I'm not driven to write this based on that burning, itching sensation I get in my brain and fingers when I usually write a post on The Audient, but the Tusk post doesn't seem like it should be the last of a scant few Halloween posts in 2022. (Can you tell I'm sort of missing the structure of what I did in 2021, when I watched 1970s horror throughout the month?)
Besides, I'm not working today -- it's "Cup Day" in Victoria, a day off work to watch a horse race. Yes, you read that right. The Melbourne Cup is run today, and as of right now, it looks like they might not have to run it in the rain, even though it's been raining constantly, including while my kids were trick-or-treating yesterday. The over/under on the number of horses who have to be put down during the race is two.
In any case, not working means I don't have any excuse not to squeeze out a few lines here. Plus it'll post while it's still Halloween in the U.S. and elsewhere.
So without further ado (the previous "ado" was brought to you by trying to clear the poster before including my first sub-headline) ...
The first movie of our kid-friendly projector double feature on Sunday night was the sequel to 1993's Hocus Pocus, which I only just watched for the first time near the start of the pandemic, and really enjoyed. I'd actually started to watch the sequel the weekend it was first released in order to review it, before deciding early on that it would make a good family viewing, especially since it takes place in Salem, Massachusetts, which we just visited while in America.
The person this tie-in was targeted toward was my wife, the big Salem lover in our family. Alas, she ended up opting out of the first end of the double feature out of a desire for some downtime. HP2 needn't have been that first movie, but she said the second was the one she preferred to watch, which we'll get to in a moment.
I didn't end up being a big fan of Hocus Pocus 2. It really didn't have anything to do with any shortcomings by the main trio as a result of being 29 years older. They are made to look remarkably like they did in 1993, and are not significantly less nimble comic performers for being ages 76 (Bette Midler), 65 (Kathy Najimy) and 57 (Sarah Jessica Parker). No, I just found the writing overall to be generally unfunny, and found the generation of teenagers cast in this one to be a bit limp. I did like the return of the undead Billy Butcherson character, and was delighted to see that he was played by Doug Jones this time just as he was last time. Overall the film recovered a little toward the end so that it was only a marginal thumbs down (2.5 stars on Letterboxd).
I was worried that especially my older son wouldn't care for it, given that the vast majority of the characters are female -- not that he has ever specifically stated a bias against female movie characters. (He claims not to have liked Turning Red, though I remember a different reaction at the time and I think he's rewriting history a bit.) But it was a good sign of his having enjoyed it that he asked me what has become his standard question after finishing a viewing: "Is it in your top 1,000?"
The 12-year-old is definitely fascinated that I have more than 6,000 movies in my Flickchart and he always wants to know how high a movie he's liked has ranked. I didn't have the heart to tell him that Hocus Pocus 2 is probably not in my top 4,000, and just left it at the simple "No." Even the original is only at 1,641, which is pretty good in a list that currently has 6,168 titles, but I couldn't tell him that either because a) it doesn't meet his top 1,000 threshold, and b) it would just remind him that we hadn't watched the original before watching this, though he doesn't really seem to care about such things.
The second movie, which in my mind I had envisioned as the probable first, was once titled Boo! until they changed it, and is streaming on Netflix. I was worried -- without reason, thank goodness -- that the kids might be slightly inclined against this one because it stars a Black family. Fortunately we are raising them without such prejudices (or so we hope) and it never once got mentioned.
In fact, my 12-year-old joked that it was in his top 1 of all time. I think this was indeed a joke -- I don't think he's prepared to anoint this his new favorite of all time, despite a documented proclivity for such things -- but he probably wouldn't make that joke unless he'd really enjoyed it, which he obviously did. I threw him a bone and suggested the movie might be a contender for my top 1,000, when he inevitably asked, though in reality I expect it'd land somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500.
