31 Days of Halloween 2018

The Descent (2005) - The year before this movie hit theaters in the USA my family and I were spending a couple weeks in Cuernavaca Mexico, at the Encuentros Spanish school, and living with a family when not in class. We were really tired of the nonstop Spanish and needed to find some way to hear English just for a little while, you can only watch so much TV in Spanish before tuning out. We decided to go to the big fancy mall in the city to see a film. In English with Spanish subtitles. While the girls went to see some romantic comedy or something I found the movie The Descent. I already knew the director Neil Marshall from his great Dog Soldiers so I was excited that I was going to get to see a new movie from him. It was just what I needed to see, a claustrophobic, exciting horror movie with lots of gore. I love this movie, I have seen it multiple times now and enjoy it each time. Smartly paced with excellent scares it build to an exciting action filled climax and then leaves you thinking with a ending that does not explain everything completely. This being the international ending, which is different than the US ending.
After loosing her family in a car wreck Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) rejoins her female adventure group for a caving expedition in the Appalachian mountains. Sarah is still feeling the effects of the deaths of her husband and daughter is taking medication and having horrifying dreams. Juno (Natalie Mendoza) who secretly had an affair with Sarah's late husband, struggling with the guilt of it wants to organize a special trip to bring the group closer together. She without telling the group leads them to a cave that has never been explored before. Things go horribly wrong when the way they just past collapses leaving the group stuck under the mountain. As they attempt to find a passage out they realize they are not alone in the cave. Living in the system is a group of humanoid creatures evolved for living in the dark. The bat people stalk and start killing the party and very quickly the women are in a fight for their lives.
Spoilers: The ending in the US version of this film has the main character escaping from the caves and pulling over on the side of the road. She sees her friend Juno (dead at this point) sitting next to her and screams, the movie ends. This is the happy ending, Sarah escapes being the only survivor of the expedition.
In the international version after Sarah screams in the truck she wakes up still in the tunnels. You hear the sounds of the creatures and see her hallucinating her daughter blowing out a birthday cake. In this ending you are brought back to some of the exposition dialog, where the effects of darkness can be hallucinations, paranoia, etc. It could be that the women were trapped and then Sarah broke and killed all her friends and the creatures and all were just her minds way of dealing with the craziness. Or that there was indeed creatures and although she fought then off and sacrificed Juno to them that she never found the way out of the caves and it ends with her still trapped.
Either way this movie kicks ass and I loved it. Even after seeing it multiple times I still sit enthralled with this one.

Mom and Dad (2017)   The idea that a signal could make people violent is not a new idea. I think of things like Stephen King's Cell and the film the Signal (2007) of examples. This story by writer director Brian Taylor is a great take on it though.  In the story some kind of signal when heard by people makes them need to kill their offspring. Brett (Nicolas Cage) and Kendell (Selma Blair) are a married couple with two children, teen Carly (Anne Winters) and 10 yr old Josh (Zachary Arthur). Neither is particularly happy in life having settled down for a life of middle class boredom. They are out when the signal gets them so the first part of the film focuses on the kids. Josh is home with the house keeper Sun-Yi (Sharon Gee) and her daughter. He witnesses the Sun-Yi kill the girl and fearing for his own safety locks himself in his bedroom. He does not understand that the only child Sun-Yi is driven to kill is her own. In fact she goes about cleaning up the mess she made like nothing happened when the act is over. Carly is at school and when all hell breaks loose she and her friend Riley (Olivia Crocicchia) make there way to their homes. Also coming to Carly's aide is her boyfriend Damon (Robert T Cunningham) who after surviving an attack by his father heads to Carly's to check up on her. Unfortunately Mom and Dad do arrive home and when they do the kids are in a tough spot. Eventually they lock themselves in the cellar and Mom and Dad then begin a cat and mouse game trying to kill their children. The film mixes horror elements, humor and drama to create a really enjoyable film. The turn in the third act is great when Brett's Father and Mother arrive at the house. There is no satisfactory ending to this film but it sure was a lot of fun.

Season of the Witch (2011)

Season of the Witch (2011) - QUICK HIT! I don't really want to spend a lot of time talking about this film, but I saw it the other night on Netflix streaming and gave it a whirl. Opening scenes are important and the opening of this film is all about the book of Solomon. Witches are being taken from a village for hanging and drowning. A priest oversees it and after the poor women are killed he requests they be pulled up so he can do a ritual from the book to keep demons from entering them and bringing them back to life. Unfortunately on this day the soldiers are tired and leave him to do that work himself. You can guess what happens. So we know this scene has not been put here for no reason so it is bound to come up again later in the film.
Set in the 14th century or so the crusades are in full swing. We are introduced to our hero's the buddy team of Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman). We get to hear there buddy banter as the compete for the right to drink free by slaughtering their way through multiple fictional battles.Whoever kills more enemies drinks for free, which is how we do it at our family gatherings. The sequence may be a bit long I think it had five battles highlighted and is designed to show that these are quality fighters, the brutality of battle and to highlight that they are fighting on the side of good. The Gulf of Edremit 1332, The siege of Tripoli 1334, The Battle of Imbros 1337, The Battle of Artah 1339, Battle of Smyrna 1344, the final battle is the the crusader breaking into a city. Some of these battles never took place in history others like the battles of Imbros and Artah took place at different times but the idea is to show they are seasoned veterans of the crusades as well as how the crusades went from war with the armies of Islam to corrupted slaughter of innocents. Finally when ordered into a city where Behmen in the fog of war drives his sword through a young woman. As the smoke clears he and Felson see that they have been slaughtering women and children. A personal crisis of conscience that leads to their decision to desert the army.
As they head back toward home, a month into that trip the two men come across a farm where they first see the black plague. The excellent special effect make for a gruesome scene.
When they next reach a town they see more of the plague. They are captured as deserters and brought before the plague infected leader of the town. There offered the task of helping take a convicted witch to a monastery 200 leagues away, where a book of Solomon exists that can deal with her magic. It is thought she is creating the plague and the verses in the book of Soloman can be used to negate the magic. Even though our heroes refuse it is inevitable that it is going to happen, there would be no movie! So with a priest (Stephen Campbell Moore), a young knight wannabe (Robert Sheehan), another veteran knight (Ulrich Thomson) and a criminal (Stephen Graham) who happens to know the way the two men with witch (Claire Foy) in caged wagon spend the next 40 minutes of the film on the road. There is much to do about how the witch will use her powers to turn one man against another but remarkable this does not really happen. Sure they have their doubts about each other but the road is long and the way treacherous so stress levels are high. I am not saying that this is not an interesting part of the film, it is a good enough story. Only two characters die before they reach the abbey so not too much chaos is wrought. The climax is exciting with some good creatures and fighting and saving the world. Thirty minutes of taking care of the business at hand. We know because Nick Cage is in the film that he gets to have that moment of doubt before finally winning. This movie is really not bad but does a recap thing that I did not like very much as Behmen has a moment of recognition of her plan. You do not have to explain the breadcrumbs that the writer Bragi F Schut left on the road. He wrote the really underrated and short lived show Threshold. Director Dominic Sena does a decent job and in the end I recommend this as a fair view. Filmed primarily on sets it has a strange old time horror movie feel, lit primarily in blues it can be dark at times. The music is good in that it is not overwhelming. So give it a view.
Rating (5.7) 5.0 and up are recommended but some more recommended than others.