#14 HalloweenTown

I'll be honest, I threw this one on because I was getting a little behind and I just needed a flick that would be over in 85 minutes. I like this movie, but I would never count it among the stuff that I would watch multiple times. It was a made-for-television flick that came along a little late for me to actually be into it. I do love Halloween movies for kids, and you could do worse than the HalloweenTown series. There are definitely some makeup effects and costumes that are pretty stellar. And the writing moves things along and keeps the show on the road. Highlights are Princess Leia's mom (not Natalie Portman) and April O'Neil playing mother and daughter and the skeleton cab driver.

#13 Under the Dome Season 2 (Ongoing)

Under the Dome is a strange beast. The book by Stephen King is a large story that is kind of low on plot and high on King's trademark storytelling. It's all about the power struggle of society. The book merely showcases how quickly things can go awry when people get scared and desperate.

The TV show has taken an odd spin on 'adaptation'. We came to terms early in the first season that this show would not be along the lines of something like Game of Thrones, which sticks relatively close to the source material and seems to be out to satisfy fans. The dome coming down over a town called Chester's Mill and most of the names and basic characters in the novel is about where the inspiration for the show calls it a day. The CBS version of Under the Dome is exactly that: the network television version of a King work, stretched out to try and accommodate multiple seasons. The stakes are lower, with the inhabitants actually finding a way out of the dome this year. The characters are less abrasive, more cookie cutter, less real (I mean, really, how could they include all the rape and killing and drug use of the novel, this ain't HBO), as are the actors playing them. All the folks in front of the camera probably have great head shots, but once their mouths start moving it's kind of weak. 

King has apparently put his stamp of approval on the show. He even wrote the first episode of season 2, which has completely departed from his source novel. I'm not in love with the show, but I've come this far, so I'll probably keep watching, at least through this season (and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be the last). I liked the first season a bit more. This season's highlight was a multiple episode guest spot for Dwight Yoakam, who is delightful, but that now seems to be at an end.

Really, any King adaptation is going to have troubles, because the magic of his work is in all the insights he has into the human psyche, not in the events of whatever story he's telling. And that is a very difficult thing to translate to any other medium, especially when you completely depart from all of that and just use skeletons of the characters and the one uniting factor of the original story, the fact that they are Under the Dome.

#12 Creepshow 2

Here's one of my favorites. The final installment of this anthology of short horrors, penned by Stephen King and George Romero and directed by the cinematographer of Dawn of the Dead, 'The Hitchhiker', scared the goats out of me and my childhood chum, Westin. We ran around saying, "Thanks for the ride, lady!" for days.

Now, I think that I like the cartoon storyline that runs between the stories the best. It even features a mask wearing Tom Savini as the live action version of 'The Creep.'

Nothing stirs up the nostalgia in me like these old horror movies about a time before the digital revolution. There is something fun and creepy about remembering how completely isolated people could be back then.

#11 Fight Night (1985)

This is one of those movies that a lot of folks have a special place in their heart for. It's one of those 80s movies that stands out in people's minds because they saw it at that special time in their development where the cheese, the horror, the effects and the comedy were all new to them. Witter, Mandy and I are not of this club. None of us had ever seen this flick before, and I have to admit, for about the first 45 minutes or so, we were baffled. After a run of mediocre titles, I was stoked to watch a tried and true classic of 80 horror, especially one that I hadn't seen. But man, when Prince Humperdink stated terrorizing Marcy from Married with Children, her boyfriend, a stereotypical 80s nerd and a Van Helsing wannabe, I thought I had been burned again.

But eventually the movie did pick up. About the last 20 minutes are pure gold. There's tons of awesome effects, good physical comedy from the vamp's familiar, and just enough emotion to keep me on board. I won't say that Fright Night is going to become one of my go-to flicks, but I can see how others would cherish it. I'm glad it made the list.

#10 House of the Devil

AGAIN: SPOILERS

I gotta say, and I don't think I'm alone on this, this movie didn't really impress me that much. Stylistically it is great, and I love homage to the great horror flicks of the 70s and 80s as much as the next guy. AND I'm a fan of strong, smart female leads... but even with all that, something has to HAPPEN in order for a movie to be interesting. If you're going to pay tribute to genre horror, you kind of need to try and add something to it, not just copy and paste.

It just seems like Ti West, in an early directorial effort, didn't capture the thing that made all of those horror movies that he was paying tribute to work. It was the slow building of suspense. I wasn't really very worried about ol' what's her name in this flick. I'm glad that there was never a moment when I thought that she made a decision that was totally stupid and would eventually lead to her demise, but those decisions are also the plot devices in most horror movies that lead to the good shit. This movie just didn't ever get to that, the good shit. Mostly it was just a bunch of sequences of characters quietly moving from scene to scene and being in the 80s. 'Oh, I'm alone in the house, here's my walkman (again).' 'Better call for pizza, check out this rotary phone.'

