I reviewed Cronenberg's original Rabid a few years back, you can read about my thoughts here. The story is solid and original, and I could see where he was going with it... the Soska Sisters saw the potential too, and made it even better in their 2019 remake! It's nice that they kept it directed by Canadians.

Side note: remakes don't really excite me, but this one was intriguing. I'm always interested to see a woman's perspective. There were a lot of boobs in the 1977 one, and it did nothing for me.

***Spoilers Ahead***

The plot somewhat follows the old one, Rose gets into a motorcycle accident and has experimental reconstructive surgery that causes her to crave blood. The gore is excellent, and her story line is fleshed out in the new movie. (See what I did there?) Rose is a lowly fashion designer that works for a design house where she is publicly ridiculed and ignored. She has one model friend, Chelsea, that looks like Krysten Ritter. This movie peels back the curtain of how design houses work. It gives off In Fabric vibes too. Quick background, Rose is a vegetarian and has scarring on her face from a car accident when she was a child that killed her parents. (So very Disney. Heaven forbid she's not an orphan!)

Krysten Ritter is that you?

The story moves quick, and she gets hood winked into attending a nightclub party by a friendly male co-worker named Brad. He truly seems sincere and likes her. Rose finds out that Chelsea asked him to ask her to go, and she leaves upset, getting into the motorcycle accident.

All the horrible things about an accident happen if you work in the modeling industry. Part of her face is ripped off and her jaw is wired shut, so she can't talk, her intestines are punctured, and her face is pretty gnarly. Chelsea takes Rose in once she's released, since this cost her the design job. She finds an experimental treatment facility that ~ if she qualifies ~ will take care of her reconstructive surgery for free. (Brings up the idea of the problems with healthcare and how it should be accessible to all regardless if you can afford it or not.) Surprise, she qualifies!

Frankenstein face.

They graft a gooey clear jello looking piece of prosthesis to her face that bonds to her skin and makes her look like a model (she kind of already looked like a model before the accident), but now she's a supermodel. It clears up her childhood car accident scars and eyesight. The only problem is that she has to take medication that can cause "hallucinations", and she has to drink "protein" when she can't stomach anything else. Calls into question, what are you willing to do to be beautiful? And the doctor claims they are hallucinations, but are they?

Don't get me wrong, the red is striking, religious vestment style, but how do they see where the blood is when doing surgery? Isn't that why doctors wear white or green? Bonus: I bet they are easy to clean!

Now that Rose is a gorgeous party girl, she gets noticed by her old design house. Pretty people are rewarded. She gets her design job back, and then some. The difficulty is that she can't tell what's a hallucination or not, and she spreads her illness to others by sharing drink glasses etc. It transmits through saliva and blood. I like how they highlighted this is the movie, so the viewer can catch how it spreads. She creates dead people and zombies in her wake. Hospitals think it’s a contagion and kill the infected. Feels a little COVID-y. There's a slow motion nurse scene that looks like Silent Hill ~ the music video ~ and it's great.

She feels like a monster, and tells the doctor what's happening, and he's not listening to her. We've all been there, huh, ladies? Instead of getting annoyed at the doctor, check out the wonderful, surreal artwork on the walls in his office!

Painting behind the doctor of a person without a face. Turning a "blind-eye" ~ if you will ~ to what's happening at this facility or giving off the feeling that Rose one of the many faceless victims to his whims.

Rose gets contained in the treatment facility, along with her friend Brad, who's been in on what's happening to her. But it doesn't feel malicious, he cares about her and was just told to keep an eye on her. It's a body horror ending that will remind you of The Thing, and Society, combined with a little Slither. Reminder: don't just stab, but ALWAYS chop off the head. It ends on a stark, depressing note, but did you expect anything else from the makers of American Mary? 

"Being human is limited, Rose is so much more." The actress that plays Rose conveys all the concerns you would have in this situation. This is the perfect homage with respect to the original, and you won't be disappointed there's still an armpit dick and lots of red doctors uniforms. Highly recommend. I give it 4.5 protein shakes out of 5.

