This October, I’m going to be doing something a little bit different with my contribution to 4 Shots From 4 Films. I’m going to be taking a little chronological tour of the history of horror cinema, moving from decade to decade.
Today, we start with the 1890s and the birth of horror cinema.
4 Shots From 4 Films
The Execution of Mary Stuart (1895, dir by Alfred Clark)
The House of the Devil (1896, dir by Georges Méliès)
The Haunted Castle (1897, dir by George Albert Smith)
Hi there and welcome to October! This is our favorite time of the year here at the Shattered Lens because October is horror month. For the past three years, we have celebrated every October by reviewing and showing some of our favorite horror movies, shows, books, and music. That’s a tradition that I’m looking forward to helping to continue this year.
Let’s start things off by watching the 1953 sci-fi “classic,” Robot Monster!
Yes, Robot Monster is the movie where a gorilla wearing a diving helmet terrorizes that last surviving humans on Earth. It also features some oddly placed dinosaur stock footage. But, that being said … Robot Monster is a lot of fun. There are few movies that have truly earned the “so bad that it’s good” label and Robot Monster is one of them.
Add to that, watching Robot Monster in October is kinda of a tradition in these parts!
Welcome to The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!!! It’s October- Horror Month!!! I will be reviewing many great and terrible films for your reading pleasure. My advice to you Gentle Readers: decorate your house, turn the lights down low, read my posts, like them, retweet them, tell your friends and family about them BECAUSE if you don’t demons will get you! Here we go!!!
I am watching a man have extreme explosive diarrhea and cough up furballs, when I think, some poor asshole paid to see this.
Escape From Tomorrow is a quasi horror film about a man on vacation with his family to Disneyworld and things go absurdly weird and boring. It’s black and white, which gives it a good eerie feel. It is, in fact, filmed entirely at Disney World and Disney Land. My expectations were raised- too bad for me.
The dad is fired in the first scene over the phone right before he takes his family to tour Disney World. Upon entering the monorail to the park, the dad ogles and passively stalks two girls. One of the ladies he ogles is Annet Mahendru – “Nina” – from The Americans and the other is a REALLY young lady. He ogles them both on the monorail, in line, and pretty much all over the park. His stalking is the only part of the movie that is moderately creepy and scary. At so many points in the show I thought, Dude, your children are right there! Gross!
They arrive at the most wonderful place on Earth to find people coughing. The dad goes on rides and hallucinates. You expect it to get scary and it fizzles out like a damp sparkler. Eventually the mom and dad go to different parts of the park and the Dad is left to stalk the two girls again, but he gets distracted and blacks out and wakes having sex with a woman who looks a lot like a sexy version of the wicked witch in Snow White – It’s weird. The story gets rapidly off the rails and you have to grab at plot points like wet tissue paper. There’s a “Cat Flu, a ridiculous scene inside of Epcot, and redneck in scooter; it’s truly nonsensical and dull. SNORE.
This is why the film fails to do anything but disappoint: he had done it- Randy Moore got into Disney and did pure guerilla filmmaking. However, he forgot to have one thing: a story. OOPS!!! Maybe he left the story at Universal Studios?! I hear the shark can really startle you on the tram! From written accounts, Moore was so worried that he would be sued, he edited the film in South Korea. What a waste of cash! Disney realized quickly what I did- the film sucks and isn’t worth the paper to file suit in Court.
There was ONE and ONLY one part of the film that was compelling. The dad had a drinking problem. He does drink …. A LOT, but the movie strays from that interesting plot point to go off on some boring surreal tangent. If the movie got away from the surreal bullshit and focused on the dad ruining his family and himself at Disney because of alcoholism, it would have been the most moving story about drinking since Leaving Las Vegas. Moore, however, squandered that great opportunity and will either learn from this mistake or go into Real Estate.
He did manage to film in Disney without anyone giving a shit, which is novel and a bit impressive. Also, I have to be stingy with my “As” and “Fs”. Therefore, I give
I don’t know much about The Autopsy of Jane Doe but there are a few people, with whom I casually interact on twitter, who saw this film at TIFF two weeks ago and they swear it’s the scariest thing that they’ve ever seen.
Take that for what you will. I’ve lost track of how many horror films have been described as being “the scariest thing that has ever been seen.” Go read a few of Stephen King’s reviews and you’ll notice that he apparently thinks everything that has ever been written and/or filmed is “the scariest thing that he’s ever seen.”
Beware of hyperbole, I’m saying!
That said, here’s the trailer and it looks like the movie might be pretty scary…
…though times may look bleak, there’s only 38 days left to Halloween and that means that it’s almost time for our annual horror month here at the Shattered Lens!
Remember that old game where you would go up to a stranger’s house, ring the doorbell, and then run off? It’s one of those simple games that really shouldn’t be that much fun and yet, strangely, it is. The thrill of the game really doesn’t come from the fact that you’re making someone open the front door for no good reason. Instead, the thrill comes from seeing if you can run away before that door opens.
