31 movies I would recommend for someone's month long Halloween movie marathon (aka, the post where I throw all of my credibility away)

It's with some trepidation that I am making this available to the world at large. Mostly because I know that my taste in movies is suspect to begin with, and here I am, confirming it for everyone. Eh, fuck it.

Here it is, my nomination list for the 31 FLICKS THAT GIVE YOU THE WILLIES.

Alright, since this is a nominating list, it doesn't need to be in any specific order, so here it is, my list as presented in the format of... The 31 movies I would recommend for someone's month long Halloween movie marathon.

Some things to note. This is MY list. It reflects MY tastes. I'm not a huge fan of Carpenter, it shows in the list. I'm not a huge fan of slasher movies, it shows in the list. I don't care about the Freddie and Jason movies, it shows in the list.

I also tried to stay away from all those low budget, scfi channel movies that I love. I enjoy watching them, that does not mean that they're good. Some of the movies veer towards comedy, and may not be as scary as others, however, I included them because, well, I think that they are good. Also, I think that they showcase a good blend of horror and light fun. And you need that sometimes.

The other consequence of my list is the format I chose to present it. I took it as a challenge to create a list of 31 movies I would recommend for someone else's movie marathon. This means that I may not have made a list of 'the 31 greatest fucking movies I ever saw and if you disagree you're a cock sucking asshole from outer space'. I picked movies that I like and that fit certain thematic requirement, arbitrary as they may be. What I do hope it accomplishes in terms of nominations though it to give a couple of smaller gems a little credit and maybe a bit of a boost, even though half of them will be the same shit everyone else is nominating.



Oct 1: The Ring

This was a toss up. I could have put Ringu on the list instead and been just as happy. However, I think that the American remake is equally as good, and a great way to ease into what's yet to come here in the first week. Not to mention, it's a great little kick off to the whole month. I think it's really a great, creepy movie that really serves to demonstrate that Hollywood CAN remake an Asian horror movie well. So long as no one is paying attention yet.

Oct 2: El Espinazo del Diablo (The Devil's Backbone)

This Spanish ghost story from Guillermo Del Toro has a ton of atmosphere. It's a creepy little ghost story in an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War. While not as heavy on effects as El Labarinto del Fauno, it's still an amazingly fantastic piece of work.

Oct 3: Ju-on

Ju-on was one of the first Asian horror movies I watched, and still one of the best. It scared the shit out of me. The pale little boy. The atmosphere. The undefined evil that just bleeds off of the screen. This was the rare instance that I was glad I wasn't watching the movie alone.

Oct 4: Haute Tension (High Tension)

Now we're talking. Alexandre Aja gave us a neat little psychological twist in this one that people either love or hate. Ending aside though, this movie it a tightly wound ball of fury and pain. What's starts like any other movie quickly dissolves into a frantic chase. Trying to escape alive.

Oct 5: Ils (Them)

This is a very new movie, but certainly worthy of inclusion on the list. Claiming to be based on true events, you can't help but get emotionally involved in this movie. 'Them' refers to an unknown person or group who is terrorizing a young couple new to Romania. The events themselves all take place over the course of a day and a half...at most.

This takes us into our first weekend, aptly titled Isolation Weekend (I tried to get a couple of themes going while stringing together some of the movies)

Isolation Weekend:

Oct 6: Kairo (Pulse)

Kairo itself isn't a perfect movie. What it is, however, is an excellent study in loneliness and isolation. It's the end of the world as electronics seek to drive everyone apart. The Japanese original is miles better than it's 2006 American counterpart which was like watching lepers suck cock.

Oct 7: 28 Days Later

It's 28 days after the outbreak of the rage virus when Jim wakes up from a coma, alone in London, and unaware of the crisis he's about to face.

This leads us into Zombie Week. Might as well do a week of zombie movies, right?

Zombie Week!

Oct 8: Resident Evil

Not the greatest movie ever made, but a good little zombie adventure. Milla Jovovich is kicking ass, the effects work and the zombies themselves are creepy as hell.

Oct 9: Slither

Say what you want. I liked it. And, sure, the little slugs turn everyone into a PART of Grant, they still exhibit many zombie-type behaviors.

Oct 10: Boy Eats Girl

This is one that I'm sure will not be on anyone else's list. I'm okay with that. This little Irish zombie movie was good though! Part teen comedy, part bloodbath, this zombie movie is the rare diamond in the rough. It looks like just another zombie movie at first glance. Once you get deeper though, it's a movie with a lot of heart, not to mention a lot of zombie killing.

