October Horror Movie Challenge 2019 - Play Along at Home

October begins tomorrow, and thus so will my latest October Horror Movie Challenge.  My Justgiving page is still up, we're still doing the appeal for Crisis, please give generously.  It's currently at the point where I have unlocked infamous video nasty Faces of Death, I'll be doing that early on, but still need a little bit more in there before I'm forced to tackle the entire Twilight Saga.  Today though, it's time for me to do a few recommendations for those of you who'd like to try it for yourselves.  The recommendations I did for 2016 and 2018 all still stand of course, and again I suggest giving Shudder's library of titles a try; use the one month trial, that's all your Halloween viewing sorted for a fiver.  Here's another set of recent titles that I recommend giving a try.  If some of these are exclusive to particular streaming services I'll make sure to mention it.  Before I start, a quick shout out to some ones I have blogged about on here before; do check out Train to Busan and One Cut of the Dead if you haven't already.  Right, with that done, let's get started, in alphabetical order, with...

Trailer(s) of the Week - The Gates of Hell Trilogy (City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery)

Decided to do a bumper selection today; last week we had a knock-off of one of Lucio Fulci's zombie films, so this week, I thought I'd cover the real deal.  Now Zombi 2/Zombie/Zombie Flesh Eaters was a big hit worldwide, and did help to solidify the George A. Romero rules for the undead (plus it gave us the sight of a zombie fighting a shark).  However, for me where Fulci's work with the living dead really hit its stride is where he went next with them.  Seemingly taking a bit inspiration from Dawn of the Dead's tagline, "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth", he made a loose trilogy of films with merged undead horror with a surrealist, ethereal, cosmic horror sensibility.  It's a trilogy purely in a thematic sense, in that they deal with similar ideas, rather than any plot details... which is good because if you've come to these films for a coherent plot, you're really in the wrong place!  Let's open up the Gates of Hell to have a peak...

Canary Duty - A Shaun the Sheep Movie : Farmageddon

The Shaun the Sheep film in 2015 was a thing of wonder and joy.  A great transition from short-form TV into full feature length, whilst still keeping a lot of the heart of the show intact, namely near pitch perfect sort-of silent animated comedy.  Plus it managed to have a genuinely heartfelt storyline, getting a real emotional response out of all but the most stone-hearted.  Not bad for a stop-motion spin-off with no real spoken dialogue.  So all in all, a pretty tough act to follow, and going for a "IN SPAAAAAACCCEEE" sequel can often be a somewhat variable prospect in terms of what it can do for a franchise.  So, does Farmageddon end up more a Super Mario Galaxy, or a Hellraiser Bloodline?

Halloween Bloggery - Another Game

Forty days left till All Hallowe's Eve, so it's time to start sharing random cool thematically appropriate stuffs.  This time it's a short film I saw on the big screen last year as part of a horror shorts showcase.  It's from the same team behind comedy feature film Ashens and the Quest for the Game Child (and the upcoming Ashens and the Polybius Heist), including star Dan Tomlinson, director Riyad Barmania, and internet funnyman himself Stuart Ashen.  It's a fun little creepy tale, all about the risks of gambling, and the "it'll never happen to me" fallacy.  I'll let the short, which is now officially available on YouTube, speak for itself, enjoy Another Game.

Please consider donating to my regular Halloween fundraiser for Crisis!

Silly Movie Trailer of the Week - Nights of Terror/Burial Ground/The Zombie Dead/Zombi Horror

Been too good on here recently, we need some silly schlock as we're going into the Halloween season, dammit!  And what better place is there for that than the wild world of Italian zombie cinema?  Today's entry is from one of the several dozen pieces of undead exploitation that were made shortly after Dawn of the Dead (retitled Zombi) and Zombi 2 (Zombie Flesh Eaters) were big hits at the European box office.  In fact, this one tried to pass itself off as Zombi 3 on occasion, something quite a few films tried before they made an official one.  This is 1981's Nights of Terror, aka a whole bunch more alternative titles I'm not going into again, and let's see a UK video dealer's trailer for it!

