Halloween Horror Watch #2

Howling (2012)-- Ha Yoo
I hadn't heard of this until recently and only added it to my Netflix queue because Kang-ho Song, perhaps my favorite actor, stars. I could watch him in just about anything. Just last night, I Song-ed up my queue. He's amazing.

Going in, I was expecting a werewolf movie based on the title and the description. But no. There's a part-dog, part-wolf going around systematically killing people. Howling is OK and for a while it seems like it's going to have some big comment on male culture and a woman's place on the job in South Korea, but those themes drift away as the plot picks up. For the first hour, I was way more interested in the new female detective's experience than the actual plot of the movie. This was a good thing. Check it out if you like Korean cinema or Kang-ho Song (if you watch on Instant View, you have to use your computer so you can activate the subtitles).



V/H/S (2012) -- various
This is an anthology film most notable for Ti West and Joe Swanberg's involvement. It's a piece of shit. I made it through about an hour until I bailed because it wasn't worth getting motion sick watching a bunch of unlikeable people do unlikeable things then get killed. Plus, I correctly guessed the ending of the overarching story before the first short began, so I feel vindicated in not wasting my time.

A group of douchebags break into a home looking for a specific VHS that someone will pay good money for. In the search for it, they watch a series of tapes. These are our shorts. Oh, the douchebags tape everything they do, so the screen is constantly erratically moving and the shorts are similarly shot. It really bugs me that most of the shorts are shown to be shot on some type of digital device, yet someone took the time to transfer them to VHS. This is a stupid movie and I waste of Ti West's skills as a director (his main strengths are his control of the camera and his patience with storytelling, elements completely absent from movie). Lastly, it's not scary.



Die, Monster, Die! (1965) -- Daniel Haller
It's German for "The, Monster, The!" Daniel Haller was a set designer for loads of American International films and this was his first as director. It's based on the Lovecraft story, "The Colour Out of Space," though it only loosely follows it. As with many AI movies, it's good, but the advertising and aesthetics are the best parts. I love seeing Boris Karloff* in anything and it's been great discovering him in non-Frankenstein's monster/Mummy parts. I wonder if Bela Lugosi was ever jealous that Karloff's career continued with moderate success after the Universal monster movies. At least the film offered Suzan Farmer to crush on for an hour and twenty minutes.



*Apparently, he was 5'11". I'm taller than Frankenstein's monster!