Weekend horrors.

Movie-lovers embrace no other holiday quite like Halloween, and if we had our way, it'd rave on throughout October. And actually, as Gary Dretzka points out at Movie City News, we're just about there. "This year, too, Hollywood will scare up even more holiday-related revenues, thanks to the proximity of Friday the 13th to Halloween." He offers "a sampling of this season's spine-tinglers."

"Who'd have thought that the best slasher pic to come along in a while would hail from Korea?" asks Grady Hendrix in an appreciation of To Sir, With Love: "By the time the credits roll, reason and logic have gone out the window and what you're left with is a most excellent horror flick that has no pretensions to any greater goal than to sit comfortably in the video store between Ticks and Tourist Trap."

Updated through 10/15.

Bill Gibron, blogging for PopMatters: "No one is writing [John] Carpenter off completely - his oeuvre is too overpacked with potential to toss it aside forever - but it does look like a once prominent personality is falling further and further down the horror hierarchy. Here's hoping he recovers before reaching rock bottom. After all, Tobe Hooper has the utter has-been angle covered quite well."

As it happens, the Telegraph's Marc Lee talks with Kevin Smith about Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Yes, the second one. "'It's a kinda out-there choice,' he says. 'But it's a movie I do love dearly and one that I appreciate even more having done Clerks II. You're talking about a sequel to a much-loved, no-budget original that was perceived as not nearly as good. I totally feel Hooper's pain.'"

Catching up with 31 Days of Horror at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: Jenny Jediny on The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth; Adam Balz on The People Under the Stairs and Teddy Blanks on The Last House on the Left; Thomas Scalzo on Grizzly and The Last Man on Earth; Tom Huddleston on Faust; Marlin Tyree on Onibaba; Leo Goldsmith on Demon Seed; and Rumsey Taylor on Friday the 13th.

The Los Angeles Times is running a Halloween package that includes "LA R.I.P.," a "Hollywood Terror Tour"; pix from "some of the greatest suspense/horror films of all time"; and a piece from Hugo Martin: "Tucked away in the rocky canyons, the serene neighborhoods and the steep hillsides of Southern California are the creepy settings to some of Hollywood's most frightening moments."

"What makes The Grudge 2 so bad?" Jeffrey M Anderson counts the ways at Cinematical. Related: Lesley O'Toole talks with Sarah Michelle Gellar for the Independent.

Online browsing and viewing tip. Poltergay, via MCN.

Updates, 10/15: Kyu Hyun Kim finds Im Kyung-soo's Bystanders, "a halfway decent effort gutsy enough to lay all its cards on the table in the first twenty minutes." Also at Koreanfilm.org, Darcy Paquet on Kim Eun-kyung's low budget Roommates: "[O]f all the horror films to debut this summer, this one is the most consistent in its vision, and for me the most memorable."

For Laura Kern, writing in the New York Times, Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare is "a 1970's-style horror oddity that could pass for a perverse experiment masterminded by a mad scientist." In the Voice, Joshua Land finds that it "sadly fails to live up to its title."

"[W]hile horror films are rarely successful at being both mischievous and smart, The Barber is somehow both and neither," writes Adam Balz at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Online viewing tip #2. Toxic Mango, via Todd at Twitch, where he wonders how it got slapped with an X in the Philippines: "This is a pretty straightforward morality tale that plays on the Garden of Eden story - albeit a modified version with a sludge zombie and fatal intercourse - and is not explicit in the least. It boggles the mind."

Posted by dwhudson at October 14, 2006 2:45 PM