Here's the trailer

 

I'm one of the few people that still gets the DVDs from my Netflix subscription. (We have a VHS player too.) "Why?" You ask? Because they offer different movies than the ones that are streaming, like the Fulci gem The Black Cat from 1981, not to be confused with the more well known The Black Cat from 1934 with Karloff and Lugosi, or The Black Cat from 1966, or all the movies named The Black Cat from 1941, 1968, 1989, 1991. Many are loosely based on the Poe story we know and love. While the 1981 version is not a "good" movie, I will say it's an amazing CAT-centric movie!

*spoilers ahead*

We get the point of view camera angle from the level of a cat, and he seems to be everywhere that people are ending up dead. The cat belong to Mr. Miles, an eccentric man that records spirits of the recently deceased. He has a wonderful old mansion house too! Lots of woodwork, giant staircases, candelabras...you get the idea. In the beginning, we are led to believe that cat is being forced to kill people as an act of revenge, but with the help of an American photographer, we learn that there's more to it. Both the cat and Miles are “bound by hatred” and by the end of the film the cat is the more powerful one, controlling Miles to kill!

I'll admit, not much happens in the movie, but it's a remarkable watch because they use a real black cat throughout. At only one point when the cat attacks can you tell it's a fake cat. It's rather impressive. I'm sure there was more than one cat actor used in the movie, and I loved all the close-ups of the cats and the purring sounds. There's also no dialog for about the first 15 minutes, which is fine as long as I'm watching a cat.

There wasn't just close-ups of the cats, but the eyes of the actors too....a little too much close-up. The lighting was interesting and at one point there were floating glowing eyes. The eyes have it! The town they are in looks quaint, sometimes overly foggy. The acting is ok, and there's your typical boobs, and several awkward make out sessions from the 1980s horror movie genre. (That's saying a lot since the movie's run time is only 1hr 32min.) The soundtrack has a folk horror sound that sets the tone.

Some special effects are well executed (see what I did there?), a highlight is the scene where a woman catches fire and her face melts. Some effects are not so great, like the scene with the fake bats, or bright white skeletons covered in cobwebs.

*trigger warnings*

Miles does try to kill the cat a couple of times, when he feels the cat is getting stronger than him. He tries to kill it by hanging it. While they never show it, they do show it in shadow, and the cat ends up living. (Yay, evil kitty!)  Another time he tries to poison and bury it alive, it's mentioned but not shown.

The first awkward make out session shows a young couple, and it gets a little rape-y, when she says no, and he tries to convince her to have sex. Not cool.

As a whole I give it a 1.5 out of 5 drinks at the pub (yes, yes, I know Fulci has a cult following, but I'm not in that cult), but I give it a 6 out of 5 for use of real cats!

Here's the trailer...

 Knock at the Cabin wasn't terrible, it just wasn't good. 

*Spoiler Alert*

Directed by M. Night Shamalamadingdong a.k.a. M. Night Shyamalan, Knock At the Cabin had potential with an interesting story based on Paul Tremblay's book The Cabin at the End of the World. (We know how I feel about his writing.) 

A gay couple and their young daughter are vacationing at a remote cabin in the woods, and four armed strangers knock at the cabin and tell them they have to make a decision to avoid an apocalypse. They have to sacrifice one of themselves to save the world. Note: They can't commit suicide, it has to be an agreed on choice. The four strangers know this because even though they lead very different lifestyles, they all had the same vision of the world ending.

Of course, initially, the dads don't make a choice which results in the first signs of the end of the world...AND of the four strangers, one of them has to die by the hand of the other three... and so on until the last stranger kills himself because the family won't decide, and a rain of fire touches the earth. Not until that happens, do the dads come to a decision. The dad with the temper kills the other dad. Since the other dad sees the future with his daughter living happily, he knows she will be fine and chooses death. Plot twist, THERE IS NO PLOT TWIST. Honestly it would have been better with a twist.

