31 Days of Halloween 2018

October 9:

Boo (2005) It's Halloween night and a group of friends enter an old haunted hospital for a good old fashioned scare. Unfortunately for them a ghost on the third floor is looking for a way out and possessing the recently dead body is the only way he can escape. Thwarting his plan is Jessie (Trish Coren) who is having visions that may just save her and her friends. The difficult script has a lot of exposition at the strangest times, like in the middle of ghost haunts and gunfire. Beside Jessie is her boyfriend Kevin (Jilon VanOver), Marie (Nicole Rayburn) and Freddy (Josh Holt). Emmett (Happy Mahaney) went ahead to set up scares but by the time they find him he is past being quite human. You see when the recently dead are possessed his / her body begins to rapidly decay, making for some squishy slimy effects. Entering another route into the hospital is Allan (Michael Samluk) in search of his sister Meg (Rachael Melvin) who with some friends also came to explore the hospital. He finds her frightened and wishing she had never stepped foot in the place. The final character is Arlo (Dig Wayne), a cop who is looking out for Allan. Eventual after a bunch of visions and some fairly decent gory effects the characters come together. They have to find a way out of the hospital, hell even off the 3rd floor would be good, beat the evil pedophile ghost Jacob  ( M. Steven Felty) who wants to escape, and hopefully survive the night. Written and Directed by Anthony C. Ferrante this film is a hot mess. He has gone on to some fame for writing the first five Sharknado films but here I think the film could have used more work. From the less than convincing dialog and acting to the logical leaps explained through exposition well into the 3rd act to the convoluted endgame; it leaves the viewer bewildered. I watched with someone who is not really a horror person and his reaction primarily was two reaction saying WTF, and laughing. I do have to say the one real joke was pretty funny. They setup that Arlo was a former action star in blacksploitation films and his character Dynamite Jones would light a matchstick and kick it at a target. There is a great seen where Arlo attempts this trick only to have it fail which completely subverted expectation and was very funny. In the end the film only makes a little sense but it spends some lines setting up that the entire ordeal of Jacob trying to use the living to escape the hospital could happen again with another unfortunate group. Really not in anyway a favorite of this writer it is only included this month for it's name and the fact it happens on Halloween.

The Bat (1959) Well although included here this was not really a Halloween type movie so I had to do something else to make up for it. This film is a murder mystery in a big old house several people vie to find 1 million stolen dollars. It stars Agnus Morehead as Cornelia van Gorder a wealthy mystery writer who rents a big old house in the country to finish her latest novel. The story unfolds where the owner of the manor house and local bank president John Fleming (Harvey Stephens) has embezzled one million dollars from his bank. He tells this to his long time doctor Malcolm Wells (Vincent Price) while on a hunting trip, offering half the cash to have Wells help fake his death. That did not go as well as he planned and soon Wells is looking for ways into the house to find the loot. van Gorder and her maid Lizzie Allen (Lanita Lane) are in the house and frightened by a mysterious killer in the area, The Bat who kills with metal claws. Meanwhile the cops are around as well as a butler and a couple others and the audience is unsure who the culprit is. The Bat makes several appearances and there is more murder before the story comes to a climax and the Bat is unmasked. This film is really great fun and entertaining in that 50's cornhttps://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001186/y kinda way. Not really a horror movie so it does not count but it sure was entertaining.

October 10

To The Devil a Daughter (1976) - At the time Hammer Film Production was just about out of money when Christopher Lee obtained the rights to make this Dennis Wheatley novel into a film. They found financing and John Peacock went about adapting the novel with Christopher Wickings. As the production started director Peter Sykes thought the script was not shoot able so brought in Gerald Vaughan-Hughes to rewrite while they were filming. The result is an interesting if scattered treatment of the novel that was hated by Wheatley and he disavowed it promising to never work with Hammer again. Furthering the problems with the film was they brought in American actor Richard Widmark to play John Verney. Hammer had never really had good relations with the American actors they worked with and Widmark was no exception. He found the production to be less than Hollywood standards and was vocal about letting them know it , calling the production Mickey Mouse. Still they managed to keep him on set and finished the film which went on to a  amount of financial success. Probably riding on the huge tail of the Exorcist a few years earlier. Unfortunately the original investors reaped most of the benefit of its box office leaving Hammer film near death. The great cast of Widmark, Christopher Lee and a young Nastassja Kinski made up for a cobbled together script but that was not enough considering the construction of the financing.
  The film is about Catherine (Kinski) and the satanic cult she was raised in, run by Father Michael Raynor (Lee) and there plans to turn her into the living version of the devil. There plans are foiled when Catherine's father Henry Beddows (Denholm Elliot) breaks his pact with the cult and manages to get John Verney (Widmark) a writer on the occult to steal his daughter away at the airport. Alot of the film features Lee and his clan trying to get Catherine back, by both physical and Spiritual means. She is connected to them and can be influenced by there incantations. The imagery is striking in this film where Catherine remembers a ritual in which the devil is simulating sex with her, not in reality but followers hold a statue of him over her while Lee is nearby impregnating a follower. This baby is to be a sacrifice of blood that will later baptize Catherine allowing the devil to take over her body.
In fact later in the film is a weird scene of the baby creature thing crawling into Catherine's vagina which is bizaare and so out of place in the film. It even appears to be eating her out at one point. This scene was hated by Lee when he saw the film as well as appalling Wheatley since it was not in his original story.
  As the time of her baptism draws closer Raynor uses his chants and spells to get Catherine back into the fold. At the same time Verney tries through the church to find a way to stop the ritual. The problem is that the film never gets a full ending. The writers in rewriting the script forgot this whole element where one of the cultist allows all her blood to be drained. They then had to figure out how to work that back into the ending. So at the baptism we see Father Raynor creating a circle of blood to do the ritual in. That being the case Verney needs a way in to get Catherine so there is another contrivance where he has a rock he had hit one of the cultist with. The blood of that disciple is what allows him to enter the circle. Confused? Well it gets worse. Verney throws the rock hitting Raynor in the head, and he vanishes. WTF? Well the original ending had Raynor getting hit by lightening  and following down into what would look like an inverted crucifixion but someone at the studio thought that was too similar to another Cristopher Lee death from the Scars of Dracula (1970) so the sequence was cut. So instead Lee disappears and Verney carries Catherine out of the circle and the film ends. Completely crazy. Now I still like this film even with all its flaws. Lee is fabulous as the crazed true believer bring satan back to earth. I like how the story bring a bit more information in until we have the full story and are ready for the climax. Unfortunately it does not pay off quite as well as one would hope. I could see this film as a remake someday fixing problems and making a great devil cult film.