Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Horror Month Roundup 2023

Transcript

Horror Month Roundup 2023 · Pick Up and Deliver

0:03
All right, welcome to pick up and Deliver the podcast where I pick up
0:06
my audio recorder as I step out for the library and deliver an episode two
0:10
while I walk home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, greetings, listeners.
0:23
It is early November, and I thought I would share with you a little
0:27
bit of my October movie watching. You'll remember last year around this time I
0:34
did an episode called Horror Movie Roundup, and that's what I'm doing again this
0:38
month. So in October, as you know, it's spooky season, and
0:43
I have for the last couple of years participate in the thing called the Slashing
0:49
the Slashing Movie List. I don't know it's called Slashing nine this year because
0:53
it's the ninth year they're doing it. I think I did seven and eight
0:56
and then nine. And what it is is the challenge on board game where
1:00
people log horror movies they watch. In this case, they watch they try
1:03
to watch thirty one horror movies in thirty one days in October. And while
1:08
that is really fun, I generally don't have time for that in the thirty
1:14
one days of October. So what I do instead is when that list gets
1:19
posted somewhere around September, fifteenth, I start preloading this year. I called
1:25
it the blood Bank because one of the themes those vampire movies. I start
1:29
preloading horror movies in September that I can use as fill ins for if I
1:34
miss a day in October, then I can fill in one of those.
1:38
And the goal would be to have enough preloads in September that I can mark
1:41
one for thirty one days of October. It's sort of like in my top
1:45
of the stack, I say, I pick four games and try to play
1:48
three of them. In the slashing nine thing, I pick, I try
1:53
to watch thirty one movies in forty five days, and I do make clear
1:59
on the fight which movies I'm watching when. So any day where I fill
2:02
in a movie that I watched previously, I put it with an asterisk and
2:07
say the date I actually watched it, just to kind of keep track of
2:09
that. So but in this list, I won't be sharing which ones I
2:14
watched in September or which ones I watched in September, just out of time
2:17
sake. So I've already eaten up like three minutes of my walk maybe more
2:22
telling you what I'm going to talk about. So I'm going to talk about
2:24
the horror movies. I'm going to go through them in order, the thirty
2:27
one that I logged for October, and I will stop and comment on ones
2:30
that I think are worthy of comment. Otherwise you just get to hear the
2:34
movies I watched. I started off with a banger, This is Hell House
2:37
LLC on October first. Hell House LLC is a movie I've heard about a
2:40
number of times. It was on my list last year and I didn't get
2:44
to it. I think it wasn't available on streaming. It has found footage,
2:46
which is a genre I generally really enjoy, and it's great. Oh
2:50
wow, it's really good. Maybe the best movie I watched. To see
2:53
her a second best of the horror movies I watched. It is about a
2:55
group of people building a haunted house in an abandoned hotel, which turns out
3:00
to itself be haunted and bad stuff happen. It does the best things that
3:04
found footage movies do, which is, you know, they restrict where you
3:07
can see things, and then they put stuff in the background that the characters
3:10
who are on screen or filming don't notice, but as the audience we notice,
3:15
and it's extra creepy. Because the characters don't really good strong film Hell
3:20
House LLC starts off with a banger. One of the other things they suggested
3:24
on the challenge was to try to watch technology movies, so I picked out
3:29
two right away to start. I watched The Signal from two thousand and seven
3:32
and The Signal from twenty fourteen. These are not remakes, they just have
3:37
the same title. The Signal from two thousand and seven is your standard.
3:40
I say standard just because I've encountered a number of times. Stephen king Sell
3:45
has a very similar idea the end of the TV show The Dollhouse, or
3:49
the sort of futuristic glimpse of what happens in the TV show The Dollhouse has
3:53
this idea. But the idea is that there's a signal coming through media that
3:59
drives us crazy, turns us into murderers or whatever. The way people act
4:04
in this movie reminds me the most of the crazies. They sort of go
4:08
nuts and kill people, but it's not it's not like zombies where they're just
4:12
constantly murdering and staid. They're like they think they're doing the right thing.
4:16
That's the signal. Then the Signal twenty fourteen is a totally different thing.
