It's Day 288 of my One Movie a Day for 2023, and Day 15 of both my own 31 Days of Hallowe'en challenge/project, as well as the 31 Day Horror Challenge being hosted by Nightmare on Film Street. Plus, we can not forget the 100HorrorMoviesIn92Days challenge that I joined this year.
And of course as always, this is where I say how over the last decade I've done a 13 Days of Hallowe'en project on my old social medias consisting of movie reviews, recipes and comedy skits that ran from the 19th-31st of October; but that this year I am keeping things contained to this site and my Letterboxd.
First up, my own 31 Days of Hallowe'en project mini theme for today is New Release Sunday. I think I sort screwed up with this one. There wasn't much of a choice for "new releases" on my Shaw Video on Demand section; at least not anything I haven't already seen. However, I did find the movie Camp Cold Brook listed as "new release" on the demand for CTV Sci-Fi.
We follow a group of paranormal hunters as they take a job at a remote abandoned summer camp where a serial killer had once taken the lives of 28 kids. As the team begin to experience things that make their reality show look legit, one of the team members uncovers a connection to his past he didn't even know he had.
It mixes camp slasher with Blair Witch and reality ghost hunting shows, to give you something fairly decent. It's slow to start, setting the pace to make you feel paranoid for the first half of it, before it gets into the actual hauntings. It's better than some of the ghosting hunting genre movies, riffing off of the way those reality shows are conceived. For me, it just didn't dive enough into the witchcraft. Once that had been introduced, I was expecting so much more to be pulled from that end of the genre.
Today's mini theme for the 31 Day Horror Challenge being hosted by Nightmare on Film Street, is Rock 'n' Roll. I am not going to lie, this was not an easy task today. My mind right off the bat went to my childhood favourites of Trick or Treat from 1986, Black Roses from 1988, Shock'em Dead from 1992, Queen of the Damned from 2002 and even Suck from 2009. All vampire movies. I really wanted to do something that wasn't a vampire movie. At different times over the decades, I've had all these in my movie collection. Trick or Treat and Shock'em Dead, which I no longer have, are difficult to find currently (been hearing rumours of both getting anniversary re-issues soon) my copy of Suck is damaged, and everyone else seemed to be doing Black Roses and Queen of the Damned for this challenge. So, I went with the movie Immortal. Yes, it does happen to be a vampire movie, no shocker there.
We jump right in to things with a musician who just happens to be a vampire. He needs to hide his nature from everyone around him. Everyone but his life long best friend that is. The people in his life, his other band mates, his boss, his girlfriend, all just think he's dealing with a drug addiction. But, his best friend not only knows the truth, he also cleans up after him. Helping to hide the bloody truth. Our vampire continues to have night terrors and loosing time, waking up to find yet another victim. As his situation gets worse, he begins to dig into his past, trying to uncover the reason for his vampirism. It leads him to the sole survivor of a train accident that he knew as a child. The survivor informs him that he can over come this and live a normal life. Leaving everything behind, our vampire tries to make a new start only to find himself being pulled back into his old patterns.
This is clearly a metaphor for addictions. It's not subtle about it either. There is however, at the end of the movie, a brand new character they introduce that leaves you wondering if it's meant to be the character of Death? Nothing is explained, we just see a female character who is clearly a vampire give him a token. Through the whole movie, the lead is holding onto an old watch, when he gives the watch back to the sole survivor; that's when he starts in a new city playing music on the street. The female vampire then kills the survivor stealing the watch and leaving it for our lead. The first thing I thought of when I saw this was the idea of living on borrowed time.
As far as the rock'n'roll part of this; it is not my style of music. This movie was done in the early 1990's when grunge was the big scene. It was never my scene. I was in high school when grunge was hot, I never cared for it then and I really don't care for it now.
Come back tomorrow to see what other tricks and treats I've got on the slab for you.
Comments