'Trick r Treat' is a Halloween fear fest!

Trick r Treat (2009)
Starring: Dylan Baker, Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Isabelle Deluce, Britt McClipp, Brett Kelly, and Monica Delain
Director: Michael Dougherty
Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

If there's a horror movie that perfectly captures the Halloween spirit, then this is it!

"Trick r Treat" is an anthology film consisting of four interlinked and intermingled short horror tales that all start out like traditional horror tales yet provide unexpected twists that are amusing and shocking at the same time... and in a couple if cases even dish out a little poetic justice like the tales in classic horror comics like "Tales from the Crypt."

The film doesn't have a framing sequence per se, but there are two main threads running through all the stories, each of which eventually reach their conclusion when they end up serving as a major plot point in one or more of the tales. The first of these deals with a strange little boy who is wandering the streets with his treat bag late Halloween night, while the other features a pair of sisters and their friend who are "on the prowl for men," so the more shy of the sister can "do it for the first time". Meanwhile, a vampire is killing the residents of a neighborhood, and a vampire is stalking partiers in downtown alleys.



As these threads weave their way in and out the film, a school teacher is revealed to have several dark secrets, a group of kids staging a mean prank Halloween prank on a socially inept girl discover that the legend of a driver killing a bus load of "differently abled" children on Halloween eve is far more than just a scary story; an "adult party" party in the woods comes to a startling conclusion when those who arranged it reveal their true natures, and a bitter, Halloween-hating old man is set upon by what can only be described as the Spirit of Halloween Past, Present, and Future all wrapped into one.

This film is a real treat for anyone who enjoys horror movies, be they of the classic variety or of the somewhat more fast-moving, modern variety. There's something here for everyone--as is usually the case with a well-made anthology film--but what is even better is that we're treated to a whole range of classic horror movie tropes that are then spun off in unexpected and wholly satisfying directions. The film features vampires, ghosts, werewolves, mad slashers... all the figures that belong in Halloween. But the each come with a fun twist that adds a trick with each treat. The stalker of innocent victims ends up stalked himself, the Halloween bullies find the tables turned on them in the most shocking of ways, and the Scrooge-like Halloween-hater gets some "Halloween Carol" action that will stay with the viewer for a long time.

With great looking sets and even better cinematography and lighting, with a great cast performing clever and spooky tales of terror, first-time director Michael Dougherty has delivered the best horror anthology film I've seen in a very, very long time. It's a far better film that its direct-to-DVD release indicates, and it should become a new Halloween tradition in any horror-lover's household. (Except maybe those with young children... but adults will have a blast with this one, even on repeated viewings.)






And with this review, the 31 Nights of Halloween come to a close for another year. I hope everyone out there has a spooktacular time tonight!

Be a Ninja in 30 Seconds or Less

Halloween is here, and Michelle Phan has a last-minute quick and easy costume tip for all you proscratinaters. Or a quick and easy way for you to get ready for the Nine Days of the Ninja, which start tomorrow.

'Cadaverella' is cleverer than many horror flicks

Cadaverella (2007)
Starring: Megan Goddard, Ryan Seymour, Santiago Vasquez, Jennifer Friend, and Kieran Hunter
Director: Timothy Friend
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

When Cinder (Goddard) is murdered the day before her 21st birthday -- just before she would have gained control of the trust fund her father left her, and just before being able to kick her ex-stripper stepmother and her two freakish stepsisters out of her house -- she is restored to life by voodoo god Baron Samedei (Vasquez) so she can take her revenge.

"Cadaverella" is a neat low-budget horror film, but one that may be a bit too strange for those who like their zombie/revenge flicks pure and brainless. It's mix of fairy tale elements, voodoo, and strange 1950s vibes was fun for me, but it was off-putting to some of the people I viewed the film with.

The story in "Cadaverella" is roughly constructed like the fairy tale "Cinderella" (if the combo of the main character's name and the film's title doesn't make that obvious). Like her fairytale counterpart, Cinder slaves away at work and school while her stepmother and her stepsisters never lift a finger, but unlike the fairytale, Cinder doesn't get to live happily ever after. She is a troubled young woman, and she is more abusive to her Prince Charming (a wheelchair-bound college student named Justin) than loving, and she is ultimately murdered by the motorcycle-riding bad-boy she is attracted to (both played by Seymour, in an interesting casting choice, although I do wish they'd gotten a better wig for the Cash character. While I didn't recognize Seymour--he does a good job at changing his inflections and facial expressions between the two characters--that awful wig did make me take notice of Cash in ways I'm sure the filmmakers didn't intend. Finally, we have Baron Samedei standing in for the Fairy Godmother, granting Cinder's wishes, and seeing that she gets her night at the ball.