4:20
Involves a couple people having really weird experiences and trying to figure out what's going
4:26
on with where they are. And it started with them following a signal into
4:30
the desert and then something happens, and from there they're just trying to figure
4:34
out what's going on. I don't want to say too much because it's a
4:38
thriller mystery, and so the more you reveal, the less good it is.
4:42
But it was pretty entertaining and I recommend if you like a sort of
4:46
techno thriller with Lawrence Fishburn in it. I like Lawrence Fishern. Next up
4:51
October fourth was The Pope's Exorcist. I watched this on Netflix, Russell Crowe
4:56
being the titular Pope's Exorcist. It was fine. I find demonic possession movies
5:02
entertaining and kind of enthralling, in in part because I know people really believe
5:08
in that, and I confess I don't, and so the overlap between the
5:12
two makes four interesting storytelling in my opinion. Russell Crowe played that with his
5:17
usual amount of panache. For October fifth, I counted the final three episodes
5:21
of last year's Cabinet of Curiosities series, which I watched. The rules for
5:27
this say that you can watch TV shows encount them, but you need to
5:30
count two hours of a show counts as one movie. So I watched three
5:33
forty five minute episodes and called that called that one day's worth. I think
5:39
my favorite one, Dreams of the Witch House, was pretty good, but
5:44
the other two were good also. So that's Cabinet of Curiosities episodes six,
5:47
seven, and eight. On October sixth, I watched Dracula Dead and loving
5:51
it. The Melbrooks movie it was garbage. October seventh, I watched Bones
5:56
and All. That was a really interesting movie about characters who are cannibals and
6:00
the idea that if you're cannibal you have a sort of irresistible need to be
6:04
a cannibal and what happens. It's sort of a quiet, meditative movie despite
6:11
being about cannibals. I like it. October eighth, I watched Meg Too
6:14
The Trench. Not a good movie, not even kind of fun the way
6:16
the first one was just kind of boring, and then Shark's eating people,
6:23
so yeah, I didn't really like that one. Cover Nights Troll Hunter.
6:26
This was a found footage movie that barely crosses into the realm of horror.
6:30
It would only be horror because of the subject matter, not because of the
6:33
movie doesn't have very much intense horrific moments. It has a couple action packed
6:39
scenes, but I don't think action by itself makes it horror. But it
6:42
is essentially about a group of college students who they hear about a wild bear
6:46
that's been attacking people, so they go to document it, and they discover
6:50
a guy whose job is he's being employed by the Sweetish government to fight trolls
6:57
and hide the fact that trolls exist. So pretty good. I like it.
7:02
Next up we have Near Dark. This was great vampire movie about a
7:08
vampire biker gang or vampire ne'er do wells who go around killing people, but
7:13
they're kind of a biker game family. One could suggest that you see hints
7:18
of Rob Zombie's The House of a Thousand Corpses in this movie or his Devil's
7:23
Rejects. You know, you have these characters who do horrific things but are
7:26
kind of a family to one another, and we follow their exploits. These
7:30
movies are a little more coherent and a little more a little less weird than
7:34
the rob zombie movies, but pretty good and includes a lot of the people
7:40
who are in aliens, which is kind of fun. Directed by Katherine Bigelow.
7:44
Special shout out to Bill Paxton, who had as a really great role
7:48
in that one. That's near dark. I'm going a third of away through
7:51
the list and I'm most of the way home. So I watched the event.
7:55
Horizons is not the first time I'd seen that movie. I like it
7:57
quite a bit. I'd been reminded of it number of times because the basic
8:01
premise, which is traveling faster than light exposes you to other worldly entities which
8:07
then try to take over your ship kind of demonic, is kind of the
8:11
same premise as the faster than light travel in the moot. In the World
8:16
of Warhammer forty thousand, the idea is that the way the humankind travels from
8:20
place to places through the warp, which is actually like a hell dimension.
8:24
There's demons constantly trying to get into your ship when you're traveling by that method.