Not for nothin', but if you're going to call your movie House of the Devil, I kind of want to see some devil. You know, have him dancing around in the living room or answer the door all pitch fork-y and the whatnot. Instead, we get an old guy, an old woman, and the chunky guy from all these movies as the villains, and they don't even stand a chance against the girl that they lure into the house... of the devil. She basically whips all their asses, no problem.

Oh, I guess there is one part where a weird old lady (?) creature (?) draws a picture of a pentagram on ol' what's her name's belly, thus impregnating her... with the devil. I kind of almost forgot about that part because I was thinking about something scary. Something else, besides this movie.

Oh, and one last thing: this movie cost a million dollars? A million freaking dollars!? Any movie that costs more than sixty thousand better at least deliver a car chase. Or an explosion. Or, I don't know, maybe, the devil?! In this day and age? Really? A Million dollars? That's what you get for shooting on film, bro? Hope you're happy with how 'authentic' your movie looks, because you sacrificed all of your 'doing something awesome' budget on 'making those girl's hair look like hair looked 30 years ago' and getting the rights to that song. You know, that one song, that one that'll make everybody say, "Oh, yeah, that song is from the 80s" when they should be saying, "Holy Lord! Look at that amazing three hundred thousand dollar, fully animated, life size puppet of the devil voiced by Alan Rickman!"

Oh, man... I need to calm down.

#9 The Blair Witch Project

We (the participants of the 60 Days of Horror) have talked about watching this flick every year, but for some reason we never did. I haven't seen this flick in its entirety since I saw it in the theater in 1999. It scared the bujezzus out of me then. Then, after the movie, as a bonus, I got to see a guy throw up from motion sickness caused by the film.

It's the original. The grandaddy of all found footage movies. And it still gets the job done. I'm glad that I decided to watch it tonight, alone in the dark, on the big TV with the sound cranked. The fact that I am sick right now and may also have a fever probably helped me to get into the experience as well.

I think that the effect of the flick is lost a little bit when it's lo-budget scope is shrunk down for the small screen. The thing that made this movie so effective when it came out was that people were so used to seeing the creature. The subtleties of using the audience's imagination against them had all but disappeared from films in the nineties (now such a technique would be totally unthinkable). But this movie used that as a weapon against its audience. We were glued to every movement and every sound, waiting for the damn thing to pay off. And while we were waiting, we imagined what the witch would look like, we put ourselves in the character's places, we built real, palpable anticipation and worry for these b-movie people. I can't imagine what it would be like to watch this bad boy on some tiny screen with crappy sound, because the thing that made it so intense was that you felt like you shouldn't blink. You might have missed something. Your ears had to be alert in order to catch all the bangs and clacks and screams emanating from the woods.

The fact that we NEVER see the villain or find out what happened to our heroes makes it even more frustrating and satisfying at the same time. We get to take the horror home with us, to be discussed and evaluated.

This flick was truly a product of its time. It couldn't be duplicated now because part of its effectiveness was the ad campaign. Many filmgoers went into the thing thinking that it might be real. So effective was the initial ad campaign, with commercials, fake websites and news articles, that we didn't quite know what to believe, except that we were seeing something new and different in the world of horror. This baby took us back to our roots. It helped a generation of desensitized horror fans remember why we enjoyed these movies in the first place.

#8 The House on Haunted Hill

WARNING: SPOILERS BE HERE

I figured that I'd warn about the spoilers, even though this flick is 55 years old. So if any of you younger folks out there are like me and still hadn't watched it even though it is on instant Netflix, just go watch it before you read this blog. This horror classic is totally worth it and it's only 75 minutes long.

This flick is just a good ol' fashioned murder mystery, with a whole bunch of ghostly activity thrown in for good measure. There's a motley crew of folks that go up to a haunted house for a dinner party and the chance to go home with $10,000 if they can stay in the house the whole night. It's funny how each character plays a specific part in the story, with a few of them just there for effect or to throw the viewer off the trail. The drunk and the columnist are basically just there as fluff, especially ol' drunky-Magee, stirring up a whole bunch of trouble about ghosts. I'd like to see a movie about his first night in the house.

This movie gets everything done right. It's quick and fun, it has a bunch of supernatural scares, and then it wraps everything up just fine. Sure the whole murder plot doesn't quite make total sense, but Vincent Price comes out on top with the ol' puppet skeleton gag, so it's fine.