My HH world is done, yay! It's wacky. So anyway, in honor of my favorite holiday (I won't say what it is, you'll just have to guess!), I have organized and added to my Netflix queue, flooding the front end with 30 or so horror movies. We won't get through them all by Halloween, so when that happens, I'll just scatter them back into the queue (so lame that Netflix offers no "Random" button) for future fun. But in the meantime, let me begin my yearly Halloween reviews:
First up was
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Crawling Hand - MST is always great. This was a big surprise though... it must be one of the VERY first episodes. Dr. Forrester's assistant was some guy I do not recognize, who also voiced Tom Servo, poorly. He was not funny. The whole show had a real local-cable-in-Wisconsin feel to it, it was interesting (reminds me of watching Fish Masters up in San Luis Obispo. Ever seen that? It's awesome). Anyway, this was not among the best of MST. The guys were rather stilted and not quite comfortable with their work yet. Of course, stilted is part of Joel's schtick, but this was moreso.
Next, we saw
Saw. Yes, we were going to see Saw and we saw Saw. Anyway, I was totally disappointed. It wasn't terrible, it was okay. But I had this idea in my head before seeing it - I thought it was going to be a super intense, totally psychological movie. What I imagined was an entire movie taking place in a single room, two guys, nobody else, and gradually through their dialogue and environment, you'd discover new things and be on the edge of your seat wondering if one of them might be the killer or what. Kind of like Cube, but in one room (which Cube basically was, since the rooms were almost identical). But instead, most of the movie takes place outside of the room the guys are trapped in, and is kind of the usual police hunting serial killer stuff. It's a little weird (and by the end, I daresay, a lot silly and full of plot holes), but pretty standard.
Nanowrimo's coming up next month, and I was thinking one idea for something to write would be a proper version of Saw. Just in that one room... intense. Really more of a short story topic than a novel, though.
And the last that we have seen so far (very slow process with only 3 movies at a time and slow shipping) is
The Evil Dead. I've seen parts of it many times, and I've seen Evil Dead 2, which is pretty much the same thing with more production values. But we finally saw The Evil Dead. And you know, I'm really surprised. The acting was horrible, of course (except Bruce "The Man" Campbell, of
course), but everything else was really well done - the direction, sets, effects. I mean, it didn't make any sense, but it looked like a real movie. For such a crazily low budget, so many years ago, it impressed me. On the downside, about 2/3 of the runtime of the movie consists of demons screaming and flailing about, which is really hard on the ears and gets a bit dull and repetitive. It's better when you cover it with the Bruce Campbell commentary, though I only got to hear a little of that - had to send the movie off so I could get more movies!
So that's round 1 of the horror review. More to come as they gradually trickle in.
