Witchery

David Hasselhoff, a pregnant Linda Blair, an obnoxious child, the worst actress of all time, and some old people end up stranded at a mysterious house on a small, secluded island, and suffer the wrath of a vengeful witch who can make them travel into some sort of evil witchery dimension or something.

The whole month can be summed up with a deceptively simple question: Witchery, or Faceless? Actually, no it can't, those are just two shitty horror movies that Andy procured for me that happened to start and close out the month. I never intended to end this year's festivities with Witchery; in fact, Andy and I tried to watch it the first weekend of October. But we watched it late at night and got kinda tired the first time and turned it off after a confusing half hour. Then we tried again a few weeks later... and the DVD turned out to be broken, and the last half hour wouldn't play. So I finally tracked down another copy and watched the rest of it on Halloween.

And that story is a lot more interesting than Witchery itself, although unlike some of the other unfortunate crap I watched this month, it's a pretty funny bad horror movie. It has an incoherent plot about haunted houses and witches and mysterious lights and alternate dimensions, a lot of elaborate but shitty looking and poorly staged make up effects (that one woman sure takes getting her mouth stitched shut well), a really hilarious bad recurring effect where shots of the actors waving their arms and moaning are superimposed over some poorman's 2001-style swirling void. And I swear the film ends with the world's worst actress, in a monotone voice I assume was meant to convey horror, saying "A baby?" and then looking directly into the camera:

 

If I didn't know better, I'd think the filmmakers were actually trying to make a comedy. Although it still wouldn't have been a very good comedy.

Grade: D++

I do these marathons every year in the hopes that I'll find some forgotten classic or unknown gems. Although I had no trouble discovering a lot of okay to really good movies this year, I didn't really find anything I hadn't seen before that really blew me away. I worry sometimes that I've already seen all the great horror movies that have already been made, but that's not going to stop me from searching. And to show you how positive I still feel about all this, here is a list of the movies I saw for the first time this month that I enthusiastically recommend, even if none of them were quite great:

(in no particular order)

Nightwish

Rampage

The Abandoned

Scissors

Vanishing on 7th Street

Bereavement

A Horrible Way to Die

Make-Out With Violence

A Chinese Ghost Story 2

I Bury the Living

The Baby

Kuroneko