Awwww, that poor pumpkin! Well, hopefully, he’s smiling now!
This animated special originally aired on Halloween night in 1979. I would imagine that the crying pumpkin probably traumatized children across America. Hopefully, all the kids were out trick or treating when this aired. Myself, I remember that when I was a kid, I would help my mom carve a pumpkin every year. And then I would get so depressed when we later had to throw it out. Seriously, I would get really attached to those jack o’lanterns.
Anyway, this cartoon is before my time but I have a feeling that, if I had been around to watch it, I would have been depressed for a whole year afterwards.
Trick or Treaters in the post-apocalypse or is it just San Francisco?
Four kids in traditional costumes go out for candy and find a survivalist house with loads of guns, but hey candy is on the line! The home is occupied buy a very tired husband and wife. The wife is getting sick, but it appears that the kids might be in the house!!!
The wife disappears and the husband is confronted by one of the kids in a ghost costume. These aren’t ordinary trick or treaters and those costumes aren’t store bought!!!! It’s kind of cool figuring out what’s going on in the end. It’s a very fun short!
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 lets the visuals do the talking!
This October, we’re using 4 Shots From 4 Films to look at some of the best years that horror has to offer!
4 Shots from 4 2016 Horror Films
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016, dir by Andre Ovredal)
The Belko Experiment (2016, dir by Greg McLean)
The Neon Demon (2016, dir by Nicolas Winding Refn)
Happy Horrorthon! I found a great and FREE place for horror short films! Alter on Youtube!!!!
I’ll admit the social message was a bit obvious, BUT it is WAAAAAAY better than Two Sentence Horror. Also, the stories try to hide the social message with some well-done horror. Lastly, if you don’t like it, you’ve only lost 8 minutes of your life- 20 minutes MAX!!!
The Plague takes place in Spain. A woman is living alone in her father’s home. He has Alzheimer’s disease and the elderly father has returned to his home. His daughter finds him in the shower and she is immediately she fed up. She wants him back at the nursing home and tells him so. All during the short, he has arms reaching out to her for affection, but his daughter spurns him repeatedly.
In a brilliant allegory, gun thugs appear and try to kill her father who has super-strength, but not enough against 5 armed men who shoot him, put him in a steel box, and store him in an abandoned area to rot in a living death. The father was never depicted as a zombie only that when he died he was not ready to go and only wanted to be with his daughter. The steel box represented the nursing home where so many of us put our parents. Saying the father was dead but wasn’t ready to go, symbolized how she was treating her father- he was already dead to her, but he still loved his her.
I won’t put my personal opinion on nursing homes here, BUT I will say Guillermo Carbnonell is welcome to break bread with me anytime.
Happy Horrorthon! This short from Dean Loxton is a thriller throwback. Abdul (Akin Gazi) is in a relationship with an unstable SJW (Madeleine Sims-Fewer). It clocks in at about 8 minutes, but it throws you right into the suspense. Abdul is looking at body of woman and he gets a call- “Did you do it?”
The story is told in a flashback where we learn about his SJW girlfriend and the frustration Abdul with life and being in love with someone unstable. As someone who nearly married an unstable person, I could relate to Abdul. He was on edge because he never knew what was coming next with his girlfriend. This edge keeps you guessing until the end.
Dean Loxton sets the mood for a great thriller and you can watch it in just 7 minutes and change!!! I highly recommend this film. It really keeps you on edge and keeps you guessing.
