The Ghoulish Plot: A group of 70’s era teens are on a road trip and pick up a hitchhiker who turns out to be crazy. Then they stop at a gas station with no gas, so they find their way to a house that seems to be abandoned. As they start to explore they find out they’re not alone and not only is there a large, silent murderer wielding a chainsaw, but an entire crazy hillbilly family out for blood.

Of all the interpretations of Ed Gein’s insanity, this one remains the most disturbing (at least in my opinion). It’s also very of its time in the mid-70s: nobody is to be trusted, everybody is out for themselves, gas is in short supply and, as always, never ever stop anywhere in rural Texas.

If you’re at all into horror movies and you’ve somehow never seen this, it’s an unabashed classic that isn’t necessarily for every year at Halloween…but when you haven’t seen it in a few years, holy SHIT does it hit hard. It’s just gruesome and greasy and foreboding and threatening in all the ways Rob Zombie tries to make every one of his movies and never quite nails it.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: early on, the villain Leatherface comes out of nowhere, grabs one of the teens and does something so horrific in the span of a few seconds that fully brings you up to speed on what the stakes are. It’s a super-effective and scary moment that sets the tone for the rest of the flick.

Spookiness Factor: bloodthirsty rednecks in rural Texas? High spookiness factor. Yikes.

Rating: 9 out of 10 full-size Snickers

The Ghoulish Plot: Raccoon City, right after the first incident with the T-Virus. Our two heroes, Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy, are headed to Raccoon City unaware that there are bloodthirsty zombie hordes out to get them. They must get to the police station and then find their way to safety by collecting weapons, solving puzzles and most importantly, blasting zombies in the head again and again.

This is another video game but it’s a perfect one for October/Halloween. The earlier game review in this series I posted, “Resident Evil 4,” is a sequel but nowhere near as scary or effective at creeping you out as this one. That one is an action game, THIS one is very much “survival horror,” whatever the hell that means.

I was legitimately spooked out numerous times by the way the game manipulates you into thinking you’re safe and then surprising you, or just providing a nonstop sense of dread when a particular monster is relentlessly coming after you and you have literally NO way to stop it.

I played the remake version on PS4, and the controls and graphics feel and look great. And bonus: the game is lengthy enough to be worth diving into, but not a 100+ hour marathon of having to retrieve medallions from shrines or whatever in order to get the torch so you can have a magic arrow or something.

The Scariest Part of the Game: Mr. X; once you have him on your tail you’re always at high alert and very aware of how limited your ammo supply is.

Spookiness Factor: Very, very high. Started playing this with the lights off and surround sound going and eventually started keeping the lights on. There are bumps and creaks and zombies breaking through windows at the worst possible moments.

Rating: 8 out of 10 Monster Energy Drinks

The Ghoulish Plot: after not writing these October reviews for a few years I was under no illusion that it would be an internet sensation; this is a WordPress blog I’ve used only to post show details and videos for years and there’s nothing the internet needs less than more movie reviews.

So this month has been a fun writing exercise aimed at the couple-dozen folks who are stopping by regularly. And my guess is that at least a handful of those folks will see this combo and think, “that’s a pretty great match.” Cuz it IS. I’m a genius, praise me, and send me all your money.

Both movies are set in that bygone era of moviemaking filled with silly horror tropes and gimmicks and writer/directors trying to carve out a niche for themselves. “Ed Wood” is based on the real life of the guy who directed “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” and “Matinee” is based on a real-life producer. Both of these were directed by people who were at the height of their powers (Tim Burton and Joe Dante, respectively), both include great performances from their casts and both feature a look into the cost of ambition and self delusion about artistic skill, all wrapped up in the world of corny monster movies.

“Ed Wood” has been a favorite of mine since it came out, and is part of the 4K Blu-Ray collection. I hadn’t seen “Matinee” in years and it holds up supremely well. Are they scary? Only if you compare yourself and your ambition to the protagonists of these films as they try and (mostly) fail to succeed despite their willingness to do whatever it takes. Plus there’s an Oscar-winning Bela Lugosi performance and a movie-within-a-movie called “Mant” that is just fantastic.

