We did it, Joe! We made it through all 31 days of this countdown! I can hardly believe it myself.
And what am I going to do now that it's actually Halloween, and I don't have any more movies to post about? Go see another movie, of course!
I hope however you choose to spend your Halloween, it's fun, spooky, and includes some candy.
Thanks again to all who have stopped by this blog this month. I also hope I helped you discover some good things to watch, or some bad things to avoid.
If you have any interest in reading what I think of more current films, you can find me the rest of the year on Rotten Tomatoes, or at my review site, Mulling Movies. I am also an avid Letterboxd user, and usually have something to say over there about everything I watch.
I'm already looking forward to next year's Countdown, which will mark my 20th (!!!) year participating. Until then, you can find a list of all the movies in this year's countdown below, with links to their posts.
Best wishes for the holidays ahead, and an excellent 2027!
As per tradition I am ending this Halloween countdown with something brand new, but this time it isn't a movie. It's Mike Flanagan's Carrie TV series, currently streaming on Prime. (The last two films in this countdown are beginning to make more sense now, aren't they?)
Warning upfront: this contains some mild spoilers, so if this series is something you want to watch and be completely surprised by, please stop reading now. (But be sure to come back and let me know what you thought after you watch it!)
The 1976 version of Carrie is my favorite Brian De Palma movie, and one of my favorite movies, period. I watch it almost every year. In fact, I saw it in a theater for its 50th anniversary just a few months ago. I don't think any adaptation will ever top it.
But any complaints I have about this new series are not based in comparison. This version is not a remake of the movie. It's an adaptation that includes some aspects of the original novel the 1976 version omitted, and then adds a whole lot more on top of that.
One thing it takes from the book is the idea that this story is partially being told by survivors. Much of the book is written like an epistolary novel, so this adaptation spins off of that by opening with survivors being interviewed for some kind of video testimonial. But, frustratingly, this framing device is essentially dropped until the end of the series.
I do think it's smart to set the story now, and include what modern bullying can look like. In some ways, 1976 Carrie had it pretty good! At least when she was pelted with tampons and pads no one outside of that locker room saw it!
Summer H. Howell, who plays Carrie, is excellent. She's sweet, and awkward, and a tad annoying. And I'll say I don't have any problem with her being "too pretty" for the role, especially when her "ugliness" in the novel is simply based in her being chubby, shlubby, and acne prone. Plenty of lovely girls are bullied in life simply because they are different.
But I will say this Carrie is not quite different enough. Yes, she's sheltered, and a little weird. But she is such a sweet and sympathetic person that I had a hard time believing she would have ever been bullied as much as she is here. And it is a little tough to watch a character suffer, get her hopes up, only to again get crushed, over and over, which is what happens in an adaptation that's eight hours long.
And for an event that takes roughly eight hours to get to, the prom scene is oddly...anti-climatic? There is no burgeoning romance between Tommy and Carrie. He takes her to the prom (on his own volition) just to be nice, they dance, there is no kiss, and then the blood happens, he's knocked unconscious, and dies. But maybe the whole scene just feels rushed in comparison (oops, I said I wasn't going to do that!) to the 1976 version and its drawn out, slow motion fueled suspense.
It is in this final episode that the show really starts to veer off into new territory. Another aspect the show retains from the book is the idea that Carrie is not the only person in the world to demonstrate such powers. So there are new characters introduced in this final episode, and developments that imply this is just the beginning of something that will connect Carrie to a larger Stephen King Supernatural Universe. Or something. Which kind of feels like it's trying to be the new Stranger Things, but when you remember that Stranger Things owed a lot to Stephen King, I guess that just means we've come full circle.
Ultimately, I didn't hate this version of Carrie. But I'm not sure we need more of it.
Yesterday's Ruby was sort of a ripoff of The Exorcist with a bit of
Carrie tossed in. But Jennifer is just a full-fledged Carrie rip-off,
not doubt about it.
You have a religious teenager named Jennifer (Lisa Pelikan) who has moved to Los Angeles with her Pentecostal father. She attends an all-girls school on a scholarship, and is ostracized by the cool girls, lead by a blonde with a bowl cut (see photo above), named Sandra (Amy Johnston), who is jealous that the teacher she keeps flirting with (Burt Convy!) is actually kind to Jennifer.
Jennifer and her father fled the south and their snake-handling church after Jennifer accidentally killed a preacher's son with her telekinetic snake-handling powers. Which sure come in handy when you're being bullied at school!
So, yeah, this is basically Carrie but with snakes. And some pretty ridiculously large snakes at that. The finale has to be seen to be believed; I still haven't decided if it ruins the movie, or makes it amazing.