With the exception of that one wig, the only other complaint I have with the films production values is that someone should have played a little less with the Video Toaster software (or whatever is being used nowadays. There are some very bad, and unneeded visual effects here and there in the fillm--but since they show up at least twice, the filmmakers must have liked them.

"Cadaverella" has the look of being shot on video, but scenes are framed and staged is anything but cheap. The scene where Cash and Cinder are in the woods, and the camera pulls back to reveal the shovel leaning against a tree particularly stands out in my mind as a resonating image. Another favorite is the bit of slapstick at the library where Donna is electrocuted. In fact, I've seen films that were probably made for ten times the budget of this one where the camera-people could stand to take a few tips from the crew here.

Something else that "Cadaverella" has that many films of this kind do not are main characters that the viewer can relate to. Cinder and Justin come across as real, living human beings (although the library scenes mark Cinder as something of a bitch), and the final scene they share together becomes quite impactful and moving as a result.

In fact, I think Justin and Cinder could have seemed even more real--and their relationship have even more impact--if the writers had spent just a little more time on the dialog the actors delivereed while playing them. The performances are excellent--and far better than I've come to expect from modern low-budget films--and they would have been even stronger if the lines had seemed just a bit more natural. The writers have horror and comedy down, but the dialog remained just a little rough.

Saturday Scream Queens: Barbara Parkins and Jacqueline Bisset

With the 31 Nights of Halloween coming to a close, we're ending it as it started, with a double-dose of Scream Queens!

Barbara Parkins

Canadian actress Barbara Parkins is best known for her long-time role role as Betty on the soap opera "Peyton Place" and for her starring turn in "Valley of the Dolls". However, she also appeared in some of the niftiest horror movies to come out of the early 1970s, such as British anthology film "Asylum" and the made-for-television chiller "Mephisto Waltz". By the 1980s, she mostly retired from acting, but she continues to accept the occasional role.

Jacqueline Bisset

British-born Jacqueline Bisset was a model-turned-actress who emerged as an international sex symbol during the 1960s and built a genre-spanning spanning, highly successful career from "window-dressing parts" into trend-setting leading lady roles. She starred in several horror and suspense films during the 1970s and 1980s, among which are "Murder on the Orient Express", "The Deep", "Mephisto Waltz" (where she co-starred with today's other Scream Queen), and "Crime Broker". As the 1990s gave way to the 2000s, Bisset made a successful transition from leading lady to character actress, and she continues to act in one or two movies every year.

'The Mephisto Waltz' oozes 1970s horror

The Mephisto Waltz (1971)
Starring: Jacqueline Bisset, Alan Alda, Barbara Parkins, Bradford Dillman, and Curt Jurgens
Director: Paul Wendkos
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

A dying pianist (Curt Jurgins) makes a bargain with Satan to have his soul put into a younger man's body (Alan Alda). The younger man's wife (Jacqueline Bissett) realizes slowly something is different about her husband... and realizes something is seriously wrong people around them start dying mysterously.

"The Mephisto Waltz" is an unsettling little horror film from the 1970s (and it oozes '70s sensibilities from every frame, along with an unsettling sense of dread) that features a surprising twist as it enters the third act and an even more startling ending. It's not often that I am taken completely by surprise by a film's direction, but I was with this one. (And I've just taken three cracks at hinting at the twist while drafting this review, but each time I felt like I was revealing too much and possibly spoiling the film. I feel the surprsing story development here has to be witnessed "cold" to have its full impact.)

As impressed as I am with the ending of the film, it doesn't start out strong. The filmmakers make a tremendous mistake at the beginning of the film by revealing beyond doubt that Alda's character has been possessed by the old man, and that we are dealing with true Satanic magic. By showing us this up front, it removes a degree of mystery and uncertainty that could have make the movie even more suspenseful.

Still, the film does recover nicely from the early blunder, delivering lots of chilling moments, some suitably eerie dream sequences, and one of the best-handled summonings of Satan I've ever seen. It's a film that's worth seeing, and it's a film that doesn't deserve the obscurity it currently endures.

Rushing toward 'Nine Days of the Ninja'!

This Rumiko Takahashi drawing of fierce Ninja Chicks rushing through the autumn landscape captures the urgency of Ninja everywhere over Nine Days of the Ninja! 

The Nine Days of the Ninja Blogathon will take place November 1 - 9 across many of my blogs. I hope some of you out there will participate with posts of your own. Click here for more information.

Join us for the deadliest of Blogathons!

