31 Nights of Halloween Horror

The Mortuary Collection 108 mins. Dir. Ryan Spindell 2019/USA The horror anthology, probably the most difficult sub-genre to tackle.  Few are great, some are good, most are forgettable.  The Mortuary Collection falls somewhere in the middle.  This is no Creepshow, but an ok new flick to watch this Halloween. Like most anthologies, the wrap around story can sometimes be the most interesting part.  This definitely holds true to this movie and they spend more time than usual building upon it.  The wraparound here obviously takes place in an old creep mortuary run by Clancy Brown, who steals the show in every scene he is in.  There is a help wanted sign out front, and a young girl applies.  As he gives her a tour of the house he shares some stories with her.  The first is a short tale, teaching you to mind your own business.  The second is a kind of tables-turned be careful what you wish for, which I felt was the weakest of the four.  The th...

Pulse aka Kairo 119 mins. Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2001/Japan I don't even know where to begin with this one, it is two separate stories that intertwine at the end.  It's a very heavy handed movie, it is not scary in the sense of jump scares, but more of a depressing sense of dread.  A bit too long, just shy of two hours, filled with symbolism and non-linear ideas of death and ghosts, you are not going to walk away from this one unaffected. Trying to explain this movie in a couple paragraphs or sum up the true essence of the feeling it is getting across is impossible.  I will try to break it down to it's most basics.  In the first story line, some friends work in a greenhouse and another co-worker/friend is working on a computer program for something.  The project is due tomorrow and no one has heard from this person in a week.  So Michi decides to go to his place and see what's up.  She finds him there, he is pretty aloof and quiet.  He tells her th...

Hubie Halloween 102 mins. Dir. Steve Brill 2020/USA Taking another break from all the horror, I had to take a look at Adam Sandler's Hubie Halloween.  Not the world's biggest Adam Sandler fan, he was funny in the beginning, but the same joke wears thin over and over again.  But with that being said, you throw Halloween into the mix and I'm in.   To put it bluntly Hubie Halloween is a Waterboy halloween special, sadly without Fairuza Balk.  Sandler play Hubie another man child of a character with a stupid voice and low I.Q.  This time he is living in Salem, Massachusetts and is the self proclaimed Halloween safety police of the town.  Wether they want it or not, and seems like most people don't want it.  Kids make fun of him, adults make fun of him, he gets things thrown at him as he rides down the street.  Everything from eggs, to dog feces, to toilets and firecrackers.  But Hubie dodges them all.  Hubie loves Halloween, which is ir...

Laid to Rest 90 mins. Dir. Robert Hall 2009/USA This will probably be the shortest review of the month, since basically this movie has no plot and no purpose other than to show off some gore effects.  So if you like blood, read on.  If you like story, see you tomorrow. Girl wakes up in a coffin, she breaks out and finds herself stalked by a guy wearing a chrome skull mask.  She flees the funeral parlor, gets picked up by a nice man who only has enough gas to get to his home, that has no phone.  Chromeskull of course finds her, because serial killers in movies have GPS trackers built in to all their victims.  Chromeskull kills the guys wife, they escape, more people are killed, they drive, even though they have no gas, to the next house.  Roach from People Under the Stairs lives there, who also has no phone.  But he has a commodore 64, so they call 911 through the computer.  Next they drive to the police station, but Chromeskull beats them to it an...

The Night Stalker 74 mins. Dir. John Llewellyn Moxey 1972/USA You see kids, back in the day they actually made movies specifically for TV.  Not only that, but sometimes they made horror movies for TV and they were actually quite good.  Faced with more of a challenge by standards and practices these movies needed to be more creative when they couldn't splash the red stuff.  This caused us to get some really great films, Don't be Afraid of the Dark, the terrifying Salem's Lot and in this case The Night Stalker, which was the most popular highest rated TV movie at its time and spawned a sequel and a TV series afterwards. Darren McGavin, who if you don't know from this, you will remember as the father in A Christmas Story plays a Carl Kolchak, a reporter who has been fired from numerous papers throughout the country for his outlandish brackish stories.  He winds up in Las Vegas writing for a small paper with a boss who fights him on every article he hands in.  One d...

Lucifer's Women 91 mins. Dir. Paul Aratow 1974/USA It's the 70s and Satanism is in!  Another film to jump on the occult band wagon in the 70s is this somewhat softcore, Satanic, previously lost, mess of a film called Lucifer's Women.  Bare with me as I try to explain this convoluted plot, as this one took a few attempts to sit through. Larry Hankin, (you would know him if you saw him, guy has been in countless TV shows and movies, mostly comedic stuff.  Though here he plays it straight.) is an illusionist who just wrote a book about re-incarnation and also believes he is the re-incarnation of Svengali.  His skeevy publisher is like, hey I am re-incarnated too.  I'm a High Priest in a Satanic Coven called the Society of the Bleeding Rose.  We should team up to replenish our psychic energy with a human sacrifice.  So Svengali goes to the local burlesque club to use his hypnotic powers to lure Trilby into the coven.  Here is how it works, Trilby will...

Deathdream 88 mins. Dir. Bob Clark 1974/USA Bob Clark, the genius who brought us Black Christmas, Porky's, A Christmas Story and Baby Geniuses, first did his follow up to the greatest horror film of all time, Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, with Deathdream aka Dead of Night. Some of the Children crew are back, mainly Alan Ormsby who wrote this one and did effects, his then wife Anya, who plays the daughter, as well as Jeff Gillen and Jane Daly in a bit part, plus most of the crew.  Deathdream is a take on the Monkey's Paw, be careful what you wish for story.  Andy is killed in Vietnam, his family is given the death notification, but Andy's mother is in complete denial and believes he will still come home.  Eventually Andy does come home surprisingly, even though his family informs him they were told he was dead.  To which Andy simply replies, he was.  And they all have a good laugh.  But as we know, things that come back from the dead generally ar...