Running on Tubi: October Movie SCARE-a-thon

So for the month of October, I'm watching a whole slew of spooky and scary movies. After watching the fourth one I suddenly realized, "Wait a minute, wasn't I doing that movie review series on my blog?" And so the Running on Tubi: October Movie SCARE-a-thon was born.

What a story, Mark.

It's tricky to trick 'r treat to trick 'r treat right to the beat it's tricky. 

Trick 'r Treat

Holy shit this was a funny movie. I watched this one with some friends, on one friend's strong recommendation. Definitely an excellent movie to watch as a group. It was interesting, I didn't feel scared the entire time through ~ whenever someone was brutally murdered, I was more likely to laugh. Yet on the drive home I was starting to dread Sam ~ depicted above ~ to the point that I started seeing him under every streetlamp and around every corner. I suppose that might have been due to my friends' influence. Maybe the movie would have been more frightening and less comedic if I had seen it alone.

Marilyn Manson was a 10/10 music choice, cheesy as hell in the best way. I liked this movie.

Why can't we have nice movies called Happy God or something?

Mad God

I love stop motion animation! But when I was rating my favorite stop motion movies the other day, I realized I'd only seen like 4 that I actually remember at all. But miniatures are so cool! And this movie was beautiful. Grotesque as Hell, to be sure, but beautiful all the same. All the torture and death and grime and shit and blood and so on and so on ~ like Hieronymus Bosch was a special effects artist with a Kickstarter. Someone who knows about Renaissance religious art please check me on that.

As far as a plot or narrative ~ I think I understood what was going on? Largely? But I definitely got the vibes. It started with an image of the Tower of Babel being struck by lightning, and an excerpt from Leviticus about all the ill that should befall those who do not honor their covenant with God ~ and the title ~ and all that felt like it was pretty necessary to frame the rest of the movie. I didn't fully get what was happening and why, but I didn't feel like I was missing something necessary either.

I liked this movie. 

The actual protagonist of this movie was the floating head in the top left.

Mr. Vampire

Mostly a comedy ~ and not like Trick 'r Treat where all the jokes were grotesque and mean-spirited, it was just a comedy movie where a Taoist priest is trying to stop some dangerous moving corpses. The comedy was very Hong Kong cinema, if you know what that's like. Some slapstick, lots of misunderstandings, good stuff. There was action too, which was also very Hong Kong cinema, and well integrated with the comedy. There's actually a whole Mr. Vampire series that I'll definitely be watching more of. I started with Mr. Vampire 5 ~ which is actually a mostly unrelated movie called Magic Cop with the same lead actor, Lam Ching-Ying. I didn't review that one here, but it was also quite fun along the same lines, perhaps even better than Mr. Vampire.

I liked this movie.

They should have called this movie Resident Evil 2.

Resident Evil

Holy shit this was a funny movie. I did not intend to frontload this month with funny movies; my watchlist is mostly horror. And this movie did scare me a decent amount! But also it was really funny. I probably already messaged this to most of the people who will ever read this blog post, but it was not like playing a Resident Evil game ~ it was like watching your friend get really frustrated while playing a Resident Evil game. Your friend is running around, cursing under their breath, "Oh great, the zombie is back up, gotta shoot it again," "Where's the goddamn key," "Oh damn I'm out of bullets," "When did I last save?" Of course, anyone can get that experience without going to the theater ~ if they have a friend and a copy of a Resident Evil game ~ but this is also just a fun, comedic, moderately scary horror movie.

I liked this movie.