The Giant Claw (1957)

The forties, fifties, and sixties spawned something of a pantheon of schlock movie producers, men whose names are stills spoken of in hushed tones even today: Samuel Z. Arkoff, Henry Saperstein, K. Gordon Murray.  Also standing astride that B-movie Olympus is "Jungle Sam" Katzman, who's enormous body of work includes everything from Mark of the Gorilla to the Elvis Presley flick Harum Scarum.¹.  Katzman is well-known for producing a number of very influential sci-fi flicks in the 1950s, including a pair of Ray Harryhausen classics, It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.  Still, you can't have your hands in that many films without leaving your fingerprints on a few steamers, and today we're going to talk about one of them: The Giant Claw.

If you've ever seen the (much better) film Rodan, you've pretty much seen the The Giant Claw.  Both of the films structure their action around hazy sightings, close calls, and finally destructive attacks by an impossible huge avian monster.  In both cases the creatures are too fast to be tracked by aircraft and in any event are nearly impervious to conventional weapons.  I'm not making any claims that The Giant Claw was influenced by Rodan, but I will point out that Rodan debuted in Japan a year before The Giant Claw and in fact came out in the U.S. just a couple of months before it in 1957.  Just sayin...

In any event, The Giant Claw centers on ace test pilot Mitch McAffee, who's the first man to encounter the bird during a training flight.  Initially unable to convince his bosses in the military that he actually saw something and isn't just losing his mind, it's McAffee who eventually figures out the bird's flight pattern and allows the armed forces to intercept the beast.  You see, McAffee is able to deduce that the bird is flying in an enormous spiral pattern...despite the fact that all of its attacks, as shown on an on-screen map, take place is a line moving directly southeast. ²



Now that they can predict the bird's course, the air force sends a flight of jets to engage the monster.  This marks the first time in the film that the audience really gets to see the bird...and it's a noodly mass of feather dusters and flaring nostrils topped off by a huge white mohawk.  As anyone who watches these sorts of movies no doubt expects, conventional weapons are "worse than useless" against the bird.  In the best shots in the movie, the bird swats the aircraft out of the sky and then devours the pilots as they try to parachute to safety.

We soon find out that the vulture-like beast is a space monster.  It's nearly invulnerable because it can project an anti-matter force field for reasons that are only half-explained.  In any event, worldwide air traffic is completely grounded in the hopes of cutting off the bird's food supply.  Unfortunately, this only provokes the monster into attacking targets on the ground, gulping down cows like popcorn and laying waste to cities in its quest for food.  Eventually McAffee, who's the only character in this movie that actually does anything, tracks the bird to an enormous nest in the forest.  He discovers the beast roosting on a huge egg, which he immediately shatters with rifle fire, provoking a series of terrible reprisals.

Finally, McAffe - who at this point is also apparently the smartest theoretical physicist in the world - single-handedly builds a ray gun that fires muonic atoms.  In the movie world, this is somehow the only thing against which space birds are vulnerable.  The weapon is mounted onto a B-52 and stock footage ensues the heroes rush to destroy the bird as lays waste to New York City...but also specific buildings from L.A. and Washington D.C. because they had some footage from War of the Worlds and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers laying around.  With its force field disrupted by the muonic ray, the bird is anticlimactically felled by about three bottle rockets and the very abruptly ends.

Although it's pretty infamous these days, The Giant Claw is pretty much par for the course in terms of cheap 1950s monster flicks in terms of its mad-lib of a plot and ultra-cheesy "science".  Although it's honestly not that much worse than a lot of other flicks from the era, The Giant Claw has gained prominence in the internet zeitgeist in the last few years thanks in no small part to its inclusion in the 2009 edition of James Rolfe's extremely popular Monster Madness series of Halloween film reviews.  If nothing else, it's known for its utterly laughable monster design, which looks like a cross between Jimmy Durante and one of those old Limber Louie marionettes  Legend has it that at one point in the film's production the creature was intended to be a stop-motion effect, but budget issues forced the use of a puppet monster that looks, to borrow a phrase from Chaucer, totally flippin' ridonculous. 

