Horror-a-rama

So, I've been binging on horror movies lately, because 'tis the season, and also I was able to bully my roommate into letting me use the Roku unit. All of these movies are available on Netflix Instant. Among the things I watched were:

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors: I'm not really sure why I had this on my instant queue, but it's been there for a while. I seem to recall either a commentary or critical article citing it as an influence on a movie I enjoyed a lot, but what that movie was is lost in the mists of time, leaving only this. It's OK, I guess: the episodic nature of the movie kept things rolling at a steady clip, and my roommate and I amused ourselves by guessing the twist endings to every section. But after a while, it just felt overstuffed: they seriously were just shoving in every genre they could into the stories, and the only thing really unifying them was their fatalism. The cast was surprisingly familiar, with Peter Cushing, Donald Sutherland, Christopher Lee, and Michael Gough -- the last one perhaps most familiar as Alfred from Batman '89. But the protagonists' behavior in the stories didn't make much sense at times, and the threats weren't very imaginative. Plus, and this bugged the hell out of me: Dr. Terror had a more-than-full tarot deck -- the stack he had was so thick I wondered if they were printed on graham crackers -- but the only cards he pulled were from the Major Arcana. That sort of thing almost bugs me as much as when they pull cards that don't exist. Yes, I'm a geek.

Circus of Horrors: How was this, in any way, a horror film? It was more a crime film than anything. The set-up doesn't suck: a rogue plastic surgeon goes underground after changing his own face, inherits a circus via an unfortunate "accident", and then starts stocking the ranks of the circus with scarred criminals that he uses his abilities to pretty up. If there's one thing Eyes Without A Face (released the same year) has taught us, it's that plastic surgeons are seriously creepy. Circuses have been a bottomless well of creepiness for a long time now. So why does this movie play like a domestic drama? The doctor keeps falling in love with the ingénues in his circus, but when they reject him, or try to leave the circus, he has them killed by one of his henchmen. Only the deaths are always made to look like accidents, and always happen while the girls are doing their routine in the ring. The doctor's distance from the murders, his relative lack of passion, and the fact that all the deaths look like accidents, does little to increase the level of suspense. There's a lot of behind the scenes stuff, with unrequited loves and blackmail and investigations, that it starts to seem a lot more like a soap opera than anything else. And, even though he recruits a circus of criminals, they never even do any crime! (Except for killing the 14 girls he's fallen for.) Apparently he just wants criminals so that he'll have information to hold over them if they ever want to rat him out to the police.

Vampire Circus: At least with this movie, I know the reason it was in my queue: Dr. K featured it in his Halloween Countdown last year, and I was intrigued enough to want to watch it. (Dr. K always did a great job with the horror movie write-ups; here's hoping he returns to it again!) This movie did a much better job of making the circus itself clearly awful: putting aside the fact that at least three of its members are vampires, it also has a mute strongman (played by the future body of Darth Vader!), and the creepiest little-person clown imaginable.

Seriously, this fella needs a job as a henchman for the Joker, he's that creepy. And then there's the human woman, introduced at the very beginning of the film, who actually seems to get sexually excited watching her vampire lover drink from and kill a little girl she's brought him from the village. That scene is effectively creepy. As is the fact that the village the movie takes place in is slowly being killed by a strain of rabies carried by the bats in the area: it's clear that the village is dying before the circus comes to town, a victim of an infection within its boundaries, possibly because of a curse left upon it by the vampire they killed at the beginning of the movie. Because of this, the village itself has been quarantined by the government, and anybody who tries to leave it is shot on sight, with nobody allowed to enter the village, either. Nobody, that is, but THE VAMPIRE CIRCUS! It's not a perfect movie, but it is a pretty effective one. Certainly creepier than the other two.

Let The Right One In: I can't explain why I hadn't seen this movie before now: I've certainly seen plenty written about it online, by critics and friends whose opinions I respect speaking about it in glowing terms. Part of it might have just me being contrary. But a couple nights ago, my roommate demanded (SIGH) that he choose a Halloween-type movie for us to watch, and of the options he gave me, this is the one I opted for. It isn't particularly scary, and it isn't particularly gruesome, but it is very well acted, and it is shot absolutely beautifully. Watching its outdoor scenes actually made me feel colder. The ending is more complicated and sad than it seems, although that same description could go for the movie as a whole. It's Bergman-esque horror. I liked it.

Creepshow: Another film selected by my roommate. I had actually seen about 4/5s of this movie before, and had been impressed at the time by the sudden flares of non-natural lighting whenever danger loomed. The set-ups tended to be a tad corny (which I realize was part of the point), and the sudden intrusion of panels and graphics from comics a little distracting -- I thought the lighting shifts, suddenly mimicking four-color printing, accomplished the same thing, less obtrusively. The one segment I hadn't seen, the last one, was genuinely creepy, and it reminded me of Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls." That's a good thing. And the shot of the bugs rupturing from the skin gave me my only genuine moment of queasiness throughout the whole movie, in spite of the latex being a bit obvious.