Nightbooks | 2021 Halloween Movies

The phrase “family friendly” is a bit of a double edged sword. On one hand, there are some amazing PG rated movies out there. On the other hand, calling something “family friendly” tends make people think a movie is dumbed down or boring. This year, Netflix released Nightbooks, a movie based on a 2018 horror-fantasy children’s book. It definitely piqued my interest.

Alex (Winslow Fegley) loves writing scary stories. After a particularly bad day at school, he trashes his room and decides to destroy all of his “Nightbooks,” the notebooks that house his creations. On the way to the apartment building’s furnace, he gets coerced into one of the other apartments. Soon, he finds that he is trapped in the apartment of an evil witch, Natasha (Krysten Ritter), who forces him to tell a scary story every night after dinner. Along with Yazmin (Lidya Jewett), another child Natasha trapped, Alex must find a way to leave the apartment and get back to his parents.

It took me a little while to get into the plot of Nightbooks. I thought it was going to be another anthology movie like Twilight Zone: The Movie or Tales from the Darkside. Boy, was I wrong. The stories within the plot are but a small part of the actual storyline. As a matter of fact, when I thought we were reaching the end of the film, I found that we were actually only halfway through it. I couldn’t figure out how they were going to squeeze another 45 minutes out of a story that seemed to be over. And those 45 minutes were the best parts of the movie.

On top of the pretty amazing storyline, the acting was superb. Krysten Ritter was breath-taking as Natasha. Part of it was the special effects when she used her magic but a lot of it was Ritter’s take on the character. That’s not to say the kids didn’t do a great job as well. There wasn’t a time that I wasn’t convinced that these kids were scared that they were going to die at any minute.

I loved Nightbooks so much. This was the perfect example of how you could make a terrific movie with an extremely small cast. Yes, this was filmed at the end of 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Any movie that doesn’t look at this and feel bad that they couldn’t pull off something so wonderful should feel ashamed of itself.

Well, I think you get the idea. You should definitely watch this movie. Actually, you should add it to your annual Halloween movie list along with Hocus Pocus and The Nightmare Before Christmas. I hope they make a sequel and I hope it is just as good.

Squid Game | 2021 Halloween Movies

I struggled when I was deciding whether or not I wanted to add horror series to the 2021 Halloween list. On one hand, there are some interesting series that I would really like to see. On the other hand, a series takes a lot longer to watch and I only have so much time to watch all of the movies! As you can tell, I decided to attempt to watch all of the series, as well as the movies, this year. The South Korean Netflix series, Squid Game, was first on the list.

A group of 456 people, most of whom are severely in debt, participate in six children’s games in order to win a large sum of money. However, they aren’t told that if they lose a game, they lose their life. Once they find out that little twist, how will that change how they play the games?

When I first started watching Squid Game, it reminded me of the 2007 Japanese drama Liar Game. In both of them, the main character has a debt that needs to be repaid and they are invited to play a game in order to win money to pay off said debt. The big difference is that people die in Squid Game. They just go into more debt in Liar Game, which the contestants act like they will die from it.

I don’t want to spoil the show too much because Squid Game really is something that you should watch. Besides the expected deception and bloodshed, there is a lot of heart in some of the characters. Though I think my favorite part is that you really don’t know what is going to happen. There’s a lot of horror movies where I can guess who is going to die or what the villain is going to do next. I figured that the main characters were going to make it pretty far but as Game of Thrones has shown us, main characters can die early in a series.

While the creator hasn’t said anything about a season 2, I do hope that there will be another season. I really want to see where the characters go from here.

OK, stop reading now and go watch it immediately! Go!

Intrusion | 2021 Halloween Movies

Netflix has quite a few Halloween releases this year. While Intrusion isn’t a horror movie, it is listed as a thriller. So Netflix put it on the Halloween roster. I’m not completely convinced it belongs there.

