Halloween’s Dead: The Final Picks

Here it is, our final viewing suggestions for this year, and instead of releasing it Monday, we waited until Halloween itself to make it a good old fashioned marathon.

Derek’s Picks

That 70’s Show - Too Old To Trick Or Treat, Too Young To Die (S3E4)

Listen, Hitchcock is great. I want to get that out in the open before I go any further. I just happen to have a hard time sitting through a lot of his films these days. Personally speaking, I would rather sit down and watch a Hitchcock spoof, and this That 70’s Show episode is among the best of them. You really get the greatest hits of Hitchcock films in this episode, where they touch on Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, Rear Window and North By Northwest. All of this crammed into 22 glorious minutes, so you’ll have time to watch ALL of the other picks on our list. While this episode is great in many respects, the highlight is getting to see Fez in a Dr. Frank N. Furter costume reenact Rear Window with Hyde - and it’s almost as good as the Simpsons version! Overall there are a lot of great Halloween episodes of sitcoms you can watch throughout the season, but I definitely think this one is best saved for the night itself. Give it a watch!

Trick ‘r Treat

If there ever was a perfect pick to watch on Halloween itself, this is it. John Carpenter’s Halloween is fine, but Trick r Treat is the holy grail in comparison, in my opinion. This movie is just dripping with atmosphere (and pumpkin guts….and blood) and you really want to live in this little Halloween world. It benefits from being an anthology, and it’s honestly one of those rare anthologies that has zero weak segments. The framing story? Near perfection, and it BLEW 16 year old Derek’s mind once it wrapped everything up. What about memorable lines? I don’t know, does “Charlie Brown’s an ASSHOLE!” work for ya? (It should).

If you can’t tell, Trick r Treat is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t end up loving it after watching it. The movie itself has such a classic, nearly timeless feel to it which I believe will lead to it being enjoyed by many generations to come. Lord knows it’s made it into my mandatory yearly viewing, and I hope it makes it into yours as well!

Some parting thoughts before I leave another Halloween season behind - I’ve had such a great time with all of the other DemBoys putting our brains together once a week this month to gush about our favorite Halloween films for you all. I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I’ve enjoyed writing, and I hope we’re able to make this a yearly tradition!

Optimus_Grime814’s Picks

The Adventures of Pete and Pete: Halloweenie (S2E5, 1994)

Big Pete (Michael C. Marona) no longer has any Halloween spirit. After learning his friend isn’t allowed to participate, big Pete is begged by Little Pete (Danny Tamberelli) to help accompany him trick or treating to break the record for house visits. Big Pete agrees but worries he will be seen by his classmates who all agree that Halloween is for kids and anyone older celebrating trick or treating deserves to be smeared. A gang of jack-o-lantern headed Halloween haters, the Pumpkin Eaters, run around Wellsville on bikes smashing pumpkins, egging houses, tp-ing trees and torturing trick or treaters. My favorite characters definitely have to be the Pumpkin Eaters! Picture 3 teenagers on bikea with Jack-o-lanterns for heads.... it doesn't get any better than that. This episode, to this day, still makes me wish I could be a kid again to break neighborhood candy collecting records on Halloween.

Return of the Living Dead (1985)

"You think this is a fucking costume?! This is a way of life!" The punks just want to party but Freddy (Thom Mathews) is starting his new job at a medical supply warehouse. His trainer, Frank (James Karen) shows him a secret military experiment which contains remnants of a zombie that they both accidentally release into the atmosphere. As the gas from inside leaks out, it brings the dead back to life to feast upon the living. My favorite scene is when Tar Man is introduced. He's probably the best looking zombie in this movie. Not really a Halloween movie but out of all of the zombie movies out there, this is among one of my favorites (next to Shaun of the Dead).

