Yesterday I gave some suggestions for classic film alternatives for Halloween. Today I’ll give some suggestions for for modern films that might make for a good alternative to the standard films watched on Halloween.
Blow Out (1981)- Brian De Palma’s intriguing reworking of sixties cult hit Blowup (1966) has John Travolta as sound engineer for a film company who inadvertently records a car accident that may be a political assassination while getting background sounds for a film. He teams up with call girl Nancy Allen, who he saves from the accident, to find the truth and are pursued by creepy fixer John Lithgow who decides the best way to handle things is to start killing women so that when he kills Allen it will look like the random work of a serial killer.
The Private Eyes (1981)- An hilarious throwback to the haunted house comedies and who done its of the Golden Age with the perfect casting of Don Knotts and Tim Conway playing bumbling detectives in 1930’s England investigating mysterious goings on at a mansion. They keep coming across dead bodies while the killer leaves taunting poems that never quite rhyme, almost do themselves in while investigating an ancient torture chamber and don’t even solve the mystery but get credit for it anyway.
First Blood (1982)- Don’t scoff at my including this film, while promoted and considered an action film by most it is actually a well made thriller with moments of intense suspense. Sylvestor Stallone plays John Rambo, a disturbed Vietnam vet who is arrested for vagrancy by Brian Dennehy. Freaking out in Jail, he escapes and is pursued into the woods where Rambo plays cat and mouse games with his pursuers in a series of suspenseful sequences that will have you on the edge of your seat.
10 to Midnight (1983)- A great high octane thriller with super macho Charles Bronson manufacturing evidence to convict a killer rapist, only to end up ruining his career when it’s discovered and the man goes free. Tension mounts when the twisted killer seeks revenge by targeting Bronson’s daughter as his next victim.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)- Another questionable suggestion perhaps, but Harrison Ford discovering a Thuggee cult holding human sacrifices that include pulling people’s hearts out of their chests while they are still alive and turning Ford himself into a mindless slave through an ancient drug recipe, puts it squarely in the horror genre in my book.
Twin Peaks: The Movie (1990)- Back when Twin Peaks was all the rage for a TV season, director David Lynch took the two hour pilot and filmed new footage to making an ending for the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer, which was completely different from the eventual solution revealed in the second season, for foreign markets as a stand alone film. The result is one his better efforts, with a coherent and linear storyline that chronicles Kyle MacLachlan’s quirky FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer that leads him to the picturesque and extremely weird North woods town of Twin Peaks.
Ed Wood (1994)- Though not an actual horror film, Tim Burton’s homage to legendary cult filmmaker and cross dresser Edward D. Wood Jr., plays like an old fifties horror film, made in black and white with lots of shadowy lighting throughout. Plus, the scene where Martin Landau’s drugged up Bela Lugosi tries to convince Johnny Depp’s Wood to join him in suicide while waving a gun around is one of the more frightening scenes to come out of a Hollywood film in the last two decades, and beats anything shown in the Saw movies.
Insomnia (2002)- While the film came and went in the blink of an eye, this unassuming remake of a Norwegian thriller was an under appreciated film by both critics and audiences. Al Pacino plays a dirty cop who is sent to investigate a murder in Alaska, up in the far North where it is perpetually day. Unable to sleep and under investigation for manufacturing evidence, he inadvertently kills his partner, who just happens to be the key witness in the case against him, and this was seen by the killer he is hunting down, played with surprising restraint by Robin Williams. This leads to a tense battle of wits between the two as Pacino tries to keep from getting arrested for own misdeeds and prevent Williams from framing his victim’s boyfriend for both deaths.
Unfaithful (2002)- Director Adrian Lyne reworks his earlier hit Fatal Attraction (1987) with a film that starts out as an erotic and dramatic chronicle of bored wife Diane Lane having an affair. But things take a Quinton Tarrentino stlye twist as the film shifts genres at the midway point when husband Richard Gere kills his wife’s lover with a snow globe and the couple then work together cover it up. One of those rare films where an ambiguous ending works.
Tomorrow I’ll take different tack and offer some TV show suggestions for Halloween viewing.
