Put on your favourite The Cure album and set the razor blades beside the bath tub because Valentine's Day is here again!
After a long hiatus I'm back with another batch of horror movies to watch while you "clean" your gun this evening.
But y'know what doesn't make me want to kill myself? Tubi, one of the numerous free streaming services with commercials that have basically become the current era's version of peasant vision.
Remember the time before cable came to your area and you only got three local analogue channels that came in kinda fuzzy? Well, that's Tubi, Pluto TV and Shout TV these days. There are others as well, but if you haven't already tried any of these free services because you can't sit still for 30 seconds of commercials in exchange for two hours of free entertainment, you'll be surprised by how much good content is available—especially if you're a fan of B-grade-and-lower horror movies. Besides, you're probably watching something else on your phone while the movie plays anyway.
All of the films on this year's list can be streamed for free right now in Canada. Due to licensing agreements varying per region I don't know what's available in other countries, but I'm not even fully convinced that those countries exist anyways. I went to Mexico once but I'm pretty sure it was just Calgary with fewer homeless people and drug addicts.
The Void
What better way to fill the void in your heart on Valentine's Day than with a movie about the void on the edge of our reality?
The best thing about The Void is its great practical creature effects. The story is ostensibly Lovecraftian because of the whole "breach in all that humanity knows is true" thing, but it's hard to have incomprehensible horrors beyond the limits of your imagination when they're made of foam rubber and slathered in red corn syrup. So I'd say The Void is more evocative of The Thing than Call of Cthulhu, which I suppose would make it John Carpenterian, or Kurt Russell-byterian.
(I'm personally a Keith David Adventist.)
 |
| "Y'all ever been sued by a Keith David head spider?" |
Lord of Illusions
What do you get when you cross Quantum Leap with Goldeneye? A Clive Barker film that isn't Hellraiser, apparently. It's not what I was expecting either, but I'm not a chemist.
Lord of Illusions stars Scott Bakula and Famke Janssen as private detective Harry D'Amour and Xenia Onatopp before she started doing kegels, respectively.
When I was browsing Tubi one night, looking for something to distract me from my pathetic life, I almost scrolled past this film before I read the description and recognized the name of the main character from The Scarlet Gospels—which is a really great book by Barker and a pseudo sequel to The Hellbound Heart, the novella that Hellraiser is based on.
The film isn't amazing but it's neat to see Bakula playing a character whom I always pictured looking more like Paul Blackthorne, because every paranormal P.I. looks like Harry Dresden in my mind.
 |
| Ziggy is Onatopp of this one. |
Warm Bodies
A few people I know have avoided watching Warm Bodies because they don't like Kristen Stewart. Even when I tell them that she isn't in this movie and the main actress, Teresa Palmer, just looks a lot like her, they still refuse to give it a chance for some reason. This is the damage that Twilight and the mormons have done to the world.
It's a shame because this is the best film in the "zombies, but what if...?" genre that I've seen so far. Warm Bodies is "zombies, but what if romantic comedy?" just like Fido is "zombies, but what if pets and also maybe sometimes fucktoys 👉👈?"
 |
| Only technically still warm. |
The Return of the Living Dead
Now we're finally getting to the top of the bottom of horror films.
If you like George A. Romero's "[Fill in the Blank] of the Dead" series, you'll... probably hate Return of the Living Dead, honestly. Both of them branched off from Night of the Living Dead when the writers, Romero and John Russo, couldn't agree on what to do with the story going forward.
Russo's "Return" films are pretty much the antithesis to Romero's series. The inarguably more successful "... of the Dead" films are all about using the zombie apocalypse as a backdrop for social commentary. Return of the Living Dead, meanwhile, uses zombies for gore and an excuse to show tits in a graveyard. There isn't even really an apocalypse to be had since the infection never spreads beyond a single town in any of the five films released to date.
I like most of Romero's zombie films, but none of them are as good in my opinion as the first and third "Return" movies. The rest of the series is pretty terrible, but 1 & 3 are amazing. Return of the Living Dead is the film that invented the concept of brain-eating zombies that have been referenced and parodied endlessly from The Simpsons to The X-Files. However, these ironically aren't the mindless idiot zombies from Romero's films that wander aimlessly through shopping malls and vote Conservative. The zombies in RotLD are fully conscious, remember their old lives, and are in constant pain as they feel their bodies slowly rotting away, just like a Liberal. That's the best horror movie monster pathos I've seen since Frankenstein's monster got chased out of town for looking like Fred Gwynn.
 |
| Brought to you by the Government of Canada. |
And with that, another Valentine's Day has concluded and the corpse of Saint Valentine can go back to masturbating in his grave until next year. Let me know which of these four films was your favourite to masturbate to.
Post a Comment