Letters From Our Fathers

It is almost impossible for me to believe that Letters From Iwo Jima (originally given the far better title of Red Sun, Black Sand) was filmed back-to-back with Flags of Our Fathers. There isn't a single complaint that I leveled at that film that hasn't been deliberately excised from its sibling with surgical precision. It's just as well, too, because the American-made film focusing on the Japanese who fought at Iwo Jima as a companion to a film that was already hopelessly indelicate could very easily have been a total disaster. Instead, it ended up the finest war movie of the last decade.

Eastwood clearly knew how much was riding on the movie, because all the stops have been pulled out in making sure everything hews as close to real Japanese culture as humanly possible. Understanding that there was no way Paul Haggis could be allowed anywhere near the material, Eastwood instead hired Japanese-American writer Iris Yamashita (a woman with precisely zero other film credits, before or since) to pen the script. Haggis gets a story credit, but I suspect it may just be because Letters parallels his Flags script, as it must. The cast is also composed entirely of Japanese actors speaking their native language in place of the usual Hollywood approach of casting a slew of Pan-Asian actors and letting them butcher dialogue in a language that they quite possibly don't speak at all. I'm far too Caucasian to pass judgement myself, but the tremendous critical and commercial success that Letters saw in Japan makes me fairly comfortable in believing that there are no serious representational gaffes here.

The level of dedication shines through in the film itself. It's impossible to doubt for a second the filmmakers' dedication to their characters. If Flags was already a war film of unusual humanity, Letters bests it by a spectacular margin. Like Flags it focuses on three particular soldiers in the fight for Iwo Jima without ever really being about them at all. Where Flags was also about those men struggling to come to terms with life after the fact, Letters is instead about the fact that these men are going to die, and they know it. The letters of the title are written by the film's characters to their families, but they are written for the characters themselves, who know full-well that neither they or the letters will ever leave Iwo.

If I described Flags as 'restrained', the only adjective I could rightfully level at Letters is 'meditative'. In my review of Flags of Our Fathers I said that Iwo Jima was by far the most important character in the film*, and that it was never better than the moments it returned to that island. Letters From Iwo Jima (aside from a handful of flashbacks) never leaves those shores, and this allows it to settle into a steady rhythm, following the Japanese soldiers as they each continue trying to exist in the only way they know how. Even when the war finally reaches the island it's made to feel like an inevitable fact of life introducing further complications to the characters than the bloody combat that it really is. Even more than Flags the warfare is painted in broad, abstract strokes, with cinematography so desaturated that it more suggests colours rather than capturing them on film.

With its gentle rhythm, stripped-down aesthetic and endless reserves of humanity it's difficult not to become caught up in the lives of those Japanese soldiers yourself. When the inevitable comes and people start dying, their removal from the film's fabric feels more painful than the countless hectic, brutally violent war-film deaths. Being an Eastwood film, it's entirely unsurprising that Letters is a formal masterpiece. Being an Eastwood film, it's altogether surprising and greatly pleasing that it should so perfectly balance bitter anti-war outrage and raw emotion without ever feeling less than absolutely genuine. The director is genuinely not known for keeping his emotions in check, but he manages it here with grace to spare.

That Letters From Iwo Jima is alone the finest war film in a decade, probably more** would alone make it worthy of being remembered. The real magic, though, occurs in a roughly twenty-minute passage in the middle of the film where it directly overlaps with Flags of Our Fathers. In these moments the two films together do something that transcends either of them. No matter which of the two you are watching, it becomes impossible not to think of the very real men and their struggles on the opposite side of the battle, even as they appear no larger than ants milling about before the camera. In this way, both films (Flags especially, since it had further to climb) overcome their limitations, even many of the ones endemic to the medium, to become among the most powerful and effective anti-war statements ever conceived.

*At least, I wish I had.

**With the concession that The Thin Red Line beggars a descriptor like that.

Flags of Iwo Jima

Few great movies exist that are not subject to flaws. This is nothing new. It is rare, however, that great movies  are such in spite of flaws quite as big as the ones that face Flags of Our Fathers, a Clint Eastwood-helmed war film that uses the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photo as the centrepoint for a bold and sometimes shockingly vicious mission to re-evaluate just how we as a society should necessarily feel about World War II.

