10/23/16 - Prince of Darkness (1987)

Personally, I was expecting a little more Prince of Darkness in Prince of Darkness. If you told me "here's a movie about Satan, except instead of Satan it's a big green vial of crap," I would expect the worst. But leave it to John Carpenter to take that concept and make a pretty darn good movie about it. Misleading? Maybe. But it's still a pretty decent watch.

I'm not overly familiar with the horror maestro's work. (Shake your finger at me - "Thats a BAD horror movie blogger.") But he seems to excel at taking a group of people and trapping them in an isolated location - this time, it's at an abandoned church surrounded by crazy homeless people (including Alice Cooper!), where a ancient (and evil!) artifact has recently been unearthed. According to an old text, the green goo will be instrumental in bringing Old Scratch back our plane of existence. The big vial of green stuff made me wonder what kind of film John Carpenter's Secret of the Ooze would have been - probably no Vanilla Ice. And a lot more vomit.

10/2/16 - The Wicker Man (2006)

As I get older, I find myself getting less and less upset with remakes. At this point, it's like getting pissed at the wind. (My dog has been known to do this, barking wildly at the swaying branches.) Or maybe getting mad at the current state of politics. It is what it is, there's no changing it, it's not really worth expending energy on.

However, even with that liberal (in the internet age, at least) take on the subject, I have a hard time trying to figure out why anyone would try to remake The Wicker Man. It's got such a good reputation that it would be virtually impossible for you to come out in front of it - it's setting yourself up for failure, even if your movie is pretty good on its own. (Please note: this one is not.) There's a reason that The Classics remain untouched, and yeah, the original Wicker Man is a Classic. BUT, say you take that ill-advised leap and decide to do it - why would you change so much that made it great in the first place? While it's true that the bones of the story are the same here in the 2006 version, so much of what I really dug about the original doesn't make it here - the atmosphere, the use of music, general unease (here it's much more overt), the religiousness of the main character... it gets to a point that it should really just be a different movie.

And who could forget the CGI bees?