38 - The Skeleton Key

    I saw it once about four years ago, and I was impressed then.  This time, it just reinforced how well written it was.

    A young girl is hired as a hospice worker for an old estate on the bayou.  The patient is strange, and is trying to escape.  The house has no mirrors, and the lady of the house is peculiar.

    Without delving deeper, it's a nicely creepy movie, and it's fairly unconventional.  Worth seeing, probably worth seeing twice.  Photographed nicely, too.  But I wish it had been given a different title.

37 - Frozen

    Three friends on a ski trip wind up getting stranded on the chair lift at the end of a day of skiing, leading into a week that the slopes will be closed.

    In concept, this fits into a genre of man-v-nature thrillers, and it's easier to portray the movie as being a 'serious' movie.  This seriousness takes away from the enjoyability of this movie.  When I take it seriously, I'm more bothered by plot holes.

    In particular, there are wolves in this movie.  The existence of the wolves isn't a problem.  The fact that they attack people is.  After doing a bit of research, there are wolves in New England, but they don't seem to run in packs.  They've all been loners.

    They also aren't about to attack a live person who isn't posing them a threat.

    The characters don't seem too likable, but I'm not too concerned about that.  It's more of an annoyance during the first quarter of the movie.

    With some more careful handling, this movie could have been really good.

36 - House

    1977 Japanese movie, released by Criterion.

    I can't exactly explain this movie.  The plot involves a group of girls going to visit one of their relatives at a house out somewhere.  It's sort of a horror movie, and it involves the ghost/house picking the girls off.

    But it's probably the weirdest movie I've seen.  I've seen Un Chien Andalou, and that's not quite a movie - it's mostly nonsense, any meaning assigned to it is really up to the viewer.  This does have a plot, but the movie is so packed with strange photography, special effects, and lots of bizarre happenings, that it overwhelms you.

    It's worth seeing, at least for the novelty of it.  I can't say that I thought much of it as a film, but it was entirely worth it, at least to say that I saw it.

35 - Horror Express

    A 1972 Spanish horror movie, noteworthy for a few reasons - it has Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Telly Savalas.  Plus, it's in the public domain.

    A frozen specimen of a missing link is found, and is being transported on the trans-Siberian express.  A series of mysterious deaths follow, and things get progressively weirder.

    I used to watch this, since we had it on VHS when I was young.  I think the last time I watched it was probably around 8th grade or so.  It actually aged very well.  The story moves faster than I remember, and it's much more explicit in explaining exactly what's going on.  All of the dialogue was recorded in post, but it doesn't come across as fake as it could.  The Blu-ray is an interesting print.  It's a bit sharper, but it has a lot more other errors - scratches and blotches on the film.  Still, very fun.

34 - House

    2008 horror movie.  There's not too much horrifying about it, little to no blood, and very little tension.  But it's really pretty good.
    Two couples wind up at a strange house in the middle of nowhere, with a collection of odd residents (which reminded me of Rocky Horror in a strange way).  They are stalked by an enigmatic killer (although we never see that killer actually kill anything).  There's something very likable about this movie.  The colors are interesting, and the story gets really strange at around 35 minutes in.  I'm not entirely happy with the movie, since there are several unanswered questions, but it remains very compelling.

33 - The Cellar Door

    Summaries of this movie are kind of misleading, suggesting that it's more about a game of wits between captive and captor.  It's not quite that bright.

    A guy keeps a girl captive in a mostly wooden cage/box in his basement.  It's never clear what he intends to do with her, except that there's a gradual implication that he's just looking to make her into an ideal girlfriend.

    The movie starts slow, the middle is pretty decent, then the end of it changes into a very simple breakout and chase/fight movie.  The budget is low, and it's most evident early on.

    I did discover something interesting about it.  It was released as Broken 2 in Germany.  Broken was a similar premise, but was done very well, and was more about enslavement and the process of breaking someone to be a slave.

32 - Dark City

    I think the last time I saw this was a little after it came out on DVD.  It's less confusing than I remember, but that could be since I'm seeing the directors cut, with subtitles.

    It's not a plot I can summarize without giving too much away.  A guy wakes up at a murder scene, and he tries to figure out if he's the one who did it or not.  This leads to a strange problem with a bunch of creepy guys with fedoras and long black coats and no hair, who are messing around with memories.

    It's shot very well.  The one thing I didn't like is that the scene that explains what's happening is too explicit.