Review – The Purge: Election Year

This time around the usual plot line about ordinary people trying to survive the country's annual 24-hour crime spree is joined by a left-wing candidate whose opponents are trying to take advantage of the chaos to assassinate her. The thinly-veiled anti-Trump moralizing is spread pretty thick (not that I'm necessarily objecting), particularly toward the end. Excessive preaching notwithstanding, the production includes some dislikable villains meeting satisfactorily violent ends. What more can one ask from an entry in the Purge series? Mildly amusing

Review – Boggy Creek Monster

Some of the fine folks of Fouke, Arkansas, are interviewed for this documentary about the bigfoot-esque monster that first gained national attention thanks to The Legend of Boggy Creek. The production involves a lot of wandering around in the woods while locals tell their tales of encounters with the beast. Overall this is neither credulous nor incredulous to be interesting to anyone other than those already fascinated by this corner of the cryptid kingdom. Mildly amusing

Review – First Man

Ryan Gosling brings his dull-eyed emptiness to the lead in this Neil Armstrong biopic. The effects work is meticulous to a fault, re-creating the look and feel of early space flight so realistically that it's nearly as nerve-racking as the real thing. Though the characters' personal lives are beyond maudlin (which doesn't work well with Gosling's typical emotionless stupor), the historical details are fascinating enough to carry the production. Mildly amusing

31 movies for October

Seems like every year the Internet floods with lists of 31 movies to watch in October. So who am I to buck the trend?

Obviously the list draws almost exclusively from the horror genre. But these aren’t necessarily my favorite horror movies, nor is this a list of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. Instead, these movies all have a certain Halloween look and feel to them. It’s hard to define, but it’s kinda a mix of seasonal setting and campfire tale quality.

Unless otherwise noted, titles refer to the original version rather than remakes, reboots and the like. Also please note that the first two entries on the “kid-friendly” list are rated R, so the MPAA and I disagree about how appropriate they are for children. I’d say tweens and older or those two.

Kid-Friendly Fare
Sleepy Hollow - Tim Burton’s take on Washington Irving’s classic tale
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark - Kid moves into a mansion full of monsters
Something Wicked This Way Comes - One of the strongest October-themed movies on the list
Beetlejuice - Ghostly fun without too many bad scares
The Addams Family - The family that was practically designed for an October movie marathon

Classics
House of Wax - Vincent Price at the top of his game
Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors - An oddly unsettling British anthology piece
Freaks - Todd Browning’s tour de force, not necessarily for everyone
Dracula - Bela Lugosi is the iconic Count Dracula
Bride of Frankenstein - No October marathon would be complete without Frankenstein's monster
The Mummy - Boris Karloff is wonderfully creepy in the title role
Cat People - 1942 original is a masterpiece of subtlety, 1982 remake is more visceral
The Omen - The demonic king of evil kid movies

Ghosts
The Fog - A classic ghost story told in classic ghost story style
Poltergeist - A fun combination of ghost story elements, too intense for its PG rating
The Frighteners - Guy who can see ghosts starts to really wish he couldn’t
House on Haunted Hill (1999) - Spending the night in a haunted asylum is a bad idea
The Ring - Watching a video causes an evil ghost to kill you in seven days

Monsters
Dawn of the Dead - Or if you’re in the mood for a triple feature, add #1 and #3
The Crazies (2010) - Oddly better than the Romero original
The Howling - Sayles writes, Dante directs, Bottin makes the werewolves. Great stuff!
Candyman - Creepy combination of urban legend, Clive Barker story and Phillip Glass score
Bram Stoker’s Dracula - Do fangs make it hard to chew scenery?
Fright Night - For real. One of the few vampire movies that’s both fun and scary
Creepshow - Romero directs Stephen King’s take on EC-Comics-style storytelling
From Hell - The Hughes Brothers adapt Alan Moore’s telling of the Ripper myth

The Final Five
The Burrowers - Settlers beset by a new kind of horror
Cabin in the Woods - A meta mash-up of horror clichés that’s actually original and entertaining
Exorcist III - Consistently frightening, it features one of the best jump scares ever
The Crow - A murdered man seeks vengeance on his killers during Devil’s Night in Detroit
Halloween - Because what else would you watch on October 31?

Review – The Midnight Man

So I guess there’s a law on the books somewhere now that requires Lin Shaye be in every mid-budget horror movie with a role for an older woman. The story here starts with a typical children’s spooky game gone bad set-up, and our good friends at IFC spent enough on it to get a decent cast and good production values. But then it loses its way, meandering around without telling much of a tale. The movie would have gotten a higher rating if not for the excessive animal cruelty. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Coco

This Disney Pixar production is as depressing as it is colorful. It has some of the most beautiful computer-generated visuals I’ve ever seen. But the bright colors are sharply at odds with the protagonist’s dreary journey to the land of the dead to uncover the reason his family hates music. Mildly amusing

Review – Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

Like The Empire Strikes Back, this one bifurcates into a Jedi training plot line and a good-guys-running-from-bad-guys plot line. Unlike Episode V, this one isn’t good. It comes together a bit toward the end (again with a scene that tasted distinctly like leftovers), but it does a lot of posturing and meandering before it gets there. Mildly amusing