8:28
So this is sort of the very early days of human beings discovering that
8:31
problem. I thought it was pretty fun. I've hearden Noordy Able to talk
8:35
about this movie as being really scary, and I didn't think it was,
8:37
but I enjoyed it. Event Horizon, I saw The Nun two. I
8:43
think that was one of my September viewings. Actually, The Nun Too is
8:46
the sequel to The Nun, which is itself a spinoff from The Conjuring two,
8:52
featuring a demon that looks like a Nun and kind of bothers the a
8:56
Laine Warren or Helen Warren or whatever name the Warren lady in the original Nun.
9:01
It goes back in time to when that demon was sort of discovered,
9:07
and then the second one follows that demon in its next part of its journey
9:11
through I don't know our world causing trouble. I thought the first movie was
9:16
the first Nun movie, was a series of sort of jump scare set pieces
9:20
with this creepy Nun character and a very thin plot. And what they did
9:24
for the second movie is they made the plot thinner. Really not great,
9:28
but some fun jump some front set pieces, and I like the way the
9:31
Nun looks, so that's nice and creepy. October thirteenth and fourteenth, I
9:35
gave into my habit of like clearing out chains of movies or series of movies.
9:41
And I watched the hel Hell House two, Hell House LLC two,
9:46
The Abaden Hotel, and Hellhouse LLC three Lake of Fire in each of these
9:52
movies, because the original Hell House was a found footage film. As I
9:56
said, it was a fo footage film in the form of documentary, the
10:00
documentary being made about these people who did this thing. And then the documentary
10:03
documentarians found all this footage that the people in the house shot, and so
10:09
the second one expands on that to be a talk show about the documentary crew
10:13
and all the weird stuff that's happened since then at Hell House. And then
10:18
the third movie is a further documentary about the TV people who made the second
10:22
documentary, et cetera, et cetera. It becomes this sort of Russian doll
10:26
of found footage. And I thought both of them were fine. I liked
10:31
the third one a little better than the second one, but they both fall
10:35
right in the middle of like enjoyable and watchable. They're not bad, not
10:39
amazing either, and honestly, they I'll kind of run together in my head
10:43
now, So I'm not sure three out of five is the right rating.
10:46
If not two out of five, but I enjoyed them while I was watching
10:48
them. I didn't find them particularly scary. They're all kind of the same
10:52
scares over again. But the people who make it generally are good at making
10:56
really creepy stuff, and I'm happy to see what they did. I know
11:00
that they have another one coming out that's sort of the origins of some of
11:03
the stuff from the Hell House, but in a different place. I'm gonna
11:07
watch it at some point. That sounds fun anyway. That's October thirteenth and
11:11
fourteenth. October fifteenth, I watched a movie I've heard about for a while
11:15
but never really seen. It's an anthology movie called V Slash H Slash S.
11:18
It was okay. I gave it the same rating as Hellhouse as the
11:22
Hell House two and three, which is three out of five, because it
11:24
was fine. There were some genuinely spooky moments, and also was really of
11:31
its time and problematic in some ways. You know that it used to kind
11:35
of be pretty standard in a horror movie that there would be topless women at
11:37
some point, and it feels like the people making V Slice V Slash H
11:41
Slash S thought like, oh, you know what, we definitely need to
11:46
bring that trend back. So there's a fair amount of kind of unnecessary nudity
11:50
in the movie, as well as one pretty early in the movie kind of
11:54
very disturbing nudity sequence that made me really hate the main characters, which I
12:01
think is the point. We're not supposed to like them, but I don't
12:05
know that we're actually supposed to root against them either, but I was so
12:09
anyway, that's v slitch h slash s. I know they made a bunch
12:13
of sequels to that. I don't think I'm probably gonna watch them mark this
12:16
point, because later I'll probably watch them anyway. October sixteenth, I watched
12:22
Censor This. This is the one that I probably would point to as the
12:26
best the best horror movie I watched in October. Really really good. That's
12:33
the movie about a woman who works for the British Censorship Office in the nineteen
12:37
eighties censoring video nasties, which is what British people call like horror really exploited
