We've reached the end of the first week of the 31 Days of Halloween experiment my wife and I are doing, designed to broaden her horror movie experiences and provide me entertainment for a month, and spoken about at length here. I thought it would make sense to check in every week and let whoever might be interested know how it's going, what we liked and didn't like, and so forth.
We kicked the marathon off on Day One with one of my favorite horror movies Trick 'r Treat, one of my favorite horror movies and one that my wife likes as well. Despite the fact that we've both seen it before, I wanted to start things off on a good note with something we'd both enjoy before getting into the unsorted mixed bag of nuts the rest of the month will be.
For Day Two we watched The Prophecy, one of my favorite Christopher Walken movies. It's been quite a while since I've seen this and... it hasn't aged well. Walken is still amazing in it as a crazy, evil angel, and Viggo Mortensen pops up with a very chilling performance as Lucifer, but the movie itself is more than a little ridiculous and poorly done otherwise. My wife thought this was just okay; it was a little too biblical and dated for her, and not really a horror movie at all in her opinion.
We watched The Strangers on Day Three. This flick made the list because we watched the sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night, a few weeks ago and it was really, really bad; I had remembered watching this one in theaters and it was way better, so I thought my wife should give it a try. My wife enjoyed this one and found it pretty creepy, especially how it's loosely based on true events.
Day Four brought us to our first TV show binge of the marathon, Hulu's new show Monsterland, which I reviewed earlier this week here. Much like in my review, my wife only liked a few episodes, specifically the first, third, and eighth. She also agreed that there needed to be more monsters actually involved.
There's a movie from the mid-eighties on Amazon Prime called The Stuff, which is what we watched on Day Five. It was recommended to us by two friends of mine on Twitter, and I have to tell you I have no idea why. This movie was just laughably bad. Low-budget, horribly acted, and just utterly ridiculous. Although, Garret Morris was in it playing Chocolate Chip Charlie, who's hands were lethal weapons, so it wasn't a total loss. I asked my wife what she thought about this and she just groaned at me.
We stayed on Amazon Prime for Day Six, watching a new movie called The Lie, which is the first in Prime's new "Welcome to the Blumhouse" series of movies all produced by, duh, Blumhouse. I wasn't too impressed by this movie throughout most of its running time, finding it kind of dull and overwrought, but there's a twist on the end that really changed things up for me a bit. We both agreed that the acting was pretty good, but the plot was pretty flawed, but disagreed about the twist; she liked it a lot less than I did.
For Day Seven we switched back to Hulu for another new movie, Books of Blood, based on the old John Carpenter series. The movie is set up as a three-chapter anthology, and the first chapter is both the longest and by far the strongest. Honestly, the movie itself would have been much better if that chapter had been fleshed out and turned into the entire movie, but the other two chapters have a narrative purpose as framing devices so I understand why they did what they did. It makes even more sense when you learn this project was initially developed as a TV series and not a movie. My wife liked the anthology aspect, especially how the stories were all connected, but thought the other two stories needed more time. She also agreed the first story should have been its own thing, because there's a lot to unpack in that one.
Finally, for Day Eight last night we watched the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead, one of my favorite zombie movies and also one of the only Zack Snyder movies I enjoy (please don't come at me, Snyderbros, my dislike of his movies takes nothing away from your enjoyment whatsoever and I'm not here to bash anything). My wife really liked this one, especially the characterization, some of the techniques used to tell the story, and the zombie baby idea. She also complained there was too much violence... but hey, it's zombies.
It's Friday, and this should be one of the better weekends of the marathon. We're watching Friday the 13th tonight, followed by Friday the 13th Part 2 tomorrow, and then The Haunting of Bly Manor on Sunday, which is really the centerpiece of the whole affair. The Haunting of Hill House was just amazing, so I'm hoping for a good time on Sunday!
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