Make no mistake, The Giant Claw is a bad movie.  I'm just arguing that it's not as -uniquely- bad as some folks would have you believe.  I really can't recommend going out of your way to see it, especially since the only licensed DVD version of it available in the U.S. is part of a relatively expensive Sam Katzman boxed set.  More than anything else The Giant Claw is just kind of boring; just another paint-by-numbers 1950 sci-fi flick.  If you're a huge fan of giant monster movies then maybe The Giant Claw is worth a look, but there are a lot better "death from the skies" flicks out there.  For your average Joe looking to scratch that specific itch, I'd recommend either Rodan or Q, the Winged Serpent.

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1.) Mark of the Gorilla was a Jungle Jim film, one of several Katzman worked on and which were based on a popular adventure comic strip. It was due to his early work on these sorts of films that he came to be called "Jungle Sam".
2.) It's the McAffee character who first refers to the monster as "a flying battleship", a phrase that will be uttered at least a dozen more times throughout the film and which has now become something of an internet meme.

Mortality Sucks

For the most part, I do my best to avoid talking about personal matters on the blog.  Blogs are inherently something of an ego trip, and while I may have convinced myself that some small portion of the world may care about my opinions about faith healing or Godzilla, I'm not far enough down my own rabbit hole to think that anyone wants to read my life story.  I made it a rule from the beginning that I would never ever post anything about any drama going on in my own life - I have friends to help me deal with that so I have no need to turn to the internet for it.

Tonight, I'm going to break that rule.

One of my cats died today - he had to be put down.  I know, I know, that's the sappiest first-world yuppy problem, right?  Doesn't matter.  I loved that cat, and more importantly my wife loved that cat.  His name was Tigger, and I caught him from the wild about nine years ago when he emerged from an abandoned garage near my parents' house.

Tigger the Cat, aka Sluggo, Mr. Underpants, El Tigre, and Fart Nards

He was...a cat.  Hobbies included sitting on tall things, chewing his toenails loudly, and carrying around a rainbow-colored rattle mouse.  His original role in the household was as a gift to my wife, and he got the point that he followed her around everywhere.  I'm not going to go on about him, but rest assured that he was an awesome cat for all of the reasons that anyone who owns a cat thinks their cat is uniquely great.

He started having some health issues before Christmas and despite our best efforts he went downhill very quickly.  We never got a firm diagnosis as to what was wrong with him - he just started wasting away day by day.  We did extensive - and expensive - tests for the better part of a month.  Today he went in for more lab work and they found that his liver had failed.  He had already lost more than half his body weight, could barely stand, and was unlikely to survive any aggressive treatments.  We had to let him go.

I'm kind of very extremely childishly sad that he's gone.  It's a shitty thing, to have something...someone... you care about sicken and die so suddenly.  A few weeks ago he was a happy, chubby cat and now he's just gone.

In one respect though, I feel good about it.  He died with peacefully and without pain in the arms of people who cared about him.  Plus, I can honestly say I have nothing but good memories of that cat.  That's a perk of pet ownership - you never have arguments with them.  There's no bickering, jealousy, or grudges with a cat.  They just want hang out with you and rub their buccal glands all over your stuff.  It's an amazing thing, really, to have a critter running around in your life that you feel 100% positive towards.  It means when he's gone you don't any regrets, no "coulda'-saids" or "but-I-meants" to haunt you.

It's not nearly so easy with people.  There's no afterlife in which to make amends, no matter how much we may wish there was.  The time we have is incalculably precious because it's the only time we have.  I can't help but think today that instead of a cat passing away, it could have been my wife or one of my parents, brothers, or friends - members of  the occasionally complicated, sometimes difficult, but always worthwhile network of relationships that I'm privileged to be a part of.  It's not nearly so easy to maintain those relationships as it is to be buddies with a cat, but it goes without saying that it's more than worth the effort.

I like to think that atheists...well, materialists in general, have a more...tangible, I suppose, grasp of the beauty, worth, and fragility of life than the folks who spend their days hoping for heaven.  If this is the only life we get - and I honestly believe that it is - the it's all the more important to say and do good things for the people in our lives while we have the chance.  We all lose sight of this sometimes, but tonight, at least, I can see it very clearly.