I know this to be the movie's mission, because writer Paul Haggis (working here with William Broyles, Jr.) was afraid I might not pick it up and helpfully has one of his three lead characters state it out loud in just about every scene. Namely soldiers John Bradley (Ryan Phillipe, in a rare turn of not making me want to punch him), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), the three men responsible for putting the flag up that day who lived long enough to report on the experience to their superiors.

Ira is also Native American, something Paul Haggis would like to point out at every possible opportunity, because apparently he wasn't quite done being condescing about race issues in America after the suffocatingly preachy Crash. This is to say nothing of Ira's DRINKING PROBLEM. Barely a scene passes in which he is not seen DRINKING ALCOHOL, or teetering around and being belligerent because he is DRUNK, at which point someone will remark on how very DRUNK he is, and that just maybe his DRINKING PROBLEM is the result of POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS. Because he was a SOLDIER. In the WAR. And you WEREN'T. I could happily hang shit on Paul Haggis and his shortcomings as a writer forever, but that would be a great disservice to the film and to anyone reading this review. Suffice it to say that Flags of Our Fathers is not at all a good script and leave it at that.

Thank god then, that Eastwood was not at all interested in sitting back and letting the script carry the film. It is his work (with, of course, his regular collaborators, cinematographer Tom Stern and editor Joel Cox) that elevates the film from 'Flags of Our Fathers, terrible script' to 'Flags of Our Fathers, entirely respectable war movie'. Anyone who knows anything about Eastwood as a director will find no surprises here - his usual minimalist aesthetic is here in full force, but it is used to uncommonly good effect. Where Haggis will bleat the same theme at us scene after scene, line after line, Eastwood far more adeptly layers subtle meanings over every shot, carefully, patiently and totally without mercy deconstructing and demythologising World War II without ever daring to marginalise the efforts of the people involved.

Generally speaking, the film operates on three levels: on the base level is the day of the landing on Iwo Jima, depicting the struggle to take the island and the activities surrounding the flag-raising itself. On top of that is the War Bonds campaign in the months after, following the three living flag-raisers on a tour of America to drum up public support for the war effort. On top of that sits the modern-day efforts of one of the soldiers' sons, trying to do the same thing as the film itself - piece together the events of that day and clear away the mess of publicity and hero-worship that has since distorted them. His third, unspoken role is to fill up a totally unnecessary narration track explaining in detail the movie's themes. Also generally speaking, the further things get from Iwo Jima, the living beating heart of the film, the worse they become as Eastwood is less and less able to save the script from itself.

When that heart is exposed, though, Eastwood siezes the opportunity with both hands. Having already established that one cannot understand the sensation of being in a warzone through film, he instead opts to shoot the battle scenes like some kind of hellish dreamscape. Iwo Jima as it appears in Flags (played by Iceland) is sparse, unforgiving and devoid of life (in the words of one of the film's characters, "an ugly, smelly, dirty little scab of rock"). Even at their most hectic the battles that take place there have a bare and surreal quality that gently reminds us of the unknowability of war. Even then Eastwood maintains his careful, controlled visual style, focusing as much as possible on the men fighting it and the way this is, for them, all part of the job they signed on for. And all without using graphic violence as a crutch, like some war movies I could mention. In these moments Flags is unimpeachable, and it carries its themes across in a way that the rest of the film's talking on the subject could never hope to.

So no, the film is not a home-run by any stretch; such a huge disconnect between script and film is never a desirable thing and the movie founders for much of its not-inconsiderable running time. A leaner, meaner script without any of the relentless Haggising (in particular, lose the damn framing device) to go with the brutally lean, mean visuals would have left Flags of Our Fathers in far better shape. As-is it's an uncommonly restrained and humane -albeit unfortunately preachy - war movie that struggles to hold itself entirely upright without its sibling for support. Ah, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Not the sequel to 'P'

2007 could, I think, be called the Year of the Tortureporno. The genesis of the fad can be traced to a handful of foreign horror films and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake circa 2003. Saw  cemented it in 2004 and a couple of notably disreputable entries trickled out over the next couple of years - the pair of dreadfully unpleasant Saw sequels and Eli Roth's Hostel probably the most so. In 2007, though, the floodgates opened.  A fourth entry saw the Saw movies making the leap from trilogy to franchise, Hostel saw its own follow-up, two French torture films, Frontier(s) and Inside, made waves,  Captivity generated massive controversy with its ad campaign and the year was capped off with today's subject, a tortureporn Christmas movie of all things, P2.

