Hello there! Welcome to a special Halloween edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Film trailers! The trailer kitties went out this morning (despite the fact that it’s been raining nonstop down here since yesterday) and they came back with these 6 horrific trailers for Halloween!
Let’s see what they’ve brought us!
(By the way, some of these trailers may be NSFW and some may contain excessive gore or even nudity so use your best judgment when it comes to watching. The TSL accepts no responsibility for the occasionally over-the-top choices of the trailer kitties.)
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.
4 Shots From 4 Films
Requiem For A Vampire (1971, directed by Jean Rollin)
The Living Dead Girl (1982, directed by Jean Rollin)
Two Orphan Vampires (1997, directed by Jean Rollin)
The Fiancee of Dracula (2002, directed by Jean Rollin)
Another rarity from the dark vault of live TV horror! This time it’s Boris Karloff starring in a spooky tale called “A Night at an Inn”! Brought to you by Auto-Lite spark plugs (“From bumper to headlight, you’re always right with Auto-Lite”), here’s King Karloff in a 1949 thriller from SUSPENSE:
Happy October! It’s been a great horror month here at the Shattered Lens! Not only have we shared a record number of reviews but we’ve also received a record number of site views! Thank you everyone for reading and commenting and, to our new readers, we hope you’ll stick around even after Halloween!
Now, here at the Shattered Lens we have a tradition. Every Halloween, we share one of the greatest and most iconic horror movies ever made. That film, of course, is George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead! Enjoy and have a great Halloween!
Tonight’s episode of The Twilight Zone is another one of those existential stories of dread that I love so much. An army officer wakes up to find himself trapped in a cylindrical room. He has no idea how he got in there. He can’t even remember his name. All he knows is that 1) there doesn’t appear to any way out and 2) he’s trapped with four others; a hobo, a clown, a bagpiper, and a ballet dancer.
The officer wants to escape but, as his fellow prisoners explain to him, existence is pain.
This episode originally aired on December 22nd, 1961.
Whenever I watch 2012’s Smiley (and, since this is one of those films that always seems to be playing whenever I have insomnia, I actually have seen Smiley more times than I should probably admit), I always find myself hoping that it will actually be a better film than I remember it being.
Some of that, I have to admit, is because I once dated a frat boy whose nickname was Smiley. His high school football coach gave him that name because he was always smiling! (Yes, I once dated a football player who smiled a lot and didn’t really care much about literature, art, movies, history, or anything else that I was actually interested in. Don’t ask me to explain how these things happen.) His pickup truck even had a personalized licence plate that read, “SMILY.” That’s right — he wasn’t really sure how to spell Smiley. Whenever I see the title Smiley listed in the guide, I think of him and I have to kind of laugh.
Beyond that, Smiley was an independent, low-budget film and I have to admit that my natural inclination is always to support independent filmmakers. If Smiley was a huge studio production, I’d have absolutely no qualms about ripping it apart. But when I see an indie horror film like Smiley, there’s a part of me that almost feels that I have to be supportive. But the things is, it’s one thing to be supportive and it’s another thing to be delusional. I may want Smiley to be a good horror film but it’s not and I’m really not doing anyone any good if I pretend otherwise.
Finally, I always want Smiley to be better than it actually is because the film features one of the creepiest killers that I’ve ever seen. Even if the character is cheapened by a rather stupid twist, Smiley is scary looking. Smiley is presented as being the spirit of a man who, after stitching his own eyes closed, carved a permanent smile on his face. As a force of evil, Smiley is genuinely frightening and it’s unfortunate that the rest of the film doesn’t live up to the character’s potential.
As for the rest of the film … well, it’s pretty much your typical slasher. All of the characters are loathsome, the murders are neither suspenseful nor gory enough to really be memorable, and this is one of those films that relies far too much on scenes of people running into someone, screaming in terror, and then discovering that it was just one of their friends. It is true that there is a twist towards the end of the film that’s designed to make you question everything that you’ve just see but since the twist doesn’t make much sense and comes out of nowhere, it’s hard to get excited about it. The best thing the film had going for it was the character of Smiley and the twist pretty much ruins that.
(The film’s other big twist is that the cast is full of YouTube personalities, which makes Smiley the spiritual descendant of The Scorned, a similarly bad slasher film that was full of reality TV stars.)
