Memorable Moments in Horror - Part 9

*The old lady dead in the dryer in My Bloody Valentine (1981).



*The unsettling quiet of Dead Birds.



*The dead Mrs. Ganush vomiting into Christine's mouth in Drag Me To Hell.



*Cut in half by wire in Ghost Ship.



*Stuck in a box of body parts in The Hills Have Eyes (2006).



*Ripping Frank apart in Hellraiser.



*Down the pipe in Jeepers Creepers.


*Christian Bale's weight in The Machinist.


*Joey Lawrence getting shot in the head in Rest Stop.



*The pit full of 'mistakes' in The Resurrected.

Memorable Moments in Horror - Part 8

And still, there are more.....

*The last scene in Psycho with Norman/Mother in the police station.

*Dinner with the family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

*Death by aluminum baseball bat in Rob Zombie's Halloween.

*The hand coming out of the grave at the end of Carrie.

*Piano wire dismemberment in Audition.

*Poor Sgt. Howie at the end of The Wicker Man (1973).

*Dracula's piercing eyes in the original 1931 version.

*Radu's long-ass fingernails in Subspecies.

*The scene where Dr. Frankenstein is screaming "It's Alive!"

*The ethereal floating child ghost in The Devil's Backbone

Orphan: Further justification for why I don't have kids.

I bought this movie the week it was released, and planned on watching it on or near to Halloween, simply because it was something new and I wouldn't have to watch something I already owned on the biggest holiday of the year.
However...I had a wedding to go to on Halloween night (yes, it was a costume-required wedding - fun!) and was too tired to commit to the movie afterwards, thinking I may fall asleep. So I ended up turning out all the lights in the house and watching the '68 version of Night of the Living Dead - again.
I digress....

So...I finally watched Orphan a few nights ago, and I really have to say I enjoyed it quite a bit.
The hubby liked it as well, and he didn't fall asleep- so that's a good sign.
I've read alot of reviews that said it derailed about halfway through from a creepy thriller to a downright nutty debacle of horror. I can't agree there. There's no teenagers getting hacked up, no horrific curse to overcome, and not a zombie or vampire to be seen.

I liked the rather slow build up. It was unnerving at first. You just knew something was wrong with the girl from the minute you see her in the orphanage. And the twist near the end, if you want to call it that, did take me by surprise.

By casting good, reputable actors in the film, it upped it's class factor immediately. And the plotline wasn't really good girl gone bad. It was more like bad girl gone ballistic.




Kate (Vera Farmiga) and John (Peter Sarsgaard) have been through some recent bouts of bad luck and bad decisions. They lost a third child to a stillborn death, Kate has been dealing with depression and alcoholism, and John has resorted to affairs to keep occupied. We learn all this within a few minutes of the film's start, so we can come to grips with why they would even need or want to adopt a child into this situation. They have overcome their various woes and have decided to adopt an older child to give it the love they had saved for Jessica (the stillborn child)... Huh? Whatever.
They already have two other children. A son Daniel, (Jimmy Bennett) who resents the decision they made to adopt, and a daughter (the beautiful little Aryana Engineer) Max (short for Maxine...yeah, I know), who is deaf from an accident by the pond in the yard - apparently Kate was supposed to be watching her but was in a drunken stupor. Typical class-act parents. Where are Children and Youth Services when you need them?

So they go to the orphanage, run by Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder). The Sister tells them to look around, and John happens upon a young girl painting, alone in a room. He starts up a conversation with Esther (the very good Isabelle Fuhrman) and feels she is quite special.

Yeah, she's special alright. After they bring her home she proceeds to kill a bird in the yard and pushes a classmate off the playground slide, fracturing the girl's ankle. But even though Max has seen what happened, she has the sense to be enough afraid of her that she covers for her, saying the classmate slipped. Daniel doesn't have the time of day for Esther, and at dinner one night even goes as far as saying she is NOT his sister.

And let's face it folks, Esther is one weird bird. She wears frilly dresses all the time and ribbons around her wrists and neck that she never takes off. In fact, when someone does try to remove the neck ribbon, she throws a Rain Man-caliber fit.

