October/Halloween/Horror Recommendations

I stuck on V/H/S 85 over the weekend and thought it was pretty decent. The second short was the weakest despite having a really good idea - it sounds weird to say about a short, but it felt like it was dragged out too long. It doesn't help that the acting was, uh, not great - strong bang of daytime soap opera from it. The final feature is the best executed one, I reckon, although I did enjoy the Unsolved Mysteries style wraparound story.

I'm also a comparatively late arrival to Prince Of Darkness, although I'm not as enamoured of it as you - amongst other things the ending feels a bit weak compared to The Thing and In The Mouth Of Madness.

I would still say that PoD has more to offer than Carpenter's do-over of Village of the Damned, which is one of those films where a great premise seems really well-suited to the director until you actually watch the result :(

Ah yeah, Dead Zone is a great call! Mind you, with Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen and David Cronenberg all involved you'd expect something good.

It wasn't made by Shudder, but it seems they've distributed the last 3 films. It does fit their wheelhouse I suppose :) I watched V/H/S 94 previously and thought it was OK, if a bit similar to some of the previous shorts in the series. I haven't seen '99 yet - if you've seen it, what did you think of it relative to the rest of the series?

I didn't think '85 looked any cheaper than previous films in the series, and tbh given the conceit there's an argument that looking too polished would work against it.

I read an article interviewing the creators where they talked about the ways they achieved the look of each short, and it's pretty interesting - some of them used obsolete kit to film on, others ran their footage through iterations of copying to, then from, VHS. One of the directors even boasted about how upset their DP was with the end result, which does feel to me like fetishising an aesthetic a bit too much, but I can't fault the commitment to the theme...

Having said all that, if it didn't work for you me talking about what cameras they used isn't going to make a difference. I do think that the god of technology one was the most interesting one in terms of its premise, but I'd be torn between that and the police one for best overall.

Bringing things back around to Mr Carpenter, I decided to revisit Cigarette Burns, his contribution to the Masters of Horror series. I think, of the latter-day Carpenter output, it's a contender for the best work. It's not written by Carpenter nor does it have one of his synth scores, but it has a compelling atmosphere and feels like its events could be happening alongside any of Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy.

It's not without its flaws, admittedly - the film-within-a-film scenes aren't as good as I would like given the context, and there's a repeated use of "sudden noise and 'shocking' image" that actually makes the images less shocking. But these are relatively small things.

In a complete swerve from my last few horror viewings, I got an itch to revisit Todd And The Book Of Pure Evil, a very silly Canadian horror-comedy series with a tone that's like Ash Vs Evil Dead if it were set in high school, taught by teachers like Miss Perky from 10 Things I Hate About You. I'm 3 episodes into the first season and it remains endearingly stupid and funny.

It's not easily available in the UK or Ireland legitimately - if you have a VPN it's available on Amazon in some countries. I ended up picking up the R1 DVDs on a trip to Canada a few years back.

I saw a rec for this elsewhere as well and it sounds good - where did you watch it?