This one was also a win because it reminded my younger son of a movie he obsessed on a couple years ago, Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, in that both movies featured Halloween decorations come to life. So The Curse of Bridge Hollow might not be the most original Halloween movie ever, but it makes up for that in charm, and with the adults, in having funny performers like Marlon Wayans, Rob Riggle, John Michael Higgins and Lauren Lapkus. And the girl on Stranger Things, Priah Ferguson, appears to be the real deal. Kelly Rowland, the former Destiny's Child, was probably the weak link, but they also gave her the least to do -- which is probably both a good thing and a bad thing.
It was striking how good of a pairing it made with Hocus Pocus 2, as Bridge Hollow could be a fictionalized version of Salem. It's clearly set in New England, anyway, as the central family has just relocated from Brooklyn and found their neighbor (Riggle) wearing a Tom Brady jersey.
My recent few days of viewings would have looked a little different had I had easy access to the 2022 Hellraiser reboot. I was going to rewatch the original on one night and the reboot on the next, to either give it a fighting chance or to damn it, depending on whether I ended up thinking a close fealty to the original was a good thing or a bad thing. I was going to call the post "Hell appraiser."
But 2022 Hellraiser is trapped behind the wall of a streaming service I don't subscribe to (Hulu, but you can also get it through Paramount Plus I believe), so I decided to can the whole project. And then I got itchy to watch the original, which I'd only seen once back in 2011, anyway, and made it my third consecutive movie on Sunday night. Needless to say the kids were banished to their bedrooms by this point.
That was one too many. I slept a lot during Hellraiser. I always paused when I did so, but the experience was ultimately chopped up quite a bit. (I wish I had intended that pun but I didn't.)
Still, I recalled what I had enjoyed so much about the original, which makes it such a classic, and I will state again how surprised I am that the Cenobites play such a small role given the way Pinhead would become the enduring franchise mascot over umpteen sequels. There's some great grisly gore, makeup effects and puppetry here. It's a masterpiece of practical effects all over.
The coup de grace had an audience of one
I had been pointing my scary season viewings toward a Halloween night viewing that I hoped my wife would watch with me. Saint Maud had everything you could hope for in an October 31st viewing: 1) It's genuinely terrifying; 2) My wife hadn't seen it; 3) It's only 84 minutes long.
Not enough.
Even though we have a tradition of watching a scary movie together on Halloween night that dates back more than a decade, with only a few misses, my wife wasn't interested in a scary movie, pronouncing herself "done" with Halloween after she returned from taking the kids trick-or-treating in the rain. The four of us watched two Treehouse of Horror Simpsons episodes with dinner, and that was good enough.
I can't really blame her. Earlier in the day she had done a lot of physical labor tossing building waste into the "skip" (small dumpster) we had ordered to our house for just such a purpose. I had helped a bit (though I was working) and the kids had helped a bit (though they're young and distractible). She did most of it and then took them out when I said that one of us should stay home to give out candy. I'm glad I did that because we had a lot of trick-or-treaters, and I liked seeing them even if they have no clue how this works (the number who said "trick or treat" I can count on one hand). In the past we've both gone out with the kids and left out a bowl of candy, which then just gets immediately ransacked, leaving most of the trick-or-treaters with nothing -- an especially sad outcome when they'd trekked out in the rain. But then all the trick-or-treating in the rain fell to her, and being "done" is a perfectly reasonable response after that.
So I still watched Saint Maud by myself -- it rented at a tiny $2.99 AUD, maybe an acknowledgement of its short running time -- and liked it even better the second time.
Saint Maud made my top ten last year at #7. After this second viewing I'm starting to think it's going to be a serious contender for my best of the decade seven years from now.
If you still have time to pick out your scary movie for tonight and you haven't seen this, I hope the leading poster on this post will whet your appetite for a truly chilling experience. There are so many different things that make Saint Maud great, and I won't ruin any of them, but I'll just point out that there are two moments in this film that are shocking and horrifying both in their suddenness and in their gruesomeness. If those are the best moments, they have a lot of other competition, and as I've said, the great thing is that this movie really just gets in and gets out. Anyone can do an 84-minute movie on Halloween night, right?
Well, almost anyone.
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