I watched 7 movies last week:
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- All the Colors of the Dark—also, and much less interestingly, known as They’re Coming to Get You!—isn’t necessarily a good movie, but it is a lot, with the giallo really cranked up to eleven in some very entertaining ways.
- Headcount is a lot more effective when it’s content to be quietly unsettling, leans into awkwardness and uncertainty and finds the unnerving terrors there. It’s a lot less effective when it tries to resolve things, introduces lore, starts behaving like any of a dozen other forgettable horror movies.
- Night Creatures is fun enough, thanks largely to its cast, and even then largely to Peter Cushing.
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- Vincent Price gives it a good try, but Cry of the Banshee feels cheap and shoddy, making up for what it lacks in a coherent plot with gratuitous nudity and sexual assault.
- V/H/S/85 has some good horror stories running throughout it, and if none of those stories are more than half-formed, the movie gets a lot of mileage out of its creepy aesthetics.
- ‘Salem’s Lot is bad. I’m not sure it’s “bury for two years in movie release purgatory” bad, but it does seem to fundamentally misunderstand what made King’s original novel so effective, that slow and quiet creep of a small 1970s American town dying off. It doesn’t matter that the movie very clumsily speaks those themes aloud at one point late in the game, it moves at too fast a clip to generate any real scares, much less dread. It’s not difficult to see why the previous two adaptations, whatever their own faults, were miniseries, or why Gary Dauberman, the director of this one, reportedly first turned in a three-hour cut. But it is difficult to see how one extra hour would make up for some of the dumb plot changes the movie makes, the misguided decision to combine some characters, change motivations, and re-stage the final confrontation. That the movie doesn’t take its time is only the greatest of its numerous problems. All that said, there are some nice, mostly visual, touches to the film—very creepy uses of light and color, fog and shadow. It seems well enough directed, and most of the actors at least acquit themselves well. But it’s a fundamentally bad adaptation of the source material and not very entertaining because of that.
- The Substance is not subtle, nor are the things it has to say about women and beauty and aging especially revelatory. But it’s bold and audacious and features a fearless performance by Demi Moore, which I am certainly not the first to suggest might be a career best.
I also re-watched the thoroughly enjoyable House on Haunted Hill.