October Horror Movie Challenge 2016 - Play along at home! #OHMC2016

Time again for me to engage in that most mysterious of internet film geek traditions*, the October Horror Movie Challenge.  31 Days, at least 31 Horror Movies, NO EXCUSES!!!  Once again, I'm doing it sponsored for Crisis, so if you can spare a few pennies, that would be most generous of you.

This year though, I thought I'd preface the challenge itself with something that can help you play along if you so wish.  Finding the right titles to watch can be a bit of a minefield, because I will be the first to admit that, with the horror genre these days, there’s a lot of crap out there.  So here’s a very quick look at a few recent releases that may have flown under your radars, which are well worth your time (and a lot of these are available to stream or are cheap on HMV's shelves right now, so no need to go digging!).  What’s more, I guarantee that none of these end with either “they were dead all along” or “it was the lead character’s split personality”!

I’m going to start with one I watched in last year’s challenge; Night of the Wolf aka Late Phases.  This is one of the best werewolf movies in quite a while, with Nick Damici giving a superb central performance as the blind veteran who realises there’s a lycanthrope on the loose near the retirement village he’s been put in.  Yeah, it’s like an inverted, way less rapey Don’t Breathe.  It also plays well with werewolf lore, with one of the best transformation scenes in quite a long while, nods to a notable eighties movie (but not the one you may be thinking of), and has something that I’m genuinely surprised I haven’t seen done in one of these movies before.

Another werewolf movie, but one with a very different tone, Wolfcop!  There are two things you need to know about Wolfcop!  First, he is a cop!  You can guess the rest.  Yep, it’s big ridiculous, utterly absurd, and knows it.  For example, our lead character’s name is Lou Garou.  Yes, really!  Don’t make the mistake though of thinking this is just a sort of “ZOMG, that so random!” title like Sharknado; for this the film-maker’s actually gave a shit.  There’s actually a decent mystery in play as Lou’s lycanthropy actually makes him a better cop, and he actually has to work out who or what has done this to him, and for what purpose.  It’s one hell of a reveal when it is discovered, and actually adds a few more layers to the story.  Plus, the action and horror scenes are all good ol’ practical effects, and boy are there sights to behold in here.  You know what you’re getting into with a title like this, it’s a tonne of fun.  Also, a bonus; it’s just been revealed at Fantastic Fest that the sequel Another Wolfcop is now finished, yay!

Moving away from werewolves, but still keeping the tone light, let’s go to the slasher genre with The Final Girls.  Here’s another good example of the meta-textual horror movie, like Scream, Behind the Mask and much more.  This has a tonne of great gags, from characters being able to hear the incidental music (including that "ki-ki-ki-ha-ha-ha" leit motif the killer has), to how they interact with a flashback.  What works about this one is that it’s a deliberate mash-up of generations too, as we have the more savvy cast of a modern teen horror wander around the setting of an eighties style slasher-flick, pointing out all manner of stuff, including the decidedly less… enlightened social attitudes these had.  There’s also a genuine heart in here, as there’s a truly touching story about the lead character and the character her mother played, which I suspect was more than a bit autobiographical, as one of the screenwriters, Joshua John Miller is the son of Jason Miller from The Exorcist.  It is a bit light on the gore for a slasher movie, but it does so much else right, that’s barely an issue, almost anyone who has seen a slasher (or at least the trailer for one) will get a lot out of this.

Now onto darker territory but carrying on the meta approach; Resurrecting the Street Walker.  Given its ubiquity, a found footage/first person horror title was bound to make it on here in some way, however this one goes about things in a slightly different and more clever way.  This is a fake documentary about an attempt by an eager film company intern to restore an old serial killer movie, only for things to go very badly wrong.  This does a good job critiquing the more grim areas these sort of films can get into, while also having a surprisingly multi-layered story, with many unexplained details suggesting that there might be something supernatural going on, although nothing overt happening on screen.  It’s a clever little film, and I know that it’s free on Amazon Prime video (thanks to my brother's review of the film), so this is worth checking out.

Recently British movie fans received the sad news that distributor Metrodome had gone into administration.  That's a real shame, as they have bought over quite a number of really interesting titles over the years, including Donnie Darko for starters.  One consequence of this is that I noticed in HMV they are selling off Metrodome discs for ridiculously low prices as stock liquidation, £2 a DVD, £3 a blu ray.  There are some interesting horror titles in there, including The Borderlands, an extremely well done British found footage film I reviewed yonks ago.  But if you pick up any one of these, make it The Innkeepers, a very well done ghost story that a friend of mine Paul Gannon once described best by saying "you know it's a real horror movie because for the first hour, nothing happens".  It's one of the few films where, when watching it at home alone, I got almost to scared to carry on watching.  That's happened very few times...

Here’s another one I saw last year, at the London Film Festival; The Invitation.  This is the hardest one to sum up, because it’s a title like Kill List or Cabin in the Woods in that it doesn’t so much have a “twist”, it’s more built around several big reveals.  That means I highly recommend it, but I can’t actually say why.  What I can say without giving the game away is that it’s based around a dinner party, and does a great job at building tension almost purely through character interaction.  It’s also got a great, and very diverse cast, who are more than capable of pulling this story off.  That’s pretty much as far as I can go.  Look, it’s on most streaming services right now, just go in blind, check it out yourself, you won’t be disappointed.

