horrorthon 9

went to the annual exhumed horrorthon this weekend.i went by myself this time and there were a couple duds this year but as usual it was still a great time.


here's what they showed:

We're Going to Eat You


i missed this one since i got to the festival a little late but i definitely plan on tracking it down soon since i hear good things about it.

Godzilla 1985


can't say i've ever been a big godzilla fan so i felt pretty meh about this one. they did show Godzilla's Revenge aka Attack All Monsters last year though and that movie was HILARIOUS.

oddly my favorite movie of the festival that i had never seen before was Silent Rage


part slasher, part action, part sci fi. ALL cliche, ALL hysterical. i literally could not stop laughing through this entire movie. some of the laughs packed in were intentional but this movie is so over the top i couldn't help myself.there were people in the theater laughing at me laughing i think.

Martin was one of the few Romero films I had never seen though I already knew everything about it


while i suppose it was neat to see student films of the likes of John Carpenter i wasn't a fan of Shock Value


the last short was the best and that was the often adapted old urban legend of the babysitter and the obscene caller that's coming from inside the house. overall i thought they were a little boring,not scary or entertaining. they were student films albeit from some of the masters of the genre

my favorite treat of the night was Night of the Demons


along with showing Night of the Demons, the writer and producer of the film was there to present the film and then do a Q&A afterwards. He grew up in the northeast and I was surprised to find that this was the first the movie had been shown on the big screen here in Philadelphia. It has long been one of my favorite horror movies so this was a really great surprise.

Brain Damage was up next


I need to revisit this one because i was enjoying it a lot but wound up dozing off for the last tiny bit of the movie and then into quite a few parts of the next feature...

which was Altered States



next up was terrorvision


every year i wind up watching one of the movies shown at horrorthon like the week before i go so i wind up a little disappointed that i wasted time watching it when i could have just watched it at the fest on the big screen. luckily, the night i was about to rewatch terrorvision for the umpteenth time this month i decided to choose something else last minute. even though i've seen it many many times i somehow forgot it is almost like a horror peewee's playhouse.

next up was "The Witch" aka "Superstition"


there were a couple of good gore scenes but i thought this one was boring overall.

At this point there was a beach romp b-movie about some kind of sea monster but I forgot the name of it as soon as they showed it on the screen. It was cheesy. I might have enjoyed it more as a mystery science theater send up.

in the program the next mystery movie was billed as "quite simply one of the best vampire movies of all time" and I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment: Near Dark


definitely one of my favorites that I had already been planning to watch this week, excited I got to see it in 35mm on the big screen!

back to back Lance Henrickson with Piranha 2: The Spawning


basically jaws 3 with smaller fish that could also somehow fly.i'm curious what james cameron thinks of this effort in hindsight.

last movie of the night/morning was Army of Darkness


was so happy that this was finally screened. it had been a while since i had seen it and I had a hankering especially with the new Ash vs the Evil Dead series about to begin, which i'm pretty excited about.