I broke my 6 week streak of seeing a new release theatrical movie because fuck Marvel, so this week's kino of the week was Tenebrae (1982). An excellent giallo from the master, Dario Argento. I'm still pretty new to the genre, but I'm trying to add them to my knowledge base. I've heard people say this is is one of his best, but I still like Deep Red better. 8/10
other stuff I watched this weekend
Underwater (2020) - A soggy Alien knock-off featuring Kristen Stewart with a platinum blonde buzzcut (described by another character as a "beautiful flat-chested elven creature), Cthluhu, and not much else so unless those two things appeal to you, avoid. 11/10
Bloody Moon (1981) - A joyless giallo/slasher from Jess Franco that just staggers from one murder to the next, which some really dumb people in really dumb scenes in between. Was once in banned in Britian as a "Video Nasty" and even on the Blu-Ray a few seconds of violence were obviously trimmed out of the original German prints and then only spliced back in later from a low quality workprint (a few seconds of a women getting decapitated by a buzzsaw and a guy getting a pen stabbed through the neck), but honestly Britian wasn't missing much. 1/10
Tremors (1990) - Kevin Bacon's finest hour. 10/10
House on Haunted Hill/13 Ghosts (1999/2001) - Look, I'm not saying it's time for a critical reappraisal of this duology of William Castle remakes....but I'm not not saying it. Both of these movies were critically roasted, but did they really deserve that much scorn? They're basically R-rated Scooby Doo episodes with amazing production value and set design; yeah they're ridiculous but so were the originals. House is imho the better of the pair, with Geoffrey Rush as the theme park tycoon, Famke Janssen as his unloving wife, and some decent performances by Jeffery Combs, Taye Diggs, and Peter Gallagher. And Chris Kattan is it for some reason. But the star is the crumbling Art Deco sanitarium, it was such a cool set. Decent scares, decent kills, I have a lot of fondness for this movie. 7/10
13 Ghosts is significantly the weaker of the two, but I still have a little bit of nostalgia for this movie too. The Scooby Doo factor is cranked up to 11 this time. Although that's part of the problem, because much of the movie is forced to be carried by the acting chops of Shaggy himself Mathew Lillard and also Rah Digga who's not exactly an actor. (At least Shannon Elizabeth's screen time was limited.) But even Tony Shalhoub wasn't great in this movie, he just was just kinda confused and yelled a lot. Like HOHH though, the star is the house, this time a crazy-ass glass house covered with Latin ghost containment spells and ghost traps. There's a lot of weird mechanisms, and sliding walls, and spinning shit that doesn't make any sense because it's magic. I actually expected to like 13 Ghosts more than I did upon rewatching it, it does get tedious and repetitive by the end. They just keep running down identical glass hallways for an hour while one ghost after another pops out to scare them. Some of the ghost designs were cool, some were less cool. I at least give them props for going with mostly traditional makeup effects. The lawyer getting bisected was still a great kill. 4/10