Indeed, P2 showcases a positive laundry list of trappings of this most unsavoury of subgenres: a relentless string of contrivances to keep salvation perpetually just out of reach of the protagonist(s, torture films are less given to having a designated Final Girl), a resolutely unthreatening villain, scenes of violence that focus far less on the gore and more on the suffering of the people involved, and a vein of sour misanthropy that takes weeks to shake after viewing. It's not true of all movies in the genre, but almost all of them also share the following trait with P2 as well: they are profoundly fucking awful movies.

The only thing that really sets P2 apart from so many of its contemporaries is the involvement of noted French filmmaker Alexandre Aja, who first broke on to the horror scene in a big way in 2003's neo-slasher Haute Tension. Written by Aja himself with regular collaborator Gregory Levasseur and directed by first-timer Franck Khalfoun, who had previously appeared in front of the camera in Haute Tension, the grubby fingerprints of the man behind that film and the Hills Have Eyes remake were all over this one.

P2 is delightfully mercenary in establishing its goals. Over the course of not more than fifteen minutes we're introduced to Angela (Rachel Nichols), a career woman working late one Christmas Eve who ends up stranded in her workplace's underground parking lot after her car refuses to start and the rest of her co-workers have headed home. Friendly night guard Thomas (Wes Bentley) lets her up to the lobby to wait for a cab before she finds out the front doors are sealed and at this point you could almost believe you were watching a particularly generic holiday comedy save for a couple of flimsy false scares. On her way back through the parking lot Angela is knocked out by Thomas and awakes chained to a table, facing him. The movie is barely a tenth over and that's all the plot and characterisation we'll be getting. From then on it's a slow crawl to the end credits as Angela sees herself stuck in torture setpiece after torture setpiece.

Alexandre Aja's involvement meant one good thing, at least - the director brought with him Maxime Alexandre, his regular cinematographer, and the thing looks a million bucks. Draped in moody shadows and contrasted with harsh neon lighting and vivid splashes of colour (the colour-coded pillars of the parking lot look particularly striking, as well as frequent uses of the colour red), the camera works its hardest to really capture the ominous feeling of an underground carpark late at night even as a generic, overmixed and wholly inappropriate score by the outstandingly douchily-named tomandandy does its best to ruin the mood.

That's about all the praise I have to sing, though, because the movie that plays out within that gorgeous and evocative setting is rancid. I already mentioned the plot contrivances but I'm going to mention them again because the movie is literally built out of them.  Everything from the general brunt of the plot to the tiniest little gruesome detail is contrived from some hellish place where screenwriting goes to die. Contrivance in horror is nothing new, but it adds up to vey little of anything here. I never cared that Angela was in jeopardy or pain because Angela barely existed, a non-character hidden behind an icy exterior, a lousy performance and a whole lot of tears. Even this could have crippled but not ruined the film if its villain wasn't every bit her equal. I was constantly torn between wondering if Thomas was supposed to be scary or hilarious, and Bentley's inability to do anything other than feign awkward conversation or scream shrilly did little to make it any clearer. By the time he proved himself a clown with a big Elvis song-n-dance number (no, really), I'd stopped caring because P2 clearly never gave a shit to begin with.

I'm not even the right person to be talking about this, though. This movie isn't about Angela, or Thomas. This is a film about watching people tear their own fingernails off. This is a film about seeing a dobermann stabbed to death with a tire iron. It's not even about the execution of those ideas - indeed, i've never lied about my love of a nice gooey gore effect, but there's not even a whole lot of that on display here. It's about wallowing in the idea of such acts, and praising the creators for... for what? For the willingness to Go There? I'm not buying it. I know that Alexandre Aja can make a delightfully amoral splatterfest that is full of energy and liveliness; I have seen Piranha 3D. Now there was a film that didn't make me feel like I had to shower afterwards.

It's Haddonfield, but not as we know it

(Note: The following review is based on the Director's Cut of the film)

It's hard to imagine an easier way to earn the ire of legions of horror fans in this day and age than to announce a brand-new remake of a beloved classic. From the moment of its announcement you can all but guarantee hordes of faithful fans who have stuck by their given franchise through the worst of the sequel-happy 80s descending upon the IMDB message boards en masse raging about the travesty is being wrought upon their once-proud series, as if the act of remaking a film somehow causes the source material to stop existing.