Oct 11: Return of the Living Dead

Dan O'Bannon shows us that he can do something besides write creepy movies like Alien with this sort of sequel to Romero's Night of the Living Dead. While a bit more comedic in tone that Romero's work, the unrelenting hordes of undead still stand out. Not to mention the twist that killing them spreads the disease.

Oct 12: Shaun of the Dead

The story of two guys who's lives barely change when the zombie apocalypse comes. Part romantic comedy, part zombie flick, and part social commentary, this movie just works in so many ways that even if it's not exactly scary, it's hard NOT to include it.

Dawn of the Dead Weekend

Oct 13: Dawn of the Dead (original)
Oct 14: Dawn of the Dead (remake)

Here's a twofer for you. Both are the stories of a zombie outbreak. Both have their survivors seeking refuge in a mall. That's where the similarities end. Both however are excellent movies.

Oct 15: Alien

Could you make a list without Alien? No, it would be like making a list without The Thing.

Oct 16: The Thing

See.

Oct 17: Jurassic Park

Okay. This might not be what most people consider a horror movie. However, the velociraptors themselves make this a worth while inclusion. Speilberg basically manages to do for raptors what he did for sharks.

Oct 18: Gojira

This is another one that straddles the horror fence. It's hard to think of a more frightening allegory for the use of weapons of mass destruction though.

Oct 19: Jaws

The movie that made a generation of kids afraid of the water. Mechanical problems forced Speilberg to do the one thing that ultimately makes the movies so effective...limit the screen time for the shark. Nothing is scarier than what you don't see. More than 30 years later, it's still an amazing movie.

Oct 20: Dog Soldiers

Neil Marshall manages to make an amazingly sinister werewolf movie on a scifi channel budget. You never know who to be more afraid of, the werewolves, or the black ops.

Oct 21: Jurassic Park 3

Fuck you. It worked for me.

Oct 22: Shikoku

A Japanese ghost story about a young girl with long black hair, go figure. This one, though, managed to send a chill up my spine. It's not Ringu, it's not Ju-on, but that works in it's favor.

Oct 23: Silent Hill

It's the atmosphere and cinematography that really make the movie here, not the story. Silent Hill has a look to it. There's little else to say. It feels creepy. The fog around the town, the burning coal mine, ash covers everything, and when the darkness comes...be careful!

Oct 24: Open Water

What's scarier than being abandoned in the water due to bad counting? When the sharks arrive.

Oct 25: Cube

You're alone with a group of assholes for no apparent reason in a facility designed to kill you.

Oct 26: Evil Dead 2

The first time I saw it, I hadn't slept in days and must have felt much like Ash when the appliances and taxidermy started laughing and howling 'dead by dawn'.

Sam Neil Weekend

Oct 27: In the Mouth of Madness

One of the few movies to really scare me. Like, really scare me. In fact, I wouldn't feel that scared watching a movie again until Ju-on.

Oct 28: Event Horizon

Great characters, great concept. Poor execution, but still an enormously creepy movie.

Oct 29: Ab-Normal Beauty

Oxide Pang's story of a photographer who becomes obsessed with death. The ending isn't perfect, but it's still a great story.

Oct 30: The Hitcher

The devil himself comes out to play on Devil's Night as Rutger Hauer terrorizes poor C. Thomas Howell in an unrelenting killing spree across the desert.

Oct 31: The Descent

Claustrophobia, monsters and madness. Can you ask for more? No.

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That's it. That's my list. Criticize me all you want. Tell me I wouldn't know a good horror movie if it handed my a business card that said 'I'm a Good Horror Movie'

Tomorrow, I'll take a look at a couple that I wish had made the list but did not. And, naturally, by 'tomorrow' I mean 'when I get to it'. And by 'when I get to it' I mean 'tomorrow'

Could we call it a flawed masterpiece?

I want to re-visit Event Horizon. As I said before, I REALLY want to like this movie. And I keep trying. The story is good, the actors are all good (well, Laurence Fishburne basically plays himself, and Richard Jones is an okay as the Magical Black Man, Cooper ( though he seems to be trying to hard to play a young Eddie Murphy)), the idea behind it is great, and by 1997's standards, the cgi is pretty damned good. I mean, everything was in place. This should have been an A-1 Super Dooper horror movie in space. (Look at me laying down those sick rhymes!)

It's not, but it should have been. I don't know. Everything just doesn't come together. It feels forced. There's just so little chemistry in the movie. And, I still blame Paul W.S. Anderson for that.

I keep watching his movies, hoping that he'll get it together and make something good. He did a good enough job with the first Resident Evil (though even there a lot of the casting, acting and story choices were a little suspect), but nothing else has really felt as cohesive.

