Everyday is Halloween

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“Everyday is Halloween, Isn’t it? For Some of Us.”

the-tinglerIt’s Halloween.

When I was a kid, my mom would always sit us down to watch whatever cartoons or action movies were on, while she went off to cook or clean. Back then, we didn’t have cable, but we did have many VHS movies, and most of them were horror movies that my mom kept in a chest in her room, away from us.

My mom had a stellar library of the classic horror films, and many of them were on VHS, and included titles she’d watch religious. Though she banned more adult horror films from us for a long time, she’d trained us to be horror fans, and to quench our thirst for the frightening, we’d watch stuff like “The Monster Squad,” and “The Goonies.” These were films that were creepy, but not scary enough to keep us up at night.

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Boo! A Madea Halloween (2016)

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amadeahalloweenIt’s too bad we get a Halloween comedy, but it’s a man who’s based his entire career around a character tailored for religious audiences. I’m not saying the religious can’t celebrate Halloween, but Tyler Perry seems to center his movie on the holiday for absolutely no reason other than grabbing October crowds. “Boo! A Madea Halloween” isn’t a bad movie by any stretch, but it is Tyler Perry’s most unfocused and tonally inconsistent. Perry has no idea how to handle the aesthetic of Halloween. He can’t even use it as a means of conveying what could have been a very touching story about a dad who is trying to gain control of his increasingly out of control daughter. Halloween is more of an after thought here.

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The Night Before Halloween (2016)

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nightbeforehalloween“The Night Before Halloween” should actually be called “I Know What You Did The Night Before Last Halloween Around 11:50pm,” as it borrows heavily from those slasher themes and, once again, steals a lot from “The Ring.” Someone at the Syfy Channel must have loved “The Ring,” as they seem persistent on copying its themes involving teens running from a dark curse that is targeting them or some such nonsense. Seriously, a movie like this should not be so complicated and confusing to follow. The storyline and mythos behind it is actually so confusing no one in the movie can ever explain what the hell is going on. To anyone. Set on the night before Halloween, a group of girls have a vicious prank played on them from local boys in their school. During the prank one of the friends, Beth, is accidentally electrocuted and nearly killed.

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All Hallows’ Eve (2016)

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all-hallows-eve“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.

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A First Edition Festival in Brooklyn [Brooklyn Horror Film Festival 2016]

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bhffAnother film festival had its first edition this year and it had a great line up.  This fest had it all: films, scary stories, trivia, et al.  The fest had some great films, features and shorts.  Some of my favorites among many were The Master Cleanse and Child Eater for features and for shorts there was Shorty, Pigskin, and The Man Who Caught a Mermaid.

They also had films we reviewed as part of other festivals like Let Her Out, Therapy, La Rage du Demon, The Puppet Man, The Stylist, Disco Inferno, and Mute.

Cinema Crazed’s coverage was limited but here are the few films I reviewed here for the Festival if you missed the updates:

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The Last Pinoy Action King (2016) [Horrible Imaginings Film Festival 2016]

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the-last-pinoy-action-kingFilipino cinema has its own culture and during its action heyday, actor Rudy “Daboy” Fernandez was one of the biggest, if the not THE biggest action star the country ever saw.  The documentary explores his films, his fame, and his life.  It also explores action cinema and cinema in general in the Philippines at the time of his rise to fame and his reign on action films. Documentary co-directors Andrew Leavold and Daniel Palisa, who previously made the Filipino cinema documentary The Search for Weng Weng put together a very informative piece on a beloved actor.

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The Biker Warrior Babe vs. The Zombie Babies from Hell (2014)

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zombie-babiesIn the small town of Cranberry Lake, a wannabe witch and her succubus assistant attempt to summon a demon, when this goes badly, an army of zombie evil babies is unleashed on the town for which the only hope if a group of teenagers who have seen the evil and want to survive. Writer/director Jeremiah Morehouse has some good ideas in the script that he tries his best to put on screen but the script may have been a bit too ambitious for its super micro budget.  This budget is estimated at $10,000 and this unfortunately shows a lot in the film.  The story is ambitious and wants to achieve a lot which is lost a bit due to the effects and other issues in the film that are mostly blamed on the budget and a bit on a lack of experience.  However, the film’s ambition and love for its genre shows and this helps it greatly.

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