It took a long time and a lot of raging of my own to realise how silly the whole affair was. It's true that horror remakes are almost invariably cynical exercises in brand recognition not worth the time it takes to watch them.  The same could also be said for a very great many horror sequels, with the added offence of being a part of the same continuity as the original and generally doing terrible things to the mythology in a way that retroactively taints their predecessors. No, most of these remakes have no damn cause to exist; but they do and there's no real use nor reason in fighting them.

In retrospect it probably should have come as no surprise when Rob Zombie announced his intentions to remake John Carpenter's 1978 seminal slasher Halloween. Both of his projects up to that point had been remakes after a fashion - the borderline-unwatchable House of 1000 Corpses owed more than a little to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the shockingly excellent follow-up The Devil's Rejects was at its heart a riff on Bonnie and Clyde imbued with the blood of countless 70s exploitation flicks. So it was that Zombie, armed with Carpenter's blessing and the advice to make the project his own, set out to bring us a brand-new version of the timeless original.

Except he didn't. It becomes abundantly clear only moments into this new Halloween that Zombie really has made the material his own. Indeed, there's a lot that tells us from the opening moments that we're watching a Rob Zombie film and very little that suggests a relationship to Carpenter's work.

After a title card informing us that it's October 31 in Haddonfield, IL (the year, by my calculation from the film's other title cards, is 1992), we join events already in progress at what we'll soon learn is the Myers household, where hardworking Deborah Myers (Sheri Moon Zombie, who has again come forward in ability by leaps and bounds since her last Zombie project) is struggling to manage the demands of both a teenaged and infant daughter, as well as the more juvenile yet Ronnie (William Forsythe), her trailer trash live-in boyfriend. It's hardly surprising that she is out of energy by the time her son Michael (Daeg Ferch) emerges from the bathroom (we know, as she does not, that he was in there disposing of a murdered pet rat).

Off young Michael goes to school, where he is bullied mercilessly about his mother's occupation as a stripper by resident school bully Wesley (Daryl Sabara). The ensuing fight sees Deborah hauled into the school to discuss Michael's increasingly violent tendencies with the principal and psychologist Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), while Michael himself sneaks out to tail Wesley before beating him to death with a tree branch out in the woods in an incredibly vicious scene that is marred by what is thankfully the only poorly-judged slow-motion shot of the film.

Thus is the tone set for much of the next hour as Michael acts out his violent impulses on his family and is incarcerated in Smith's Grove asylum under the treatment of Dr. Loomis, all filmed with a lot of queasy closeups and grainy cinematography intercut with faked news and archival footage (one touch I liked was the noticably shittier sound quality in the scenes where Loomis is seen recording his conversations with Michael) combined with just enough carefuly crafted longer shots that you couldn't quite call it 'documentary style'.

It's fair, I think, to call this Zombie's best work to that point, treading well-worn narrative ground with great panache and an unnerring craftsman's eye. Watching Michael's journey from teenage fuck-up to passionless killer is genuinely convincing and incredibly unnerving for it, and watching the toll it takes on his mother gives the film its most human and emotionally-charged arc. All good things must come to an end though, and Halloween hits a stumble it never quite recovers from at almost exactly the halfway mark of its 117 minutes.

The action jumps forward a number of years to 2007, when Michael breaks out of Smith's Grove due to events that, in the director's cut at least, are almost unspeakably vile. He's only got one destination in mind, and it's not long before he's commandeered a vehicle and is headed straight for Haddonfield. It's only now that we meet Laurie Strode, the character Jamie Lee Curtis played in the original Halloween and the one that film was chiefly concerned with, and the new Halloween starts actually retelling the events of its namesake.

Unfortunately, because we're already an hour into the film at this point, something had to go to keep it a reasonable length and the axe fell on Laurie. Not content with butchering her role, she's then placed in the hands of the wretched Scout Taylor-Compton, who has absolutely nothing in her repetoire beyond being shrill and and obnoxious. It's a performance that makes even the few scenes spent introducing her and the two friends she spends her time trading crudities with (credit where it's due - Zombie deserves kudos for giving us a Final Girl who is a far cry from pure and virginal) hard to watch.

