October has been an incredibly busy month for us. So far, all but one weekend has been filled to the brim with family and friends to visit and fun things to do. Even the weeknights have been busy. We've been attending our regular tabletop gaming night on Wednesdays and hitting some bars to celebrate birthdays of coworkers. It's times like these when work seems like that thing that just gets in the way of my real schedule.
Last weekend, we attended the second annual Musicbox Massacre, a 24-hour festival of horror movies. I'd seen a lot of the movies on the line-up, but I'd never seen any of them on the big screen. For me, the highlight of the 24 hours was watching John Carpenter's The Thing in a packed theater, hearing people gasping at the design and make-up wizardry, and starting in their seats at the scary moments. It's a real testament to the quality of the movie that despite after almost 25 years, it is still so tense and spooky that it can both scare and disgust an audience like it does.
Other personal highlights included finally seeing Let's Scare Jessica to Death, a movie that's more about tone, lighting, and pacing to make an audience uncomfortable than going for the popcorn-throwing scare. It's a film very much in the spirit of The Wicker Man, in my opinion, which is also one of my favorite movies. I was also treated to seeing Night of the Creeps for the first time in almost 20 years. When I was younger, I never really understood a lot of the comedy in the movie outside of the overt slapstick stuff, but watching it as a middle-aged man, I was able to piece together more of the references that they tucked away in the characters and settings. It's a movie dripping with 1980s cheese, but I would argue that that's an intentional decision in order to juxtapose the 1986 time period against the anachronism of the detective's character. The people sitting behind me had never seen it and said that it was the best suprisingly good movie of the festival. I would most certainly concur.
There were two surprise entries to the schedule that were both fantastic. The first was Imprint, Takashi Miike's submission for the Masters of Horror series on Showtime that was never shown because it had been banned from cable broadcast. That ban was for good reason, too. Imprint was one of the most difficult movies I've ever had the (dis)pleasure of watching. If you are a fan of Miike's other work, I would most certainly make an effort to see Imprint, but its 63-minute running length ends up feeling like a full 180 minutes by the time the end credits roll. Seeing Imprint once was enough for me but I will never forget it. The second surprise was The Eyes of Edward James, a short film that is shot entirely from a first-person perspective with continuous, interconnected, un-edited walking shots. If you find this movie as a rental, please check it out as it is a unique experience.
My only regret was the timing of Dario Argento's Deep Red. The festival had actually been given the unedited 126 minute Italian release and not the 96 minute American mess, neither of which I've seen. However, if you've ever experienced an Italian horror movie by the masters like Argento or Fulci, you'll know that it was very slow paced without much action. So, because it was also the next to last movie shown, I was so tired I couldn't keep my eyes open and ended up sleeping through most of it. If I had been smart, I would have slept through Friday the 13th Part 2 in order to see Deep Red.
On a final note, Movieside auctioned off some items for charity throughout the evening and I ended up getting a 12 month subscription to Netflix for their 3-at-a-time (Unlimited) plan for $50. Considering that the plan would cost over $200 normally, I was quite pleased with that deal. I'm most certainly looking forward to next year's Massacre!
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