Critters 3 - so the first Critters is excellent, the second Critters is okay, and the third one is... tolerable I guess. It has a young Leonardo DiCaprio and features more of the critters being critters, but it just feels kind of dumb and hollow. The most memorable gags involve a critter eating beans and farting and another critter drinking dish soap and burping bubbles. Whatever. This is definitely the more "wannabe Gremlins" than the first two and the plot makes considerably less sense. But it ends on a cliffhanger and I bought the box set so I'm definitely going to end up watching Critters 4.
Creepshow 2 - It's been over 15 years since I've seen this movie; the only segment I really remembered was "The Raft" and the animated bit that ends with "they eat MEAT." As an adult, I can definitely see how this is a big step down from the first movie; it's lacking in the really great 50s-comics aesthetic that George A. Romero was able to deliver and instead looks more like a conventional horror movie (though still shows its retro-comic book roots in the bookending sequences and general campiness). It's still a fun movie though that probably fits into my top 5 Stephen King movies just for being some lightweight entertainment. (Just for fun #1 The Shining, #2 Carrie, #3 Creepshow, #4 The Mist, #5 Creepshow 2)
Wrong Turn - A 21st century "classic" that I never watched before now, but I saw there are 5 sequels and a reboot on the way so I thought I might as well familiarize myself with the original. It's very much a "evil hillbilly" movie, focusing on some cityfolk who run into a group of deformed cannibals in the rural hills of West Virginia. It does what it does well enough, but it didn't really bring much in the way of new ideas (or ANY ideas) to the genre. The cannibals might as well just be ogres instead of people; there's no backstory as to WHY they seem to live a lifestyle of killing and eating people, they don't even speak beyond grunts and laughs. I get how this film was popular in 2003 when gory horror was just coming out of its dormancy of the 90s, but it's exactly what I imagined it was and I really could have skipped it. Give me the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre over this any day of the week.
And while it wasn't a strict goal, I managed to actually fit in 31 spooky movies for October!
Oh, and I don't think I mentioned it in the thread but I played through Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth on the Wii, which was a pretty solid classic-style Castlevania game! There are a few bits that I found annoying, but it's a HUGE improvement over the original Game Boy version.
I still have some movies checked out of the library, and I do have some unwatched discs I bought, but I'm looking forward to slowing down my movie watching pace and coming back to non-Halloween reality. Tomorrow I'll put away my decorations, I'll stop eating candy like there's no tomorrow... but I'm still going to hit up a Halloween store to see what heavily discounted things I can find!