I promise the next post won't be so maudlin, but please allow me the final indulgence of posting one last picture of my pal.

Eons of matter flowing from spot to spot throughout the universe,

combined with millennia of random feline sex,

gave us nine years of this pudgy cat with underpants and a cowlick.

I miss you already, buddy.   

Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Over the years there have been a number of Christmas-themed horror films.  From Bob Clark’s proto-slasher film Black Christmas in 1974 to the surprisingly funny Santa’s Slay in 2005, Christmas horror is a subgenre with a long – but not particularly illustrious – history.  Still, if you bring up Christmas slasher flicks in casual conversation most people’s minds immediately jump to 1985’s controversial cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is one of those movies that a lot of people have heard about but a relatively small number have actually seen.  Yeah, it’s one of those movies.  It’s famous (to use that term in the loosest possible sense) due the controversy surrounding it, while the actual film is really fairly obscure.  As one might imagine, a film in 1984 depicting a guy in a Santa suit killing people really riled up a number of parent’s groups.  Even then, sometimes the outrage about this movie tends to be overstated – many parents, understanding that any children young enough to be disturbed by the film would also never actually see it, were instead angry about the placement of commercials for the movie on television.  Of course, you also had the good ol’ “War on Christmas” brigade waiting to leap out and be angry, but if they hadn’t had this movie to be angry about they’d have found something else to complain about.  Ultimately the film only lasted about two weeks in theaters, supposedly as a result of the public outcry.

            Before we begin, I’d like to point out that the version of the film I’m reviewing today is the 2003 Anchor Bay unrated DVD release.  It’s unfortunately a two-sided disc (the second side holds one of the film’s four sequels), but it does have some deleted scenes that didn’t make it into the theatrical cut of the film.  The extra scenes are from a badly degraded source, but it’s nice to have them included.

            The film opens on Christmas Eve 1971 as young Billy, his baby brother Ricky, and their parents have set off to visit their ailing grandpa in a mental institution.  Anyone who went against my advice and watched Enter the Ninja will recognize Will Hare, the actor playing catatonic grandpa, from his appearance in that film as Dollars the street merchant.  I like to think that it’s the same character in both movies – That Dollars from Enter the Ninja was so traumatized by the nonsensical insanity of that film that he ended up institutionalized back in the States.

            In any event, the instant Billy’s parents leave him alone with crazy ol’ gramps, the old man suddenly snaps out of his trance just long enough to spout off some crazy gobbledygook about Santa Claus killing people.  Needless to say, Billy little mind is blown and he spends the drive home fretting to his parents about Santa coming to kill him.  It just so happens that his parents encounter a stranded motorist in a Santa suit on a remote back road, so the pull over to help him – and to defuse Billy’s fears by letting him “meet” Santa.  Unfortunately, this Santa Claus is actually a psychopath who only moments ago blew away a gas station attendant over $31 during a robbery.  Santa shoots Billy’s dad, then inexplicably tries to rape his mom before cutting her throat.

            Billy and Ricky end up in a church orphanage in a sequence that lasts far too long.  Billy’s unable to put his trauma behind him and has violent outbursts every single Christmas.  His mental problems are exacerbated by the harsh Mother Superior, who delivers brutal beatings to anyone who’s “naughty” under her care.  (The tottering old woman even somehow manages to deliver a beating to a pair of nearly-grown teens she catches humping.)  A sympathetic nun named Sister Margaret tries to provide him with a gentle upbringing, but is constantly at odds with the authoritarian Mother Superior.  The entire orphanage sequence takes up way too much of the film, though it’s highlighted by an uproarious sequence where Billy lays out a costumed Santa with a Hail Mary haymaker.