The Scariest Part of the Movie(s): that moviemaking like this doesn’t happen anymore. I mean, Tim Burton fell off HARD after Ed Wood was released and it felt almost like he blew out the pipes completely. Joe Dante has continued working but after Gremlins 2 and this, he stopped getting the same carte blanche (even though both of those are better than the Gremlins movie that made all the money).

Spookiness Factor: if you yourself have ever pursued something creative, you will wonder if you are anything like Ed Wood, and it will haunt your dreams.

Rating: 10 out of 10 Twix

The Ghoulish Plot: In the halcyon days of the 1980s, things were different. You could smoke cigarettes literally everywhere, sugary cereals were a part of “a complete breakfast,” and people everywhere looked to a big fat cat who hated Mondays and loved eating lasagna to help us celebrate holidays.

Garfield wakes up on Halloween day to realize it’s Halloween and he can go get candy that night, so he puts together a pirate costume and heads out in the evening to fill up a sack of goodies…only to encounter ghouls and ghosts. Greedy for as much candy as possible, Garfield finds a rowboat and tries to take it to another neighborhood for even more treats, only to find the boat floating to a tiny island with a creepy house on it.

Once he arrives, they find a weird old man who tells them that the island is the location of a buried pirate treasure, and at Midnight the ghosts of those pirates will return. Then the old guy bails and leaves them stuck at the island, and then the ghosts show up and Garfield and his pal Odie have to make a run for it. Will they get home and get to enjoy their candy and catch the latest episode of Dynasty? It’s an animated special from the 80s, so probably!

This animated special somehow made it into the annual rotation for my sister and I growing up, and while it’s no longer a Halloween staple and it’s generally pretty corny and silly and literally every kid I’ve ever tried to show it to since thinks it’s dumb and slow, it’s a fun nostalgia watch every few years. If you grew up when Garfield was at his peak and somehow even inspiring Heathcliffe-era copycats and you’re up for some pretty mediocre jazz songs about finding a costume, then this one is your jam.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: the old man on the island is way scarier than he needed to be. Everything else in this is pretty lame, but some animator must have decided, “fuck it, let’s give some kids nightmares.”

Spookiness Factor: almost zilch, except for the old man.

Rating: 5 out of 10 lasagnas

The Ghoulish Plot: right off the bat, this movie features the first acting role for Paul Reubens after his porn theater scandal, and I love that in 2024 he’s literally the least problematic person involved with this movie as the writer and several of the stars have gone on to prove themselves sex pests, predators and/or right-wing nut jobs. Not Luke Perry, though. Luke is still cool.

Anyway: valley girl discovers she’s “The Slayer,” one of a long tradition of women who have a preternatural disposition to hunt and kill vampires. She also happens to live in a town and go to school at a spot destined for invasion by a superpowered ancient vampire and his gaggle of vampires, so she undergoes training and begins to kill off all the vamps on her way to the big baddie to save her town.

This movie was a precursor to the far superior TV show, which was also created and executive produced by Joss Whedon, who has created and director some very cool stuff while also turning out to be a gigantic scumbag. And star Kristy Swanson later fell down the conservative rabbit hole and became an election denying anti vaxxer who now just makes movies with James Woods and Dean Cain and Kevin Sorbo that are strongly endorsed by The Heritage Foundation.

This is mostly a horror-comedy that leans heavily on the comedy side, and in a turn that I never thought my brain would think or my fingers would type, the whole California Valley Kid shtick was done much better in the Pauly Shore/Brendan Fraser movie “Encino Man.” Just typing those words out hurt me in ways I can never fully articulate.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: I have no idea how somebody goes from “I starred in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “hey, maybe the Earth IS flat” but 2024 is fucking weird, dude.

