YOUR HORROR MOVIE CHECKLIST FOR OCTOBER 2008

[mister_punchy]

___ Set a plastic container of chewy orange mallo-pun'kins on the teevee. Find a half-dozen of them between your couch cushions sometime next April.

___ Watch Halloween stoned.

___ Watch Pieces drunk.

___ Watch Wild Zero drunk & stoned.

___ Watch Evil Dead II on coke.

___ Watch Suspiria while coming down from a psychedelic mushroom high

Comments

[transistorblast]

Yes, the 4-hour ABC miniseries The Shining does suck, and it takes about ten minutes of viewing to figure it out...Wait, did you mean something else?

That Muppet Show episode looks badass. I don't know how I missed that as a kid.

[mister_punchy]

It's a pretty freaky episode. Spoiler: the murderer turns out to be Statler and Waldorf.

[transistorblast]

Joking aside, I got to see Kubrick's The Shining on the big screen earlier this year. Not only was it still damned scary (okay, to me, anyway), but it made me appreciate the movie even more and notice plenty of things I'd never picked up on watching it on TV or home video.

Things like Kubrick's brilliant use of music and sound, and the heavy use of mirror images. I mean, "REDRUM" backward is obvious, but somehow, every time I'd watched The Shining previously, I never picked up on the fact that the scene where Jack Torrance is speaking to his kid on the bed, the camera's aimed at an image of them in a mirror, not the actors (for part of the scene, at least). There are a few other scenes like that (Jack in the bar with Lloyd is another). Also, you never see Lloyd letting Jack out of the freezer. You hear his voice, you hear the sound of the bolt being withdrawn, but the scene cuts after that. In King's book, the ghosts are real, but in the movie Kubrick really plays around with the idea the ghosts might not be real at all. I didn't

[mister_punchy]

I'm not all that into Kubrick, but "The Shining" seems to be one that everybody puts at the very top of their favorite horror movies. It's ironic considering the extreme stupidity of some of the horror flicks I dearly love, but I just find it dull and Nicholson goofy and totally unsympathetic. I'd rather watch The Exorcist or Rosemary's Baby.

[dehumidifier]

Casserole dish filled with John Kerry's disembodied head is my favorite Halloween-time character.

[mister_punchy]

I just looked for John Kerry's disembodied head on Google and I found something even better:

[businesscasual]

"Yoooooooou baaaaaastard...."

[dehumidifier]

Whatever pic you found isn't showing up for me.

[piedpiper]

hey, have you seen Family Portraits?

[mister_punchy]

I don't think so. I'm about to go pick up a stack of horror DVD's though and will look for it.

[piedpiper]

please do--only because it drove me crazy and i can't tell if it's brilliant or fucking stupid.

[mister_punchy]

Cool, those are my favorites. That's what we were striving for in the Rob Zombie thing I embedded up there.

[businesscasual]

Watch that DirectTV commercial that utilizes footage from Poltergeist and cringe that it commercializes little blonde Carol Anne, who didn't make it to her 13th birthday. Wish for the Poltergeist curse to finally splatter Craig T. Nelson for his participation.

I THOUGHT THE SAME THING! I was like, "Does anyone at DirectTV know that girl died, therefore making this commercial kind of creepy?"

[mister_punchy]

You have to assume someone's mentioned her death to Craig T. Nelson sometime in the last twenty years. Maybe he forgot.

[_wendybird_]

That Muppet Show looks awesome. I wonder if it's on You Tube. I particularly like Animal with the axe in his brain. I'm sure that didn't traumatize little kids or anything.

[mister_punchy]

It's from one of the seasons that isn't on DVD yet... I got a ton of episodes off eBay about five years ago, and it's one of the best. (The Debbie Harry, Johnny Cash, and Alice Cooper episodes are also up there.)