Team Up’s Picks

Army of Darkness

The original Evil dead/ Army of Darkness movies have such a special place in my heart. I have had an Army of Darkness Poster hanging in every apartment I’ve ever had. I’ve read Bruce Campbells Autobiography “If Chins Could Kill” cover to cover twice in a row before just to gain what backstage knowledge I could from it. So for my last recommendation of the month I say go out and beat some deadites and watch Army of Darkness. Ash gets thrown into the time stream and comes out in the dark ages where he must fight to survive. It was during one of these encounters with evil that he is actually split into two copies of himself. One being the hero we know, the other being an evil incarnate. He makes quick work of his evil self and goes to find the Necronomicon, and in classic Ash fashion, he fucks everything up and wakes an entire graveyard of the undead including the evil, dead version of himself. A large battle ensues and Ash wins and is sent back to his real time to carry out his job as a nobody shelf stocker at S Mart. It’s a great goofy Halloween movie that is incredibly self-aware of how ridiculous it is.

Ash Vs. The Evil Dead

Fast forward 30 years. Ash is still a deadbeat with only one arm working a dead-end job. He lives in a trailer, no one ever believes his crazy stories about time traveling and defeating evil, he’s a creepy drunk. One night he brings an attractive woman home with him and to impress her he reads some “poetry” from a creepy book bound in skin he just has laying around. Nothing happens. Or so he thought! Turns out Ash just unleashed all the evil he has defeated in his past adventures and it is ticked off at him. That’s the opening to the great show that is Ash Vs The Evil Dead. Its just as self-aware and crazy as any of the movies, only now it has a bigger budget and Ash is a bigger loser than ever. The first few episodes alone had more fake blood than the movies. If you want a zany show to really sink your teeth into, I highly suggest you get over and check this one out on Netflix pronto! Stay Groovy!

Zach’s Picks

Land of The Dead

Since Optimus_Grime814 decided to talk about my all time favorite zombie film, I had originally planned to write about my second favorite one: Day of the Dead. The more I got to thinking about it though, the more I realized that you can read about Day of the Dead just about anywhere. It was then that I decided to try to make a case for a much less popular entry in George A. Romero’s zombie saga. Most people love to hate Romero’s zombie films from the 2000’s, writing them all off as garbage that doesn’t fit among the film classics his first three zombie movies were. While I would agree with them about Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead, I would argue that Land of the Dead is a completely logical continuation what we see in Day of the Dead.

One thing I love about Romero’s films is that there seems to be a natural progression to them, almost as though the time that passes between movies in the real world is how time has passed in the world of the movies. Night of the Living Dead sees us at the start of the outbreak, representing these zombie attacks as a string of isolated incidents. Dawn of the Dead takes place several years into the outbreak, with no cure in sight and no means of preventing the spread of the plague (in Romero’s films you become a zombie after dying no matter what, not just from being bitten) society has devolved into a semi-modern police state, with most people living in strictly controlled cities. Day of the Dead is set in an isolated military research compound, but we can see that the nearby city is devoid of all human life, implying that people have almost completely been replaced by zombies at this point.

Another thing that Day of the Dead establishes is that the zombies are capable of learning, and that they maintain at least a small level of recognition for things they may have used during their lives. This is expanded upon in Land of the Dead, where we can see from the beginning that some of the zombies are getting notably smarter. The most prominently featured zombie of this film, known as “Big Daddy” due to his size and the patch on his shirt, is able to use a variety of tools, and even displays a level of empathy and concern for his fellow zombies. He even teaches the other zombies how to use basic weapons. It’s all done in a way that makes sense, following the discoveries in Day of the Dead.

As for the quality of this film, I think it’s pretty decent overall. Lots of great gory special effects, acting is somewhere in the B range, the plot moves at a good pace. I think the main reason this one catches a lot of flak from people is that they go in expecting a horror movie, but this one’s more of an action movie. Really though, there’s a scene where a zombie uses a machine gun, for crying out loud! What’s not to like? Also, speaking of Day of the Dead…

Bonus Dia De Los Muertos Movie: Coco

I mainly went with Coco because it’s one of the only Dia De Los Muertos movies I’ve actually seen. I’m basic like that, leave me alone. For those not in the know, Dia De Los Muertos means Day of the Dead, and is a Mexican Holiday celebrated the day after Halloween. It centers around honoring and remembering your deceased relatives, you can learn more about it by searching google, although the movie does a decent job outlining it.

Coco is sort of your standard Pixar film, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s fun, entertaining, and has a few touching moments here and there. The CG animation is beautiful, and the acting performances are pretty good. Ultimately it could be a fun post Halloween viewing tradition suitable for the whole family.