Halloween 2016 movie thoughts

On October 1, 2016, I began a movie challenge to watch 31 horror(ish) movies in 31 days. Many of these were ones I hadn't seen before, many of those classics. I've marked these with NS for Not Seen and PS for Previously Seen below. My thoughts and/or mini-reviews follow each.

NS (1/31) A Nightmare on Elm Street: Great start to the series. This is a horror movie that understands the implicit comedy in horror and uses it to great effect. I wish the desire to fall asleep vs. a villain who kills you in your sleep had been played up more; it's there in some form but it doesn't feel as visceral as I would like. That need to sleep kind of peters out by the end.

NS (2/31) Friday the 13th: I'm not gonna say I hated it, but I will say I probably should've just watched the second one. This feels like a slasher film without an identity. No Jason (not really, anyway), no hockey mask, it's just young adults getting naked and slaughtered. Kind of boring.

NS (3/31) Poltergeist: Horror via Spielberg. It drags on about half an hour too long, but it mixes comedy and horror well. Sliding the kid across the floor in football gear got a laugh out of me.

NS (4/31) The Evil Dead: I'd seen Evil Dead II once before, although I wasn't sure until I started this one which one that had been. Both are very small scale, taking place mostly in a cabin in the woods. (Whoops, I somehow forgot to include Cabin in the Woods in this year's movie challenge! Maybe next year.) Probably the most obviously low-budget thing I'll see this year. Hard to dislike in that context, but not really a great movie in its own right.

PS (5/31) Resident Evil: This is a movie where nothing happens, then a guy gets sliced by a laser grid, then nothing happens. I thought maybe I had forgotten a majority of it since the last time I saw it (when it was in theaters back in like 2002), but it turns out there was nothing else to forget. Boring.

PS (6/31) Silent Hill: Still my favorite video game film adaptation. I often say it goes off the rails after the Pyramid Head scene (roughly the halfway point), and that's mostly true, but the hallway of nurses is at least kind of creepy and interesting.

NS (7/31) Dark Shadows: Another one that drags one longer than it needs to. The first half hour is admirably quirky without being obnoxious, and the finale is an unexpectedly exciting special effects fest, but the middle third is completely forgettable.

NS (8/31) The Fly: At last, we get to A Genuinely Good Movie. I'd only seen a couple Cronenberg films before (Videodrome and eXistenZ, unless I'm forgetting others), and this blows both away. It's a great body horror film and a great performance by Jeff Goldblum.

NS (9/31) Hellraiser: This was nothing at all like I expected. The marketing for the series as a whole has always focused on Pinhead, but he and the rest of the Cenobites are a relatively small part of what is largely a film about a zombie baiting his ex-lover into murdering randos to bring him back to life. Not a bad movie, but again, nothing like I expected.

PS (10/31) Drag Me to Hell: One of my favorite horror films. It's been a few years since I've seen it and it holds up brilliantly. It's creepy, gross, laugh-out-loud funny, and everything a good horror movie should be.

NS (11/31) Scream: This is probably the most surprising that I hadn't seen. It came out in 1996, when I was old enough to be aware of its pop culture impact, but before I had gotten into the genre myself. It's staunchly entrenched in the 90s, but it holds up pretty well as a humorous skewering of horror tropes. The video store scene and the living room Halloween scene reminded me of Deadly Premonition's car ride monologues about 80s films. Amazingly, I'd somehow managed to avoid spoilers on this one for twenty years and had no idea who Ghostface really was. I thought by the end there was only one possible outcome, but I was wrong!

NS (12/31) Child's Play: I'd probably seen via Wikipedia or IMDb that Brad Dourif has voiced Chucky in every Child's Play / Chucky film, but I'd forgotten it. It totally makes that character. Another great horror/slasher/comedy mashup.

NS (13/31) The Witch: This one was really surprising. I'd heard good things about it, similar to the praise I'd heard for other recent horror films like It Follows and The Babadook (both of which I have seen very recently and therefore rejected from this year's movie challenge). It was more period-piece-y than I expected, all thees and thous, and I found myself anticipating a twist that never came. Very understated horror.