So, it made me think last night, as I was watching Event Horizon again...what if someone else had directed Event Horizon?

I think it's fairly obvious that had Danny Boyle directed it, you'd basically have gotten Sunshine. Go figure.

What if Speilberg had been at the helm? He's done a few movies with aliens, but not really anything in space. He can certainly make a scary movie. Though you run the risk of making Saving the Event Horizon which has some great scares at the beginning and end, but a lot of boring BS in the middle.

Can you imagine Paul Verhoeven, instead of working on Starship Troopers, making a different kind of space movie. There'd be corruption everywhere, and a bit of nudity. The Event Horizon would be a warship, and the gravity drive a weapon. Everyone would falling in love and betraying each other as the Event Horizon destroys planets everywhere it goes.

What about George Romero? Event Horizon of the Dead. The Lewis and Clark arrives to find out that the crew have become flesh eating zombies. Weir gets bit, but hides it from everyone (someone ALWAYS gets bit and then hides it), and upon returning to Earth, he begins to infect everyone else.

Ridley Scott...? Well, most likely, he'd just make Alien. Which he did. 20 years prior. So, I guess, really, if you had Anderson remake Alien, you'd get Event Horizon.

31 movies I would recommend for someone's month long Halloween movie marathon...now THAT'S an idea...

The other day, in my comments, I received a comment that I wasn't sure what to do with. No, not a comment, an invitation. It was from one Ed Hardy, Jr of Shoot the Projectionist and it read:

Hey there! I just wanted to drop you a line to invite you to participate in the 31 GREATEST HORROR FILMS survey we have going on over at Shoot the Projectionist. Here's a link to the original announcement:

http://shoottheprojectionist.blogspot.com/2007/09/31-greatest-horror-films-survey.html

Thanks.

Naturally my first reaction was one of shock. I don't know this guy, yet here he is, asking me to join in. It's kind of a neat feeling.

So, I read a little more...

I hereby announce the 31 Greatest Horror Films , a survey to be compiled throughout Shocktober! and published on Halloween. I am inviting, inducing—hell, just plain cajoling—you to submit a list of the 31 Greatest Horror Films according to you. Whether that means your 31 favorite scary movies or the 31 films you feel are the most influential or original, well… that’s sort of up to you. I suppose when I do my list I’ll include the 31 horror films that I feel are the most worthy for discussion, because that’s usually the defining factor of whether I care about a film or not. And, of course, the entire reason I’m picking the number 31 instead of some other arbitrary number like 25, 50 or 100 is that there are 31 days in Shocktober!, so if you would like to think of your list as the perfect month-long horror movie marathon, I encourage you to do so. Think of it however you must, as long as you submit a list!

So THAT'S the catch. I have to make a list. A list of 31 movies. Horror movies at that! What do I know about horror movies? Oh yeah, a little bit. For me to make a list of the movies that I've found to be scary though...well, we're talking a short fucking list. The Descent for sure. In the Mouth of Madness. The Thing. I'm sure there's a couple others, but, well, not another 28! However, what I did like was

so if you would like to think of your list as the perfect month-long horror movie marathon, I encourage you to do so

Yeah. Now we're talking. I could do that. What would be the 31 movies I would choose to watch for a fictional, month long Halloween marathon...for someone else. See that. If I were going to do a marathon like that, I wouldn't want to do 31 days of movies I've seen. But trying to do a list of 31 movies I would suggest for someone else's marathon, well, that's a fun kind of idea.

31 movies I would recommend for someone's month long Halloween movie marathon. Ed, I'll get the list to you next week, and I'll post it here before Oct 1st.

NOTE:Ed has corrected me, the official title is 31 FLICKS THAT GIVE YOU THE WILLIES

We interupt our regular scheduled programming

I'm just happy to see someone finally gets it.

The lady doctor had a terrible whiny voice too

Alright, I know that there's been a lot of downtime lately, so lets see if we can get back on track. I mean, how hard is it to sit down and watch a movie? Seriously.

No, you're right, it's not that hard. It's just that I have all of these....EXCUSES... and I want to use them SO badly. But I won't! Onward ho, to the movie!

King Kong Escapes was the sequel to King Kong vs Godzilla. You remember that one, right? Where Kong fights Godzilla in an all out street brawl to the death? No? Well, it was good. It was fun. KKE however was...well, less fun.

Basically, Dr Who is helping an agent of an undisclosed nation mine for Element X. Apparently, it's some sort of nuclear material. To mine it, he has built a giant monkey robot. Sort of like Mechagodzilla, only an ape. But the Mechani-Kong breaks down. Some sort of a problem with magnets. And then he kidnaps the real Kong to finish the job. And then robo-Kong and real-Kong square off in Tokyo.