'The Addams Family' is creepy, kooky, and altogether hilarious

The Addams Family (1991)
Starring: Raul Julia, Angelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd, Dan Hedaya, Christina Ricci, Dana Ivey, and Carel Struycken
Director: Barry Sonnenfeld
Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

Tully Alford (Hedaya), the corrupt attorney to the Addams Family--a clan eccentrics who are exceptionally creepy, fabulously wealthy, very generous of spirit, and totally ignorant to the fact that they are completely out of step with the world around them--concocts a scheme to defraud the Addams' of their vast fortune with the use of a lookalike of their long-lost Uncle Fester (Lloyd).

There are very few TV series that have been adapted to the Big Screen as successfully as Sonnenfeld did with "The Addams Family".

Perhaps this is because it feels like the movie was made with love for the original series and source material, where others feel like they were extended ads for the show (like the original "X-Files" movie) or made with contempt for the series (such as the "Charlie's Angels" movies).

With "The Addams Family", we don't get any "reimagining" or mockery of the subject matter. Instead, we have the Addams Family in all their naive glory--unintentionally freaking out everyone around them while simply trying to be neighborly and helpful--and we have a cast that seems to take their characters seriously, even while being overtly comical. What's more, the film carries a strong, positive message about "looks can be deceiving" and family values... What's even better, the script-writer and the director are talented enough and confident enough in their own abilities that they don't feel the need to get preachy or to hammer the audience over the head with the movie's message.

The casting of every part in this film is spot-on. Julia and Huston (as Gomez and Morticia Addams) are perfect as a very strange couple who are deeply devoted to each other, their children (Pugsley and Wedneday--the latter portrayed by Ricci in a hysterically funny goth-like fashion), and their extended family. They are equally devoted to their employees, such as the butler Lurch (Struycken), and others, whom they treat as well as they treat their own family.

Of special note is the childlike glee with which Julia portrays Gomez. Some of the movie's funniest--and saddest moments--come from this aspect of Gomez.

The best part of this movie is the way the strangest characters--the Addams Family--turn out to be the most decent characters in the film. Every supposedly respectable person that interacts with the Addamses is lying and deceitful, while the Addamses never attempt to cheat anyone and virtually always speak their minds.

"The Addams Family" is a Halloween movie that I think everyone in a household should be able to get a kick out of. It's a great fusion of horror and comedy, with a strong emphasis on the comedy.





And here's a special musical bonus....

Picture Perfect Wednesday: Veronica Lake's Ready...

... for Halloween. Are you?

'Creepy Tales: Girls Night Out' disappoints

Creepy Tales: Girls Night Out (2003)
Starring: Joe Heffernan, Samantha Turk, Bianca Joy Chavers, Kimberly Hiss, Scott Shiaffo, and Francine Civelle
Director: Micheal Russin
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

"Creepy Tales: Girls Night Out" is an ultra-lowbudget horror anthology film that features three stories which are introduced by a Crypt Keeper-like wise-cracking host, The Professor (Heffernan). The three tales that in the film share the same old school vibe as The Professor, in that they are twist-ending shockers.

The first tale, titled "Girls Night Out" sees two friends (Turk and Chavers) driving along a lonely stretch of road on their way to a friend's house for a party. They encounter an axe-wielding lunatic recently escaped from an insane asylum... and their night only goes down hill from there.

The second tale, "The Creep", sees a small-time attorney (Hiss) whose sanity starts coming unraveled when she comes to believe she is being stalked by a man who has lunch in the same restaurant as she does every day.

Finally, "Blood Moon Rising" is about an ailing businessman (Shiaffo) who falls in love with his private nurse (Civelle). However, both the businessman and the nurse harbor dark secrets, and their hidden natures collide with deadly results.

This is another one of those movies that could have done with a little more time spent on the script.

Only one of the three took a direction that surprised me ("Blood Moon Rising"), but all three kept me mildly entertained, so I didn't mind terribly. I can also forgive the fact that the film wasn't particularly scary, because I did find it amusing. What I did mind was the near-total absence of likable characters anywhere in any of the stories. In at least one case, I'm pretty sure the viewer is supposed to have sympathy with the main characters in "Girls Night Out", but one of them is such a bitch and the other such a dish-rag that I found myself wanting them to get chopped to bits by the axe murderer. I think that if a little more time had been spent on polishing some of the characters, all three stories would have been much stronger, because the viewer would have had someone to relate to on the screen.

I also think the filmmakers should have stayed away from putting monsters in the picture, espcially werewolves. That is one creature that is very hard to do right when you have a tiny budget. Blurry images, double-exposures, and other effects that I could create on my Macintosh couldn't hide the really bad costume. (Although the "fang-cam" shot was hilarious.)

