“All Hallow’s Eve” is the fiftieth movie involving Halloween in the last five years named “All Hallow’s Eve” but this time it’s more of a low budget Disney-lite family film. Its Harry Potter meets “Halloweentown” in one of the more painfully derivative and hokey attempts to build a franchise around a teen witch in a long time. It’s not to say “All Hallow’s Eve” is terrible, but it’s a movie that has way too many ideas and not enough of a budget or script to help realize them. So characters spend a lot of time sitting around and explaining things, rather than allowing us to bask in the awe of magic and fantasy. In “All Hallow’s Eve,” Lexi Giovagnoli plays Eve Hallow. No seriously.
Author Archives: Felix Vasquez
King Kong (1976)
I’m not against contemporizing “King Kong,” but director John Guillermin shows us how to take a very simple concept like “King Kong” and completely botch it from minute one. It’s not like “King Kong” has a complex story. It’s a fairly exciting adventure about a giant monster, the woman he loves, and New York being torn to shreds by this out of place animal. Apart from being utterly abysmal, “King Kong” is also way too long, with a premise retrofitted for the seventies that stretches the limits of suspension of disbelief. For a movie about a giant ape climbing the Twin Towers, it’s sad that the whole plot to get King Kong in to New York is the most far fetched element I had difficulty buying in to.
Stay Alive (2006)
This dry as a bone “horror” entry is part “Dream Warriors”, part “The Ring”, with neither of the characters is developed beyond your basic concepts upon which they’re established. And there are also your usual under-developed back stories that Bell limps along with for no reason. Here’s the hero who has a fear of fire. Why? Well—who cares? Look! A ghost! How can we root for characters whom are basic morons? Perhaps it’s Bell’s allusion that gamers in general, are morons. Not that hard to believe, when you think about it. The characters that are supposed to die die.
Demons 2 (Dèmoni 2) (1986)
Playing October 29th in a double screening with “Demons,” at the Anthology Film Archives, NYC [Tel: (212) 505-5181]. “Demons 2” star Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni is set to appear and present both films. Check theater times and ticket prices here.
Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento bring us quite an interesting universe where all elements of their narrative and concept tend to transcend reality and common sense and the realities kind of intercept one another. In either case, “Demons 2” much like the original, is a film where you basically buckle up and take the ride without picking apart too much of the ideas. When dissected nothing makes much sense, but it’s at least a fun tour through some genuinely fun shocks and creative moments of horror cinema. Unlike the first film, “Demons 2” lacks the novelty of the movie theater setting. Wherein the original had demonic forces infiltrating a safe haven for movie lovers, director Bava and producer-writer Dario Argento confine their victims to a locked down apartment complex.
ClownTown (2016)
If you think Rob Zombie is the only director releasing a schlocky survival horror film about evil clowns, you’d be mistaken. Here comes Tom Nagel’s “ClownTown,” a film a group of hapless travelers that wander in to an abandoned town ruled over by psychotic clowns that want to kill them a lot. After an unusual and tacked on prologue that copies John Carpenter’s “Halloween” almost shamelessly, we enter in to the actual tale of a group of friends heading to a concert. When they’re accidentally run off the road in a seemingly abandoned town, they and two other travelers find themselves being victimized and terrorized by psychotic and murderous clowns.
Nighthawks (1981): Collector’s Edition [Blu-Ray]
Director Bruce Malmuth’s “Nighthawks” is easily one of the most eighties action thrillers ever made. It’s a teaming of various talents from the decade, and further paves Sylvester Stallone as an action hero. Stallone is quite convincing in his role as renegade street cop Deke DaSilva who goes to great lengths to stop criminals alongside his partner Matthew Fox, as played by Billy Dee Williams. Most of the concept for “Nighthawks” revolves around the uneasy pairing of Stallone’s more rough neck street cop going up against Rutger Hauer’s international villain. Hauer is excellent the villainous bomber Wulfgar who delights in terrorizing people with planting bombs and infiltrating the local populace.
Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
IN SELECT THEATERS OCTOBER 28TH – Although Henry Selick does a damn fine job of directing what is one of the most entertaining stop motion animated films, “The Nightmare Before Christmas” has Tim Burton’s stamp all over it. It’s about an outcast, a love for the Gothic and Halloween, and it’s unabashedly menacing. Though Henry Selick’s animated movie was originally touted to kids, the film is very much a dark and harrowing narrative about monsters from the Halloweentown infiltrating the Christmastown, and using the traditions and rituals to terrorize random victims. One montage even features kids getting very creepy presents like a shrunken head, and a snake. Jack Skellington is the pumpkin king who is the anti-hero that finds himself restless with Halloween and accidentally becomes the villain when he falls in love with Christmas.