VHS and Betamax You Have Recently Rented

[Devon Malcolm]

Overlord is technically a war film and one of the few war / horror crossovers that really work.

[SaitoRyo]

Ruckus

It's First Blood, hicksploitation style! This actually came out two years before the first Rambo film, but it shares various similaraities to it. 

A transient, yet highly-skilled Vietnam vet (Dirk Benedict, AKA Face from The A-Team) is chased out of small town because he doesn't talk and looks like he needs a bath. He fought for your friggin' country, ya damn rednecks! Anyway, while most of the townspeople want him on a bus out of the county - or, better yet, dead - he fights back while falling for a kind, understanding woman (Linda Blair), who doesn't mind when he breaks into her house.

This is the sort of ultimately pointless, somewhat mindless fodder that gave small cinemas a popcorn flick to show that particular week. Doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, mind, and there's some genuine quality there, including appearances by Ben Johnson and Richard Farnsworth, who are always good value. You can sort of tell it was directed by a stuntman/stunt coordinator, as there are lots of chases, fights and falls. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, and this is an easy ninety minutes of action and comedy without any proper violence. 

[LaGoosh]

Monster

A strange film about a school boy who is seemingly bullied by his teacher. It's told from a number of different perspectives and is hard to follow until the final third where everything ties together in an unexpectedly moving way. A really beautiful but also sad film - the ending stayed with me for a long time.

The Wages of Fear

I've heard a lot about this one over the years and it's hailed as a classic and masterpiece of tension but I was disappointed by it. The main character is such an absolute cunt it pretty much ruined the film for me. When the final hour of the film is based around the tension of "is he going to survive?" but instead I was thinking "I hope this dumb piece of shit dies"...well it kind of takes the air out of the film.

[Supremo]

AMC kickstarted their Fear Fest last night by showing a Halloween marathon, from 1 - 5.

Watching them all together really hammers home how underrated Halloween 3 is and how much better the franchise could have been if they didn’t bottle it and go back to Michael Myers, instead keeping it as an anthology series with fresh ideas. The speed with which the quality nosedives in Halloween 4 and 5 is incredible. I haven’t watched the rest of them in forever but I seem to recall 6 is even worse!

However, watching them on an American feed, let’s make one thing clear; nothing that happens in any horror film is as terrifying as the way Americans advertise prescription drugs on television. Every single ad break featured at least two adverts for a miracle cure, with the final ten to twenty seconds of each ad being a list of potential side effects, including death. ‘Murica.

Edited October 2, 2025 by Supremo

[LaGoosh]

Yeah I've never thought much of the Halloween series. I enjoyed 3 but the first one is the only genuinely good film in the entire 13 film series. 

I have a huge soft spot for the Friday The 13th series though which is trashy, cheap and bad but loads of dumb fun. 

[BomberPat]

I have a soft spot for all of Halloween, the cult stuff they add in is ridiculous, but it at least tries to justify how Michael keeps coming back from the dead and turn it into something else, and Donald Pleasance is always good value for money. By contrast, I hated how much time the Rob Zombie movie spent on showing Michael as an abused kid with a horrible homelife, because then you end up either having sympathy for him or at least understanding why he ends up the way he does, when really the horror should just stem from him being completely unknowable. It was a real hack move to try and explain him in such simple terms, and I'll take weird cults over that any day.

Halloween 3 is great, though, I agree there.

[SaitoRyo]

7 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Donald Pleasance is always good value for money.

He is, but I always pissed myself laughing at this: 

Just the way he runs away immediately as the music starts. Perfect timing. 

I loved the Halloween films when I was younger as I was really into horror (particularly slasher) stuff in general. Back then I didn't really like Halloween III as Michael Myers wasn't in it, but I watched it again years later and loved it. Fun concept and a fucking great score. Got to see the original Halloween (on Halloween!) in the cinema about a decade ago, which was amazing. The Odeon let me take the poster, too, which was nice of them. 

[BomberPat]

I might have to watch some more of them this year; a couple of years ago we decided we were going to do a watch-through, but I don't think we got past 3. My other half had never really watched any slashers, so it's been to watch the first three Halloween movies, and we went to a screening of Nightmare On Elm Street last year. I don't think I have it in me to do the full Nightmare franchise, but I'd like to at least get to Dream Warriors and New Nightmare.

What really stands out to me with the original Halloween is just how much it stands up. I think the Carpenter score has a lot to do with that, but it's a film where every single trope has been done to death since, there have been a million over slasher movies, and yet it still works and doesn't feel tired or hacky.

[Supremo]

The first one is the very definition of Less Is More. There’s more tension and fear in the Halloween 1 showing you an empty street in broad daylight, where you think you can see him, than by the time he’s slicing people’s necks with a sickle in Halloween 5.

[DavidB6937]

The original Nightmare will always be the one that genuinely scares me the most. The score, some of the kills etc. I think they got the balance just right with that, and even now I find it incredibly unsettling. Obviously once they started playing on him as a comedy character a bit more it all went a bit tits up but the usual highs of 3 and 7 are ones I'll happily return to. I'm gutted that Cineworld is having a horror season and they're showing.. number 2! Fuck off.

Halloween is phenomenal. It's such a simple approach but the tension and the score work perfectly and it knows exactly what it's doing. It doesn't need any more. I must admit I haven't seen 3 in quite some time but I imagine I'd enjoy it a lot more now compared to when I first saw it and wondered what the hell was going on. But yeah, the series itself loses its way a bit and the basics are forgotten unfortunately.

The F13 series has always been ridiculous and I'm absolutely okay with that, even from the beginning. I can stick any of them on and have a laugh because I feel they didn't exactly deviate from the formula. They're all stupid. Even the space one was very much 'yeah we know we're dumb, fuck it, let's have some fun' and that was fine.

I very much appreciate the movies that can have such an impact by doing so little, compared with so many now that are completely OTT and it all just washes over me.

 

[BomberPat]

something that is already silly by Halloween 2, let alone far later in the series, is how often Michael is lying in wait ready to do some really elaborate kill. He stops being this silent, inevitable thing, and instead you're forced to picture all of the prep work he must be doing. 

[gmoney]

13 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

something that is already silly by Halloween 2, let alone far later in the series, is how often Michael is lying in wait ready to do some really elaborate kill. He stops being this silent, inevitable thing, and instead you're forced to picture all of the prep work he must be doing. 

Cunt learned to drive at some point!

[Devon Malcolm]

I watched all the Halloween films one weekend a couple of years ago. 1 and 3 are far and away the best ones. The one at the school was quite good and the first one of the reboot trilogy was really good. The rest are shit aside, especially the Rob Zombie ones.

[FLips]

The first Halloween has been added to this year’s playlist as another classic I’ve not seen yet.

We kicked off the season last night with Cabin in The Woods which I’d had three people close to me all recommend as brilliant. 
I enjoyed it for the most part, but feel I’d enjoy it second time around now the tension is gone. I did find it funny though, and the concept is a unique one. Definitely one I’d watch again as it is what I expected Scream to be, but Scream was a drag.

[LaGoosh]

39 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

something that is already silly by Halloween 2, let alone far later in the series, is how often Michael is lying in wait ready to do some really elaborate kill. He stops being this silent, inevitable thing, and instead you're forced to picture all of the prep work he must be doing. 

Well he does put on the blanket and glasses over his head for a kill in the first one. So he always had a tendency to get a bit whacky for some reason.