You Can’t Escape, the latest short film from Rubbish Rebel Media, opens with a child (Rayce Zatye) walking through an apparently suburban neighborhood and doing just that. He runs up to houses, he rings the doorbell, and then he runs off. As he does this, we can’t help but notice that the neighborhood appears to be deserted. Where are all the other people? Does anyone ever actually answer their door? From the way that the film is directed, we get the feeling that someone may be watching the child but who?
And when the child returns to his own house … well, I won’t spoil the film. Let’s just say that it concludes with a surreal bang.
You Can’t Escape lasts just a little over 2 minutes and the end leaves us with just as many questions as answers. That’s okay, though. The key to horror is the fact that not all questions have easy answers. Director Renner Zatye emphasizes atmosphere and, despite the film’s short length, he captures several uneasy images. The scenes of Racye Zatye walking through that deserted neighborhood are undeniably creepy. A scene where the child walks by several trees especially made me nervous. This is one of those films that asks you to consider what could be hiding behind those trees and whether or not you’re ever as safe as you think.
You Can’t Escape should be getting a release in a few months so be sure to keep an eye out for it!
A man (Rudd) after suffering a horrible loss decides to reach out and, not in his best interest, become a caregiver. Trevor (Roberts), a bitter kid without a Dad decides to take him on. How does this end up? Well, on a road trip across the country with the kid he is there to care-give for, fountains of youth are found….In a deep dark pit between them….
Review:
I needed a good cry movie tonight, and The Fundamentals of Caring did that for me! Actually, Selena Gomez kinda took the movie in a way I wasn’t expecting.Got to give her a lot of props for what she did in it. Was it a great movie? By no means…Does it fill a deep pit in your soul when you need a movie to cry too?…Yes, it absolutely does!
The Fundamentals of Caring is on Netflix now… and if you want to see a trailer you can…..
WAIT…WAIT…WAIT…. I said there was three things in my preface!!
3: fuck you…No, Fuck you…NO…FUCK you!…Now Stand up and take your piss! Stand up and take a PISS!
Have you ever woken up one morning with a song stuck in your head, just bouncing around, like you can never get it out?
Yeah?….Well, this is not the song you want to wake up to tomorrow!
In Tara Price’s new short film Earworm, that is what it is all about. What can you take? The relentless, unending things on (in) your mind can take everything out of you.
Preview:
For a short film (Thomas) gives everything, literally, everything. And Tara knows how to write, direct and tell the story she wants!
After watching the trailer, I went to bed with my earholes tightly closed!
If you would like to see a trailer for Earworm movie you can here!
Now, I may be alone in this (or, at least, it sometimes feels as if I am) but I absolutely love The Ring. I wasn’t necessarily a big fan of the sequel but the first Ring remains one of my favorite horror films. In fact, I may have to revisit it in October for TSL’s annual horror month!
Well, after 11 years, The Ring is finally about to get another sequel! In Rings, it turns out that the killer video has gone viral, which, now that I think about it, was also a skit on Robot Chicken. Sadly, Naomi Watts will not be returning for Rings. In fact, the entire cast pretty much screams VOD.
But no matter! I will still see Rings the day that it opens. (That would be October 28th, just in time for Halloween.)
Remember, back in 2014, when I reviewed a horror film called A House Is Not A Home? Well, if you don’t, I’ll remind you what I thought about the film in a second. But first, I wanted to let you know that A House Is Not A Home not only has a brand new and super intense poster (seen above) but it also has a release date!
Following a limited theatrical run, MVD Entertainment Group will be releasing A House Is Not A Home on DVD and digital platforms on September 27th! Directed by Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray and starring Bill Cobbs, Richard Grieco, Eddie Steeples, Aurora Perrineau, Diahnna Nicole Baxter, Gerald Webb, and Melvin Gregg, A House Is Not A Home premiered at the Burbank International Film Festival, where it picked up the award for Best Horror Feature!
You can order a copy of A House Is Not A Home from amazon or at the MVD Shop.
You can check out my review by clicking here. If you don’t have time to check out my review, I’ll give you the short version: A House Is Not A Home is an atmospheric, well-acted, and entertaining horror film. It’s an effectively creepy film and features a genuinely interesting exorcism scene. As I said at the end of my review, the film’s dream-like and horrific atmosphere compares to the best of Lucio Fulci.
Finally, to quote directly from my review:
“A House Is Not A Home is one of the few non-comedic films that I’ve seen recently that featured an almost entirely African-American cast. That’s really saying something when you consider that I literally watch hundreds of films a year. At a time when mainstream filmmaking (and the horror genre in particular) still seems to be struggling to break free from racial stereotyping, A House Is Not A Home is definitely a step in the right direction.”
I wrote that two years ago. I’m glad to see that now everyone else will have a chance to discover A House Is Not A Home for themselves!
Through the Shattered Lens 