There are two major flaws that cripple the retread half of Halloween. The first is that it's too often content to outright copy John Carpenter, only not as well. It's worth noting that the filmmaking in this half of the film is far more anonymous, although 'anonymous' in a Rob Zombie vehicle is a highly relative term. The second is that it's absolutely not reconcilable with the first half in any meaningful way. Michael Myers as we see him in the second half is a largely characterless brute (played by the frighteningly large Tyler Mane) who shows no real echo of the Michael Myers we've just spent an hour with. The only link between the two halves, then, is Loomis, who is portrayed as an occasionally well-intentioned dick with a flair for melodrama that would make the late, great Donald Pleasance blush.

There are some small pleasures. Danielle Harris (in her third appearance in a Halloween film) is by a wide margin the most interesting of the girls as Annie Brackett, matched by Brad Douriff as her father, the town sherriff. The kills, unlike most you'd see in a slasher movie,  are distinctly unpleasant and not-at-all interested in audience satisfaction - the film is never terribly gory, but the deaths are every one of them brutal, held aloft on (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the director's background) terrific, eye-watering sound design that makes you feel every damn hit. The terrible plot revelation that ruined the original franchise is far more organically a part of this version, and if it had come forty minutes earlier as a continuation of what we'd already seen and not been shelved in favour of bland Dead Teenager boilerplate, it might have been enough to save this wreck. It certainly adds to the impact of the film's shocker ending, twenty seconds that tries to tie the two disparate halves together with only partial success, but serves in its own right as a pretty indellible image to leave the film with.

Halloween '07 is a font of so much wasted potential it'd just about make you weep, but it hits almost as much as it misses. Between the near-perfect first hour and a handful of moments of demented inspiration hidden amongst the dreary last act, there's more than enough good in the film  to chalk it up as an interesting failure. And in the annals of horror remakes, 'interesting failure' is tantamount to 'a damn masterpiece'. I'm glad the thing exists, and that's something it has in common with very few modern horror remakes.

What better introduction, indeed

Introductions are a hell of a thing. Trying to communicate, in a single post, why exactly my film blog is worth adding to an ever-expanding list of mostly-irrelevant ones.

It isn't, so you'll have to make do with a Hallowe'en holiday quiz courtesy of Dennis Cozzalio over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, dealing with my favourite genre and that which is likely to dominate most of the posts here, horror.

1) Favorite Vincent Price/American International Pictures release.


I wasn't quite prepared to reveal the degree of my sheer jackassery this early on, but here it goes:


The Raven, by virtue of being the only AIP film I've seen. Certainly a genuinely enjoyable film but not, as far as I can see, particularly indicative of the Price/AIP films in general.

2) What horror classic (or non-classic) that has not yet been remade would you like to see upgraded for modern audiences?


A couple of years ago I would have said The Last House on the Left, but lo! A remake materialised shortly thereafter and was, as far as I'm concerned, largely successful.


I suppose a version of Jeepers Creepers that didn't piss away all of its genuinely frightening first act would be rather nice, but said first act is so damn close to perfect that you'd basically have to remake it shot-for-shot for a good third of the film.

3) Jonathan Frid or Thayer David?


Possibly owing to further jackassery on my part, I haven't seen any of Dark Shadows.

4) Name the one horror movie you need to see that has so far eluded you.


In case it's not already clear, there are a lot of gaps I need to plug. Anything that predates colour, more or less*, as well as a goodly number of foreign films. Bava's Bay of Blood/Twitch of the Death Nerve/Reazione a Catena has been on my mind a lot lately, in particular.

5) Favorite film director most closely associated with the horror genre.


Every fibre of my being wants to say Wes Craven, a man who has a hand in a great many of my favourite horror movies of all time, but he has been directly responsible for so many more atrocities in the face of cinema that the scales only barely tip in his favour. Many would argue they don't, a sentiment that I can't in good faith begrudge them.


Instead I'll nominate George A. Romero, who puts out masterpieces at roughly the same rate as Craven without anywhere near as much irrelevant drivel (but not none, unfortunately - particularly of late) in-between.

6) Ingrid Pitt or Barbara Steele?


Barbara Steele.

7) Favorite 50’s sci-fi/horror creature.


