Group. Bram Stoker's Dracula. 1992. Drama. The centuries old vampire Count Dracula comes to England to seduce his barrister Jonathan Harker's fiancée Mina Murray and inflict havoc in the foreign land. For starters, this cast was awesome.


Gary Oldman as Dracula - A+
Winona Ryder as female lead - A+
Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing - A+
Keanu Reeves as a feature role  - A+

For some reason I thought this movie was made in the early 80s. It felt like both an 80s and 90s movie, for both good and bad reasons. To start with some of the good - the costume design was really good. Dracula looked awesome and the old timey dresses were elegant and elaborate. The aesthetic of the movie was very nice. The castle (much to profs chagrin) looked very cool and was featured heavy. There was not any over the top cgi animorph bullshit that plagues transformation movies like this, which was a breath of fresh air. I think one of the movies biggest issues was direction. Once we got the setup and were introduced to Dracula, the rest of the plot felt rushed and kinda anticlimactic. I felt like there wasn't a strong enough rationale for the actions of Winona and even Dracula. The last 30 minutes were full of total WTF and what are you doing moments. If this was condensed into a 90 - 100 min film with a clear ending, it would have benefitted greatly. While there are definitely things to appreciate, there are too many plot discrepancies to really rate this super high. 6/10 for me

TSK: The Descent. 2005. Thriller. A caving expedition goes horribly wrong, as the explorers become trapped. If you are fortunate (or unfortunate depending on your perspective) not to have seen this film yet, I highly recommend you go watch it. I will spoil the bejeezus out of it and it's a very good horror. You've been warned. This movie does an excellent job of playing into external fear for another person. The main characters are adventure junkies, so to start the movie we see they're white water rafting. Bouncing up and along the river, nearly falling out of the boat, waves crashing all around them. It isn't scary per say, but it creates an atmosphere of unease because you know that something can go wrong at any moment. But it doesn't. And you feel a little let down. Until the ride home when Sarah's husband gets Final Destinationed behind the wheel of his car while her daughter dies in the back seat. Right as you'd let your guard down too. Sidenote, right before this scene, we are privy to a wordless interaction between one of Sarah's best friends and Sarah's husband. As the audience we can infer that something is going on romatically between the two. Very well done opening scene that gives a good background on the friends and who they are AND provides an emotional and traumatic event that sets the groundwork on how the rest of the movie can operate. 


Ok, now that we've got the exposition out of the way, we find the girls a couple years down the road getting geared up for a caving / splonking / exploration situation. We're also given the small lil caveat that caving like this can create situations in which people are prone to paranoia, claustrophobia, and hallucinations. I don't know if I'd consider myself more claustrophobic than the average person, but I do feel uncomfortable if I am locked in a small room or if I feel like anything is restricting my breathing. That being said, the idea behind caving in the manner that these do is absolutely terrifying to me. Navigating your way through tunnels that are so small you have to crawl like a worm, with little to no light and dust and jagged rock all around you is absurd. It goes along with the fear of being buried alive, and you can't help but feel these girls are one small misstep away from that fate. When a tunnel caves in behind the girls, we find out that sideaction friend (from the beginning) picked this cave because it hadn't been explored before, so they're essentially left without any indication of a second way out. Egos come out as the group dynamic deteriorates. 


What I'd like to talk about next is the biggest spoiler, last chance to quit now and go watch the movie. OK. We've already got all of the elements of a trapped / group dynamic movie. 1 - Belief that there is no way out. 2 - Struggle within the group dynamic. 3 - lethal situation (lack of water / food and injury to two different girls). It isn't until 45' in that this movie dramatically changes course and becomes something special. It does so by introducing a new lethal threat in humanoid cave creatures. These creatures look good for what they are and the rules in which they operate create for a lot of cool moments. These creatures can't see or smell, but rely totally on hearing in order to hunt. They are seemingly slightly weaker than a human and are not great in hand to hand combat. This gives the girls a fighting chance while maintaining a high level of fear / unknown as the girls traverse through the cave trying to find an escape. 