By the way, the idea behind Smiley is that you can go on Chatroulette and, if you type “I did it for the lulz” three times, Smiley will appear and kill whoever your chatting with. Just for the record, I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work.*
——
* Well, to be honest, I got a friend of mine to try it and it didn’t work. I’ve got better things to do then watch some guy jerking off on Chatroulette.
DRACULA is the film that ushered in The Golden Age of Horror. Sure, there were silent films with elements of the macabre, especially those starring Lon Chaney Sr, and the German expressionist films of Ufa Studios. But this tale of a bloodthirsty vampire on the loose in London struck a collective nerve among filmgoers for two reasons. First was it talked…sound films were barely out of their diapers, and the chilling voice of star Bela Lugosi mesmerized the masses. Second, the country was in the midst of The Great Depression, and audiences were hungry for escapist fare to take their minds off their troubles. DRACULA took them to another world, a world populated by undead creatures of the night, fiends who were ultimately stopped by the forces of good.
No need to rehash the plot of DRACULA…if you don’t know the story by now, you’re reading the wrong blog! Instead, I’ll take a…
Would you believe that there’s a film that not only brilliantly satirizes and pays homage to the old slasher films of 80s but which also possesses the type of emotional depth that can bring very real tears to your eyes as you watch?
Well, there is and the name of that film is The Final Girls.
In the 1980s, a struggling actress named Amanda Cartwright (played by the always-wonderful Malin Akerman) found a certain amount of cult fame by appearing as a doomed camp counselor named Nancy in the slasher film, Camp Bloodbath. However, as often happens, playing an iconic role in a horror film has turned out to be as much of a curse as a blessing. As The Final Girls opens, Amanda has just finished yet another audition. As she drives home, she tells her teenage daughter, Max (Taissa Farmiga) that she will never escape being typecast as Nancy. Suddenly. they are blindsided by another car. Max is the only survivor.
Three years later, Max reluctantly agrees to attend a showing of Camp Bloodbath and Camp Bloodbath II: Cruel Summer. It’s not something that she wants to do but she’s talked into it by Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), the geeky stepbrother of her best friend Gertie (Alia Shawkat). Also attending the showing is Chris (Alexander Ludwig), who Max has a crush on, and Chris’s ex-girlfriend and self-described “mean girl,” Vicki (Nina Dobrev).
Some of the best scenes in The Final Girls occur while Max watches Camp Bloodbath. Not only is Camp Bloodbath a perfectly pitched homage/satire of old school slasher films (like Friday the 13th, to cite an obvious example) but Farmiga perfectly plays Max’s reaction to seeing her mother on screen. Max watches Camp Bloodbath with a heartfelt mix of sadness, pride, and eventual horror. (One of the film’s best moments is the way that Max slowly sinks down in her chair while watching her mother make out with another actor on the big screen. It’s a very human moment, one that is both poignant and funny at the same time.)
However, during the showing, a fire breaks out. In their efforts to escape the theater, Max and her friends find themselves literally sucked into the movie. That’s right — they are now inside the world of Camp Bloodbath. And though they can interact with the film’s characters (and, for that matter, with the film’s killer, Billy), they find it’s much more difficult to keep those characters from playing out their pre-ordained roles. Even after explaining to the camp counselors that doing anything the least bit sexual will cause Billy to come out of the woods and kill everyone, the counselors still find themselves incapable of changing their stereotypical slasher film behavior. It’s not really their fault, of course. As Duncan mentions, they’re just “badly written.”
While the rest of her friends simply want to survive the movie and somehow get back home, Max wants to spend time with her mom. (Except, of course, Nancy isn’t really her mom. Instead, Nancy is a character that her mom played in a movie that made before Max was even born.) And you know what? The scenes between Taissa Farmiga and Malin Akerman brought very real tears to my eyes. The scenes between Max and Nancy (and Max and Amanda) are so heartfelt and so full of sincere emotion that they elevate the entire film.
Without the relationship between Max and Amanda, The Final Girls would be a very clever homage to the old slasher movies. But what that relationship, The Final Girls becomes one of the best films of the year.
On November 3rd, The Final Girls will be released on DVD and Blu-ray. Be sure to keep an eye out for it.
Through the Shattered Lens 