“What, so yer tellin’ me there’s some sorta snake orgy out in the jungle?!”
I like very few vampire movies, but there are some I do like. One of my favorites is The Lost Boys.
It had everything — humor, horror and an actual story with characters we would care for.
Let The Right One In is nothing like The Lost Boys, but it has a good story that is haunting to say the least. It is slow, but you feel for two of the characters in it.
The new movie Twilight attempts to capture what Let The Right One In succeeds in.
DesignLive has a great collection of Photoshop tutorials for making people into zombies, creating spooky-looking text effects and what not. I’m going to give them a try tonight. 
The ‘evil eye’ tutorial looks promising!
My starting image will be this:
Instead of a little girl in the car with him, a screaming Uncle Sam. Maybe I’ll put ‘Socialism’ on the front of the car, and a highway scene behind the bumper car.
Just for the record I’m not much on Halloween. No I don’t think its the Devils night or anything but it just doesn’t appeal to me. Even when I was a kid I really didn’t participate too much. Yeah, I’m a total bore.
So I was surfing thorugh the net checking out Halloween costumes and came across these skimpy outfits for…teens? WTF?
http://www.newsweek.com/id/62474
Who is designing these? Hugh Hefner?
Continue reading ‘Halloween night or Pimp night out? And other ramblings’
Synopsis: Lionel has a problem - an overbearing mother who won’t allow him to have a life of his own. Fortunately, his mother dies. She is bitten by a Sumatran spider-monkey (arachnidae rodenta stopanimation) becomes very sick and dies. She comes back to life, however, as a flesh-eating zombie and then she really starts making Lionel’s life miserable. Lionel is so dedicated to taking care of his mother (in life and in undeath) that he cannot even see that a local girl named Paquita is smitten with him.
The story becomes weirder and weirder as Lionel tries to hide his mother’s zombified state from the rest of the townsfolk. But since she keeps biting people (and thus turning them into zombies) Lionel is forced to house her victims as well - until his home is filled with zombies. Through it all Lionel tries desperately to keep up an appearance of complete normalcy.
Synopsis: One of the best H.P. Lovecraft-inspired films, Dagon focuses on one of Lovecraft’s strongest stories, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ - which details the story of a fishing village which has come under the spiritual thrall of an evil, oceanic deity named ‘Dagon’.
Brought to the screen by director Stuart Gordon (who also directed Dreams in the Witch House and Re-Animator) it’s a mix of horror that borders on camp, great set design, and a little bit of T&A exploitation for good measure. It is clearly not a big-budget picture, but Gordon gets the atmosphere right.
‘From Beyond’ is one my favorite adaptations of Lovecraft’s work because it is not only a faithful representation of the story it was based upon - it is also well-executed, pulling off the real horror that the story evokes. Of course, the filmmakers added a dash of lurid sex to the story, but worked it into the story well.
The original short story of the same name is told from the viewpoint of an assistant to a talented scientist. The scientist creates a machine that resonates at a frequency that stimulates the brain, allowing those within its range of influence the ability to see into the various alternate dimensions that overlay our own. A passage from the original story:
“What do we know,” he had said, “of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers.
Of the various Lovecraft-themed horror films, probably the film with the biggest budget so far has been ‘In The Mouth of Madness’, which, while not taken from any particular story of H.P. Lovecraft, it is rife with his influences. Let’s see, it has madness, the main character gets sent to an insane asylum, evil books, equally evil authors, slimy, black-tentacled abominations lurking outside the papery-thin veneer we call ‘reality’, New England, communities that worship, eh, ‘alternative’ deities, and the apocalypse.
The film begins with our main character, a former insurance fraud investigator named Trent (played by a terrific Sam Neil), being interviewed by a psychologist in a padded cell of an asylum. The psychologist is mildly patronizing, asking Trent to explain how a man as mentally stable and sensible as himself ended up in an asylum. Trent turns the tables by saying, “It’s getting worse out there … isn’t it?”
Synopsis: ‘The Dunwich Horror’, directed by Daniel Haller is a fun bit of 70’s psychadelic horror. Like the Lovecraft story of the same name, we begin in Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachussetts. A warlock named Wilbur Whately is visiting the library hoping to borrow the Necronomicon, an ancient tome that supposedly contains instructions on how to ‘bring over’ the ‘Old Ones’ — a race of supernatural beings that once ruled the Earth.
Wilbur (Dean Stockwell) is from Dunwich, a remote town located deep in the countryside. His great grandfather was also a warlock, and was hanged by the locals for trying to sacrifice a young girl on a satanic altar. His family worships the ‘Old Ones’ and Wilbur lives in a creepy old house with a doddering grandfather, and something locked in a room, trying to work the doorknob…
No not that kind of terror. It didn’t have Insurgents in it.
Anyway, Krog inspired me to watch something for Halloween and this movie was inspired by an event that happened to the Director of this movie when he was a child. Basically a man knocked on his door and asked for someone who didn’t live there. Come to find out that same man broke into houses in his neighborhood that night.
This movie starts out with a couple (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) coming home from a wedding at 4:00 AM. They are kind of in a fight because the man asked his girlfriend to marry him and she turns him down. I’d say by the end of the night she wishes she had said yes. And I immediately thought what was to come and began to happen was a tactic to scare her into marrying him. How gullible I am…maybe that’s what I would have done. Not really.
This movie is more of a terror movie than horror. It did have some creepy stuff in it. Some of it has to do with a record player. Some freaky scenes.
The full title of the film is “The Unnameable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter”.
Randolph Carter is a fictional character appearing in a number of stories written by H.P. Lovecraft. Carter is described as an ‘antiquarian’; a seeker after ancient mysteries. The Unnameable II takes two of Lovecraft’s better stories (”The Statement of Randolph Carter” and “The Unnameable”) - both featuring Carter, and tries to merge them.
Like most cinematic adaptations of Lovecraft’s work the story is changed considerably. Compared against the various films that have tried to bring Lovecraft’s stories to life, Unnameable II does fairly well. That’s not saying much.
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