At this point it becomes obvious that the entire movie is a metaphor for the journey Sarah has taken sense the intro of the movie where her husband and child were killed. She started of naive, frail, and unexpecting. Then something tragic happens (the descent and being trapped in the cave vs. her husband dying in the car accident). At one point she realized that she literally has to face her demons alone (as her friends had kinda abandoned her after the accident) in order to get her life back. This ends up creating a 'final girl' scenario in which Sarah is no longer operating on fear, but solely on the will to survive. 


This movie holds up really well, even on the third / fourth / fifth etc. rewatch. It is one of the strongest horror movies ever with an all female cast and doesn't rely on over the top dialogue / actions to push forward the narrative. This remains one of my favorite horror movies and stays at a clean 9.5/10

TSK: The Devil's Rejects. 2005. Thriller. The murderous, backwoods Firefly family take to the road to escape a vengeful police force which is not afraid of being as ruthless as their target. This is the epitome of a Rob Zombie movie. White trash cast - Check. People with clown makeup - Check. Random scene of prostitution - Check. Completely over the top aggressive storyline - Check. This was a fairly entertaining movie, but through the course of it I came to the understanding that Rob Zombie movies just aren't for me (I do need to see his Halloween remake still tho). Wouldn't recommend this one despite its high rating on IMDB. 4.5/10

TSK: Friday the 13th 2: Freddy's Revenge. 1985. Slasher. A teenage boy is haunted in his dreams by Freddy Krueger who is out to possess him in order to continue his murder spree in the real world. As a continuing effort to work my way through several slasher franchises (TCM, Scream, Friday the 13th, etc.) I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2 last night. This movie is entirely doomed by good idea, poor execution. The gist of the story is that 5 years after the events of the first movie, a new family moves into the house on Elm Street. The lead (Jesse) starts to have nightmares about Freddy Kruger and so another chapter begins. Where this one differs substantially from the first is that Freddy Kruger implants himself in the mind / body of Jesse and forces him to kill as Freddy. The problems come in many ways. First, Freddy's voice sounds awful. Like just not scary, not anything besides awful. The effects on several of the more gruesome scenes do not hold up well. There is a kill scene where I'm still debating if it's funny or just weird where a gym teacher is dragged with jump rope (nobody is holding the other ends, just floating in the air) into the showers where he is tied up and rat tailed until he is clawed by Freddy / Jesse. The supporting cast / storyline was a lot weaker than the original and tbh you didn't really care about any of the characters except Jesse's girlfriend. This isn't so much a complaint of this movie, but of all the movies of this time. I don't know whose idea it was to make the last moment in all of these slashers a stupid jump scare. You can set it up for another sequel without shoving the viewers face in the fact that the villain is still out there killing kids. Anywho, this was a disappointing follow up to a very good original concept. 4/10

Group. Battle Royale. 2000. Thriller. In the future, the Japanese government captures a class of ninth-grade students and forces them to kill each other under the revolutionary "Battle Royale" act. This is one of the movies that I consider revolutionary in the Horror genre. Not in the sense that it is so unbelievably amazing, but in the sense that a) it helped usher in a wave of good 00s Asian horror movies and b) to my knowledge is one of the first on screen adaptations of a survival kill or be killed movie. The violence is handled really well and isn't overly gory for the sake of gore. The introduction where all of the kids are learning of their fate is done really well and creates tension, despair, and most of all fear. The best thing about a movie like this is weighing the consequences and considerations of what you would do if you were forced into this kind of situation. It's a very philosophical question that is hard to think about, let alone try to answer. The only two complaints I have about this movie are the boy they introduce as a mercenary. This 14 year old is not just psychotic, he has god strength. Second, the ending is very very out there. It'd get more of a pass if I didn't know what they tried to do with it in the sequel, but since I know I can't. Overall this is still a really really good movie that a highly recommend and would even go as far as saying it's probably necessary viewing. 9/10

