Drag Me to Hell
After Plan 9 From Outer Space (in the last installment of my Halloween Movie Marathon), I decided to go for something a little more recent. Drag Me To Hell was released this year and is Sam Raimi’s return to the horror genre for the first time since the Evil Dead movies. If you have ever seen those movies (and if you haven’t FOR SHAME), then you know a little of what you are getting into with Drag Me To Hell – over the top gore, some black humor, and a pretty entertaining movie. It’s about a woman who is cursed by an old gypsy after denying her a loan. The curse involves being tormented by a demon for 2 days before the demon comes to drag you, body and soul, into Hell. Since only the main character can see how she is being tormented, of course everyone thinks she is crazy. There are a lot of fun things in this movie. The original attack by the gypsy woman was crazy and creepy (and very Evil Dead reminiscent), as was every other appearance by her – living or dead – throughout the rest of the movie. Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of the gore (at least in the Unrated Version I watched) was over the top, but in a good “Ugh! I can’t believe they did that!” way (for example, check out what happens when the old lady attacks in the tool shed). While I didn’t find it really scary overall, there were a couple of good, innovative cheap frights (one involving a cell phone) that keep you on your toes. Drag Me To Hell is by no means a GREAT film, but it is pretty good.
Graduation Day
In my first blog entry about scary movies, I mentioned that I loved them all - campy, gory, suspenseful and even the bad ones. This movie definitely falls into that last category. Graduation Day was released in 1981 and was an obvious attempt to cash in on the slasher film craze of the late 70's-early 80's that was kicked off after the success of Halloween and Friday the 13th (and a cheap attempt at that). The plot involves a killer knocking off members of a high school track team the day before and of graduation. I know what I am getting into when I watch slasher films - I am not expecting No Country For Old Men. I usually only want a few things when I watch these movies: blood, cheesy 80's scary music, a few imaginative kills and some cheap attempts to scare the audience. That's really it. This movie hits some of those points, but not all. There really wasn't much blood. The methods the killer uses to dispatch the victims are, other than 2 examples (one involving a football/fencing sword combo and the other involving the landing area for pole vaulters) are pretty run of the mill. There really weren't any attempts to frighten you, either, as every kill is telegraphed for about 30 seconds before it happens. However, the main problem I had with the movie is that the scenes in-between the kill scenes were BORING. Mostly just lots and lots of talking. BORING talking. If there is one thing a "bad" horror movie can't be, it's boring. Many slasher films will keep the interest up between the actual kills by setting up fake kills in an effort to spook you. This movie doesn't do that - if it looks like someone is going to get killed at that moment, they are. This film could have used a few more cheap spooks and a little less dialog concerned with pointing you towards the wrong suspect. If you haven't seen it, I would pass on this film.
Popcorn
Popcorn is a tribute to those cheap horror films from the 50's that would set up gimmicks in the theater in order to scare the audience (like electro-shocks in the seats), since the films were really too cheesy to do it themselves. The plot involves a horror movie festival at an old theater involving those types of movies and a killer that is stalking the staff during the showing of the films. For this movie, rather than use existing films in the fake festival, they made their own. I thought they did a really good job capturing the right sense of style for these films - phony-looking creatures, white-bread characters and very cheap gimmicks (one of the films is enhanced by "Odor-Vision", where they release different smells into the theater to correspond with what is happening on the screen). They also did a good job of capturing that old-school horror feel in a modern (for the time, which was the early 90's) way. Popcorn is a little cheesy, but there is some good tension at times and the plot was just crazy enough to keep my interest throughout the whole movie (in addition to the film festival, it involves a crazed film maker who may have come back from the dead after committing a Manson-esque killing spree back in the 60's).
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