The Taking of Deborah Logan
This was a prior Shocktober discovery for me and I had been itching to revisit it these past few years. Luckily it showed up on Shudder last week and I was able to give it another go. I think I liked it even more this time around. There's a lot of scary stuff here, and the central performance by Jill Larson is pretty impressive. I'm not sure I needed the whole backstory that becomes a driving factor in the final third, but the scares in that part are pretty good anyways. I'd probably put this in my top 10 found footage/faux doc horror films list, especially as it effectively mixes the documentary elements in with the scares.
B+
Creepshow S01E02
I had high hopes for the first short, a WWII-set werewolf story with Jeffrey Combs as a Nazi commander. But outside some fun colorful lighting this just feels too janky to be anything really fun. The characters all feel slightly off, and the eventual werewolves rely too heavily on obvious cutting away from the violence to have any real impact. Bleh.
The second story is better, seeing some kind of vengeful little monster become both a pet and a pest to a snarky loser played by DJ Qualls. I don't know that I needed to see anything here, but the monster (named Bob) is primarily shown in puppet form and that makes for a nice sense of tactility that the original films really thrived upon. The story material is good enough to keep me watching, but nothing spectacular. A meh episode overall.
C
Zodiac
You all know I like my horror films to have some supernatural verve to them, but I still count Zodiac among one of the all-time great horror films for the spectacular first hour. Fincher, working with what he's got in terms of survivor testimony and the killer's letters, depicts the killer as more of a force than a human being. A human shaped shadow, even in broad daylight, the killer appears to terrorize all kinds of people then disappears as if he were a ghost. Even the scene that features no violence, the woman with her baby in her car, still feels creepy as hell, partially because of her screams in the middle of a long, mostly empty highway.
Then the investigation takes over, first by the police then the amateur Graysmith. Is this Jake Gyllenhaal's best performance? Casting the wide-eyed, attentive actor is half the work, but he brings to the role a real sense of depth and humanity. And as his time on screen wraps up in the form of two meetings with possible suspects, the film regains some of that horror vibe it had in the early goings. The basement scene is stunningly good in its slow revelations and perfect lighting. We peer into the shadows, trying to see if we recognize the man hidden in them as one of the human shadows we saw hours and years ago. Maybe? And then we revisit Arthur Leigh Allen and the stare he returns to Jake G is bone-chilling. Could be him, too.
It's a great movie, one of the all-timers in its genre. Maybe not your typical gorefest or spooktacular, but it's got all the right moves to freak you the CINECAST! out on a chilly October night.
A+
Son of Dr. Jekyll
This sequel to the Universal version of RLS's classic tale of science gone wrong has a lot of the science but little of the wrong. The titular character transforms exactly once and passes out immediately. So the scares are gone and what remains is a semi-interesting but also convoluted story about reputations and family legacies. Not a terrible movie in any way, but it's not a horror film.
B-
In the Tall Grass
A Stephen King story that starts with a young man and woman driving down a midwest road with a dilapidated church and a bunch of plants, now where have I seen this before. Despite its initial similarity to Children of the Corn, In the Tall Grass immediately reveals itself to be much trippier. When the young people inevitably enter that tall grass, they soon realize that time and space don't quite work the same in the neverending greenery. For all the trippiness, however, there isn't much of a coherent story. In many ways this feels a lot like the movie that got its writer/director on the map: Cube. People in a strange location must find their way out, if they can survive the traps and each other. But In the Tall Grass doesn't have a strong enough sense of the rules of the Grass nor the characters that populate it. When half the dialogue is just one character yelling another character's name, especially in the first third of the film, we certainly remember who they are, but not anything beyond putting a face to a name. They don't have real characteristics, and that's the film's greatest flaw. As it gets more and more invested in its half-baked mythology, the movie loses any hope of coming to a satisfying conclusion. But hey (hay), at least it looks pretty and Patrick Wilson gives an underwritten role some juice.
C-