Meera (Freida Pinto) and her husband, Henry (Logan Marshall-Green), have moved into their dream home - an ultra-modern house that Henry designed. Unfortunately, the house is in an extremely isolated location. So when their house is broken into while the couple is out on a date, there aren’t any neighbors to witness the act. A few days later, the thieves return and violence ensues. Henry ends up killing one of the intruders, which upsets Meera greatly. Even worse, Henry wants to continue their regular lives - including holding a housewarming party they were planning. Meera, disturbed by Henry’s actions, decides to investigate what he has been doing. What she finds is worse than she ever imagined.

Uuuuuuggghhh. Everything about this movie bothers me. Meera’s actions border on unhinged, Henry is suspect from the first minute he is on the screen, and nothing really makes sense.

WARNING: I am doing to spoil the movie. If you don’t want to see spoilers, stop reading now. But know that you absolutely should not watch this pile of crap.

Here’s the big (non) spoiler - Henry is the bad guy. I knew it the second he showed up. My husband chuckled because in the first ten minutes of the movie, I said “Girl! Your husband gonna kill you!” Yep.

Anyway, Henry kidnaps this college girl, Christine Cobb (Megan Elisabeth Kelly), for no apparent reason. Christine doesn’t remember Henry doing anything besides watching her as she was tied to a chair. Henry just says he’s always had these urges but never acted on them until now. But, like, WHAT URGES? There’s a vague reference that maybe Henry raped Christine (Christine’s dad, who helped build the house, said he didn’t like the way Henry looked at her) but no one says it actually happened. Henry just sits and looks at her. WHAT THE HELL, HENRY?

And Meera is not much better. Nothing she does make sense. When she finally realizes that Henry probably did something to Christine, she goes into Henry’s home office…during the party…when there’s a house full of people AND Henry…to poke around to try to figure it out. Um, this is something you do when no one is there. Then, when she finds the hidden room and Christine, she gets herself captured by Henry because she decided to stand there and call the police instead of doing anything useful. Sure, he’s going to let you talk to the police while he’s standing there next to a baseball bat. She’s just dumb.

Just don’t bother with Intrusion. It’s slow and boring and the characters suck and it’s not scary. (OK, there is one jump scare that got me. This movie is not worth that.) Two boring movies in a row. I hope this isn’t a trend for the year.

Prey | 2021 Halloween Movies

Netflix has a few foreign films (or series) on their roster this year. Prey is the first one that crossed my path. Despite my German heritage, I’ve never watched a German movie before. It did make me wonder how Germans would handle a horror movie.

Roman (David Kross) is celebrating his upcoming wedding with his friends. The five men have decided to spend the weekend in the mountains. When they begin to hear gunshots, the group thinks there are simply some hunters nearby. Little did they realize that they are the ones being hunted.

This may be the shortest review I have ever written. Prey is a terrible movie. Now I’ll admit that I watched it dubbed in English instead of in the original German language but I don’t think the original language could have made this any better. There is very little plot or characterization going on. The entire plot is literally this group of men being killed. We get a tiny glimpse into why the killer is shooting people but at no point does the movie tell us why these particular men are being killed. The reason we are given makes very little sense.

In addition, we don’t get to know anything about the men in order to make us sympathetic toward them. Sure, murdering people is bad but we don’t get any sense that these particular men don’t deserve it. We get some weird flashbacks of Roman with his fiancée, Lisa (Livia Matthes), but these don’t really tie into what is going on currently. I mean, we do learn a secret about Roman’s brother, Albert (Hanno Koffler), but it feels very tacked on and there are no repercussions to the secret.

It’s just a bad and pointless movie. Don’t bother watching it unless you are having trouble falling asleep. Though maybe you shouldn’t fall asleep to a murder movie.

Malignant | 2021 Halloween Movies

Most of the time, scary movies are far off my radar. I may know some of the movie titles as I browse through the theater listings but I rarely know more than that. This time, however, there was a lot of buzz surrounding Malignant. And I only heard good things. So, for once, I was looking forward to a horror movie. Let’s see if it lived up to the hype.

Madison (Annabelle Wallis) has a difficult life. She has had multiple miscarriages and her husband is rather abusive. When she, once again, loses a pregnancy at the same time her husband is murdered, her life turns upside down. She begins having visions of other murders in town. It’s up to her sister, Sydney (Maddie Hasson), to dig into Madison’s mysterious childhood to find out what is going on.