Billy ends up outwardly fairly normal, but he’s internalized bizarre ideas about what’s naughty and what’s nice.  “Punishment is absolute, punishment is necessary, and punishment is good,” has been the Mother Superior’s creed, and this idea is always lurking on the periphery of Billy’s psyche, even after he’s grown up into a hulking teen played by Robert Brian Wilson in his lone theatrical role.  Although he still apparently lives at the orphanage, Billy finds a community job working at a local toy store.  Everything’s going pretty well for him (as the audience sees during a happy montage set to the incongruously cheerful song “The Warm Side of the Door” by Morgan Ames), but then Christmas time rolls around again.  The upcoming holiday, combined with his guilt surrounding his burgeoning attraction to his coworker Pamela, start bringing Billy’s neuroses to the fore once again.

When Billy is forced to play the role of Santa Claus at the toy store on Christmas Eve, his mental state is pushed to the absolute limit.  Playing Santa is bad enough, but the ensuing naughtiness of the office Christmas party manages to shove him over the edge of insanity. (Hasn’t that happened to everyone?)  When he walks in on his supervisor Randy trying to force himself on Pamela in the stockroom, Billy totally loses his shit and strangles Randy to death with a string of Christmas lights.  He then decides that she too was naughty and eviscerates her with a box cutter.

So begins about 40 minutes of Billy wandering the streets in his Santa suit bellowing “naughty” and dispatching people in the usual slasher movie ways.  The most creative sequence in the film, and one which was apparently heavily edited in the theatrical cut, involves Billy impaling a woman on the antlers of a deer’s head hanging on a wall.  Horror fans will recognize the antler victim as Linnea Quigley from such films as Return of the Living Dead, Pumkinhead II, and The Guyver.  Otherwise it’s a lot of hammer-to-the-face, arrow-in-the-back, axe-to-the-neck 1980s horror staples.  It’s not bad, but they didn’t run with the Christmas theme as much as they could’ve.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is one of those odd early-ish slasher movies that tries to take itself super seriously.  I’m not opposed to that per se, but this movie spends a lot of time early on trying to establish Billy’s character only to immediately have him devolve into more or less your standard slasher villain. Also, making a good “serious” horror movie requires a fair amount of finesse that this movie just doesn’t have.  The ultra-dramatic music and camera work at the ending is a textbook example of unintentional humor.  Also, the violence in this movie is pretty lingering and uncomfortable at times.  That’s kind of a staple of early slasher flicks, but it doesn’t work especially well here given the ludicrous subject matter.  I’m not saying that this movie should’ve been a comedy or anything, but I think it might have been more enjoyable to watch if hadn’t tried quite so hard to be a brooding, serious film. 

I’d also be curious to know the details of the filming schedule for this movie.  See, even though it’s set at Christmas, there’s not much snow to be seen.  In fact, in some sequences you can see that snow has been laid out in a fairly small area while yards and trees in the background are completely clear.  It’s kind of an odd thing to note, but the unseasonal weather is something that always sticks out to me about this movie.  The other special effects are pretty simple as well, though the antler murder is done nicely.  For a sense of perspective, this movie came out the same year as Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, which has vastly better visuals (and, to be fair, twice the budget).

            Silent Night, Deadly Night isn’t an easy movie to judge.  It doesn’t approach the quality of genre classics like Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street, but it’s also head and shoulders above films such as Happy Birthday to Me or Sleepaway Camp.  Like so many horror movies, this is kind of a case of personal taste.  I kind of like it, but if someone were to walk up to me on the street and ask me to recommend a good Christmas horror film (Hey, it could happen.) I’d probably recommend Santa’s Slay over Silent Night, Deadly Night, as the former is just plain more fun to watch.  Silent Night, Deadly Night is kind of interesting for the history behind it and it’s certainly not unwatchably bad…but it’s not necessarily easy to recommend either.  Also, a remake of this flick, with the abbreviated title Silent Night, came out at the end of November…so there’s that.

           As I alluded to in an earlier post, most of the movie reviews I’d planned for December are instead getting the podcast treatment over at Joe’s Awesome and Tommy Hates Everything.  The first two episodes of the 2012 Christmas special are already up, so go check it out.

Santaclysm!

Last year I got the chance to take part in a really awesome Christmas episode of Joe's Awesome and Tommy Hates Everything.  That particular Christmas episode is currently unavailable for download, but happily brand spanking new Christmas episode just went up!  It's first part of a fairly long special JATHE presentation we're calling "Santaclysm" and it deals with various offbeat film incarnations of Santa Claus through the decades. The first episode, wherein we discuss the portrayal of Santa in a couple of beloevd Rankin-Bass specials, was a ton of fun to tape.  Plus I got upgraded from regular guest to temporary guest host (kind of) for this one.  Check it out!