I'm not going to look very good by the end of this thing, am I.

8) Favorite/best sequel to an established horror classic.


Wes Craven's New Nightmare. The first and best 'meta' horror, and an incredible, genuinely menacing last run for a once-great villain before being mothballed for good.

9) Name a sequel in a horror series which clearly signaled that the once-vital franchise had run out of gas.


The trick here is to name a franchise that was vital past its first instalment at all. I'm gonna go with the most polarising franchise of the last twenty years and say that the Scream series was dealt an unrecoverable blow by future Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen scribe Ehren Kruger in Scream 3.

10) John Carradine or Lon Chaney Jr.?


Carradine, although I enjoy the little I've seen of both.

11) What was the last horror movie you saw in a theater? On DVD or Blu-ray?


In a theatre: The Thing, and wasn't that a rollicking hundred minutes of having everything you love about the genre pissed on. On DVD: Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, which I rather liked, all things considered.

12) Best foreign-language fiend/monster.


There can be only one.

13) Favorite Mario Bava movie.


Goddammit.

14) Favorite horror actor and actress.


Actor: Kane Hodder. The only good thing to come of the wretched F13 franchise. 


Actress: The irreplaceable Jamie Lee Curtis.

15) Name a great horror director’s least effective movie.

Anything with Argento's name on it post-Opera.

16) Grayson Hall or Joan Bennett?


Haven't seen Dark Shadows between now and the last question.

17) When did you realize that you were a fan of the horror genre? And if you’re not, when did you realize you weren’t?


At the tender age of fifteen, that being the age that my parents deemed it appropriate for me to watch such things. Perhaps it was just the thrill of the once-forbidden being laid before me, but I was in love from the moment I saw my first R-rated movie.

18) Favorite Bert I. Gordon (B.I.G.) movie.


God damn it.

19) Name an obscure horror favorite that you wish more people knew about.

Absolutely no-one is allowed to praise Black Swan in my presence until they've seen Perfect Blue.

20) The Human Centipede-- yes or no?


No. I didn't cut Lars von Trier any slack for his shitstirring Antichrist and I shan't here.

21) And while we’re in the neighborhood, is there a horror film you can think of that you felt “went too far”?

I can't think of any conceptually, but I really wish the Italians could have worked their magic without quite so many furry casualties along the way.

22) Name a film that is technically outside the horror genre that you might still feel comfortable describing as a horror film.


Is Videodrome considered a sci-fi thriller or body-horror?

23) Lara Parker or Kathryn Leigh Scott?


I'm starting to feel bad about the whole Dark Shadows oversight right about now.

24) If you’re a horror fan, at some point in your past your dad, grandmother, teacher or some other disgusted figure of authority probably wagged her/his finger at you and said, “Why do you insist on reading/watching all this morbid monster/horror junk?” How did you reply? And if that reply fell short somehow, how would you have liked to have replied?


Usually the classic 'horror movies provide a healthy way for people to externalise, confront and discuss their fears', or, if I feel like opening the genre-film-as-art can of worms 'what is art if it doesn't reflect every aspect of human life?'

25) Name the critic or Web site you most enjoy reading on the subject of the horror genre.

Unquestionably Tim Brayton over at Antagony & Ecstasy. If there is a blog on this Earth that better combines film history lessons, scathing humour and genuine insight in an easily-readable, profanity-laden
format I have yet to see it.

26) Most frightening image you’ve ever taken away from a horror movie.

If you've seen The Strangers, you know exactly the scene in my head right at this moment.

27) Your favorite memory associated with watching a horror movie.

The night three friends and I stayed up and watched all three then-released Final Destination films back-to-back. In fact it's probably one of my favourite memories in general.

28) What would you say is the most important/significant horror movie of the past 20 years (1992-2012)? Why?

Because the real answer is either Scream or Saw, I'm going to cheat and say it should have been The Descent.

29) Favorite Dr. Phibes curse (from either film).

Dammit.

30) You are programming an all-night Halloween horror-thon for your favorite old movie palace. What five movies make up your schedule? 

Night of the Living Dead, The Evil Dead, Suspiria, The Hills Have Eyes and then Halloween as a holiday-appropriate palate cleanser.

*Not because I have any real misgivings about watching a film in black and white, simply because they're harder to get. Life in a country without the Criterion Collection can be hard.