Hallo-Watch: Black Sabbath (1963)

Watched:  10/23/2025

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Mario Bava

This movie was baller.  

I haven't seen much in the way of Mario Bava, and maybe I need to remedy that.  Previously, I'd only seen Danger: Diabolik, which I still think kicks ass.  And I knew Bava was more famous for his horror films, so pairing his name with Boris Karloff, and I was in.

This is an anthology film.  And so I was able to check off my annual Halloween anthology film viewing, while also getting three very different stories.  

• The first was about a nurse called to tend to the body of her client/patient, who held seances as a spiritualist.  She steals a ring from the body, and immediately things go badly for her.  
• The second is a young woman who seems to have an active nightlife, and keeps receiving phone calls, threatening her, describing what she's wearing and what she's doing, although she's by herself in her apartment.  
• The third is a longer story about a nobleman who comes first upon a corpse and then upon a family who inform him that their father likely made the dead bandit into a corpse, but that the bandit was a sort of vampire.  Soon, the father (Karloff) returns from the mountains looking pretty rough.  

I've seen a few Amicus films and other anthologies, and other films by American International Pictures, and I guess it's Mario Bava working his magic on a budget, because this movie is just much better looking than 95% of the other movies in this budget range.  You can get a lot of mileage out of using a lot of colored lights, as it turns out.  Only cowards ask why there's purple and green light.  

The scenes also all really do have a pretty good scare factor.  The first one is pretty boilerplate stuff, with ghosts coming for a badly behaving nurse.  The second plays hard with the fear of a woman alone in her house (I do want to show Jamie the Joan Crawford movie Sudden Fear and Ida Lupino movie Beware, My Lovely.  The third movie lets Karloff go nuts, and we're all better for it.  He looks like a crazed Kurt Vonnegut as a 19th Century European vampire.  And it has some genuine great sequences that gave me genuine thrills, if not chills.  

In between, Karloff hams it up as a horror host, and it's gold.  

I had a groovy time watching this one, and recommend it. 

Hallo-Watch: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)

Watched:  10/22/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Eli Craig

Ha!  I had zero idea what this was.  I just googled "Halloween Horror Comedy" and this came up on every list, so I gave it a spin.

I don't want to spoil this for anyone, but I'll say...  if you think the first twenty minutes are a little awkward or slow, hang in there.  There are absolute looney tunes moments in this that had me laughing so hard I missed the next minute.  Maybe that's me!  But I get why people love this movie.  

It's not perfect, but for a movie that knows "okay, you get it, we're out" just under the 90 minute mark, it's kinda ideal.  

Hallo-Watch: The Exorcist (1973)

Watched:  10/21/2025

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  Third or Fourth

Director:  William Friedkin

I put on The Exorcist (1973) before Jamie went to bed, and she immediately asked and then answered the question I'd asked myself.  When had I last seen this?  She informed me I'd shown her the movie circa 1998, so that is likely when I last saw it.  Which is wild.  I quite like The Exorcist.  But it is a journey.   It's not a movie I put on without wanting to watch the whole thing.  Obviously.

I have no notes.  I think this is one of those movies that is beyond comment in 2025, and has already been talked to death.  I wouldn't change a damn thing about this movie, and I have no questions about it.  

Happy Birthday, Carrie Fisher

Remembering the great Carrie Fisher on her birthday.

JLC HalloWatch: Halloween (1978)

Watched:  10/20/2025

Format:  4K disc

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  John Carpenter

I had been a bit dissatisfied with my Halloween horror movie viewing and decided to put on a favorite to cleanse the palette.  

Also, I don't always feel like an upgrade to 4K is necessary if I have a BluRay, but somehow I'd made it to 2025 without a BluRay of Halloween (1978), and I have to say, a 4K disc was the right choice.  The picture is phenomenal, the blacks and shadowing, which are key to the whole movie, are rendered perfectly (on my aging Samsung TV) and the image looks great without anything I detected as artificial or weird in the 4K transfer/ clean-up.

Halloween probably seems slow to modern audiences used to getting carried along on a rocket ride from the start of the credits, but I think for this movie to work, you need the sharp shock of the opener and then the hard gear shift to suburban normality as Michael Myers circles closer and closer, slowly building up the speed until we land in the red zone.  

That is far from a new observation, but what do you want from a free internet site?

Hallo-Watch: Werewolves Within (2021)

Watched:  10/19/2025

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  First

Director:  Josh Ruben

I recall Werewolves Within (2021) coming out right on the heels of The Wolf of Snow Hollow, a Jim Cummings film I highly recommend.  And, wanting to let Werewolves Within breathe and not draw comparisons between two movies about guys in uniforms being asked to hunt down werewolves, I punted, and then forgot about this movie until it came by on my Hulu menu.

A sort of comedy/ horror/ murder mystery - it's a movie set up to keep you guessing in a locked-room mystery where there may or may not be a werewolf.