On a semi-related note, Tommy can apparently read my mind, because the next three episodes of Santaclysm just happen to about the exact three movies I had planned to review for my holiday festivities for the blog.  That said, I've been forced to change up my plans a bit.  I had intended to kind of avoid the most obvious Christmas horror movies this year, but my hand has been forced...so screw it.  Coming up soon will be my review of the grand-daddy of all Christmas horror flicks, that oft-maligned but rarely viewed cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night.  Please come back and join me for it!

Christmastime With Skippy

As the dozen or so of you that come by the blog for reasons other than Google Images sending here you to look for ninja pictures may have noticed, it's been pretty quiet around here since Halloween.  There are a few reasons for these, not the least of which being that the Halloween Horror Countdown was more work than I expected and I wanted a break.  It's also the case that I probably watched about 50 horror flicks in October, so I needed a break from that, too.  Not feeling like writing or watching movies makes it pretty darn hard to run a movie blog.

Wait Skippy, you might say, why worry with horror movies?  You post seasonal stuff too, so why didn't you post any Thanksgiving-related reviews?

Thanksgiving movies, huh?  Name three.  Other than Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.  Not easy, huh?  That's also why there weren't any movie reviews this month.

Now December is upon us.  As you're no doubt aware, there's no dearth of Christmas movies out there, and many of them are weird enough to fall under my purview.  There are plenty of weird Christmas-themed horror flicks out there, as well more than a couple of "straight" Christmas flicks that are more than bizarre enough to warrant inclusion here, so we've certainly got enough to work with.  I'm not going to do a countdown or anything, but things are going to start picking up around here between now and the holidays.

'Tis the season for weird movies, and I hope you'll come join in the fun.
 

Halloween Horror Countdown #1: The Evil Dead (1981)

Halloween is nigh.  We've talked about a lot of great horror movies this month, and I hope you've had fun along the way. We've come to the end of our list and now there's only one movie left.  It's a film that exemplifies what a horror flick should be.  It was made for practically nothing by a group of buddies who just wanted to make a scary movie, not concocted by an unholy mishmash of focus groups and mad-libs like so many recent flicks..  Shot in an isolated Tennessee cabin using jury-rigged equipment and homemade special effects, this film proved to be a genre masterpiece.  It's not only my top Halloween Horror Movie, but it's one of my favorite scary movies of all top.  Coming in at number one in the Halloween Horror Countdown is The Evil Dead.

When I was a kid, I used to hear my older brothers talk about The Evil Dead with something akin to frightened awe.  When I was old enough to buy these kinds of movies on my own, I picked up a VHS copy of The Evil Dead 2 at a local Target.  Frankly I was a little disappointed at the time with some of that movie's absurd humor, though I eventually grew to appreciate it.  I soon went back to Target and found the original film, also on VHS.  I hadn't seen that many horror films at this point in my life, but the night I watched The Evil Dead in my parents' darkened basement, I knew I was seeing something special.

Evil Dead is not a film that's heavy on set-up.  A group of five friends travel to a cabin in the woods for a vacation.  While fooling around in the basement of the cabin, they find a gnarled old book and a strange skull-hilted dagger.  Investigating further, they listen to an old audiotape that reveals that the book is in fact the Naturan Demanto¹, an ancient Sumerian compendium of demon resurrection spells and other nasty stuff.  The voice on the tape recites some of these spells and all hell breaks loose as demons begin to possess members of the group and even the trees themselves spring to malevolent life.



Okay, maybe that doesn't sound so unique.  So what makes this movie so good? Evil Dead succeeds in spite of its simplistic plot and shoestring budget by playing the horror straight and to the hilt.  Once the movie gets going, it doesn't break up the atmosphere with humor or irony.  The viewer gets precious little room to breathe.  This isn't a film where there's a creepy killer skulking in the shadows, it's a movie about monsters - demonic zombies - trying to rip people apart in a foaming frenzy of violence.  No one is ever killed with a quick knife in the belly.  Every single monster attack quickly turns into a brutal wrestling match, always festooned with veritable buckets of gore.  It's visceral stuff, not entirely dissimilar in tone to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and it works extremely well.