Ok, I admit it, I stopped paying attention to what was going on in there somewhere. Damn thing just couldn't hold my interest for more than a couple minutes at a time. I did have a few questions about the whole thing though. A few...points to ponder, if you will...

How is it that someone can question the existence of a giant monster like Kong in a sequel? I mean, there he was. Fighting a giant lizard. How can you say 'but I thought he was only a legend' after that? It kind of ruins your credibility.

I don't care if it is a grown man in a costume stomping on toys. I like it. CGI is great, and in the right hands, can really look very believable. However, I hope that there is always a place in the world for miniatures and men in rubber monster suits.

The King Kong costume looked terrible. That's not a question. Wow! That thing looked rough.

I'll give the whole thing 5 'that's fair, right? I didn't really pay attention, so I can't give it a super low score for being bad, but it couldn't hold my interest, so I can't call it really good either's out of 10.

Milla, what happened? You used to make such good movies...

I really wanted to do something special for my 300th post. Why? I don't know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Boy was I wrong.

I decided I wanted to see a brand new movie. Something at the old cinema. Something I could overpay for and watch among strangers. And, since I was in Atlanta, and away from my dvd player at home, it seemed like a reasonable plan to go up to Atlantic Station to see Resident Evil: Extinction.

What a piece of shit.*

No, I'm serious. Total garbage.

Look, I really liked the first movie. I thought that it had some really good moments and worked well as a zombie movie. And then came the sequel. Which, I enjoyed. It was a good action movie, I wished they'd done more with the zombies, but Nemesis was cool. The third one though, I just can't explain.

It's at this point that I would normally give a rundown of what happened. The problem here is that...well, NOTHING happened. For 95 minutes, no one did anything, and nothing was accomplished. This was supposed to be Milla's last turn as Alice, the genetically mutated zombie killer, and they left the whoel thing wide open for a fourth movie starring Milla.

"What's going on here? I have no idea..."

I'm going to give you a bit of a spoiler here. Alice's blood is the key to curing the T virus outbreak, and at one point she is in a facility with everything she needs to make the cure, so what does she do? Does she make a cure? Who the fuck knows! They never tell us. She raises an army of Alice clones to go after the CEO of Umbrella. End of movie. That's it.

The movie exists almost entirely to kill everyone off. Carlos and LJ return and are a part of Claire's convoy, cruising around the desert aimlessly. They're looking for supplies, but have no base, and no destination. Until Alice comes along with a journal from a dead guy who claims that their might be safety in Alaska. They go to Vegas looking for gas, at which point everyone dies. Well, most everyone. Well, most everyone except for the people who had just been killed by the zombie crows.

Oh, and Alice has mind powers.

Things just happen for no reason. Nothing is explained. And in what should be the closing act of your saga, nothing is wrapped up. The movie itself is an exercise in futility. There is nothing to become emotionally invested in. It's a group of entirely one dimensional characters. There is no real conflict in the movie. And there is nothing for them to do. I'd say it was the epitome of banality if I knew what banal** meant.

Rather than showing any real action, director Russell Mulcahy uses quick edits to give the appearance of action. This is a lazy technique used by incompetent directors everywhere. It's a way for implying action when you are incapable of actually showing anything. It's a cheap trick.

And good old Paul WS Anderson goes on, once again, to show what a fucking hack he is. The only thing he's worse at than writing seems to be directing. So, I guess it could have been worse. Can someone please tell me why Hollywood keeps letting this guy work?

The upside of the entire experience was seeing the trailers for Iron Man and 30 Days of Night. Both of which look pretty fucking sweet.

Resident Evil: Extinction gets 3 zombies swarming around the compound until the fence is blown wide open and the mysteriously decide to stay out of the compound of their own volition out of 10. And, I'd like to add a simple plea...please stop. Let this be the last movie. I don't think I can take much more.

*In all fairness, I reacted the same way after seeing Episode 3 for the first time. I now love it.
**I know what it means.

Well good! Fuck you!

Over at Cinematical, they're saying that 7dp favorite Quentin Tarantino was approached, but declined to offer to direct an episode of the NBC series Heroes.

"They were trying to get me to do one. I haven't even seen the fucking show. What the fuck is Heroes?"

You know what? Thank god. Tarantino is a hack who only knows how to replicate the things that have been done before he came along. All he does is remake bits and pieces of his favorite movies. He contributes nothing original to the cinematic landscape and does not deserve the admiration that his fans give him. Fuck Quentin Tarantino.