Her classmates hate her. She seems well above average intelligence, saying things that quite often begets someone of her age. Playing one parent off the other is like an Olympic-level sport for her, and she could win the Gold Medal. And she owns her brother and sister, scaring them into complete submission to her will.

Sister Abigail calls to check up on her, learns of the schoolyard accident, and for some reason then finds it pertinent to tell Kate that Esther tends to always be around when things go wrong. Something that would have been good to know BEFORE the adoption took place, don't you think? Anyway, Esther overhears Sister Abigail talking about her and proceeds to make that problem go away with a hammer. She forces Max to help her hide the body.

Things start escalating, and by that I mean Esther starts threatening Daniel that she'll "cut his hairless little prick off" if he tattles on her foul deeds. She burns down the treehouse - where she hid the bloody hammer - while Daniel is inside. He escapes, but ends up in the hospital, where Esther then tries to finish him off by suffocating him.

Meanwhile, John and Kate (okay, I just realized the parent's names were John and Kate...as if we don't hear enough of that phrase in pop culture. Ugh!) begin arguing incessantly, with John coming to Esther's rescue at every turn, not realizing the evil incarnate that occupies his home. And Esther has made Kate seem like such a neglegent, horrible mother that John tells Kate she needs to go back to rehab.

Kate knows something is very, very wrong, and tries to convince John they need to look into Esther's past a little closer. He disagrees, so she does it on her own.
Needless to say, what she finds out ends up being the twist - if you can call it that. I would call it an almost unbelievable resolution. Esther's past makes Charles Manson look like Santa Claus. And by the time the dad gets his head out of his ass and figures things out, he's blindsided too far to help wrangle his world back together.

While seemingly implausible near the end, it still was a fun ride. Clichéd in some ways, but still entertaining. Isabelle Fuhrman's Russian accent is totally passable and unmistakably creepy. I still couldn't call it a horror film, per se...I'd opt for the term 'suspense thriller' perhaps. But Esther is one sick individual. I can't place her above Damien from The Omen, but she's right up there with Macaulay Culkin in The Good Son.

Memorable Moments in Horror - Part 7

*Nail through the scrotum in The Serpent and the Rainbow

*The first ten minutes of 28 Weeks Later

*The ghost in the bathtub in What Lies Benath

*The ghoul in Carnival of Souls

*"I live in the weak and wounded" from Session 9

*Disembowelment in The Last House on the Left

*Exploding head in Scanners

*The impact tremor before the T-Rex arrives in Jurassic Park

*In Single White Female, when Hedy gets her hair done exactly like Allie's.

*All those blackbirds on the monkey bars in The Birds

Where to buy cool horror tees -

Recently I was asked where I got the t-shirt I had on in this picture:






I got it from this website: Last Exit To Nowhere.
They have absolutely great tees - all from places in horror (and other genres), such as Amity from Jaws and The Overlook Hotel from The Shining.



One word of warning - the prices are in pounds -they ship from England - so please be aware of the conversion charges.

At the very least, check out the site.

The Camp Crystal Lake shirt, however, is now red print on black instead of the gold I have.





http://www.lastexittonowhere.com/

Memorable Moments in Horror - Part 6

*Zombie baby in Dawn of the Dead (2004)




*The gas station attendant's death in Splinter




*Demonic face flash in the subway in The Exorcist



*The nasty mallet hit in The Midnight Meat Train



*The major traffic accident at the start of Final Destination 2



*"There's someone in the backseat!" from Urban Legend



*The first time Count Orlock shows up in Nosferatu



*Dr. Gordon sawing off his own goddamned foot in Saw



*"There's something on the wing of the plane!!!" from Twilight Zone: The Movie



*Sawing off that poor German tourist's legs in The Ruins

Memorable Moments in Horror - Part 5

*The crawling head scene from The Thing




*When the babysitter finds out the killer is in the house with her in When A Stranger Calls




*The creepy backwoods witch in Pumpkinhead



*Lawrence Olivier asking Dustin Hoffman "Is it safe?" in Marathon Man




*The attack on the moors in An American Werewolf in London





*Arrow through Kevin Bacon's neck in Friday the 13th





*The "Sloth" victim in Seven (man, I thought that dude was dead!)