The movie does allow for some creepier moments.  When Linda, the girlfriend of our protagonist Ash, is possessed by one of the demons, she doesn't bother to attack Ash outright.  Instead, it torments him by switching back and forth between Linda's regular appearance and its grotesque demonic visage.  When Ash is attacked by another monster, the possessed cadaver of his own sister Sheryl, Linda doesn't bother to join in - she just sits in the doorway and laughs and laughs and laughs....It's unnerving stuff.  It also goes to show that even though the demons are flesh-tearing murder machines, they're also possessed of a malevolent intelligence.

Evil Dead's does a great job of allowing the setting to play naturally into the pacing of the film.  We learn early in the film, thanks to a surprisingly graphic sequence in which a woman is assaulted by animated trees, that the cabin is the only remotely safe place available to the protagonists.  Unfortunately, one of their number is soon possessed and thus the sheltered is compromised.  It forces the characters to face certain death in the woods or take their chances with the monsters already inside the cabin.  There's no real safety, no time to stop and think.  In the few sequences when any of the characters are forced to venture outside of the cabin, it's a pretty harrowing experience.  The audience knows that there are things in the woods, as we've spent much of the film watching the "evil cam" streak through the darkness in first person, shattering windows and knocking down trees.  We have no idea what they look like or what they're capable of, but we know these things are there.  Thus it makes sense for the characters to remain in the cabin to face the demons inside - they aren't stupid horror movie characters, they're just choosing the lesser of two terrible options.

I've avoided mention him so far, but Ash is kind of the elephant in the room here.  This character is, of course, the most famous role of Bruce Campbell, b-movie actor extraordinaire.  Most viewers think of Ash as a snarky, sarcastic bad-ass.  That's true of his later incarnations in the sequels, video games, and comics that Evil Dead would eventually spawn, but in the original film nothing could be further from the truth.  Ash is portrayed in this film as the most unlikely hero of all; a lanky, uncoordinated fella' who spends most of the initial demon attack pinned under a bookcase.  He's not a  pre-destined monster fighting machine, he's not the chosen one, he's just a guy. 

If anyone in this movie seems like a likely hero, it's Ash's knife-toting buddy Scott.  Hell, Scott fistfights his own possessed girlfriend, then hacks her carcass apart with an axe.  Pretty awesome, huh?  Unfortunately he also abandons his friends and tries to flee to safety through the woods.  Ash is left to fend for himself until Scott, torn to shreds by his possessed trees, staggers back to the cabin.  The moment when Scott expires, leaving Ash, and the audience, to realize that he's the last one left, is a chillingly despairing moment.  For the rest of the movie he's not so much fighting the monsters as he is just trying to survive until morning.  Alone, desperate, and frankly scared shitless, Ash may be one of the most genuine horror movie protagonists ever.

Evil Dead's special effects have a crude genuineness to them.  Caked on makeup, makeshift prostheses, and more Karo syrup blood than you can imagine all combined to create something more than the sum of its parts.  Everything looks gritty and tangible.  Granted, some of the effects look pretty primitive, such as the sequence in which Ash slices off a demon's head with an shovel, but in this sort of movie it works.  Keep in mind that this movie was made by a relatively small crew that was more or less making up the special effects as they went along.  In that context, it's pretty impressive stuff despite the occasional rough edges.

As you may have guessed, I strongly recommend this movie for anyone with even a passing interest in the horror genre.  It's been imitated, parodied, and has even spawned an upcoming remake, but the original Evil Dead remains a titan among horror films.  I've spent many a Halloween night sitting around with the lights off watching Evil Dead and passing out candy.  In terms of mandatory Halloween viewing, the only film I can imagine ever supplanting this one in my own pantheon is a certain John Carpenter flick...

