You see, the thing about doing a month of movies revolving around Netflix, is that sometimes they take movies off of Netflix that you blindly assumed you’d be able to watch in time for a Shocktober review.  This happened to me last night when I sat down to watch 2004’s Open Water, only to discover that it’d been taken off of this almighty streaming service that we are at the mercy of.  So in order to keep the continuity going, I was able to settle on a movie that pokes fun at horror movies (for the most part), and also happened to come out in the early ’00s.  Now I’d be lying if I said I was expecting much from Scary Movie 3, but that made it all the more mildly pleasing that this movie isn’t absolutely terrible in the way that I was expecting it to be absolutely terrible. Continue reading →

Sleepy Hollow is the first film on this year’s list I have a history with. I remember the film’s trailer back in the day; a full scene from the movie of a young boy hiding from the Headless Horseman as his parents are butchered before his eyes. I also remember seeing the film in theaters, and my mom spilling an entire bag of popcorn on a random stranger after a jump scare from a witch. And who could forget the highly detailed action figures from McFarlane Toys? Truly, it was my Woodstock. But is it any good?

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I have never felt this guilty about giving a film a subpar rating. Not only because it’s a film starring a paralyzed actor doing his best, but because it was one of that actors last roles. Apart from a few guest spots, this made-for-TV movie that premiered on ABC on November 22nd, 1998 was one of the last times any of us had the pleasure of watching Christopher “Superman” Reeve. Though what would pleasure be without pain?

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It’s easy to forget how influential Scream was to the horror genre. Not only did the series pave the way for meta movies it paved the way for horror-comedies. Would we have movies like Shaun of the Dead without the Scream franchise? Scream was a trendsetter, but what about Scream 2? Well, I’m happy to say that not only is Scream 2 just as influential, it’s just as good.

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Not enough sci-fi movies take the bold leap of putting dates by their absurd predictions for the future. That’s probably because most screenwriters have the good sense to know that their outlandish ideas will probably never come true, and they don’t want to run into the 2001 problem. Event Horizon, though, now here is a movie with very little good sense at all. And so when it began by writing about humanity’s permanent settlement on the moon being established in 2015, I knew I was in for a good time.
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I don’t know that last night was necessarily the best night to put on the interesting-if-inconsequential Nightmare On Elm Street quasi-sequel New Nightmare, considering it came after watching the latest presidential debate, which forced me to grapple with the new nightmare that is American politics.  I’m not sure if that’s something that will loom over this October’s horror movie season, since it does feel a little like real life is more unnerving and surreal than a Freddie Krueger nightmare right now.  Especially when last night we got to see every woman’s ultimate fear in the form of a lurking Donald Trump.  But then again, I guess the truly disturbing things in life are always rife for satire, which New Nightmare kinda sorta demonstrates in its half-realized attempt to take down its own mythos. Continue reading →