Hope all of you are enjoying your pagan holiday. Germans especially I encourage to celebrate Halloween, perhaps while waving six American flags and singing our national anthem in both English and German.
I did not find a clear winner to Slasher Search this year, but I will ruminate on it. At least I saw lots of interesting oddities and did a respectable number of horror reviews, including a bunch today. INSIDE is a modern classic I never saw before and ISLAND OF LOST SOULS is a classic classic that I never saw before, so those were the highlights of my viewing this month. Anyway have a fun day, eat some apples and pumpkin seeds to balance out your candy diet, and try not to get run over like that masked guy that gets mistaken for Michael Myers in part 2.
The Island of Lost Souls is an interesting island. That’s what Ed Parker (Richard Arlen) finds out when he shipwrecks and the drunk captain (Paul Hurst) of the boat that rescues him dumps him along with the cargo on this small slice of uncharted jungle property. Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton) is out there doing some cutting-edge scientifically research with one colleague, Montgomery (Arthur Hohl). He’s somehow figured out how to bypass millions of years of evolution and has created futuristic plants, including giant asparagus. He lives with a pretty young weirdo girl named Lota (The Panther Woman) and a staff of hairy servants who Parker believes are the “strange looking natives” of the island. Yeah, they look strange all right, they look like the wolf boy on the cover of the told freaks video. 
Q (aka Q – THE WINGED SERPENT) is writer/director Larry Cohen’s version of a giant monster movie, about a small time New York City getaway driver played by Cohen’s DeNiro, Michael Moriarty. He’s recently out of the joint, failing to get a job as a bar pianist, and gets screwed over by some mobsters during a failed diamond heist. He runs straight from the scene of the crime to a (closed, it turns out) law office high up in the Chrysler building, where he ends up having to hide from a security guard in a not-open-to-the-public area beneath the needle. There he finds a dead body and a nest with a giant egg. Huh.
PIG HUNT is a 2009 low budget horror romp that was released by Fangoria, a magazine I proudly subscribe to but, let’s be honest, not a name I trust on a video cover. A group of friends from San Francisco take a trip out to some property that this guy John (Travis Aaron Wade) inherited from his uncle, where they’re gonna go hunting together. It’s some macho dudes and one resented-but-tough girlfriend (Tina Huang, who apparently played a waitress in DRIVE). And there’s a giant pig out there somewhere.
TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL is a corny name for an enjoyable comedy that plays off of the ol’ slasher tropes in a clever way. It starts like a real slasher movie, with a group of college kids heading out to the woods for Memorial Day weekend. And for a minute it really could pass for an authentic modern day (but not necessarily good) serious non-comedy horror movie. When they stop at a gas station to get beer they have a run-in with creepy rednecks, just like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE or similar movies. But of course the rednecks are the titular Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine), two completely innocent guys who just get nervous talking to women and come off as scary to kids like this. I wonder if that’s what the deal was with Leatherface?
I’m including this as part of Slasher Search ’11 because that’s why I rented it. But it turned out I was wrong, it’s more of a ghost or haunted house type movie.
SILENT MADNESS is another song in the key of HALLOWEEN, with little melodies from a few other slasher favorites. A psychotic mute inmate from a mental asylum gets out and returns to the scene of a 20 year old massacre. Like A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET there’s a boiler room involved, like BLACK CHRISTMAS he kills some sorority sisters still on campus when most students are on vacation, like HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW there’s a cranky old sorority mother, like SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE the killer (played by stunt coordinator Solly Marx) is a regular looking dude with no mask or anything, and there’s a twist ending that’s kind of a nod to FRIDAY THE 13TH’s nod to PSYCHO. But it’s nowhere near as good as any of those movies. I don’t want to call it Z-grade, but it’s pretty low on the alphabet. Maybe W-grade? 
When I saw that there was a WRONG TURN 4 I had to think for a minute to remember if I had seen part 3. I did, so what’s one more gonna hurt? Nothing. That’s generally the best attitude to go into a movie with, right?
Here’s another popular 2007 French horror movie. This one came out about a month before 
Here’s a weird one. Martin (Pierre Lenoir) comes home one day to find his wife Alice (Lynne Adams – “Yakuza with rocket launcher” in JOHNNY MNEMONIC) cutting his suits into little squares. After Alice has a stint in a mental hospital the couple comes to live in a new house, still undergoing some refurbishment.