My least favorite type of Halloween movie is a gory slasher flick. Thankfully, this doesn’t have a lot of gore in it. There are a lot of stabbing/slashing types of murders but it’s nothing too over the top. In my opinion, it’s the perfect amount of scary murdery stuff without organs spilling out all over the place.

However, my favorite part of Malignant is the cinematography. There are some absolutely gorgeous shots paired with interesting camera angles. Sometimes we’ll see an entire scene take place from the ceiling, as if we were crawling above the characters. Sometimes we’ll get a strange angle that makes us question whether what we are seeing is real or fantasy. That is what kept me intrigued.

The plot has been done before. It’s nothing particularly new. I was able to pretty accurately guess the “twist” before it came up. It’s actually the amazing talents of Marina Mazepa, a contortionist who brings the villain to life, that makes the movie special. If it wasn’t for her, there is no way the movie would have been as interesting.

Do I think you should watch Malignant? I think it’s worth watching. Especially if you enjoy the filmmaking aspect of a movie. But if you are looking for good cop-work, skip it. These cops are nothing more than stereotypes. Come for the visuals, stay for the…visuals.

We Need To Do Something | 2021 Halloween Movies

We Need To Do Something is an independent movie release on September 3, 2021. It was available both in theaters and streaming via video on demand. I was able to buy it on Amazon Prime for about $15. (You can rent it for like $7 if you don’t want to buy it.)

The plot for the movie is simple: A family of 4 gets trapped in their bathroom during a large thunderstorm. That’s it. That’s the whole plot. It’s not a lot to work with.

When I was looking at lists of scary movies released this year, Something sounded like it could be an interesting take on family dynamics. Unfortunately, the movie relies too much on the audience’s imagination. There are ways you can make a movie scary without showing the monster but you have to give us something to go on. All we get is family in-fighting, people describing things they see outside the bathroom, and vague flashbacks that might be the reason everything is happening.

And that is where the main problem lies - we don’t know what is happening. We don’t know how many days have passed since the family got stuck. They start fighting VERY quickly. It’s possible this whole movie takes place in 24 hours and we would never know. We also don’t know what terrible things are outside the door. The family is stuck because a tree fell on their house, blocking the bathroom door. (It occurs to me that every bathroom door that I know opens inward so the family wouldn’t have gotten stuck. Let me know if your bathroom door opens outward.) A couple of the family members, mostly the son and dad, make references to things they see outside the door but we only get a few sounds that don’t really match the descriptions and a bloody tongue. It’s not enough to allow us to decide what is actually outside.

On top of that, the story tries to give us a reason all of this is happening. However, they don’t really show us how the actions caused the consequences. Now, I get that this was filmed during Covid-19 so the cast was kept very small and they were confined to a soundstage. But we needed something more. It could have been a newspaper article talking about some of the events that Melissa (Sierra McCormick), the daughter, says happened. She says that one of her classmates died but her parents know nothing about it? That seems unlikely. As it is, we barely know the outside world exists.

To be honest, Something isn’t worth watching. It’s 97 minutes of boring nothingness. There are better ways to spend your time. Like maybe watching paint dry.

Fear Street Trilogy | 2021 Halloween Movies

Way back in July 2021, Netflix released three separate yet highly entwined movies. Based on the books by R.L. Stine, Fear Street Part 1: 1994 came out on July 2, followed on the 9th by Fear Street Part 2: 1978 and Fear Street Part 3: 1666 on the 16th. Grab a snack because this may be a long review.

All three movies revolve around the same basic plot: Every generation, the town of Shadyside is tormented by a series of brutal murders. During the 1994 massacre, a group of teenagers decide to figure out the cause of the curse and end it once and for all. The second and third movies take us back in time to reveal how the curse started, why it has been able to continue for so long, and who is really responsible for all of the deaths.

