Worth Mentioning - Horror for the Holidays

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Cody watches a Thanksgiving horror movie and a Christmas horror movie.

KRISTY (2014) 

There aren’t enough good horror movies set around the Thanksgiving holiday. So it’s a shame that Eli Roth has never expanded his Grindhouse faux trailer for a slasher movie called Thanksgiving into a feature film. A few years ago, the 1987 slasher Blood Rage finally started getting the recognition it deserves as a Thanksgiving horror classic. And this year I got around to watching a movie I had been intending to watch for years, director Oliver Blackburn’s Kristy. When I had my seven-years-or-so-late viewing of Kristy, I discovered that it is also a great Thanksgiving horror movie.

Kristy started as a spec script written by Anthony Jaswinski, who also scripted the very cool “surfer trapped by a shark” movie The Shallows. With this one, he tells the story of college student Justine (Haley Bennett), who is on financial aid and therefore can’t afford to go home over the Thanksgiving break. She ends up being the only student stuck at the school, accompanied by a couple guards and the pothead groundskeeper. You might think it’s a lucky break that her friend left behind a BMW for her to drive if she ever needs to go get something... But having that BMW in her possession is not lucky at all. After spending a day bouncing around the empty school, dancing in halls, using the swimming pool, hitting balls down the corridors, she decides to drive over to the nearest gas station / convenience store to get some ice cream. And there she’s spotted by a quartet of total weirdos. 

The story informs us that there’s a gathering of people online who hate girls they call Kristys. Privileged, pretty girls who have been blessed in life. They target Kristys, murder them on camera, and share the snuff videos on the dark web. These four weirdos Justine bumps into – three men with their faces obscured and the sickly looking Violet (Ashley Greene) – are part of this Kristy-hating online culture. And when they see Justine driving a BMW, they decide to make her the target for a snuff video. Justine crosses paths with these creeps with about an hour of the movie’s 85 minute running time left, and that remaining hour gets quite intense.

Violet and her associates follow Justine to the empty college and proceed to make her night a living hell, pursuing her through the halls and around the grounds, killing anyone else who gets in between them and their prey. As this situation played out, it really reminded me of The Strangers (with, as blog contributor Priscilla pointed out, some touches of P2). If the script had ended up in different hands, it easily could have been rewritten into a Stranger sequel. Call it The Strangers Go to College. That was never on the cards, but there was a time when Kristy was going to be a Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead reunion. Gary Fleder was going to direct the film, with Scott Rosenberg reworking the script. While it would have been interesting to see how Fleder would have shot it, Kristy turned out very well with Blackburn at the helm.

If you are, like me, a movie fan who likes to celebrate holidays by watching movies that have something to do with the date, I recommend adding Kristy to your viewing rotation. If it isn’t already in there. As I said, I was late to the party on this one. But I will definitely be watching Kristy in future Novembers. Produced by Child's Play franchise producer David Kirschner and executive produced by Sinister / Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson, this is a horror movie that deserves more attention.

BLOOD BEAT (1983) 

Written and directed by Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos, Blood Beat sounds like it has the makings to be one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s a 1980s slasher film that finds a Wisconsin family being terrorized by the spirit of a samurai while they’re gathered together to celebrate Christmas. If only Zaphiratos had been more interested in showing a supernatural samurai on the rampage, slashing his way through the cast, Blood Beat could have been amazing. As it is, it’s just really weird.

People do get slashed in this movie, but the primary focus is the supernatural element. It begins when a guy named Ted (James Fitzgibbons) brings his girlfriend Sarah (Claudia Peyton) home to meet his mom Cathy (Helen Benton), his sister Dolly (Dana Day), mom’s boyfriend Gary (Terry Brown), and Uncle Pete (Peter Spelson). As soon as Sarah and Cathy come into contact, there’s some kind of psychic connection between the women. Cathy feels like she has seen Sarah before somewhere. She knows her. From that point on, strange things begin to happen in and around the home. The electricity goes wild, unnatural lights glow, the phone melts, objects fly around inside the rooms like they’re being tossed around by spirits, Cathy floats off the floor while her hands glow, a samurai outfit and sword are found in a trunk in the house. And occasionally someone who is connected to the family or just happens to be in the general area is attacked by a glowing, sword-wielding spirit.

Zaphiratos can’t make sense of his own movie for you. On the commentary, he admits that he was under the influence of drugs when putting it together, and even the title is a reference to the way a person’s heart beats when they’re high. But if you just go with the flow, the movie isn’t a terrible way to spend 87 minutes. If you accept that nothing’s going to make sense for a while, if it all... and if you accept that movie is often going to feel like it’s moving at a snail’s pace... you might be able to work up some appreciation for its brand of weirdness.

Blood Beat left me wishing a much better, more exciting movie had been made out of the concept of a supernatural samurai being set loose in Wisconsin. But I’m glad I watched the movie anyway, and I really enjoyed the look of the locations. The movie is set in a rural area in winter, and I found the countryside to be beautiful to look at.

Now, if someone really wants to impress me, make another supernatural samurai slasher movie, but make it just like a Friday the 13th sequel.