Hooptober 9: It’s in Space Now 

“That which is dead… cannot eternal lie. With strange eons… even death may die.”

This film holds the record for the most unnecessarily stressful doorbell ringing in cinema.

Didn’t think I was going to jive with this for a while but eventually the characters and manic zombies really win me over. I mean, it’s about a mold that turns people into “intelligent” zombies and there’s a Sarlac Pit underneath the cemetery. I’m always here for weird shit like that.

The infected are stiff, stumbling, and tend to repeat their catchphrases over and over when they’re not puking black sludge. The actual zombies are green-tinted cadavers that border on cool and corny.

But this whole…

I was searching for a copy of an indie horror film I saw years ago called Salvage and discovered that it came in a Blu-ray double disc set with this movie so that seemed like a no-brainer purchase because I haven’t seen this in years and remember really loving it.

I can actually understand people not liking this one because sometimes it’s a bit of a mess and the special effects towards the end are the absolute worst, but I still dig it. A lot. It’s got a creepy old house/mortuary next to a cemetery complete with mausoleum. Before I guess they ran out of money for the ending, there are some fun effects involving these mildew vine things that spread…

As a series of disparate musings on industrial decay, structural rot, civic mismanagement, teenage agency, death, loss, family, all these as self-fulfilling prophecy, and a genre morality ideated through finessed genre tropes and personal philosophy, this is very disparate, but so much as to be the survey and the total, untempered internalization of the filmmaker's carefully bred artistic personality (that is, "aesthetic personality") that it is. Hooper has always been something of a "shaggy dog" filmmaker, even when putting forth very careful thematic analyses in his more conventional pictures of quality, and I mean this in the sense that, in his mise-en-scene, he will let fleeting concepts override Hitchcockian orchestrations. Mortuary is all this, in its horror-cheese tropes, its aestheticization…

Mashup of a Lovecraftian mold story (like a sort of unofficial sequel to The Curse occurring years after the meteor hit) and that fun Hooper vibe where family dinners start with soup and end with a meat cleaver being thrown. I still think the funniest part is when a small-town old-timer at the diner where the new kid gets a job pushes his plate away in disgust after the kid describes the embalming process to his new possible love interest (the goth-next-door played charmingly by Alexandra Adi). The town hoodlums are fun, too.

In fact, everything about characters (including the setting) is incredibly likable due to husband and wife writing team Adam Gierasch and Jace Anderson (who also wrote the…

"No more graveyard babies!"

Well, hi there.
You know who we haven't talked about in a while? Well, *I* haven't. That's right, Tobe Hooper. Despite the fact that I truly love his filmography (so far) and he directed one of my favorite films of all time, I have only seen 11 of his and I'm lowkey saving the rest of his filmography, lol.
Well, anyways, today I was in the mood for one of his films.

A family moves to a small town for a fresh start. The locals are wary of the funeral home the family moves to as they believe it to be haunted.
Ohh, so many horror cliches in one film. Should be fun.
Actually, it's amazing…