Spookiness Factor: Almost none

Rating: 2 out of 10 Red Vines

The Ghoulish Plot: A couple moves into a big old house with their family sometime in the late 70s. Turns out, the house was the location of some pretty awful witchy murders many years ago and the spirit of that very bad person still haunts the house, seeking to possess mothers and kill their children.

The family finds Lorraine and Ed Warren, who in the movie are very good people who help people deal with supernatural bad things and who in real life were complete and total scumbags who played on people’s emotions and religious beliefs to make a buck. But in the movie, they’re played by attractive movie stars and are not shysters with an Ouija board.

If you’ve somehow never seen one of these before, the first flick in this ever-expanding Conjuringverse of demon nuns and demon dolls is still by far the most effective and entertaining of the whole bunch, and (arguably) the only one with enough solid acting talent to raise it above the spook-house-in-movie-form the rest of the jumpy-scary movies have devolved into.

This is also the horror movie James Wan opted to make after his success with the “Saw” franchise, which devolved into dumber and dumber plot lines and inane traps and morality nonsense. This is a well-made modern haunted house movie with some fun jumps and surprises, and after it’s done you can just skip pretty much the whole rest of the Conjuring universe movies. And also do not look up Ed and Lorraine’s Wikipedia before you watch this; they were HUGE pieces of shit in real life.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: this movie can still make me jump in multiple spots. This time it was a specific scene involving hide-and-seek/clap, but there’s nothing particularly gory or gross.

Rating: 7 out of 10 Chick Tracts

The Ghoulish Plot: two witchy sisters are born into a family of witches with a curse that any man they love is doomed to die. Their dad meets this fate and their mother dies “of a broken heart” (nobody ever dies of this anymore, right?) so they go live with their even more witchy aunts who teach them about being super witchy as the girls both look ahead to how they want to live their lives romantically to try and avoid having to go through the same problems as their mom.

Eventually they get older and the girls take very different paths: one leaves and becomes a party girl, and the other stays and gets married and has a family and opens a store selling fancy shampoos and soaps and lotions at extravagant prices, a precursor to all the “natural” Etsy concoctions and treatments. The only thing missing from the equation is if it were made in 2024 she’d probably be anti-vaxx and homeschool her kids.

The party girl gets mixed up with a bad guy and calls her sister for help, and they accidentally kill him, then try to resurrect him with their witchy powers. It goes awry, and then a cop from Arizona starts sniffing around for the dead ex-boyfriend while also sniffing around the other sister.

Can they stay out of jail? Can they exorcise the demon of the bad ex-boyfriend from their lives? Will people really spend $88 on a tube of lotion if you say it has herbs that reduce facial lines? How many songs from Stevie Nicks can we fit on a soundtrack? All these questions will be answered.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: at one point, Aidan Quinn was considered a romantic lead. Now, he is only allowed to act when we need somebody to portray a Founding Father in something. Oh hey, a Sam Adams biopic on Starz? Thaw out Aidan Quinn!

The Spookiness Factor: pretty minimal on the scares for this one. We watched it as a palette cleanser after “Terrifier” and boy, did it do the trick.

Rating: 6 out of 10 5th Avenue bars

The Ghoulish Plot: two regular 20-something women go out for Halloween, and at the end of the night encounter a sadistic evil clown who proceeds to brutally maim and murder everybody he comes across. Literally, that’s the WHOLE plot.

I’d seen and heard things about these movies, and the third one was just released so I figured I may as well check this out. I was big into horror movies from the late 90s into the 00s but dropped out of it when new movies began moving towards the “Saw” franchise, which was just gore and torture porn with some elements designed to make really, really dumb people feel smart while they mostly watched to see people get murdered in more and more ornate ways.

This has literally nothing in it attempting to be anything more than it is: gory murders by a clown for 90 minutes. And it accomplishes this remarkably well; the special effects and makeup and gore are top-notch. They spent so much money making these elements perfect that they clearly had to reduce their budget for “actors” who are good at “acting” but hey, you’re not watching for Shakespeare.

