If you haven’t seen the blog RUPERT PUPKIN SPEAKS, you’re missing out on some good stuff. He’s one of these rare individuals who knows his shit but is still relentlessly passionate and positive about movies, recognizing that at any given time there are way too many gems that you haven’t seen out there to fixate too long on hating the new Starbat prebootquel or whatever. Some of his passions include obscurities available from the Warner Archive and collecting weird movie novelizations.
Alot of his material is lists of recommendations from various guests, and every October he has an avalanche of underrated horror lists. I love reading these and have found some good ones from them, and I’ve always wanted to do one myself.
Well, he never invited me, so this year I just asked him if I could do one. And I guess he is a gentleman, so he said yes.
note: As you can see in the intro I tried not to overlap with anybody else’s lists, but I think P2 and maybe something else ended up on other lists after mine was submitted. But what can you do?
October 27th, 2013 at 11:36 am
Hmmmmmmmmmm… interesting list. Of the movies you list that I’ve seen, I’m afraid I would disagree with you on 2/3… The one I would agree wholeheartedly with is “Bereavement”, definitely my favorite of the movies you’ve mentioned. (And another of those great little movies that I would never have seen if it wasn’t for this website.) The thing that bothered you so much about it didn’t bother me at all… knowing what happened to certain characters in “Malevolence”, and considering whose “story” the movie is, I think it had to happen like that.
Haven’t seen “Don’t go into the house” but I’ll pick it up if I see it. Sounds interesting at least.
I haven’t seen “Highwaymen” either, but from what you’ve said it sounds a little like a cross between the Stacy Keach / J L Curtis thriller “Road Games”, which you recommended on this site and which I very much liked, and “Road Kill”, the faceless killer trucker movie starring Paul Walker that was about a thousand times better than I expected. Honestly if it’s as good as either of those movies I’ll probably enjoy it, so I’ll check it out as well when I have a chance.
“Dead in 3 Days”… I like the style and the “natural” tone of it. I also like that the actors are clearly better than the standard slasher movie fare. But honestly this movie irritated the hell outta me for its frequent use of cliches that really should be dead and gone, from the very start (they’re still doing the “main characters’ eventual fate is foreshadowed when they hit an animal on the road” thing?) to the moment at the end that you mentioned, completely spoilt by the old cliche that one character can’t think to SHOOT THE KILLER IN THE DAMN LEG. There is absolutely no excuse for that.
And “P2″… I just thought it was ok. I didn’t like the cinematography (that blue filter effect is another thing that I’d be quite happy to never see in any film ever again, along with “dramatic slow-mo” and the shakycam fight scene) and I didn’t think either of the two main characters were sufficiently interesting to carry the movie, although Wes Bentley was at least convincingly creepy.
My choices would be “Hostel” and the Gabrielle Anwer version of “The Bodysnatchers”.