Part 1 introduces us to our main characters: Deena (Kiana Madeira), a spitfire lesbian who isn’t afraid to stand up for herself or her loved ones; Sam (Olivia Scott Welch), Deena’s ex-girlfriend who recently moved a town over to Sunnyvale; and Deena’s younger brother, Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr), who spends way too much time studying the horrific events of the town’s past. So, most of the town of Shadyside believes that they are cursed by Sarah Fier, a witch who was executed in 1666. Deena doesn’t believe in the curse but starts to change her mind when Sam has a vision on Sarah and starts attracting previous serial killers…who should be dead. After a LOT more murders, they are led to C. Berman - the only survivor of the Camp Nightwing massacre.

This leads us to Part 2. Here, we pick up Christine “Ziggy” Berman (Sadie Sink as teenage Ziggy, Gillian Jacobs as adult Ziggy) as another main character. Ziggy is a bit of a troublemaker, which leads her to being ostracized by the rest of the campers. She gets accused of stealing and being a witch, which results in some Sunnyvale campers trying to hang her. Two camp counselors intervene and Ziggy is sent off to the nurse. The nurse, the mother of one of the previous serial killers, goes a little crazy and attacks camp counselor Tommy (McCabe Slye), the boyfriend of Ziggy’s older sister, Cindy (Emily Rudd). It turns out that Tommy is the next killer and he goes around murdering everyone. Ziggy and Cindy figure out how to end the curse but they get murdered when they try. Ah, but we know Ziggy survives. She only survives because camp counselor Nick Goode (Ted Sutherland), son of the Sunnyvale sheriff, brings her back to life with CPR. But wait, I thought Ziggy was the only….

Onto Part 3! In 1666, Shadyside and Sunnyvale are one village called Union. Sarah Fier (portrayed by Madeira) lives a rather normal life with her father and brother, though she has an uncanny knack with the family pigs. One night, the village teenagers decide to have a party in the forest. Sarah and Hannah Miller (portrayed by Welch) visit a reclusive widow to gather “special” berries for the party. There, they notice the widow has a book of black magic but they do not take the book. Instead, they go to the party, have fun, get hit on by one of the boys, make fun of him, and go have sex with each other. Needless to say, these events result in them being called witches when the town starts to go downhill. (And by “downhill,” I mean rotting food, tainted water, and murder.)

I don’t want to give too much away but we do end up back in 1994 with Deena and things do get resolved. Though the director has expressed interest in expanding the series. So this might not be the end of our friends.

Both my husband and I loved the series. I thought the acting was phenomenal. Considering a lot of the main cast played dual roles, I think they all handled it well. No cheesiness to be found.

I also thought it was brilliant to have it as a series of movies instead of just one. It gave the plot and the characters time to breathe. I normally hate scary or slasher movies. This is the exception. If you are looking for some good Halloween thrills, Fear Street is where to go.

I write about more than just Christmas movies. Seriously.

For the past three years, I have reviewed Christmas movies. I tend to get so burned out on them that I don’t know what to write about the rest of the year.

In an attempt to fix my Big Time Writer’s Block, I am going to expand the holiday movie reviews this year. Yes, I will still do the Christmas movies. But this time I am going to add Halloween to the schedule. I am going to review Halloween-related movies released in 2021.

Now - the Christmas movies usually have to follow some rules. The big rule is they have to be first released in the year they are being reviewed (no reviewing 2012 movies in 2021). The Halloween movies will follow that same rule. In 2018 and 2019, I only reviewed movies released in December. In 2020, I moved that to every movie released for the Christmas season, which started in November. While I would like to stick to movies released in October, I might not have enough movies to fill the entire month. There are some scary movies that either have already been released or will be released in the next few weeks. So don’t be surprised if you see some September releases in the October reviews.

Another addition is series. There are a few series that have popped up on the Halloween release schedule for 2021. I don’t normally review series as it can take me awhile to power through them. But I think there are a couple of 8-episode series that I could kick out pretty quickly. I haven’t committed myself to watching the series yet. We’ll see how that goes when they actually come out.

I am interested to see how the Halloween movies match up to the Christmas movies. I don’t particularly like slasher films but, then again, I don’t like cheesy love movies either. I really am a glutton for punishment, aren’t I?