12:43
of horror movies from that era. It is a psychological horror film with a
12:48
significant level of sort of Giallo type scares, and I just like, I
12:54
really really liked it. That's censor s ce n sor like per Snews censor's
13:00
movies. On October seventeenth, I watched Scream six, which is the one
13:03
that takes place in New York. It was fun. I mean, you
13:07
know, the Scream movies are all kind of the same. They hit a
13:09
rhythm where they're not bad. I thought it was fun. October eighteenth is
13:15
one of the things you have to do, or they encourage you to do
13:16
in this challenge is to spin the Sleulette wheel, which is a sort of
13:22
randomized list of something like twenty thousand horror movies, and the one that you
13:26
get is the one you're supposed to watch. The first one I got was
13:30
I could not get a hold of it anywhere. It's not streaming anywhere,
13:33
it's not on YouTube. As far as I could find, I couldn't get
13:35
a copy of it even from like my library. I think I could have
13:39
bought it on Amazon for fifty dollars, but that's a lot for a movie
13:41
that's not rated well. So instead I decided to go with I spun it
13:46
again and I got the Pit from nineteen eighty one, and boy am I
13:50
glad I did. This was a wild really weird movie. Not particularly scary,
13:54
although some parts that are super creepy. But it oscillates madly between like
14:00
child Stalker to supernatural thriller to demon possessed teddy Bear, to hole in the
14:07
ground with prehistoric carnivores, to police thriller to sort of horror comedy and back
14:13
like It's all over the place. Really messy movie, but fun. Not
14:18
a great movie. I'd probably give it two stars, Like just as a
14:20
narrative, it was not as enjoyable as something like I don't know any of
14:24
the movies I've been saying, We're fine. It was pretty bad from that
14:28
perspective, but so much weird stuff happens in it that it's worth checking out
14:33
if you think you'd like a weird movie. So that's the pit from nineteen
14:37
eighty one. On October nineteenth, I watched Bodies, Bodies, Bodies,
14:39
which was a great kind of slash or thriller movie set in the sort of
14:45
the world of social media and influencers. It was pretty entertaining. Hello October
14:48
twentieth, I watch Afflicted, which is now I found fiction horror movie that
14:52
sort of imagines like what would what would a vampire disease look like if you
14:56
got it today, and it had some of the qualities of vamp ism,
15:00
but it was sort of a realistic look at it really good. I like
15:05
that a lot. Definitely worth checking out, especially if you like found footage
15:07
movies. On the twenty first, I watched I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle,
15:11
which I'd heard about from a lady on TikTok, and boy it did not
15:16
disappoint. It's a wild movie, really strange, takes place in the mid
15:22
eighties in Britain, and so everything's just a little weird for the American view.
15:28
But also then there's a demon possessed vampire that drinks blood, motorcycle,
15:33
a demon possessed vampire motorcycle camp be out in the sun, kills people and
15:37
drinks their blood. It's a weird, weird movie, very strange, very
15:41
worth checking out. But again, I mean, honestly, a little more
15:46
competently made than The Pit, but equally weird and bad. On the twenty
15:50
second, we watched Totally Killer, which is a relatively soft in terms of
15:54
the sort of jump scares and gore. It's a relatively soft or slasher movie
16:00
built around the idea of a time traveler who goes back in time to try
16:04
to stop a slasher killer. Has some parallels and connections to the movie Back
16:08
to the Future in interesting ways. And the best part of the movie is
16:11
sort of having a gen Z youth among high schoolers in the eighties and having
16:18
them sort of recognize all of the sort of terrible aspects of high school in
16:22
the eighties. That was a delight. On October twenty third, I watched
16:26
Slother House, which was not good. The premises somebody adopts a sloth and
16:30
it turns out to be a vicious killer, really dumb parts, kind of
16:34
fun parts. If you're gonna watch a really dumb horror movie, I would
16:38
recommend Slacks instead, which is about a murderous pair of jeans. Those are
16:44
better than Slother House. Hellbender was an indie film about a young woman who
16:49
learns that she's a witch and comes to discover all the powers that go with
16:55
it. It was fine, it didn't really do a lot for me.