SPOILERS

Hallo-Watch: Suitable Flesh (2023)

Watched:  10/18/2025

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  First

Director:  Joe Lynch

Written by Dennis Paoli, who wrote Re-Animator, From Beyond, Bodysnatchers, and Castle Freak, which Stuart Gordon would film, Suitable Flesh (2023), directed by Joe Lynch, carries on the same tradition of adapting H.P. Lovecraft and creating a weird, off-kilter, occasionally hilarious horror film that was what I was looking for after a few Halloween horror movies had left me cold.

Heather Graham plays a psychiatrist associated with good ol' Miskatonic University who is in a padded room, speaking with her fellow doctor and friend, played by Barbara Crampton.  Graham relates the tale of how she was visited by a young man (Judah Lewis) who has found her as she wrote the book on out of body experiences.  And, boy howdy, is he, Asa, having them. He claims a man, his father who is not his father, is trying to steal his body.

Hallo-Watch: Barbarian (2022)

Watched:  10/17/2025

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  First

Director:  Zach Cregger

So, this is a movie by the guy behind the very popular 2025 film Weapons, which I do plan to watch at some point.  And when I said "yes, I will see Weapons", folks asked "but have you seen Barbarian (2022)?"  To which I would say "no".  Until NOW.

So...  this movie is part of the horror genre of inbred underground/ remotely dwelling folks who are going to give our unsuspecting leads a very bad time.  Or just weirdos living in a place.  So, movies like Death Line immediately come to mind.   But also The Hills Have Eyes.  The People Under the Stairs.  CHUD, I guess.  One could even point to Psycho (and I'll circle back to that)

I don't mean to say there's nothing special about this movie, but it feels like a Polly Pocket version of one of those movies.  Only, taking inspiration from some real-life cases of psychos kidnapping women and keeping them in their basement.  

TL;DR: MTV Ends (channels in the UK)

 

MTV, Music Television, is shutting down music operations.  Specifically in England.  Likely soon to be the rest of Europe.  I assume the US will happen without so much as a whimper.

But it's been dead for a while now, hasn't it?

Complaining about MTV had been old since the mid-00's.  Even Gen-X, who lived off of MTV for a decade and a half, had drifted away from the music network before YouTube arrived and made MTV's music programming redundant.  

Launched in 1981, MTV immediately became the default channel the latchkey kids of Gen X came home and put on instead of clicking on their radios (I am often reminded that Jamie did not have MTV, as she was raised in a town that might as well have had John Lithgow forbidding her to dance).  Whether we're discussing elder Gen X or us on the trailing side of the generation, it was a true culture shift our parents would not enjoy until VH1 ushered Whitney Houston and Phil Collins safely into our homes.  

But for a while, the cable channel became like a singular radio station shared by a huge swath of America, contributing to the 1980's monoculture, and ending the ability of musicians to be non-telegenic and still make it.  

For the telegenic, it could mean a young The League would find himself watching the video for Lucky Star intently in 1984, and in the 1990's maybe watch En Vogue videos with piqued interest when he was more likely to listen to Jane's Addiction on his tape deck driving around North Houston.

Upon its debut, MTV was mostly rock and pop.  My memory of the pre-1985 MTV is of a lot of Human League, John Cougar Mellencamp, Styx, Billy Idol, and whatever else was going on.  Very early MTV included Joan Jett and J. Geils Band videos.  My understanding is that MTV just didn't have many videos at launch unless it was from a European act who needed videos for Top of the Pops.  

Between videos, VJ's (Video Jockeys), would drop fun tidbits and make it feel like a cool hang, I guess.  Ask anyone into girls between 50 and 65 about Martha Quinn sometime and see them light up like a Christmas tree.  I liked the VJ's until I didn't.  Or when the VJ bit became the bit with things like Total Request Live (utterly unwatchable unless you were a 13 year old).  

Seeing the immediate ability to get national exposure, bands rushed out to make videos, grabbing whatever they could in way of equipment and lighting.  And the crazier or wilder your look, the better.  Which became it's own thing as hair got bigger, pants got tighter, and pretty soon we had Van Halen's Hot for Teacher, after which we might as well have hung it up, because that was the zenith of early music videos.  

Hallo-Watch: Salem's Lot (2024)

Watched:  10/15/2025

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Gary Dauberman

How does one make a movie that is supposed to be horrifying just weirdly annoying to watch?

Salem's Lot (2024) is here to crack this mystery wide open.  

Poor Steven King.  Probably tired of being mistaken for author Stephen King who wrote the book this movie is based on, which had a TV series or some such of it made back when I was a wee tot and missed the show.  And Stephen King has become a master of horror novels which have only been made into good movies if Stanley Kubrick takes the novel as a suggestion or its Rob Reiner making Stand By Me, which is not horror.    I do like Christine, though.  And Silver Bullet has its moments.  But neither is a patch on the books.*

Writer/ Director Gary Dauberman took a beloved American novel, wrote down "vampires" on a yellow pad, jotted down the character names from the book, and as near as Wikipedia can tell me, paid little attention to anything else.  And, instead, he wrote a nonsense script where everyone is dumb as a bag of rocks to the point where I was wondering if the movie was supposed to be a satire or spoof at times.