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

Oh Italy, you so crazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Casa_(film_series)

Films in the series
1.La Casa (a.k.a. The Evil Dead)
2.La Casa 2 (a.k.a. Evil Dead II)
3.La Casa 3 (a.k.a. Ghosthouse)
4.La Casa 4 (a.k.a. Witchery)
5.La Casa 5 (a.k.a. Beyond Darkness)
6.La Casa 6 (a.k.a. House II: The Second Story)
7.La Casa 7 (a.k.a. The Horror Show, a.k.a. House III)

...but no Army of Darkness or House 1 or 4.

Although I prefer Haunted Castle/Secret Chronicles Of The Ghost Cat and Curse Of The Snow Witch to Under The Blossoming Cherry Trees, I think the latter is probably the best film of them all. It works on more levels and while it isn't as supernaturally focused as the others, the spooky bits are quite memorable.

The lightning scene in Haunted Castle reminded me a little bit of the lightning moment in Emperor's "I Am The Black Wizards". I'm wanting to rewatch it to see if it was really that impressive.

Rewatched Black Sabbath and I think it's probably Bava's best by quite some distance. Maybe the best film of its kind (depends how specific we're being).

Now I think Shock might be in his top 5, despite not looking as lovely and the soundtrack by Libra doing a lot of the work. I often think of the strange slow motion closeup of Daria Nicolodi, maybe one of my favorite horror scenes ever.

Spookies - Wanted to see this because I knew there was a lot of monsters in it. Wondered why it wasn't on bluray and after seeing it I can see why even the lower quality labels wouldn't want to put it out.
I seldom complain about acting but there's a few actors who are terrible here, like the man pretending to be an old german and the incredibly unfunny comedic character. But all the comedy is unfunny here.
I wouldn't recommend this but whoever was doing the creature effects was pretty good and with a bigger budget they might have been able to have done great things.
I actually quite liked the idea of this creepy old guy preserving his unwilling wife by having his small monster army (including two of his children) kill people, but the delivery is mostly dud.

Ammoru - Been meaning to see this after some Adam Groves recommendations and now it's easy to see on youtube. But after seeing half of it I couldn't finish it, I just watched highlight clips. There's a scene near the start I quite liked with the goddess breathing heavily and fire blowing behind her but the end fight is the best part (that I've seen), take a look...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9lD6kfX01k

Dario Argento: Cars & rain!

Tenebrae (1982)
Suspiria (1977)
Inferno (1980)
Opera (1987)@NicolodiDaria #cars pic.twitter.com/aHmupWMumD

— GIALLO_GIALLO (@GIALLO_GIALLO) September 7, 2017

hey we all got our fetishes

Secret Chronicles Of The Ghost Cat/Haunted Castle/Hiroku Kaibyo-Den

My second viewing (first was over a year ago) and I'm pleased to say that it's still spooky and quite thrilling when it gets going. It takes a good 20 minutes to get interesting and I still had trouble gleaning exactly what was going on in that portion, the music is foreboding and even when not much is happening, there's still a mood. I'd be surprised if there exists a better ghost cat woman or a more ferocious film monster prior to this (1969).

I may have missed something but why didn't the cat spirit keep possessing other women? The biggest disappointment is that her rampage is over too soon. Her screaming lightning resurrection is great and I wish she just kept doing that until she killed everyone. One of the best monster films ever and I might try pestering everyone until it gets a long overdue release.

I want to give a shout out to Dark Night Of The Scarecrow (1981), one of the best of all the made-for-TV horror movies. I'd really put that near the top of the list of recommendations for those looking for rural horrors upthread. There's several good hi-def posts of it online.

Just caught a screening of the The Bloodthirsty Trilogy - fun early '70s Japanese b-movie horror influenced by Bava and Hammer.

What did you think of them individually? I think the first is decent-ish, the second is the best by far and the third is pretty bad apart from the face removal scene.

He's a cool vampire.

Ha, totally different reaction. Loved the first, the third was almost as good, the second bored me to tears with that woman lead.

