Choosing A Halloween Movie Marathon

As a dedicated Horror fan; every October I try to get some friends over to my place to check out some Halloween-themed movies.

Rather than watching a series, or specific production company of movies, I've opted to try for something a little different.

I'm going to try and catch up on some classic horror titles I've never got around to see before.

First up (and as a guy who spent a year reading/watching/playing all sorts of zombie-themed stuff this is a little embarrassing), I'll be screening George A. Romero's 1985 film, Day of the Dead, the third of his original Dead Trilogy (after 19689's Night of the Living Dead and 1978's Dawn of the Dead) which honestly I've just never had the opportunity to check out before.

Honestly, as a zombie fan I really don't have an excuse for not seeing the film before, it just never came up as an option for me, and when I watched my largest amount of horror films (Junior High and High School), I was more focused on Slasher and Ghost movies.

I'm still working on deciding which other classics of Horror I should finally get around to seeing, but I think this may be a pretty fun way to spend my Friday's this October.

Bookmonkey Saw: Day 2

Okay, so today let’s look at the first film of the series, Saw (2004).  Created by Australian filmmakers James Wan and Leigh Whannel, the story is actually quite simple.  Two men wake up in an abandoned bathroom, chained by their ankles to pipes on either end of the room.  In the centre of the room is the body of a man who appears to have shot himself in the head.  In its hands are a tape records and a gun.  The two men manage to acquire the tape player and finding cassettes in their pockets which say “Play Me” (Obvious shades of Alice in Wonderland here), are informed that they have approximately 8 hours in which to escape, which will only occur for the one left alive at the end.

There is also a sub-plot focusing on two police officers who are hunting down a serial killer called “The Jigsaw Killer” who places his victims in horrible hurt-yourself-and-escape-or-do-nothing-and-die traps (such as they one our two leads are in).

As with many horror/thriller films, there will be plot-twists and discoveries, but I’m attempting to write without spoilers so I’ll go light on those.

In terms of the Horror genre in 2003/2004 when the film was released at the Sundance Film Festival and later released throughout North America , here is what was going on.

2003 Was filled with a lot of sequels and remakes, Dawn of the Dead (Remake), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Remake), and Freddy vs. Jason (considered parts 8 and 11 of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13^th franchises respectively), as well as Van Helsing an homage to the classic Universal Monster movies of the 1930s.  Keep in mind that the Horror genre is one made of sequels and remakes; usually the producers and directors are working on their first or second film and horror films have always packed kids into theatres.

Saw worked in a very different way than the other options horror fans had at the time.  To begin, the killer is off screen for almost the entire film, second there is no female lead (one of the two men in the bathroom has a wife, but she is on screen for less than 10% of the film, mostly in flashbacks), and finally, although the story clearly owes concepts to both Mad Max (1979) and Se7en (1995 – which also focuses on cops trying to find an incredibly clever killer) Saw wasn’t an obvious remake or sequel.

Watching it myself I have to admit that the first film is kind of clever.  The on-screen violence is fairly minimal (you don’t see any severed body parts for example), and the story seemed innovative and quite smart for an incredibly low-budget film.  In the end, the movie did so well at the box-office a sequel was ordered with a release date set for the Friday before Halloween in 2005.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

A Quick note: I’ll be writing these reviews in the order I originally saw the remakes.

My love affair with zombie movies goes back to the nightmares I got from watching Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Released in December of 1983, I would have first seen this video on the Canadian music video show, Video Hits at about the age of seven. The story within a story concept for the video got me pretty deeply invested with our main character (who is never named), so when suddenly Michael turns into a zombie and dances/attacks her it freaked me out.

The original Night of the Living Dead probably came into my young life around the age of ten or eleven (the end of Elementary School came at about the same time as our first VCR, so suddenly I had access to local video stores and therefore scary films). Night of the Living Dead blew me away the first time I saw it – playing with all the rules I thought horror films had to follow and leading to a young interest in monster films and stories overall.

I would have seen Dawn of the Dead in Junior High school (probably grade seven), and the idea of escaping from zombies by hiding in a mall seemed incredibly smart to me, even though it doesn’t work out that well for most of the people in the film.

Fast forward to 2004, I’m 28 years old, a parent of two and suddenly I am faced with a strange question… Should I bother going to see a remake of a film I saw almost half my lifetime ago? I mean, what possible differences could there be? In the end I saw it as a matinee on a Saturday or Sunday, due to either a lack of options or an interest in seeing how the source material would be adapted.

The biggest difference in this reimagining of the classic, the zombies no longer walk, they run.

At the time, this seemed like such a strange thing for them to do, as I was always most scared of the slow-moving, but ultimately unstoppable zombies from my childhood films. The movie looks pretty slick, has a great cast (stand outs for me include Sarah Polley (of Splice), Mekhi Phifer (of er and Torchwood: Miracle Day), and Ty Burrell (of Modern Family) and the effects (both special and dramatic) are pretty darn effective. Although running zombies are not really my thing, they are pretty freaky antagonists in this film.

Does the movie actually do better than the original? No, the original set the standard for zombie siege films and was making social commentary as well. As far as a first film to be looking at for this month however? It’s a pretty decent horror film with lots of thrills and chills.