Also, amusingly, Lisa Pelikan looks more like Pier Laurie in Carrie than she does Sissy Spacek.
I mean, come on:
And finally, I have to warn you that there is a cute kitten in this that meets a gruesome end. Ironically, not via the jaws of a giant snake.
There is a good copy of Jennifer currently available on YouTube.
What do you mean Piper Laurie, fresh off her comeback roll as the mother of a telekinetic teenager in Carrie, a year later starred as the mother of a telekinetic teenager in a movie called Ruby??
Well, technically the teenager in Ruby isn't telekinetic so much as possessed by the spirit of her dead father, who was a gangster that had been gunned down in front of her pregnant mother, gangster's moll and lounge singer Ruby (Laurie). So it's less a rip-off of Carrie than it is of The Exorcist but still kind of crazy that Piper Laurie chose this as her Carrie follow-up.
That murder opens the movie, which starts in 1935, then jumps ahead sixteen years to 1951, where Ruby now runs a drive-in theater (which we see showing Attack of the 50-foot Woman, even though that movie didn't come out until 1958). Her employees are all ex-cons (including one played by Uncle Louie himself, Len Lesser). She shares her home with her mute daughter, Leslie Claire (Janit Baldwin, who looks like Bud Cort's long long twin sister), her lover, Vince (Stuart Whitman), and blind former mobster in a wheelchair, because why not.
Piper Laurie's performance in this is on par with the batshit vigor she imbued into Margaret White. Ruby can't let the past behind, forever lamenting the loss of her singing career, ready to burst into a song and dance routine at a moment's notice, especially since she had a stage built into in her house. She's giving Pearl energy, mixed with a bit of Oh, Mary! throughout.
Ruby is available to rent online. I watched via a free trial from a service called ScreamBox.
I decided to watch The Exorcist: Believer because I had just re-watched The Exorcist II: The Heretic in preparation for watching the documentary Boorman and the Devil, and realized, despite seeing all the other Exorcist sequel and prequel movies, I had not bothered with this one. Which is odd. Of course this one got terrible reviews, but so did those two prequelversions, and I watched both of those. So why did I skip this one, especially knowing that both Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair make appearances in it?
I really don't have an answer to that aside from I think I just forgot that this one even existed!
Too bad it didn't stay that way.
It is truly not a good movie. David Gordon Green was building a career on franchise reboots (though I think Mike Flanagan may be taking over those reins, with his Carrie series, and his own upcoming Exorcist movie, which is looking like if Seven and The Exorcist had a baby), and I think Believer killed that trajectory. The two further sequels that were planned were killed after this movie tanked at the box office.
It's your basic Exorcist set-up, but this time with two teenage girls instead of one, and three different religions in on the exorcism, instead of just Catholics (though, spoiler, it takes a Catholic priest to get true results). There are some good actors in it, including Leslie Odom and Ann Dowd, but they can't save themselves from the silly script. And I hope Ellen Burstyn got a fat check for her small role because what she's put through in this one is brutal. Finally, for the record, The Exorcist III still holds the title as the only good Exorcist follow-up.
The 1976 psychological horror film The Premonition is filled with a cast of actors that will make you go "Hey! It's that guy!" The most notable is probably Richard Lynch, an actor instantly recognizable because of his burn-scarred face; he played villains in numerous 70's and 80's movies.
Here he plays Jude, an unhinged circus mime (the horrors!) with an even more unhinged, recently institutionalized girlfriend, Andrea (Ellen Barber, who definitely gives the role her all, and then some). Andrea is obsessed with finding her daughter, Janie (Danielle Brisebois), who had been placed in a foster home because of Andrea's inability to care for her. (No, I did not plan to list two foster kid centered horror movies in a row in this countdown. That was just a creepy coincidence!)
When Andrea tracks down Janie's fosters parents, Sheri (Sharon Farrell, also the mom in It's Alive), and Miles (Edward Bell, an actor I've definitely seen before but can't figure out in what), she begins to torture the mom, psychically, with dreams, phantom phone calls, and visions. Luckily, Miles happens to be a professor working with someone studying parapsychology!
This movie is verrrrrry 70's. It's slow. It's gritty. It's sometimes shocking. It's also a bit of a mess. It goes around in circles a lot, and there's one edit in it so abrupt and nonsensical I'm convinced it was an editing mistake no one ever caught, and it just remained in the film ever since. The ending is also a huge stretch.
All that said, I do think I liked it! It's well directed (for the most part), has good performances, and startled me more than once. Sometimes watching an old horror movie you've never heard of can be a drag because there's usually a reason you've never heard of it. This one deserves more recognition than it seems to have.
The Premonition is currently available to stream on Prime and Tubi.