He's definitely a great Dracula! So nuts

Also appreciated how much sleazier they got in succession

Maybe one of us saw them in a different order? Lake Of Dracula is what I meant by second. Evil Of Dracula just seemed like typical 70s low end horror, don't remember any good sleaze in it. Lake Of Dracula is way prettier and used the golden eyes to good effect.

Evil of Dracula had all the topless schoolgirls getting tit-munched, didn't it?

Don't remember that somehow!

Probably the single most ridiculously misogynistic dialogue in cinema history.

Probably. pic.twitter.com/Jnf8bNkeJp

— Sad Squiggly Ghost Strangled Nicely on a Sunny Day (@MsHappyDieHappy) October 12, 2018

The Abominable Snowman - one of the early black and white Hammer films. Nigel Kneale script and Peter Cushing. It's quite good, being more interested in the science fiction concept of the story than trying to be scary.

Distinguished by a Humphrey Searle score as well (see also The Haunting)

What Dreams May Come - One of those extremely sentimental Robin Williams films that everyone hates. Based on a Richard Matheson novel. Very beautifully shot, special effects mostly hold up very well, lots of panoramas of heaven and hell based on classic paintings (all credited at the end too). Herzog makes a brief amusing appearance in hell . Quite a few characters swap skin colour in heaven.
It doesn't modulate the sentimentality quite the right way to totally work for me but I think this is really underrated. The ending is very cute (there is an alternate ending with a questionable concept of atoning for suicide, which I gather is from the novel) and this is a better Vincent Ward film than Navigator.

Mystics In Bali - Indonesian film which is sort of an underground classic now; the best known flying headed witch film. Special effects are creaky, actors are of an extremely uneven ability (one of the supporting actors is an old pro and the lead actress was just an ordinary German tourist who had no acting experience) but it works well enough because it's got an unreal, oddly sedate tone to it (nobody seems overly impressed by all the crazy shit happening) and everyone is dubbed with cartoonish voice actors. The old witch is fun and there's little novelties like the fireball fight.

I love Mystics In Bali, yes the effects are almost Bollywood standard at times but it rattles along splendidly and everyone's performance is at least enjoyable.

KURONEKO was damn good. Gorgeous.

I like it slightly better than Onibaba, there's so much black onscreen.

Coscarelli's book may be of interest to some of you.

http://thebedlamfiles.com/nonfiction/true-indie/

Groves delivers again.

http://thebedlamfiles.com/commentary/the-taiwanese-inferno/

THE OTHERS (2001) - Nicole Kidman looks goddamn amazing in this. The whole movie has a great palette and style. Unfortunately it's been so long I already knew the twist going on, but it was still a cool, stylish throwback to '50s horror - sort of a black and white film done in early '00s color.

M. Night Shyamalan's THE VILLAGE (2004) - I'm seeing some very positive appraisals on Letterboxd and... no. This is bad. Good cast and some decent film-making overall (Deakins helped a lot), but the story and infamous twist ending is so awful it makes the movie pretty irredeemable - everyone was right back then. Really glad Shyamalan's learned to rein himself in as I liked his last two, THE VISIT and SPLIT. Looking forward to GLASS.

the village is bad, though like all the terrible shyamalan films, it has a fantastic JN Howard score

didn't realize he used the same composer all the way up through After Earth, damn

I've been practically living at the Quad Cinema in the West Village lately, taking in as many of their Sapphic Vampires series as possible. Very impressed by the diversity of approaches to this basic idea - the Hammer Films style is nothing like Jean Rollin's style which is nothing like Jesus Franco's style, and so on...

Hammer's The Vampire Lovers works brilliantly thanks to flawless casting, Ingrid Pitt foremost, but really all the women in this are perfect. The film uses subtext expertly. Twins of Evil is an amusing follow-up; the actual twin actresses have a loony appeal, and the moment when Peter Cushing announces his realization that he's dealing with actual TWINS OF EVIL is priceless.

The Belgian Harry Kümel's Daughters of Darkness deserves its high reputation, with the casting of Delphine Seyrig as the main vampire being crucial. Too bad the 35mm print the Quad showed was so washed out because this is a film with an amazing color palette.

