ok lets all shit our pants to something old: pre-2006 horror film thread

virtually all that stuff is available streaming somewhere

virtually all that stuff is available streaming somewhere isn't it?

urk, shitty internet connection.

Old Dark House is probably the best thing that isn't in the boxed set.

Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesus Franco by Stephen Thrower. 336 pages. Strange Attractor Press (November 20, 2014)

Tempted to get this. I don't think I want his Fulci book anymore because I've seen most of the Fulci I want but since Franco's filmography is so enormous and Thrower is covering them all exhaustively, it's pretty enticing.

Also..
Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies, 1956-1984. By Cathal Tohill & Pete Tombs. 272 pages. St. Martin's Griffin (September 15, 1995).
"European cinema has always excelled when it comes to "bad" movies. When continental moviemakers combined horror with sex, they unleashed a tidal wave of celluloid strangeness that lasted nearly thirty years. From sexy thrillers to pulp surrealism, from decadent erotica to blood-soaked vampire epics, nothing could go too far. Immoral Tales tells the fascinating story of this unique period, peeking into the kaleidoscope of visceral horror, maverick directors, and erotic invention."

Surprised more people weren't compelled to say what they think of the Universal horror films.

LIPS OF BLOOD

A man is nostalgic for a night 20 years ago when he was a boy briefly meeting a mysterious young woman who offered him a place to sleep. He feels unfulfilled and clings to the hope of someday meeting her again. The girl starts appearing to him in visions that guide him to her. Some people are trying to stop him but there are also vampire girls trying to help him.

I quite enjoyed this but I think it deserved to be a much better film. It has a good core, I really love the idea of a vague but treasured memory coming back to someone and finding their desires through dreamily supernatural ways.
If there is a Rollin written prose version of this, it seems more enticing than The Iron Rose text, because the film doesn't manage to get across the feelings and ideas properly.

As is often in 70s-80s vampire films, the sight of the vampires baring their teeth looks a bit ridiculous. Quite a lot of scenes are awkward and clumsy and it really needed to be consistently poetic and ethereal.
There's a scene with a severed head and although it makes sense later, they shouldn't have clearly shown how fake it was, they easily could have shown the back of the head.

Along with the quest of dreamy nostalgic yearning and the solid soundtrack, there is enough nocturnal wanderings among good locations (mostly ruins) with silent vampire girls in billowing drapes to make this one of the better Rollin films.

If this was much better looking and far more confidently made it would be one of my favourite films.

Lips Of Blood is a fantastic title. I look forward to seeing Faces Of Skin and Torsos Of Viscera.

Yeah, Rollin's titles often seem interchangeable and too non-specific and I'm sure people get the titles mixed up often.

GRAPES OF DEATH

Aside from the voodoo zombie films this has to be the most atypical zombie film I've seen (I'm sure there are plenty more offbeat ones though). The disease does decay people's flesh but the only other symptom seems to be unpredictable effects on their sanity.

What makes this film worthwhile is the impressive country landscapes and crumbling village in the grassy rocky hills. The weird and striking cruelty one unlucky person suffers is quite memorable. The woman with the dogs looks quite impressive too.

The makeup is slightly iffy in places but otherwise there isn't much wrong with it.

Rollin said in an interview that he didn't like gore but this is pretty gory.

Surprised more people weren't compelled to say what they think of the Universal horror films

The 1930s ones are all great; the 1940s ones are not so great. Except for The Wolf Man.

Creature from the Black Lagoon is a return to form.

I have a feeling I'll be looking out for Rape Of The Vampire, Requiem For A Vampire, Demoniacs, Night Of The Hunted, I know Fopp had at least two of those. Maybe if I want more, The Escapees and Lost In New York but I probably shouldn't.
I've heard other people say this and I feel the same, that Rollin's films aren't great but always intriguing, fresh and enjoyable enough that you can't help but be curious about more of them.

This has been more satisfying than the string of Fulci films I saw.

Watched DVD extra Rollin short film Les Pays Loins/The Distant Lands. Reading the Fascination blog dedicated to the director, the blogger notes how unlike the rest of French cinema in the mid60s this was but it appears to me as if he was still living in that world, not fully departed into his own world yet.
His good looking women, derelict buildings and more elegant scenery are all there but little else seems familiar to me. It seems to be about racism and unsteady societal change. The black and white looks better than some of his early colour films.
It's very short and I didn't really try to understand what was going on.

There was a trailer for City Of The Dead/Horror Hotel, an early 60s witch cult film featuring Christopher Lee. I think it's probably a bit neglected; it has some of the best foggy dark visuals from that era of gothic film and is fairly atmospheric. I really like films that never show daylight scenes (from memory I think that is how the film went), makes it seem like the village in the film never experiences daytime.

LIVING DEAD GIRL

I think this suffers from too little stylisation, there just isn't enough fancy imagery. Too much standard 80s fashion. Some brief flawed gore effects and awkward editing.
The American couple are kind of amusingly goofy (not sure if this is intentional) but the saving grace of the film is the girl who plays the beautiful and deeply troubled Catherine.

This tends to be in the top 3 of Rollin fans but I think it's one of the weaker ones of his fan favourite period.

So far from best to least..