My reading selection of books released this past Wednesday offers no real thematic connection to stitch together — no preponderance of first issues, no mix of firsts and lasts, nothing like that — so we’re just gonna get totally random with this week’s “capsule review” selections, and the verdicts for each are, likewise, all over the map —
Forcing a “milestone” label onto a book that’s been around for, like, less than two years seems a bit of a reach, but Marvel is no doubt eager to capitalize on the runaway critical and commercial success of The Immortal Hulk, and so #25 has indeed been marketed as some sort of “landmark” issue, and saddled with the extra pages and $5.99 price tag that comes part and parcel with such a purported “occasion.” Fortunately, cash-grabs don’t come much better than this stand-alone “cosmic” story that bears distinct echoes to Alan…
I’ve been meaning to get some more Manga into the mix on this site, and fortunately for me (and, by extension, you) Black Hook Press is more than happy to accommodate by means of their very solid critical outreach efforts — to say nothing of the consistently-noteworthy physical packages they put together for their expertly-curated releases.
Take, for instance, their latest — a long-overdue (for Western audiences, at any rate) collection of the early-to-mid 1970s autobio strips by pioneering master of the form Shinichi Abe entitled That Miyoko Asagaya Feeling, edited and assembled by Mitsuhiro Asakawa (who also provides a superb biographical essay) and translated by all-around Manga renaissance man Ryan Holmberg, whose association with any project marks it as being worth a purchase. The material presented herein has largely flown beneath the North American radar, but as far as making up for lost time goes, something tells me…
Annie Koyama’s “farewell tour” wouldn’t be complete without one more release from Michael DeForge before Koyama press closes up shop, and while his latest, Stunt, may not qualify as a “book” so much as a stretched-out (in terms of its page count and physical dimensions) Chick tract, it’s certainly as thematically and conceptually dense as any of this one-time-ingenue cartoonist’s previous works, and further reinforces the almost giddily-obsessive nature of the psychosexual and physical terrors that are congealing and coagulating into something very much like a core “portfolio” of concerns at the heart of his overall artistic project.
Roll call : duality, the amorphous nature of identity, bondage and submission (both mental and physical), Cronenbergian body horror, fame and celebrity, overwhelming sexual need, personal apocalypse, and fluidity as the only constant.
Among other things, of course, but those are the big ones.
Over the course of the past few years, I’ve been of a mind that Simon Hanselmann should dump Megg, Mogg, Owl, and the rest of the gang and do something different. Move forward. Push himself to expand his horizons by letting go of the familiar.
On a purely technical level, he’s definitely been honing his craft — his cartooning has become more precise and refined, while his painting has graduated from the “impressive” to the “magnificently rich and detailed” — but in a larger sense, I felt that he’d been every bit as stuck as his ensemble cast, all this aesthetically-proficient work wasted on dead-end narratives about characters who, by design, were never going to amount to shit. Sure, Megahex was masochistic fun, but Megg And Mogg In Amsterdam was largely more of the same, only in Amsterdam, while One More Year was, well, one more year. I get that…
Halloween is approaching! We should not forget to discuss the fear of failure, which this episode did not have a problem doing. Wow, I’ve reviewed some hot garbage, but this was the mathematical derivative of garbage because it was the rate of change from boring to embarrassing. The only bright spot was veteran Bruce Davison’s performance that was wasted on such hackneyed craptastic material. Sad.
The first story was about a Monkey’s Paw. Yep, Nicotero decided to do a monkey’s paw story….on purpose. It follows the typical trope: Get a Paw, make three wishes, and they all suck somehow, but this time with mediocre zombie makeup. Honestly, it looked like Party City was missing some 2 dollar makeup. We should all feel sad for the time that I shall never get back.
The second story was auditioning for the Walking Dead radio show because half of the rushed hot mess was exposition. A mayor and cronies go bad during a zombie apocalypse and town executes them. This story also had some second tier Walking Dead zombies and David Arquette who basically did agonized facial expressions whenever he was on camera. I used to really like David’s acting, but now he just looks like he’s tired and needs to angry poo real real bad. Maybe, David decided to get some gas station sushi, wash it down with past questionable milk, and go to set? That’s what his acting told me.
This show has potential for actual greatness, but man, if Nicotero doesn’t do some quality control, it’ll just be another schlocky horror series like Two Sentence Horror.
Through the Shattered Lens 