Bonus Trailers - Commemorating Breakaway Day

A special extra selection of trailers today, as this marks the twentieth anniversary of the Moon being blasted out of orbit.  What do you mean you don't remember that?  Why, it was all recorded in this fine documentary series, which first broadcast... twenty four years and nine days before the disaster happened....

Trailer of the Week - The Shining

A little later than planned, but given that it's exactly seven weeks till Halloween today, I thought I'd move these to Thursday until then.  On Sunday the final trailer dropped for one of my most anticipated films of the year, Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining.  I really dug the book, looks like it captures the story pretty well, and it seems to be doing that tricky task of balancing the book and film versions of the story.  Plus it's cool being in cinemas where the first trailer played, and hearing a few people gasp or otherwise react when they realise what exactly this film is.  So with that in mind, now's a good time to look back at one of the simplest and most effective horror film trailers of all time...

Lessons not Learned - Exorcist II: The Heretic

Here’s a little something new for on here; I thought I’d take inspiration from Yahtzee’s little irregular column and every so often have a look at particular cases of a film crashing and burning, to see what could be learned from the mess, and evidence that it wasn’t.  I’m not going to do a full evisceration of a review of these films, as plenty of other smarter folks than I have done that.  No, I’m purely going to focus on cases where there were only one or two obvious factors behind the failure, and see if those crop up again with any subsequent major flops.  With this in mind, let’s start with one of the most notorious cases of sequelisation ever… John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Yeah, this fits the tone the first one established.

Canary Duty - It Chapter Two

I wonder how many people were taken genuinely by surprise when at the end of the 2017 It, the title card came up saying It Chapter One?  Those that read the book or remember the TV version knew that the story of the Stephen King had two strands; one with a group of kids facing Pennywise, the other with them returning as adults to finish the clownish creature off.  This gave the makers of this version a solid way to take care with a common problem King adaptations face; his novels are bricks of words, hard to condense down to feature length.  So by splitting it as one film with the kids, one with the adults (as opposed to the novel's and TV version's method of switching between the two), we can have one film that can stand on its own feet, which if they didn't get a sequel would work as it's own film.  Plus it means enough time to let the story breathe properly. So two years after becoming a genuine horror blockbuster phenomenon, how does the long awaited second chapter hold up?

October Horror Movie Challenge 2019 - Fundraising Begins, With a New Twist!

This year, I am once again taking part in what has turned out to be one of the most enduring things to come out of the IMDb message boards (outliving the boards themselves!), The October Horror Movie Challenge!  The rules are simple; across October's 31 days, watch at least 31 horror movies, and at least half of them (so more than 16) must be ones you are watching for the first time.  As in previous years, I'll be going for as many as I can fit in, including a few new cinema releases, stuff at the London Film Festival (already booked my tickets!), but the main bulk of them coming from what I've been gathering from charity shops and the like across the year, on a random draw basis.  There are a few interesting marathons potentially on the cards this year, so I'm once again doing this sponsored, raising money for Crisis.  If you have liked my witterings about film this year and want to show your appreciation, please give what you can to my appeal, help prepare the homeless and those that would help them for the coming winter.

Goodbye Uncle Terrance

I don't really like having to do these, but I really thought it necessary in this case.  Yesterday Doctor Who fans around the world received the sad news that writer Terrance Dicks had passed away.  He is a figure whose impact on the world of Doctor Who, and indeed on the youth of Britain for many years, cannot be overstated.

Trailer of the Week - Drop Dead Gorgeous

A random rewatch from my pile for this week's trailer.  I hadn't thought of this film in years, then an article for its 20th anniversary reminded me of how much I had previously enjoyed it... well, enjoyed the last hour of it, I came in partway through a TV screening the first time.  So 50p's worth of credit in a CEX later, I got a copy for a rewatch, and thankfully this was one of those times my good memories were quite correct.  If anything, I think it was even better than I originally gave it credit for.  This is 1999's dark comedy gem, Drop Dead Gorgeous.