16:57
I mean, it was made on a shoestring budget and a lot with the
17:00
budget it had, but I didn't really like it. On October twenty fifth,
17:03
I rewatched Trick or Treat. This is a movie I saw a long
17:06
time ago. It's an anthology story and pretty good. It holds up pretty
17:10
well. Not quite the exploitation fast to that V slash H slash S was
17:15
and pretty fun. So trick or treat. That's trick and then the letter
17:18
are and then treat. We watched the movie Goosebumps, which is based on
17:22
the old series of books starring Jack Blackett's a family horror movie. It was
17:26
cute. My wife felt like watching it, and I liked watching it with
17:30
her. I had seen it before. On October twenty seventh, I watched
17:33
Nine Miles Down. This was the Sleighing nine series and so we were encouraged
17:38
to watch movies that have the nine in the title. Nine Miles Down is
17:41
about a place where they're digging an oil well and they find a huge cavern
17:45
under the ground and it seems like it's maybe hell and that's scary. That
17:52
was fine. Actually I thought it was less than fine. I give it
17:55
two out of five, so not actually very good. On October twenty eighth,
17:57
I watched No One Gets Out Alive, which was pretty good. It
18:02
is a pretty heavy handed allegory for the way the capitalism, choose up immigrants
18:07
and undocumented folks at the whims of capital but really intense, some really intense
18:15
sequences, nice scary stuff, good special effects. Well worth a look if
18:21
you get a chance that no one gets out alive. October twenty ninth.
18:23
I fell into a little bit of a rabbit hole at the end of October
18:26
and I watched all of the Saw movies that I hadn't seen yet. So
18:30
I started with Saw three on October twenty ninth. Then I banked for later
18:34
use Saw as four, five, and six. Then I watched October.
18:37
On October I was just doing stuff, like I was doing stuff that didn't
18:41
take a lot of concentrations. I just had those on while I was doing
18:44
that. And then Saw seven, the final chapter, I watched on October
18:47
thirtieth. Since then, I will admit I've watched Saw eight and Saw nine,
18:49
so Saw seven wasn't the final chapter was the last one called Saw though,
18:53
although Saw eight was called Jigsaw and Saw nine was called Spiral. From
18:59
the book Saw, It's the title, and then it looks like ten.
19:03
They just went to Saw ten, so they realized, like, yeah,
19:04
people just are happy to call it. Keep calling it Saw I Saw.
19:07
I thought Saw three was pretty good and seven it's pretty good. Four and
19:11
five were mediocre. Essentially, Saw is like professional wrestling in that there are
19:17
these spectacles which stop the narrative and show us a visual treat. In this
19:22
case people being like murdered in unusual ways, and then they tell some story
19:26
and they stop and have another visual treat. So in that way, it's
19:30
sort of like a soap opera or a professional wrestling match. And then finally,
19:34
on Halloween, my family watched wear Wolves Within, which is a sort
19:37
of horror comedy starring the guy he was on Veep for a bit. You've
19:45
definitely seen him before. I can't remember his name though, and the lady
19:48
who was in the AT and T mobile commercials that's what I know her best
19:52
from, and a bunch of other people who you haven't seen before but are
19:56
are pretty good actors. It's a sort of light horror comedy with a fair
20:00
amount of tension, nothing too intense, but pretty entertaining. That's where Wolves
20:04
Within the final one that I watched. I also did not get too acknowledged,
20:08
but I did watch Chronos Midnight mass Fear dot com. We have a
20:14
ghost and then the other three saw movies that I mentioned. The only one
20:18
I started to watch and put down was Skin a Marink the movie. It's
20:22
got a little bit of an art house vibe to it, and it's not
20:23
easy to watch, so you have to be in the right mood, and
20:26
I wasn't in the right mood when it was time to watch it, so
20:30
I turned it off. Well that's it for my October horror movie watching.
20:33
What have you watched? What did you watch in October? What horror movies?
20:37
What scary stuff have you and what you've been watching? Head over to
20:38
board game Get Guild THREEQ six nine and share your experiences and comments. I'd
20:41
love to hear what movies you've enjoyed and what movies I should check out for
20:45
next year. Thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope your
20:48
next walk because this pleasant is mind los oyebye. Brought to you by rattle Box