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The Oracle (1985)

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I think the worst way to watch The Oracle is to go in blind, the way I did, without knowing anything about the background or filmography of director Roberta Findlay. Granted the second-worst way to watch it would probably be after reading up on Findlay's history, but I wanted to provide a bit of context before saying I spent the first hour of this movie utterly baffled by what I was watching, or at least why it was made. The acting and direction are bad to the point I found myself wondering if it was intended as satire or parody, the pacing is glacial, and there's little internal logic to the plot. The good news is one of those elements - the pacing - improves significantly in the last half hour, at which point the movie does sort of coalesce into something semi-coherent (at least from a genre standpoint). I wouldn't call the final film good , but it turns into something of substance. Let's back up. Roberta Findlay helped her then-husband, Michael Findlay, develop the g...
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The Brain (1988)

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A low-budget throwback to old creature-features, The Brain is the sort of cheesy horror movie that aims for mediocrity and mostly hits its mark. Conceptually, it's notably similar to the cult classic, They Live, released the exact same day in 1988, but of course lacking Carpenter's skill. That's not to say The Brain is entirely without merit. As a cheesy, monster/alien invasion flick it has some fun puppetry, and the movie leans into the style of '50s drive-in movies so hard I found myself wishing they'd shot this in black & white. This wasn't made to be taken seriously, so if you're looking for something along those lines, well... honestly, you're still probably better off with They Live, Little Shop of Horrors, or just selecting something from the era this is emulating. The movie's premise concerns a televised psychologist, Blake (secretly an alien, played by David Gale), who's working with a psychic alien (this one a giant brain puppet wit...
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Letters to Satan Claus (2020)

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This is one of a few comedy/horror movies about a mislabeled letter to Santa invoking the Prince of Darkness instead that got on my radar after I saw the 2024 Jack Black vehicle, Dear Santa . I found myself in the minority in that I mostly liked that one, but of course I wanted to see other takes on the premise. This... actually isn't really that. Or rather, it is on the most simplistic of levels. Both movies feature a similar inciting incident with the protagonist writing to Satan by accident, but aside from that this is much closer to the second Adult Swim Yule Log , which is to say the horror is largely being leveraged as a counterpoint to a romcom framework playing off tropes parodying Hallmark Christmas movies. To its credit, Letters to Satan Claus did it first, though Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin' Out did it better. That's not to say this is awful or even bad. The pieces here are all actually pretty decent: Karen Knox understands the movie she's in and has a bl...
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Terror Train (1980)

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I came across Terror Train while looking through the Wikipedia page for New Year's Evil. A quote referenced Terror Train as the better of the two New Year's Eve slashers released in 1980. I agree, with the stipulation it's a very low bar, and if said bar were placed much higher Terror Train would have driven into it: "better" does not mean "good," at least in my opinion. That said, this movie certainly has its defenders, and I can appreciate at least some of what they see in it. The movie has some solid lighting and cinematography (particularly early on, when we're presented with some gorgeously atmospheric shots of the exterior of the titular train). It also features a young David Copperfield in a surprisingly significant role as a magician. The real star, however, is Jamie Lee Curtis, whose casting makes it pretty obvious what movie this is attempting to replicate. For what it's worth, producer Daniel Grodnik received permission from John Carpe...
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Pooka! (2018)

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This one's been on my radar for years. It was made as part of "Into the Dark," an anthology television series produced by Blumhouse featuring standalone horror movies each built around a different holiday. Well, they were all different in season one - season two reuses holidays, which means there are a couple Christmas and a couple New Year's movies altogether. But none of that really matters - both installments I've seen to date have felt like (for lack of a better term) real  movies, not TV episodes. I'm not saying this would necessarily have been huge if opened in theaters, but I've seen worse horror movies that were successful. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean Pooka! is great, either. It has elements that are, starting with Nyasha Hatendi's performance as Wilson, an actor hired to inhabit what's essentially a cross between a Teletubby and Furby as the mascot for a toy its company hopes will be a big Christmas release. In addition to Hatendi...
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A Nasty Piece of Work (2019)

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I'm going to lean into the reality in which this is a movie, as opposed to the reality we actually inhabit in which it's an episode in a Blumhouse-produced holiday horror anthology television series called "Into the Dark," since Hulu seems to have unbundled these at some point and now presents them as standalone movies. But over in that alternate universe, this was part of the second season of Into the Dark, which means there's at least three other installments relevant to our interests (another Christmas and two New Year's). And after my experience with A Nasty Piece of Work, I'm interested in checking those out. This isn't a life-changing experience or some kind of hidden masterpiece, but I was entertained, which is as good a description of what this is setting out to do as any. To put this another way, while this is technically horror/comedy, it leans so far towards to the latter as to read almost more like dark comedy. That's neither intended a...
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The Mistletoe Bough (1904)

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I learned about this while looking at the fifth volume of The Valancourt Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, which includes the lyrics to a popular British song written by Thomas Haynes Bayly dating back to 1829 about a young woman who seemingly vanishes during a game of hide-and-seek and whose skeleton is found in a chest years later. The underlying story is even older - Wikipedia credits Samuel Rogers with the earliest written version, a poem titled, "Ginevra", published seven years earlier, with the caveat the narrative was most likely folklore before either Bayly or Rogers wrote it down. Apparently, there are numerous old manors throughout England claiming to have been the site of the supposed tragedy inspiring the story. One difference that's hard to miss between Bayly's "The Mistletoe Bough" and Roger's "Ginevra" is that the earlier poem wasn't set at Christmas. Bayly's song, as the name implies, absolutely is - at least until the ti...
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