I'm beginning to think that the fondness I have for Mike Flanagan, the person, sometimes overshadows what I think about Mike Flanagan, the filmmaker. He seems like a really nice guy who loves horror movies, loves to share his faves with his family and friends, and has a cast and crew that seem to also like him enough to work with him over and over again. I've never sat down to watch a movie of his with any reluctance.
I love that he clearly loves to make horror movies. But I'm coming to terms with the fact that I don't always love the horror movies he makes.
Before I Wakeis one of those. Like many of his films, it centers on a family dealing with trauma, in this case parents (Kate Bosworth and Thomas Jane) who are ready to welcome a new child into their lives after the tragic death of their son a few years earlier. Enter foster kid Cody (Jacob Tremblay, fresh off his role in the movie Room), who hasn't had a successful placement after multiple tries.
The parents soon learn about Cody's fear of sleeping, and begin to see weird things happening in their home when he does sleep, like beautiful butterflies filling their living room, and...the return of their dead son.
And then the real reason Cody is afraid of sleep makes itself known...
Before I Wake is in not a bad movie, but it is a familiar one, especially for those who have seen Mike Flanagan's other work. He is very good at creating creepy set-ups, and well-earned jump scares. He always gets great performances out of his cast (though Thomas Jane's haircut is a choice). But I think a lot of the time his endings make or break his movies and shows for me. And that holds true for this one.
Sugar Hillis a blaxploitation horror movie that's better than Blacula. Yeah, I said it!
Diana "Sugar" Hill (Marki Bey) hires a voodoo queen (Zara Cully) to help avenge the death of her boyfriend Langston (Larry D. Johnson) after he is murdered by the mob. The Lord of the Dead thusly springs to action, along with his army of zombies, who are actually the preserved bodies of slaves brought over from Guinea in the 1800's. Don't know how they were preserved! Don't wanna know! I do know they walk around encased in cobwebs, with bulbous silver eyes, and are genuinely creepy looking.
Sugar Hill is a Black heroine up there with Coffy and Foxy Brown, taking no shit from nobody. I mean, how can you not love a leading lady who says things like, "Hey whitey! You and your punk friends killed my man!" and, "I'm not accusing you, Honk. I'm passing sentence!" She's also got a lot of groovy costume changes and several wigs in rotation. Perfect.
In short, I highly recommend Sugar Hill, which can be viewed (with ads) via YouTube here.
You Should Have Left was one of those movies that was originally supposed to be a theatrical release, but due to the pandemic, was released as an on-demand rental instead, and I think it did pretty well. Probably better than it would have done had it been released in theaters, because it's not very good, and also because I bet a lot of the reviews would have used the sentence "you should have left the theater."
National treasure Amanda Seyfried stars as Susanna, a movie actress married to an older man, retired banker Theodore (Kevin Bacon). They have a young daughter, Ella (Avery Essex). It's a second marriage for Theodore, and there is some initial mystery surrounding how that first marriage ended. When the family takes a vacation to Wales, nightmares and weird goings on begin to haunt Theodore..
Seyfried and Bacon are engaging enough actors that I did find myself enjoying a lot of the movie. It's got some spooky moments in their vacation home, which reveals itself to be, literally, more than meets the eye. The scenery surrounding the home is also beautiful. But the ending gets a little muddled, with some aspects being painfully obvious, and others puzzling head-scratchers. I ultimately came away from it a little annoyed.
First off, when I say I watched the movie Embryo, I use the term "watched" loosely. The only version streaming online appears to be a 10th generation (at least) dupe of a VHS copy, possibly filmed while projected onto a sheet. But this is the movie my random watchlist selection told me to watch, so this is the movie I (tried) to watch!
It starts off rough, with Rock Hudson hitting a doberman whilst driving a dark road during a rain storm. At least I think that's what happens. I heard brakes screeching, and a dog whimpering, so assumed that's what led Hudson, who is playing a doctor, to bring a dog into his home lab and attempt to save its life.
The dog turns out to be pregnant, so Dr. Rock experiments with the fetuses, which turn into puppies seemingly overnight. Of course, the next logical step is to perform the same experiment on a pregnant woman who has conveniently died via suicide.
From there the movie basically turns into a Frankenstein story, with the baby rapidly growing up to be Barbara Carrera. Her only teacher is the doctor, and yet she learns to speak with an indeterminate accent that is definitely not Rock Hudson American. That the doctor also has sex with this surrogate daughter is a huge ick, but let's just say they don't live happily ever after.
Diane Ladd, Roddy McDowell, and Dr. Joyce Brothers (!) are also featured in some smaller roles. Definitely NOT worth watching in the form that's currently available to stream, and I have no idea if its sole DVD release was any better.