Obviously, since I only rated the film with Four Stars, I'm not giving it a strong recommendation. However, the film still ranks above a number of horror movies of recent vintage that had one hundred times the budget as "Girls Night Out", because I got the sense with this film that the people involved actually put their hearts into making the best film they could with the means at their disposal. I think they set out to make a fun, unpretentious little horror movie, and I think they succeeded at that.

Bad fantasy/horror in an anthology format

Satan's Storybook (2007)
Starring: Ray Robert, Lesile Deutsch, Ginger Lynn Allen, and Michael Daevid ("Satan's Queen"/framing segment), Steven K. Arthur and Leesa Roland ("Demon of Death" segment), Gary Brandner, Michael Rider, Francis Paul and Irwin Waterman ("Death Among Clowns" segment)
Director: Michael Rider
Rating: Two Stars

"Satan's Storybook" is a low-budget anthology film with costuming that would look great at a Halloween party but which is at the bottom end of what should be considered passable for a professional film production. The flat look of a film obviously shot on video makes it look even cheaper.

I broke this review down according to the segments of the film, assigning each one its own rating. The Two Stars I ultimately ended up assigning it is an average of those individual ratings.

Aside from its low budget and near-universally weak acting which is made to appear worse than it actually is by atrocious dialogue, the film hurt most by the sloppy and loose editing. Every time there's a cut or a change in camera angle, we get at least a second of dead air, so even during what should be heated exchanges between characters we get an overly stagey sense of performance as everyone seems to be politely waiting for the other actor to finish their line before delivering his. The actors and the film in general would have come off much better if there had been a talented editor involved in the production.

Like most anthology films, it consists of a framing tale that surrounds and links short stories. Here, the framing sequence involves the kidnapping of Satan's Bride (Leslie Deutsch) by her sister who has been raised to kill her (Ginger Lynn Allen). While Satan's minions tracks his bride and her kidnappers, he orders his court jester (Daevid) to tell him tales of evil on Earth to get his mind off the situation.

The framing story is a fantasy-oriented section of the film, with better-than-average swordplay for this level of filmmaking but the too-cheap costuming and the awful editing undermines the good parts. Ray Robert does a good job as Satan, but he's also undermined by a lack of technical ability on the part of the filmmakers, as his voice is distorted to give it a spooky, demon-like quality that makes it almost impossible to understand what he's saying. The framing story rates a 4/10 Stars. It's the best part of the film, which isn't saying much. And even though it's the best part, it still ended with me saying to myself, "Is that it? Did someone forget to end this movie?"

The first story told by the jester is "Demon of Death", a tale of a serial killer who picks his victims at random from a phone book (Steven K. Arthur), but whose luck runs out when he targets a young woman who is studying witchcraft (Leesa Roland).

"Demon of Death" had plenty of potential, but it evaporates under the harshness of bad writing (not just the dialogue but also the timing of events in the tale, such as the revelation that the killer's "Book of Death" is just a phone book), subpar acting by everyone appearing, and the aforementioned bad editing. It's also padded with about five mintues of useless scenes involving the police and badly staged news reports. It rates a 2/10 Stars.

The jester's second tale is "Death Among Clowns". Here, a washed-up, drunken circus clown (Gary Brandner) commits suicide after being fired by the owner of the sideshow attracion he's spent his adult life performing at (Paul), but tries to put up a fight when Mickey La Mort, the manifestation of Death who collects the spirits of clowns (Rider), appears.

Moreso than the other parts of this film, the bad editing makes "Death Among Clowns" feel stagey and causes the actors to come off worse than they actually are. The pauses between lines due to changes in angles during a scene drains all energy from interactions. Of course, the truly awful dialogue being delivered doesn't help matters, but the editing is really what kills things here. Oh yeah... and then there's the problem the story just sort of peeters out. It's as if writers Arthur and Rider had put themselves in a corner and then said to themselves, "Let's just put a "boo" scare here and call it good." This one earns a rating of 2/10 Stars.

Two of the actors appearing in this segment have not appeared in any other films, but I want to call their performances out nonetheless.

First, there's Gary Brandner, the novelist who wrote the novels from which some of the werewolf films in "The Howling" series are based, as well as the script for "Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf". He plays Charlie the Clown, and he does it with a very bad Christopher Walken impersonation.

Second, there's Francis Paul, who plays the sideshow attraction owner who's sick of giving Charlie slack. Paul gives the most energetic and natural performance of anyone in the film. With better lines and decent editing, he might have earned "Death Among Clowns" another star. I think it's a shame he didn't do any more movies, because I think he could have been excellent if supported by competent filmmakers.

"Satan's Storybook" is a film that even lovers of the anthology format like myself would be better off not bothering with.