Well, there you have it.  The Halloween Horror Countdown is complete.  It's been a lot of work, but it's also been a lot of fun.  I hope you've enjoyed spending October here with me.  Thanks for reading and Happy Halloween!

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1.) It's not called the Necronomicon until the sequel, much to the annoyance of those of us who've tried to make "super-cuts" of all three films put together.

Halloween Horror Countdown #2: Trick 'r Treat (2007)

You know what I really, really, like?  Anthology horror movies.  These are films that combine several unrelated vignettes into one full length film, giving you a grab bag of different stories to enjoy.   Creepshow, Tales From the Crypt, and Tales From the Dark Side may be the best known titles in this sub-genre, but there are plenty of these films out there. Films like these understand that sometimes scares are best served short and snappy, and they tend to eschew the plodding padding that some other horror features are packed with in lieu of a plot.  When I was putting this list together there was one anthology flick that absolutely had to be on it.  It's the newest film in the countdown and one that may not have made onto a general roll call of my five favorite horror movies, but since we're focusing on Halloween, this one just  has to get the nod.  Coming in at #2 on my Halloween Horror Countdown is Trick 'r Treat.  I should note that the dating on this one is a bit peculiar.  Trick 'r Treat was finished in 2007 but didn't actually see the light of day in any kind of a broad release until it came out on DVD in 2009.

Trick 'r Treat consists of four stories connected by a wraparound, which is pretty standard fare for this sort of movie.  In The Principal, we meet Steve Wilkins, the local school principal who just happens to enjoy poisoning kids on Halloween and burying them in his backyard.  The School Bus Massacre Revisited finds a group of youths pulling a cruel prank on a disabled girl by luring her to the site of long-ago bus crash, only to find themselves confronted by the undead. In Surprise Party, Anna Paquin plays Laurie, a self-conscious young woman trying to find a date to a Halloween party thrown by her sister.  Instead she finds herself stalked by a serial killer, but the film twists this old trope into a satisfying ending.  Finally we have Sam, in which a mysterious masked creature torments an old curmudgeon who refuses to participate in the Halloween festivities.  The shorts run the gamut of horror genres, from serial killers to zombies and beyond.



Interestingly, all of the stories are meant to be taking place concurrently on the same Halloween night.  The shorts are somewhat interwoven, and sharp-eyed viewers will be able to see bits of each tale going on in the backgrounds of others.  That's nothing huge, but it's a fun touch.  Also present in each story is Sam, a diminutive figure in pajamas and a burlap sack mask.  Although he only really takes part in the last story, he's around in all of them, watching the grotesque events with a strange look of approval.  A bizarre Halloween imp, Sam stalks his victims with sharpened lollipops, razor blade-filled candy bars, and hard candy laced with broken glass.  Apparently based on a long-ago animated short by the film's creator Michael Dougherty, Sam's a fun, creepy little character and a great mascot.

Sam notwithstanding, Principal Wilkins, played by Dylan Baker from the Raimi Spider-Man films, is easily my favorite character in the movie if only because of the dry-matter-of fact way he goes about his business.  The "serial killer next door" motif is kind of old hat these days, but Baker pulls it off well.  He's also our introduction to the "rules" of the movie - By telling  one of his victims about the role of Halloween traditions, such as jack-o-lanterns and handing out treats, in "protecting" people, he's actually setting up for some of Sam's murderous scenes.  Principal Wilkins also shows up in a second story, but in a rather different situation.

Trick 'r Treat, like so many horror anthologies before it, gleefully draws inspiration from the horror comics of the 1950s.  This means that they strive (largely successfully) to balance humor and scares, but they're also all based around twist endings that aren't especially hard to see coming.  At no point will any viewer mistake this movie for brain food, but it's not intended to be.  Trick 'r Treat is all about creepy Halloween fun, and at this it does quite well.  As I mentioned earlier, this movie may not have a had a place in a list of the five best horror films in general, but for Halloween it's required viewing. 

Well, it's just a few days before Halloween and there's only one movie left on my Halloween Horror Countdown. While this list has admittedly been in flux during the entire month, there hasn't been a single iteration of it with the same film in the top slot.  Check back on Tuesday for the conclusion of the Halloween Horror Countdown!