Shiver Of The Vampires
Grapes Of Death
The Iron Rose
Lips Of Blood
Fascination
Living Dead Girl
Nude Vampire

I was looking up more about Marina Pierro (who I said above was the highlight of Living Dead Girl) and she was in Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Miss Osbourne/Docteur Jekyll Et Les Femmes. Also stars Udo kier and Patrick McGee. Directed by Borowczyk.
I've heard this is a real hidden gem but I really didn't think much of Beast. Anyone seen this?

I'm sure some of y'all owned a copy of Stephen King's Nightshift collection of dollar babies back in the day. On one of the VHS tapes, there was a trailer for some weird low-budget film. It was in black and white and featured a guy crawling through the desert, then this giant mantis or something flies by and drops a skyscraper on his head. Anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?

no but i wanna subscription

bumping since it looks like the horror crew is active atm.

Unwisely watched the majority of The Gate on tv. Aside from a cool living corpse and some interesting special effects it's a typical trashy 80s kid film.

oh man "Crimson Rivers", you looked so cool, you had vincent cassel which is almost always a good sign, but oh how you actually ended up sucking so furiously

Wake In Fright expires off Netflix Instant Watch tomorrow. It's not technically a horror movie, but it is a movie for people in this thread IMO. Schoolteacher in small town in the Outback goes on holiday break, encounters the worst people on earth. Early 70s. Warning there is irl kangaroo harm in this movie that surpasses The Snowtown Murders. Warning, Donald Pleasance being absolutely insane.

Is The Gate the one about the trapdoor to hell or whatever they open in the backyard? By, iirc, playing a metal LP backwards?

That's right.

I loved wake in fright

http://thedissolve.com/features/oral-history/788-the-strange-saga-of-spookies/

I have a soft spot for The Gate but it is very stupid and not scary at all.

Me too. I feel like it's one of the last YA horrors to have those kind of stop motion creature effects.

Or last horror/fantasy films full stop

If I'm remembering right, WINTERBEAST has some pretty good stop-motion effects and it came a few years later. Worth checking out despite movie's lack of winter.

but plenty of beast.

When I read Kim Newman's Nightmare Movies, I don't know why I hadn't noticed before the comedy and early teen trend of the 80s to early 90s, even though I'd seen most of them. He mostly complained about it. When I watched Dark Waters features, Mariano Baino seen his own work as partly a rebellion against goofy horror.

I think Evil Dead series and Braindead/Dead Alive have nothing to apologize for because they are great. Probably Society too. Mixed feelings on Stuart Gordon's Reanimator, From Beyond.
But when you add up The Gate, Spookies, Fright Night series, House series, Ghoulies, The Burbs, Monster Club, Return Of The Living Dead, probably many more, it does add up and I can see why it would annoy some.

Boston Strangler was really great. Don't know why I don't hear about it more often. One of the best serial killer films I've ever seen but it takes the subject way more seriously than most serial killer films. I thought that maybe since its based on real events that would be natural, but that isn't always the case.

Oddly I had a brief bad dream about the film in which I was describing it to someone and I had a horrible flash of memory which I couldn't figure out afterwards, like the ones in the film.

I pretty rarely have bad dreams about horror films and it is odder because it didn't unnerved me when I watched it last night.

The ending to that film is surprisingly sad.

Correction to above post: hadn't unnerved me.

I was really pretty impressed with that film too. The multiple simultaneous panels thing was cool.

Yeah, I wonder if Ang Lee was inspired by that for Hulk (in which I thought the panel effect achieved very little).

Another odd thing, I saw this on the Movies4Men channel which mostly shows action and military trash.

the film i saw after that which used the multiple panel thing was greenaway's Pillow Book. It's probably been used all over the place but I'm not a very good cineaste.

Evil Dead series and Braindead/Dead Alive have nothing to apologize for because they are great. Probably Society too. Mixed feelings on Stuart Gordon's Reanimator, From Beyond.

love all these movies unreservedly, personally

The Gate, Spookies, Fright Night series, House series, Ghoulies, The Burbs, Monster Club, Return Of The Living Dead

these uh, yeah less so. Return of the Living Dead is good fun, probably the best out of all these.

My rewatch of Night of the Creeps was only so-so.

Society would be one of the all-time greats if it had a decent ending.

Society is really odd tonally. It's so weird how the peeping tom who knows the truth is treated so lightly by everyone for most of the film. All the dynamics between characters are so odd and I don't know how intentional it is.

Can anyone comment on Yuzna's output? Apparently that Mena Suvari film he did was good.

Society would be one of the all-time greats if it had a decent ending

wtf the ending is the best thing about it

or are you referring to something else besides the SHUNT

I'm sure everyone loves when the boy says "fuck you butthead" to his dad.

If I had a physical copy of SOCIETY I'd shunt it, that's how much I love it.

I've always wanted to see Parents. Saw 15mins of it and it seemed similar to Society.

Parents is a strange movie - it doesn't have the marxist undercurrent, it isn't funny, and it's closer to a disturbing Freudian family drama in tone. iirc it was marketed as something of a comedy but the tone of it is all wrong.

holy shit looking at the credits I had no idea that was a Bob Balaban movie, what a weird thing for him to do