On Saturday, being the closest to Halloween, I had the pleasure of being one of a very few that decided to take advantage of a full night of horror films in Romford for absolutely nothing. Given the fact that the tickets were completely free I am amazed at just how few people turned up, and even more by how few stayed the distance and we're still there at the end. Anyway, without dwelling on the lack of people I will now go through the films and my feelings and thoughts about them.
We started of by being shown to the top floor of the Mercury Mall and into the closed down nightclub, Pulse. It is a great setting for watching horror films and I hope they do more of this kind of thing there.
The films kicked of with something light and mainstream, Beetlejuice. It was good fun watching this Tim Burton classic again and a nice easing into the night. For the first time it struck me how much Micheal Keaton's character reminded me of David Lee Roth.
The second film was the John Carpenter classic The Fog. I must say it was a lot better than I remember it being, maybe it was watching it on a big screen for the first time.
The third film was Dawn Of The Dead, one of my favourites of George A. Romero's zombie films. Unfortunately the version we watched was the Dario Argenta edit, which, although slightly more gory, was nowhere near as good as the original and was spoiled but some odd cuts and misplaced music.
At this point we moved from the old Pulse nightclub to the Premier Cinema one floor down.
The first film we saw there was The Belko Experiment. An excellent film with a good cast. A great horror/conspiracy theory slaughter fest that works so well.
Next we had a special uncut/new edit of the Dario Argenta classic Susperia. It has been a long time since I've seen this film so couldn't tell the difference in the cut but I would say that, although it is a classic and good in many ways, I find it a little slow in places, a bit over long, many too European (if you know what I mean), it's very odd in many places and has some unintentionally amusing scenes and dialogue. The Goblin soundtrack was great to hear again.
Next up was another piece of Italian horror, The Beyond. Again it was a bit slow in places. There is an excellently unintentionally funny scene with some fake spiders and a fake head. There was one scene in each of these Italian films that left me wondering what it is that Italian horror film makers have about blind people being attacked by their own guide dogs?
Then we had a more up to date and slightly more light hearted film called Tales Of Halloween. It is a film made up of a number of short films made by modern day horror film makers. It is good fun and has some great traditional scares, a good amount of gore, some great cameos and geat use of old film clips (especially from Night Of The Living Dead).
The whole night was rounded of with another classic film from John Carpenter, The Thing. There really is very little to say about it except that it is excellent.
All in all a good night of films, all I hope is that when, or if, they do a free night like this again, more people turn up.
No comments:
Post a Comment