They describe the four strangers as the four horsemen, and they are the aspects of humanity: malice, healing, nurturing, and guidance. I knew them as war, famine, pestilence, and death, so this threw me.

A big first chunk of the movie is a slow burn to explain the premise, only it wasn't really explained. Why did the horsemen come with homemade weapons? Why did the horsemen have to kill one of themselves? Why were they chosen? Why wasn't the president notified of the upcoming tragedies? Why didn't the horsemen get therapy, and why didn't the therapists contact the police? Does this happen all over the world, because the plagues etc. happened all over the world? How often is a family picked to decide the world's demise? So many questions, not enough answers. Oh, and one of the plagues looks like Covid 19. It builds to nothing and remains anticlimactic.

I was waiting for something to happen. There is only hinted at gore and some camera angles are odd. Rupert Grint and Dave Bautista are excellent in it, but not enough to save humanity...er I mean the movie. I give it 2 grasshoppers out of 5.

Trailer below...

If you've followed my blog, you know I'm a fan of Grady Hendrix's writing. I reviewed The Southern Book Club Guide to Slaying Vampires: A Novel and My Best Friends Exorcism (now a movie, that I heard was terrible, but I'll probably watch it anyway), now it's time to review The Final Girl Support Group: A Novel. Of the three novels, I liked this one the best!

***SPOILER WARNING...SORT OF***

The book tells the story of six "final girls", or women who live to tell the tale of confronting their slasher, that meet once a month in a support group. They've been together longer than ten years and each one has a different traumatizing experience. If you know horror movies, you'll relate their killers to 1970s and 1980s classic horror movies that we all know and love. The support group meets with a therapist, and in turn the therapist has used their sessions to author best-selling books. They each have processed their past differently, from one lady that has moved on and feels they are living in the past, to one that feels like the group is her only connection to people and the outside world. In any case, the final girls have a bond that no one else does, and without them realizing it, they have become a family.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. I'm impressed at how Hendrix writes female characters. Their personalities greatly vary, but their interactions are wholly realistic and relatable.

The book is told from the voice of one of the final girls, Lynette. We see her living as a victim, paranoid and scared. One day, a member of the support group doesn't show up because she's been murdered. Now Lynette needs to find out who the killer is, and so does the reader! In gathering information, you peel away Lynette's story, and watch it slowly unravel. The heroines are flawed survivors, which makes the reader sympathetic to their experiences and eager to find out more. 

I won't tell you who did it, but it's a surprise, and just when you think you know, you don't! It's a thriller and as a reader you will feel like you have inside knowledge of a horror and gore slasher movie. Again, this book is also a reflection of society's obsession with serial killers and slasher movies and how much some people idolize them. That's a whole different kind of horror.

While I've never thought of myself as a “final girl”, there are days when I feel like it's me alone against the world, and I'm ready to do battle! The ladies in this book have a fighting spirit that makes them go on fighting when others would give up. They inspire me not to give up. They have battled, and won more than once. This book wraps up nicely, and I wanted to read it before next week, when Hendrix's next book How to Sell a Haunted House is released.

The last week in September Andrew (the hubs) and I took a road trip to Sleepy Hollow, NY to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. On the way there and back, we stopped to check out some sights. I've been to Salem, MA a few times and was expecting something similar from Sleepy Hollow. They really don't cash in on their notoriety too much, and it felt like a suburb of New York City instead of a spooky town with history steeped in a headless horseman. Anyway, get ready ~ this is a long blog!

We started the trek across New York State and stopped at the Northeast Classic Car Museum thanks to a recommendation by Andrea (who you might remember from the Cat Video Fest) where even if you don't like cars, they have motorcycles, mannequins dressed in true vintage to match the cars, cars from the race of gentleman and fab art deco architecture! It was very impressive. I recommend.

Then we hit up Robot City Games & Arcade the largest arcade in NYS - I'm not a gamer but the blacklight arcade took me back! Andrew found some games he never played. He'll always get the high score at Galaga, but I kicked his butt at Tetris. We stayed over in Binghamton, NY the first night.