*Freddy's long freaky arms in A Nightmare on Elm Street




*Pulled apart by eighteen wheelers in The Hitcher




*The german shepherd's sad death in I Am Legend
(No, I can't put a photo of a dead dog on here, I just can't.)

Memorable Moments in Horror - Part 4

Moving on...

*That friggin' clown in Poltergeist

*Death by sufuric acid in Untraceable

*The ball coming down the steps in The Changeling - after he'd thrown it off a bridge earlier

*The title character appearing in the graveyard in The Woman in Black

*Broken off fingernails lining the sides of the well in The Silence of the Lambs

*The trio of killers in The Strangers explaining that they picked the couple out "because you were home"

*That cutter chick slicing maggots out of her skin in Boogeyman 2

*The tree rape in The Evil Dead

*Michael Shannon ripping his teeth out in Bug

*Claustrophobia galore in The Descent (before you ever see the creatures)

Memorable Moments in Horror - Part 3

And so we continue...
Here's part 3.

*Alien chest burst

*Yacking up intestines in City of the Living Dead

*Rabbit stew in Fatal Attraction

*Trailing intestines after run in with train in Paranoid Park

*Taking out Tim Roth's knee caps in Funny Games

*Dog pulling out guts in Dog Soldiers

*Brody throwing chum and getting a shock in Jaws

*Spinal cord severing in Wolf Creek

*Splinter into the eye in Fulci's Zombie

*Decapitation via hulking piece of furniture in Haute Tension

Memorable Moments in Horror - Part 2

More of my favorite (and most memorable) horror movie scenes...

(This could almost be the Stephen King adaptation version, now that I look at it.)

*The tent scene in The Sixth Sense

*The hobbling scene in Misery (hey, in the book she used an ax!)

*Zelda from Pet Sematary

*"All work and no play make Jack a dull boy"

*Cujo slamming into the car

*Death by fire extinguisher in Irreversible

*Zombies eating intestines in Night of the Living Dead

*Spiders coming out of the guy's body in The Mist

*All the blood and scissor usage in Inside

*Those damn twins in The Shining

Memorable Moments in Horror - Part 1

First I have to apologize for being "away from my desk" these last ten days or so.
I had posting burnout from all those quotes in October and needed a break.

So I was wondering what to post about (cause I can't seem to get my ass in gear to critique the last several horror movies I've seen) and thought I'd do my own personal list of "scariest movie moments"...

Yeah, I know Bravo has done at least three specials on this very subject... but everyone's opinions vary. Some of these were most certainly mentioned before - by me, even - but there are many that weren't. That said, I think I'll rephrase it as "Memorable Moments in Horror".
I think I'll post them in groups of ten, so in no particular order other than how they come to me, here goes.

*Samara coming out of the well (and later the damned tv) in The Ring

*Creepy ghost girl crawling down the steps at the end of The Grudge

*The hitchhiker in Creepshow 2 - "Thanks for the ride, lady!"

*The achilles tendon slice in Hostel

*Eva Galley in Ghost Story (pick a scene, any scene)


*Cerina Vincent shaving her legs in Cabin Fever

*The doppleganger's first appearance in The Abandoned

*Werewolf office scene in The Howling

*Michael Myers -not quite dead - in Halloween

*The last scene in the basement in The Blair Witch Project

Quote for October 31

"There are far worse things awaiting man than death."

~Bela Lugosi, Dracula (1931)

Quote for October 30

"There's nothing in the dark that isn't there in the light."

~Frank Burns, M*A*S*H

Quote for October 29

"Horror by definition is the emotion of pure revelation. Terror by the same standards is that of fearful anticipation."
~Profondo Argento (Dario Argento)

Quote for October 28

"Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence."

~Henrik Tikkanen