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October 30, 2006

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fatty Jubbo

my theatre showed Let's Scare Jessica To Death a couple weeks ago (35mm print!)...I only got to catch a few minutes of it but it definitely had that severe creepiness to it that only something like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre achieves. It also has a great moog-heavy score!

bunbun

I too go into a horror frenzy leading up to Halloween with a taste for older stuff.
Though I can't recommend it as particularly great or even remotely scary, I was highly amused by "Burnt Offerings" from 1976 starring Karen Black, Oliver Reed, and Bette Davis concerning a hapless family who agree to take care of a crumbling mansion with over the summer in which there may or may not be a reclusive old woman in the attic.
Terror ensues.
Not really terror, but lots of stiff, awkward dialogue, over the top performances, and tons of Karen Black.
Also, I have to recommend the ludicrous "Day of the Dead" simply because it was filmed in my hometown and I fondly remember Fort Myers, FL being overrun with zombies of every stripe. Plenty of gore, too.

James

As far as recent film goes, I loved The Descent, though it isn't wholly original (the director definitely studied his John Carpenter films). I was genuinely scared, and the audience I saw it with jumped and shrieked at all the right moments (especially the first clear shot of one of the cave creatures, cleverly placed in the background of one shot where you're not expecting to see it, rather than the foreground).

Mark Allen

Well I agree wholeheartedly with your acclaim of "Let's Scare Jessica To Death." I've always found this film to be an under-the-radar masterwork of serious 70's horror film creepiness (with an underrated soundtrack!) My first exposure was as a rerun on afternoon TV as a small child. It creeped me the fuck out then and it creeps me the fuck out now. I've said so much about "L.S.J.T.D." that I think I'll just shut up and agree with you. And "Cemetery Man?" For some reason since Rupert Everett is in this film (whom I like) it's always had a comical edge to me. Any film with flying, biting heads is OK in my book though. Related but several decades earlier, have you seen the 1957 film "I Bury the Living"?
http://monsterhunter.coldfusionvideo.com/IBuryTheLiving.html

Never seen "Don't Deliver Us From Evil" but have reserved it on Netflix already. The only film that I can think of that maybe captures the *really* nightmarish creepy factor, besides a few already mentioned, is Lucio Fulci's 1980 film "City of the Living Dead"
http://www.dvdmaniacs.net/Reviews/A-D/city_of_the_living_dead.html

Oh, that and Sharon Stone in "Scissors." Truly terrifying.

craig

'last house on the left' is a good one to drop at a party where you want to COMPLETELY kill the vibe. not halloween-y horror - serious sicko horror. a friend once called it a 'snuff film without a sense of humor.'

Account Deleted

Man, if you like Don't Deliver Us From Evil you will love School of the Holy Beast, which just came out on DVD last year. This is a Japanese nasty nun murder thriller with a Satanic bent. But best of all, this is a film that deee-livers in every way! Here's a blurb about it that I wrote for a film screening I did back in Boston:

Dario Argento meets the Marquis de Sade in this artfully filmed '70s sexploitation gem. Nubile beauty Maya (Yumi Takigawa) leaves her swinging modern life behind, taking vows as a sister at the Sacred Heart Convent in hopes of learning the secrets surrounding her mother's death. And as soon as the convent's doors close, she finds herself immersed in a world of unholy sin: blasphemous rites, sadistic torture practices, burning sapphic desires, and a lecherous, god-hating archbishop who's at the very center of this debauchery -- and the mysteries of Maya's past. Bad habits indeed.

jeffersonic

Every so often I like to see a film that just totally fucks you up around Halloween. Check out "The Reflecting
Skin" if you're in the mood to be tense, sick, astonished and totally riveted to the screen. Another relatively
sick yet entertaining flick would be "Freeway" starring Reese Witherspoon. It's a nasty retelling of er, um..
"Ladle Rat Rotten Hut". For more light hearted brain scrambling there's "The Forbidden Zone" (with a soundtrack by Danny Elfman (possibly his first?) and Oingo Boingo).

tobydammit

Too little too late? Oh well, this website has a bunch of suggestions for future Halloween viewing marathons:

http://www.hotaslove.com

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