It’s October!  Here’s four films that you can watch this weekend to help you get in the Halloween mood!

For last night’s #FridayNightFlix, we watched Roger Moore’s first outing as James Bond, Live and Let Die (1973).  Now, I know that a lot of people are going to read that and think to themselves, “Live and Let Die isn’t a horror movie!”  While it’s true that Live and Let Die is primarily a spy movie, it does borrow quite a bit from the horror genre.  I mean, this is a film that opens with a man being killed in voodoo ceremony!  Baron Samedi (played by Geoffrey Holder), the man who cannot die, is one of Bond’s best villains and also one of the few that apparently does manage to avoid dying.  If Hammer or Amicus had produced the Bond films, they would probably look a lot like Live and Let Die.  So, if you’re looking for a horror-adjacent film to help get you in the Halloween mood, Live and Let Die is a great choice.  It’s the closest thing we have to a true James Bond grindhouse film.  The boat chase is a classic, though how much of a classic depends on you feel about having a redneck Louisiana sheriff dropped right in the middle of a Bond film.  The film is currently on Prime, along with all the other Bond films.

Two weeks ago, for #MondayActionMovie, we watched Graduation Day (1981).  Featuring a great soundtrack, several over the top kills, a hammy Christopher George, a young Vanna White, and an epic 12-minute performance of the song Gangster Rock by Felony, Graduation Day is one of the best of the early slashers.  Like a lot of those pre-Nightmare On Elm Street slasher films, it owes a huge debt to the giallo genre.  The killer even wears black gloves!  Can you figure out who the murderer is?  And will you ever get the film’s insanely catchy theme song, The Winner, out of your head?  Everybody wants to be the winner….  Graduation Day is streaming on Prime.

The Dead Pit (1989) is a personal favorite of mine.  A woman end up in a mental hospital and spends the majority of the movie running around in her underwear while trying to get people to understand that the dead are coming back to life.  I’ve had that dream more times than I care to count.  This is an enjoyably over-the-top B-movie.  Director Brett Leonard captures some truly creepy images and lead actress Cheryl Lawson gives a good and sympathetic performance as the amnesiac who keeps seeing terrible things.  With all of the elevated horror nonsense that’s going on right now, it’s nice to see a film from an age when the horror films were made by people who didn’t feel the need to apologize for the genre.  The Dead Pit is streaming on Tubi.

Finally, with In The Mouth of Madness (1995), John Carpenter proved himself to be one of the few directors capable of actually capturing the bleak atmosphere of H.P. Lovecraft’s best stories.  The much-missed Sam Neill gives one of his best performances as a reporter who discovers a horrifying truth.  The film’s final scene is brilliant.

Happy October!