I have plenty of time for the bold weirdness of Jean Rollin's films: The Nude Vampire, The Shiver of the Vampires, and Fascination are all audacious and right out there on the edge of incoherence. These films' eroticism is uniquely matter-of-fact, not teasing, and the director seems to be starting from a comfort zone of transgression and coming to horror, rather than the reverse.

Jesus Franco's Vampyros Lesbos may be the most genuinely erotic of them all, something of a masterpiece - certainly one of Franco's best films. Again casting is crucial, and he nails it with Soledad Miranda and Ewa Strömberg. Franco does the reality/dream confusion better than anyone.

Tony Scott's The Hunger is solidly entertaining, though I wish that the idea suggested by the earlier scenes - that it's all a sort of music video - had carried through the entire film. I think Susan Sarandon is right that the ending doesn't really make sense.

It's in Vicente Aranda's The Blood-Spattered Bride that the theme of the inadequacy of men, common to all these films, is most pronounced, with the lead actor here being the creepiest in a field of creeps.

Of the films in this series I missed, I'm most curious about Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses, which predates the circa-1970 explosion of this mini-genre by ten years.

I would also recommend Universal's Dracula's Daughter (1936) as an all-subtext precursor to this particular subgenre.

Right, that was in the series too - I saw that years ago, time to revisit

I gotta get to the Quad one of these days, love the programming they have there.
Vampire Lovers is great, didn't realize there was a series of these movies.
Vampyros Lesbos is all-time, I love it.
The Hunger is awesome. The ending doesn't make sense because it was studio-mandated to leave it open for a sequel, it really should've ended like five minutes before.

Josefa- Have you seen british film Vampyres (1974)? It's definitely in this type.

I do appreciate the matter-of-factness in Rollin.

Twins Of Evil is my favorite of the Karnstein (?) trilogy.

Wish there were a few more films like The Hunger.

Yeah, I've seen Vampyres and own the DVD - that's another to rewatch, I remember it being well made

Damn, '50s version of War of the Worlds is as uncompromising as any film I've seen from that era. Kinda figured they'd pussyfoot with the genocide and destruction and apocalyptic vibe but nope. Really well done, to boot.

in addition to lords of salem last weekend, i watched another satanic horror called evilspeak from 1981, the message of which is that satan is incredibly awesome and will help you destroy your enemies if you summon him through a computer. i loved this movie so much though i should warn anybody sensitive to it that there's a pretty brutal dog death (not directly on camera) in it

fell asleep during the Blackcoat's Daughter last night :(

pretty sure that's the intended effect

(but this is the pre-2005 thread shakey)

haha oops

Brad, when you're trying to sell people on Evilspeak, it's important to note that it's an essential entry in the 'past-prime Clint Howard inexplicably trying to pass himself off as a teenager' subgenre (see also: Rock n' Roll High School). I think they mention in one of the special features that he was actually wearing a toupee for the film.

Why they ever tried to pull this trick with him of all people is beyond me. Dude looked like was in his early fifties as a child actor.

In a July 2017 interview for Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast, Howard also revealed that the film's producers made him pay for his own toupée.

lmao

howard is really great in it

but yes he does not remotely look like a high schooler

The label Screenbound uploaded this trailer but isn't showing up on amazon and there's no details of the release date or format. But then another source says Second Sight (a better label) is releasing it on bluray next year, so I'm guessing it changed hands but it's still on the Screenbound site and youtube page. The trailer looks stylish and great, so I'm tempted to get the Australian bluray (part of the Ozploitation Classics series) rather than wait. But Second Sight are such a great label so I should wait.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGhpQWhlzsw

i was just completely blown away by bob clark’s deathdream/dead of night. it could be the best horror film of the ‘70s? so sad and haunted and traumatized, the performances of the parents are outstanding, the cinematography is perfectly desolate and dark. i love black christmas to death but what i just saw was someone’s masterpiece

great movie!

Bob Clark had the weirdest fucking career

I was a tad let down by it but it is pretty decent. What I remember most was Ormsby in the commentary saying how awful he felt about making his son cry for the film.

Clark definitely has a weird career, he was planning to remake Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, I'm quite fond of the orignal. A Christmas Story and Murder By Decree are supposed to be good but I never cared enough to try them.

deathdream rules, deserves to be much better known