Horror Queen

If you head to Best Buy anytime soon, make sure to keep your eyes peeled for the FearNet Body Bag editions of different movies. Basically the company takes regular horror movies and puts them inside a plastic “body bag”, complete with a zipper on the front. The regular price is $9.99, but Best Buy keeps putting them on sale for $8.99. This week I grabbed two for $15, so it was a pretty good deal. Most of the movies are pretty bad (and sadly I own several), but there are also a few goods ones mixed in. I’ve already had several people comment on them, just by keeping them on the table so just consider it a Halloween decoration!

One of my favorite things about this documentary is when they take a few minutes to discuss April Fool’s Day, one of my favorite horror movies of all time. One of the men states fairly loudly that it isn’t a cheat, but that the makers of High Tension used a cheap. Damn skippy buddy! The director of April Fool’s Day even accepts responsibility for the fall of the slasher film before quickly saying he doesn’t and the distributor of the movie should be blamed.

Towards the end it starts to lose steam a little. They talk about Silence of the Lambs and Scream as revitalizing the horror movie genre and spend way too much time patting the makers of Scream on the back. They gloss over the fact that those movies spawned a lot of low budget and high budget movies that sucked, just the same as we saw in the 1980s. In fact, some might argue that movies like I Still Know What You Did Last Summer are far worse than movies like Cheerleader Camp.

Going to Pieces is still an excellent documentary and I’m glad I took the recommendation of a friend and watched it. It glosses over horror movies made earlier and focuses on the slasher films of the late 1970s and on, starting with Halloween. Plus they bring together not only John Carpenter and Wes Craven, but a lot of lesser known directors working during this time. Any movie that not only mentions My Bloody Valentine, but shows clips and an interview with the director, definitely gets two thumbs up from me.

It’s pretty hard to believe that Child’s Play has been around for 20 years now, but apparently it has. A few weeks ago I was browsing the selection at my local Target and saw the new DVD starring at me from the shelf for $9.99. Now I already own the box set of the last 3-4 movies, plus the first and last movie on DVD, but I couldn’t pass up this set.The 20^th Birthday DVD for Child’s Play includes a number of interviews and behind the scenes footage of the movie. Plus they managed to drag back the old stars and special effects people to talk about what it was like filming the movie. The real highlight is the scene specific commentary from Chucky himself.Yes, Brad Douriff puts on the Chucky voice and sits down for roughly 20 minutes of scenes to talk about things from his perspective. Some of the best quotes?