Scary Stories (from a Dark Allie)

Wow, my hit rate for June is LOW. I know, I know, sequels/prequels/paraquels/whatever you want to call this, made MANY years later, are rarely good. But I was hoping it would at least be relatively entertaining to see the Creeper again…but it wasn’t.

I’m still not feeling very talkative, or maybe I’m just choosing movies that don’t give me much to say. Either way, I don’t have much to say about this one.

I feel like maybe I’m not in a generous mood this week. This month? I’m feeling more sensitive to slow-burn films, particularly ones that drag along in a boring manner. Unfortunately, I seem to keep picking them.

This is a horror comedy that’s neither horror nor comedy. Which is disappointing, as it has a lot of familiar comedic faces (Keegan-Michael Key! Patton Oswalt! Bob Odenkirk!) and some other great familiar faces as well. But it just doesn’t land anything.

I thought this one would be a lot more fun than it was! Essentially this was very similar to Urban Legend, though I guess this movie came first, AND (briefly) has Amy Smart!

I don’t have much to say about this movie. It was short but slow, had some eerie moments, and ultimately wasn’t all that interesting.

Don’t watch this movie. Really, don’t watch it. It’s not worth it. I’m so mad about this movie. This movie is the longest movie I have watched yet. It beats the Suspiria remake by SEVENTEEN MINUTES. But it honestly feels even longer than that. And wholly unnecessarily.

It’s a big undertaking doing a new adaptation of a Stephen King novel, especially when the original was such a classic. And the original was long enough, but this is even longer. Sure, it’s split between two parts…but the original was a TV miniseries split between a few parts also, and this first part alone was OVER TWO HOURS.

But I have to give it credit where credit’s due. This movie is pretty scary, pretty interesting, and has some really fantastic performances by both the kids and by Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise.

(Spoiler warning, but also major content warning if you can’t deal with spiders or mentions thereof) Oh boy, THIS movie. This movie has haunted me since I first saw it probably more than 30 years ago. In fact, I’m pretty sure I had seen this even before my OWN scary spider incident…

I’m honestly not too sure how to write about this movie. Not because I didn’t like it, but because I did, and I don’t really have a clear explanation for why.

After how much I enjoyed Host, I was really looking forward to this one. Unfortunately it was kind of a letdown.

This is a five-star movie for me, but I have to acknowledge it’s perhaps because of a few “superficial” things versus the movie itself. Like, it’s less than an hour long! You could barely call that a feature film! And most of the characters have British accents!

This was a better movie than the original Unfriended, and also not a direct sequel (which makes sense, as the original didn’t really leave room for a direct sequel). So this was better, but also almost a totally different kind of scary movie.

In fact, this one reminded me a lot of The Den (which might be kind of a spoiler already?), which isn’t a bad thing!