bad the actual movie about her, Mother of Tears,  was so mediocre. They should have just looped…

What you see pictured here is some of the DVD packaging for the independently produced documentary film about text adventure games, Get Lamp. In the digital age, packaging matters and the creators of Get Lamp went above and beyond in creating a DVD package that satisfies collectable object fetishists like myself. The inner gatefold sleeve is covered with a nostalgic fantasy illustration that looks like it came straight off of an Atari 2600 cartridge. The DVD also came with a fancy numbered and editioned coin (mine's number 1540), which would seem kind of cheesy (alá the tin coin that came Ultima V) but is actually very well crafted and, dare-I-say cool. All this comes together in a well made cardboard DVD case that alone almost justifies the $40+ dollar price tag.

Last night I attended the Chicago premiere of James Nguyen's Birdemic: Shock and Terror and got to shake hands and chat with the director (pictured above... he's the one with the menacing claws). Birdemic is a movie that has to be seen to be believed. It's an ultra-no-budget "romantic thriller" filled with tons of cheap digital bird effects, brain piercing eagle screeches, scenes of driving, hilarious dialogue, more driving and lots of, how shall we say, "creative" film editing choices.

Okay, it's a bad, bad movie. But, I can't deny that it is incredibly fun to watch’especially with a rowdy midnight movie audience. Much of the film's charm is the sincerity and enthusiam of its director, James Nguyen. He seems to be loving the attention he is getting, and, despite the howls of unintensional…