TSK / Sug. The Monster Squad. 1987. Comedy Horror. A young group of monster fanatics attempt to save their hometown from Count Dracula and his monsters. This movie plays out exactly as that synopsis sentence states. The kids all do a really good job, the dialogue feels natural and is quite funny, and the visuals on most of the monsters were dope. It's a reasonably short movie (like 80mins) so it's understandble that they couldn't get much past a superficial layering of monster rules, but I still felt like that element was missing a little bit. Like they touched on the classics of how to kill the various monsters, but idk it felt like they could have taken that a lil more and setup for some cool attack scenes. Regardless this is a very fun movie and a good movie for Halloween. 8/10

TSK. The Borderlands (Final Prayer). 2013. Found Footage. A team of Vatican investigators descends upon a church in a remote area to demystify the unusual happenings, but what they discover is more disturbing than they had first imagined. I've sat here for a bit trying to decide what I really wanted to say about this movie. I feel bad saying this, because I thought it was well done, but it was so very plain. The storyline is as old as time at this point, and although the varying elements and escalation were handled well, nothing new was brought to the table. I felt very bored watching it, but never so bored as to turn it off. IDK. Even though it wasn't that bad, I can't rate it highly as it didn't really draw me in. 5/10

TSK. The Exorcist. 1973. Suspense. When a girl is possessed by a mysterious entity, her mother seeks the help of two priests to save her daughter. @sugrur101 I'm going to need you to come get this work heavyhanded young buck. February of this year you made the claim "I rewatched the Exorcist. It's at maximum a 5.5/10". Everybody is entitled to their opinion, and I remember when you made this post thinking "it's been a while since I'd last seen it, maybe it doesn't hold up as well as I remember". I rewatched it last night, and I could not disagree harder. Not at the fact that you gave it a 5.5/10, but at the fact that in its best case scenario, you only saw its potential at a 5.5/10. To me, a 5.5/10 is a very forgettable stream movie. To me, a 5.5/10 is something you wouldn't recommend to anybody, even a fan of the genre. To me, a 5.5/10 is a movie with just about nothing to write home about, no redeeming qualities. I'll ask you to go into more detail your thoughts / opinions on this, but that score and phrasing is just baffling to me. 

The thing that makes this movie so special is that it is one of a kind, literally. It came out during the slasher craze of the 70s with Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alien, and soon to be followed in the 80s by Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. These movies, while all good in their own right, apply fear in a very cinematic way. Your villains are superhuman psychopaths that, although scary, can easily be rationalized once out of the theatre. The Exorcist, on the other hand, does something special. It is a 2hr15min film that doesn't even introduce a villain until 45' in. Instead, it takes those 45' and shows you a happy families slow descension into madness. Seeing the mother exhaust going from therapist to shrink to doctor, all the while the problems persist and even worsen. The horror of a person literally losing their child within their own body and having no idea how to stop it is terrifying. It's terrifying in an unrationizable way. Being able to create this atmosphere, especially for 1973, is astounding. It is the sole reason why movies like Rosemary's Baby stand out in a sea of slashers.  

Linda Blair (the child, Regan) does a fantastic job in what is a very difficult role. The makeup on Reagan as she becomes weaker and overtaken by the possession looks really good. One of my favorite aspects of this movie is such a small detail, but really stands out. As the possession got worse and worse, Regan's room began to show signs of lowering temperatures. By the time the priests became involved, every breath became visible - such an awesome setting. Honestly, I don't think I have a single complaint about any character. The mother, daughter, priests, hell even the babysitter played their roles to perfection. When I watched this last night, I was leaning towards a 9.5 rating, but as I typed this review out I realized that a 10 exists for a reason, and if I don't use it here then it is a disservice to the rating system itself. 10/10