Aeronautic Primates and Other Delights

Finished The Good Place Season 4. I think I expected more of an impact out of it, given how other people responded to it. I still liked it a lot, but it didn't really eff me up or anything.

Voted on Thursday! If you're an American citizen and you haven't already voted, do so. Make a plan to vote. Go to IWillVote.com. Nothing is more critical than this moment.

Oh, also, sol_se and I have handily met our 31 spooky movies in 31 days goal for October. Everything after this is gravy.

Movies I've seen before are in italics

Masque of the Red Death (1964)
It's Alive (1974)
Evil Dead (2013)
Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979)
The Blob (1958)
Beware! The Blob (1972)
Fall of the House of Usher (1960)
Suspiria (2018)
Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

As you can see, I'm starting sol_se on the Corman/Price Poe movies. We'll see if we can work through the rest before Halloween. These were very formative for me. Of the three we watched, I think we both agree that Pit and the Pendulum is the most enjoyable. This is one of the very first horror movies my mother ever showed me, incidentally.

I really like It's Alive, but man, they needed to replace their sound guy. So much dialogue was unintelligible or too quiet. Still, it's very effective for being a killer mutant baby movie.

I didn't know what to expect out of the Evil Dead remake. I knew there wasn't going to be an Ash character (although there kinda-sorta was). I didn't agree with all the choices made, but overall it was pretty good. It's certainly the most disgusting film I've seen in a while.

A quibble: Criterion Channel listed the Nosferatu remake as Nosferatu the Vampyre, but then showed Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht. These are two different movies! Not substantially different, but the film was shot in separate English and German versions, so there are subtle differences between the two. I don't have a preference one over the other, but I did tell sol_se we were getting the English version before, lo and behold, German. In either version, this is a very ponderous movie and I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way. It's incredibly deliberate and takes its time saying what it wants to say.

The Blob remains a very workmanlike movie about killer jello. It doesn't add a lot of flair, but it knows what it's about and gets the job done. The same cannot be said for its execrable sequel Beware! The Blob (directed by Larry Hagman(!)). This was mostly a series of loosely connected unfunny sketches that all ended with someone getting eaten by the blob. I kept getting thrown off by the male protagonist, played by Robert Walker Jr, who may be better known as Charlie X from the Star Trek episode.

I do not know if I liked the Suspiria remake. I can definitely say I did not understand it.

Cheating again, but I figure that a horror experience is kind of the same as a horror movie? 

Anyway, elipie and I went out to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood last night. It's a good idea when you're going to one of these things to bring a close friend who you don't see as often as you'd like. You're going to spend a lot of time in lines, so it's a great opportunity to catch up or just philosophize (or yammer endless movie trivia if you're me).

We only ended up going through three of the mazes -- the Evil Dead, the Terror Tram, and Universal Monsters Remix, because lines. We also didn't get to the Bill and Ted stage show. Next year, I swear. We did go on the Jurassic Park and Mummy rides, though, both of which are consistently fun. Eli got soaked on Jurassic Park.

There's actually a funny story about that ride. So, the park is split into an upper and lower level. The Jurassic Park ride is on the lower level. Also on the lower level, there were generic monstery things walking about on stilt legs. Eli and I passed them by and got into line for the Jurassic Park ride behind a man and a woman. The woman glanced back, looked at me, and jumped. Then she laughed and turned to her friend/partner/husband/whatever and said, "Oh geez, I thought one of the stilt things followed us here." And then Eli laughed and said, "He's tall, but he's not *that* tall." It was amusing.

I didn't get a lot of joy out of the Evil Dead maze, since it was apparently entirely based on the remake. I was hoping for something along the lines of last year's Texas Chainsaw maze, which paid homage to the entire history of the series (including multiple versions of Leatherface), but nothing I saw really struck me.

The Terror Tram was fun, although I think I would get more out of it if I actually watched The Walking Dead (which is the theme of the maze). You do get to walk past the Bates Motel from Psycho and the crashed plane from War of the Worlds. Eli and I also went and did the Bates house photo op, which I'll post separately under a lock later (or Eli will).

Universal Monsters Remix... sigh. They replaced most of the monsters with either generic looking ones or stuff out of recent vintage horror movies. The Frankenstein lab (my very favorite part of the whole experience) had no actual Frankenstein monster in it, but instead some sort of weirdo creature with an exposed brain. There were a couple Nosferatus running around, which was neat, and the Chucky they had running around was an actual little person, which was disconcerting for those of us with very high fields of vision. However, the section with werewolves was entirely populated with Benecio del Toro-style lycanthropes. All-in-all, I think it's really sad that their one permanent haunted house maze turns its back on the classics during the Halloween season in some sort of weird effort at being hip.

Overall, I had a lot of fun, even if it sounds like I didn't. The atmosphere was great, the lines were non-annoying, and the company was good.