If you like horror that is mostly just gruesome kills one after the other with no rhyme or reason or logic or justification, and then at the end a twist which makes it all supernatural in order to ensure endless sequels, here you go! It’s a theme park ride made as a movie, and it knows exactly what it is and isn’t trying to be more than that. If you’re into it you’ll love it, but I will never watch another of these in my life.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: there’s a moment with a hacksaw that people who have seen the movie will certainly know very, very well that is beyond gruesome. It’s also a ringing endorsement of that hacksaw brand, ‘cuz that thing must be crazy sharp.

Spookiness Factor: it’s a clown killing people in a creepy old warehouse building, but I wasn’t really spooked out whatsoever.

Rating: 3 out of 10 Three Musketeers

The Ghoulish Plot: a writer (because the story was written by Stephen King) returns to his home in Maine (again, Stephen King) at the same time that an ancient vampire has arrived to set up shop in the same creepy old house the writer remembers being old and creepy when he was a kid.

Well, you know how vampires are – soon enough they’re eating people and turning them into the walking undead who crave human blood and end up floating around outside people’s houses at all hours of the night. As the town succumbs to this terrifying creature, the writer and a small band of friends tries to stop them from destroying everything and everybody they’ve ever loved.

This book was turned into a TV miniseries in the 80s and that is now available as a 3-hour movie, but it’s also wooden and slow so this version was made with the idea of taking out most of the character development and sense of dread and foreboding and just make it a fast-paced kick-ass vampire flick with some funny quips mixed in. It was also apparently shot a couple years ago and held back to be dumped onto streaming close to Halloween for a sugary-sweet harmless flick that you will start forgetting minutes after you’re done watching it.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: there’s a moment where one of the main group who had been turned into a vampire is staked to the heart and falls and one lone tear falls down their face, and in that brief moment you see the regret as they accept their fate. A brief glimpse into a deeper beating heart in a movie that has almost none to begin with.

Spookiness Factor: it’s a Stephen King story about vampires in a creepy little town, but this feels mostly like a Marvel movie.

Rating: 4 out of 10 Tropical Nerds

The Ghoulish Plot: Tess is in Detroit for a job interview and has rented an AirBNB for her stay. She arrives late at night to discover that somebody else is already in the rental and appears to have also booked the place. Initially creeped out, they arrange for Tess to sleep in the bedroom and he’ll stay on the couch. Then she realizes that somebody opened her door at night…then she finds a secret passage in the basement. THEN they find even more secrets and find out who…or what…is coming out of the passageways.

The house is owned by a scumbag actor who bought it as an investment property, but his inability to stop being a sex pest to costars has left him in need of money, so he flies to Detroit to inspect the place before selling it, and then finds himself being sucked into the situation.

This one is fairly new (released in 2022) and I’d heard good things, and if I say much more about the plot it may ruin the experience for those who haven’t seen it yet. Once this one cranks into full gear it’s a freight train with a combination of intense dread and jump scares, and it still manages to pack in a little bit of a social message (like all great horror flicks) even when you’re watching somebody’s head go kerblooey. A surprise for me, this one may find its way into the regular rotation of horror flicks for October in the future.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: are we STILL portraying Detroit as a rundown blighted town? I know this was released in 2022, so it was probably shot in 2021 and conceived of pre-Covid, but it’s getting silly to see downtown Detroit portrayed in media (and by Presidential candidates) as this rotting hellhole, then you go to downtown Detroit for real and it’s packed stadiums and bars and people in those stupid pedaly-bars and hip restaurants. Catch up, gang.

Spookiness factor: you think the movie is gonna be one thing and then it goes in a completely different direction. Then it goes in yet ANOTHER direction and forces you to reckon with a shitbag character played by somebody who is typically nice, and then it changes directions again. It keeps you guessing, a great combo for horror.

Rating: 8 out of 10 Laffy Taffys