Day 2 we drove to Storm King Art Center. It's an outdoor sculpture park that I could have stayed in all day! It was so nice to be outside in the fresh air, and everywhere you looked there was a sculpture to walk to. It had rolling hills as far as thee eye could see, and a huge outdoor gazebo restaurant where we grabbed lunch. It's a lot of walking, and I wasn't sure what to expect, but I loved it.

After Storm King we continued driving to Sleepy Hollow, and checked in at our hotel that left much to be desired. It was cold in our room, and we tried to turn up the heat, and it wasn't working. We called the front desk and they gave us a space heater. What the hell! I guess they want us to burn down their hotel. In another instance I asked where the nearest post office is, and they were unsure. You're a hotel! No one has ever asked that before?!!! At one point I asked for a fork, they told me they didn't have any. They have a restaurant in the lobby, so don't tell me you don't have any forks. Plus they were doing construction on the sidewalk surrounding the hotel, so it was loud, and the key card swipe to the outside door was left unlocked the whole time. The hotel was a mess. I'm guessing they were recently sold and under new ownership and trying to get it together, but in that case, close for a few weeks, so your customers don't have a bad experience. Of course this was the hotel we were staying at the longest too. I DO NOT recommend The Sleepy Hollow Hotel.

Onward and upward! Adventures for day 3 included fueling up with breakfast at the Eldorado Diner and walking from end to end in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and around it. The cemetery was the best part of Sleepy Hollow. It felt old with a lot of history. If you plan on going to walk around, there's a ton of steep hills, gravel, and signs that say no picnicking. You can take tours though. We weren't able to catch one because our timing was off, but I've heard good things about them. Again, wear comfortable shoes because it's lots of walking.

The Eldorado is kitschtastic for Sleepy Hollow. The outside of the building is covered in mirrors, and the inside looks like it stepped out of the 1950s with a 1970s and 2000s update to the interior. It still has a rotating cake case, but it's dark wood, throw in a life size wizard, and it was the perfect breakfast spot!

On to the cemetery! On the way there, you'll pass this sculpture in a teeny tiny park in the middle of the street.

Inside the cemetery there's very old tombstones, many of the family plots have wrought iron fences around them, and did I mention it's hilly? In some sections, there's stairs to climb built into the hills to get to the top.

Washington Irving's grave...

Me on the headless horseman bridge in the cemetery. This isn't the original location, but it's close.

I wore my Sleepy Hollow dress from Kitschy Witch Designs a nice family loved it so much they stopped and took my picture.

Earrings from TheLadyDisarray

Shoes are Doc Martens

We also stopped at this statue which is outside of the cemetery...

That evening we had our 20th anniversary dinner at Goosefeather. It's in a boutique hotel, and the setting was perfect. I will remember this ginger and thyme drink forever, the food and drinks were delicious.

On day 4 we shopped at Pretty Funny Vintage and checked out the local Main St. Of course, I ended up buying books from the cutest bookshop Transom Book Shop and YES that is a copy of Bunnicula in a red velvet cover! I chatted with the owner who was friendly and approved my selections.

We also went to the Great Jack O'Lantern Blaze where there's over 7000 carved pumpkins set to themes and a soundtrack. It's on the grounds of an old plantation near water, so it's a vast setting. We sampled local pumpkin beer too. I liked the MOPA (Museum of Pumpkin Art) display best.

Day 5 we worked our way back to Western New York. We stopped in Syracuse, NY where we ALWAYS visit The Syracuse Antiques Exchange ~ it's huge! Then we ate at Dinosaur BBQ. I think I still like the Rochester, NY one best.

It was a nice getaway, but it wasn't as spooky as I had hoped, and of course it was a lot of driving, so I did need a little recovery time after our vacation. All in all, I enjoyed the stops to and from Sleepy Hollow better than actually going there. The cemetery was the highlight.