brendan halpin

Happy Spooky Season everyone!

I kicked things off with two horror anthologies because a) I like horror anthologies and b) I got my covid shot and was pretty tired, so I wanted to watch things I could stop for a nap and then restart without difficulty.

I started in Brazil, with The Strange World of Coffin Joe! (1968) Coffin Joe, if you’re not familiar, is kind of a national antihero in Brazil, and there’s a whole unpleasant mythology around him that I don’t have the energy to get into right now which is okay because he’s barely in the movie! He appears at the beginning to spout some nonsense (“Life. What is life? Death. What is death?” is an actual quote from this monologue, so you get the idea) and then disappears from the movie.

It starts out promisingly with a segment about a dollmaker that looks and feels like a Twilight Zone episode, only with more nudity and gore. This was a satisfying segment, and I had hopes for the rest of the movie. Which were dashed by the next segment, “Perversion,” in which a creepy guy stalks a woman until she is murdered by another woman at her wedding, and then he breaks into her crypt and defiles her corpse. The end! Absolutely pointless. And then we have “Ideology,” in which a creepy professor (not Coffin Joe, but the same actor) sets out to prove love is dead by torturing people. This is deeply unpleasant and has big “smearing feces on the wall” energy. “Look at how sick my mind is! Do I not shock you?” I dunno, I guess this was groundbreakingly sick shit in 1968, but I don’t find watching people being tortured to be scary or suspenseful or really worth watching in any way. At least the whole movie clocked in at an hour and twenty minutes. If you choose to watch, I’d recommend stopping after “The Dollmaker.”

Now, on to V/H/S Halloween, the brand new entry in the found footage anthology series. And, like most of them, it’s both hit and miss. At least in this case they did us the favor of frontloading the good segments, so you can bail about halfway through the 2 hour runtime confident in the knowledge that you haven’t missed much.

Previous episodes have dispensed with the frame story, but it’s back here and, in true V/H/S style, is dumb and pointless, though it does feature some pretty good gore gags. Unfortunately, literally every segment follows the by-now-cliched story arc of “idiots with cameras blunder into something they didn’t bargain for and everyone dies.” You don’t have to do this, people. Freaking innovate, wouldja?

Anyway, “Coochie Coochie Coo” involves two high school seniors trick or treating for the final time and finding a house that drips…milk. Nice body horror, geniune sense of dread, and the biggest horror here is not dying, but losing yourself. I dug it.

“Ut Supra Sic Infra” involves the lone survivor of a mass death event going to the scene with some cops so they can figure out what happened. Oh, they figure out what happened, allright! This one was really clever as well as unsettling. Best segment of the movie as far as I’m concerned.

“Fun Size” is a funny segment about cursed candy and some too-old-for-this trick or treaters who find themselves in the cursed candy factory. I like a good horror comedy, and this one’s pretty good.

Wish I’d stopped watching at this point because “Kidprint” focuses on the torture of children, and while said torture is not depicted, we do get a lot of videos of crying, screaming, and sometimes bleeding kids. No f’n thank you. Children in danger/being killed is something I have very little patience for, and if you’re going to use it in your movie, there’d better be a damn good reason. There isn’t in this one. See “feces on the wall,” above. I hated it a lot and will avoid writer/director Alex Ross Perry’s work in the future.

Finally there’s “Home Haunt,” which has a lot of potential, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think it would have worked much better if it were at least 20 minutes longer. I know! But the family dynamic is really interesting, and the idea of a homemade backyard haunted house turning really haunted is a good one, but the setup was great here, and the symphony of gore that followed felt pretty perfunctory. No suspense, no real innovation in the gore gags, just a lot of people dying in this room, oh wait, run to the next one, people die here too, etc. And then at the end some small children are killed.

The last two segments being cavalier about/reveling in the death of children left a really bad taste in my mouth (oh yeah, some kids die in the frame story too), which is a shame because the first three segments are actually pretty good. Still, if the death of children is a hot button issue for you, maybe skip this one entirely.