OK, another one with some big surprises, but a bit more I can say without spoilers; We Are Still Here.  This is a tribute to turn of the seventies to the eighties supernatural fare, such as The Fog or some of the works of Lucio Fulci, but with a bit more of a sense of humour to it.  No, it’s not a horror comedy per se, more that it balances out the darker storyline and scares with characters that are fun to be around.  Well acted too, with some familiar faces in the horror genre, like Larry Fessenden, and Barbara Crampton, whose career has gotten a whole new wind in the past few years.  It’s interesting that this film is based around characters older than the usual horror protagonist demographic, as it allows a much more new kind of character dynamic to work, it lets the story explores ideas of grief and looking back on one’s life much better.  It’s not just navel gazing though, there’s also a lot stacked against our leads in this story; yes, the house is haunted, that’s clear from the word go, but there is more going on than just that.  Oops, brushing up against spoiler-city limits again, moving on!

Scary clown movies are ten a penny, but Clown is kind of a first, making it more a man-becoming-inhuman story in the line of The Fly (while owing an obvious debt to It, naturally).  This does a good job showing the decline of the main character, while playing the initially absurd premise very straight.  There are some superb make-up effects, wonderfully macabre imagery, and some genuinely shocking moments, sometimes all in the same scene.  Now of all the films in this list, I’d have to admit this one’s the most flawed; we don’t get to know the lead much before he puts on the clown suit that’s actually a demon skin (I love that I get to write a sentence like that!), it goes on a bit long, and the climax suddenly loses a lot of what made the earlier segments fascinating.  But it still works very well as video night fodder, there’s plenty of fun to be had.  Also, the director of this one, Jon Watts, is currently working on Spider-Man Homecoming, so it might be a good chance to get acquainted with his style before then; Peter Parker’s in good hands judging from this.

Here’s the closing night film last year’s Frightfest; Tales of Halloween.  A whole slew of horror directors team up to give a neat portmanteau of ten tales from the same town on Halloween night.  Taking a cue from Trick ‘r Treat, this has its tales overlap in subtle ways, while also keeping a fun tongue in cheek tone.  All of them work in their own ways, with perhaps my favourite being Mike Mendez’s segment Friday the 31st; I’m not even going to try to give away what happens in that one, see that insanity for yourself.  Also, if you know your horror personalities, it’s a great game of “spot the cameo”, as the likes of John Landis, Joe Dante, and even poster artist Drew Struzan have small parts (Struzan’s part in particular had the whole screen in Frightfest in near hysterics!).  It’s just the thing for the season, and the portmanteau format gives a lot of variety.

Speaking of Frightfest, here’s a title from their own label Frightfest Presents; Curtain.  Obviously made on a teeny budget, but wisely spent, this is a wonderfully off-beat tale of the supernatural, where an event as simple as someone’s shower curtain going missing leads to an extraordinary tale of cults, wormholes, and surprises I wouldn’t dream of giving away.  It has a great sense of humour, with genuinely likeable characters, which just serves to make the revelations of what’s really going on, and what the protagonists go through, that much more powerful.  Curtain doesn’t neatly fall into a particular horror pigeonhole, but that’s one of the reasons I like it so much, there’s genuinely nothing else quite like it out there.

I suppose we should have an obligatory zombie movie on here; Stalled.  I won't go into too much detail on here, since well, I already did when I first reviewed the film, and interviewed the writer/star and director.  What I will add is that if you think that zombies are pretty much done to (un)death, there are still titles like this out there to let you know that isn't the case, have a go with this one.  Actually, if you don't get round to it this Halloween, it's also worth saving for Christmas; it's surprising how well it works for then too.

I'd be remiss if I didn't give another plug to one of my films of last year, Nina Forever, a "fucked up fairy tale" in it's own words.  Check out my top ten list for more on this one, and I'll just add here that this is one of the most honest films about relationships I've seen a very long time.   Alongside admittedly a level of blood and nudity that even HBO would raise an eyebrow at.

One last relatively new release: Cub. Again, I won't repeat myself, already reviewed it on Filmjuice.  What I will say is that it's a good example of a trend we've been having in horror films of late of titles very much influenced by the VHS era, when lots of offbeat, insane projects got made thanks to having an all new distribution model.  It's nice to see that spirit make a comeback, especially from an international market; one wouldn't have figured Belgium would give us a slasher classic, but here we are.  Also, we finally have a film to match to the Weird Al song Nature Trail to Hell.  Only took three decades.

Finally, definitely not a new film, but a new release of a classic.  Legendary film distributor The Criterion Collection (who I am so glad has made it to the UK) have made a new restoration of the 1942 version of Cat People, the first of Val Lewton’s horror productions for RKO.  Directed by Jacques Tourneur, this is a major landmark in the history of horror films, as behind that tacky title, handed down to Lewton by the studio, is a very smart, mature story about sexuality.  What’s more, it’s one of the first to fully grasp that what the audience in a horror movie doesn’t see, can be just as, if not more, effective than what they do see.  This is a film that still holds up remarkably well today, if you haven’t seen it before, go pick up the new edition and give it a try, you’d be surprised how much power a film from the forties can have on a modern audience.  Mind, I do admit that I also recommend this so that, if it sells well enough, Criterion will do the rest of the RKO horror cycle too!

Well, this was fun.  Might do this again sometime.  In the meantime, if you liked it, please give generously to Crisis, and follow me for the challenge.  Halloween is just around the corner, take it away Silver Shamrock!

*by mysterious, I mean that I couldn't find a definite answer as to how it got started.