“Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror.”
This film has always seemed more or less perfect to me. The zombies just seem utterly unstoppable, every shot is played with a sense of melodrama, and of Herbert West . . . I can speak only with extreme terror.
I particularly like the use of one of the themes from Psycho in the opening credits.
COSTUME IDEAS: You could be a zombie, but one white lab coat puts you in charge of all the zombies. That’s an investment, my friend.
I think I threw a lot of curveballs here — and I did that mostly by ignoring my own criteria. I think Uzumaki makes up for its lack of Halloween theme with it’s abundant number of costume ideas. And I think Spider Baby, by being a creepy little black and white film, in some ways is a little scarier than Alien. Mostly because your expectations are lower, and then that’s how they get you.
But you won’t be able to guess. I guarantee it. Here’s a hint: it’s not Paranormal Activity.
Uzumaki is pleasantly unconcerned with the fact that it’s a J-horror movie. It’s just going to play around and come back to that theme– a lot, as you can see from the first ten minutes.
COSTUME IDEA:There are a whole bunch of costume ideas in this movie, and they’re all shaped like an uzamaki.
Spider Baby was a film made with summer stock actors and two faded film stars of as a simple horror film to make money. Writer Jack Hill, in the video interview at the bonus material of the DVD, seems to barely remember writing the screenplay. The two actresses who play the cannibal-inclined sisters hadn’t seen the film until decades later. Since then it’s become a cult favorite, and that means it’s got to be a musical as well.
The film opens up with, as you can see, a My Three Sons style animation of demented merriment. I adore this sequence, because no matter how many times I’ve seen it, I find myself wondering just what in the hell is going on here, and that’s exactly how I want to feel when I’m watching a horror movie around Halloween.
Buts much as I love Spider Baby, it begins without too much promise. The film’s only black character(1), a mailman, is slain by the lead actress, Spider Baby itself. Speaking as someone who loves it when horror scenes are unconvincing and weird, the whole thing sucks, and depends mostly on the idea that this mailman will do anything to deliver a letter and is too stupid to pull himself out of a window. Because, I mean, windows–seriously. No amount of wriggling is going to get you out of one of those, especially when your life is on the line.
But then, we’re introduced to a family with a unique disease that turns them into cannibals at the age of adolescence. Their parents, who have degraded into drooling monsters, are locked in the basement and for the most part are unseen. With no parents in sight, the family chaufer, played by Lon Chaney, Jr. (2), cares for the two daughters and one son, which occasionally means not blinking when they want to eat a cat for dinner.
The guy with the shaved head, is Sid Haig has been in a ridiculous number of cult films, and was the robot policeman from THX 1138. People who can endure Rob Zombie’s films will probably remember him as the murderous clown Captain Spaulding, but this is something I try to forget. Because I’m afraid of clowns.
The whole film can be downloaded from archive.org and is in the public domain.
COSTUME IDEA: The two daughters are really the strongest roles in this film. I think carrying around a spider web net and possibly a stuffed cat might get the point across.
(1) Played by Mantan Moreland, legend of the 30s and 40s screen. The only film I have seen him in was King of the Zombies, in which he reduced all actors, setting, and plot around him into splinters. If he wasn’t improvising, I would be surprised, because the script was beyond horrible. Moreland was almost one of the Three Stooges, according to his Wikipedia entry. So seeing him die without much a role or reason in Spider Baby is an acute pang for me.
(2) This was Lon Chaney Jr., and Mantan Moreland’s last film. Weird, right?
Alien is one of the scariest movies ever made, for so many reasons. It’s gross, it’s alarming, but one of the main reasons I like it is that it really captures a feeling of dread that most horror movies do not. But one of the more unsettling themes of the film, which I didn’t notice until I saw it at Film Forum last year — is that outer space is just another place where you have to be able to live with yourself. And the only crew member who manages to do this has to fight with a giant alien.
My favorite scenes are all prior to the chest-exploding sequence, primarily because John Hurt is still alive and his eyes are full of bleary loathing for just about everything around him. But there are also the very clever scenes where the crew’s video equipment is failing, which are full of tension and ridiculously cinematic static.
I would move this movie higher in the ranking for Halloween, but it flubs one thing in my criteria–it has nothing to do with Halloween. TV stations used to show it around Halloween when I was growing up, however.
COSTUME IDEA: The crew of the Nostromo have these horrible / great shoes which are like a cross between K-Swiss and Converse high tops. And then there’s the silkscreened Nostromo jacket that what’s-his-face wears. Those are two items that you might just become the Halloween costume you end up wearing every day, for years.
Sadly, pictures of these sneakers are a little hard to find. They’re the uh, ones in white above. And in the sequel, Ripley wore Reebocks, which feels like a defeat to me.
This is quite possibly the most popular kid’s costume this year. I know because I ran around the West Village running errands and I saw at least five kids who were Wolverine. None of them referred to anyone as “Bub.”
I don’t think the photo really does the costume justice. Those ab muscles so pretty prominent, to the point where you could probably wedge candy bars between them, which is exactly what the hell I would do if I had abs.
Anyway, this a seriously “I bought it for my kid and I have given up as a parent” costume, but I find the multiple wolverines wandering around to be totally charming. I just wish they could stop smoking, maybe quit drinking, have meaningful dialogue with their fellow Avengers, stop quarreling with Cyclops, and sort out their issues with Jean Grey.
This costume, though–this is the one that gets confiscated at school.
If Wolverine was like this all the time, we would be in serious trouble.
This is a dumpster full of pumpkins. Pumpkins which were grown about as big as they could get for who knows how long, and have been carved and thrown away before Halloween even came and went. The only thing missing from this photo are the various pedestrians, like myself who are staring at it wondering “Why?”
It might just be time to reconsider how we decorate for this holiday, what with all the growing all the pumpkins, carving them up, illuminating them for a day, and then hiring a company to haul them away. Seems like something’s a little glitchy there.
We just need to do a few scary tests before we get to the scary operation and then we’ll send you to the scary recovery room and then we’ll let you know the scary results after we talk to your scary insurance company over the scary phone while we eat our scary danish and drink our scary coffee.
Pilates. Thanks for looking.
Hey! Can you help me out and eat some of these gross hors d’ouvres?
