THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN (1966) *

Don Knotts stars as a newspaper typesetter with big dreams of being a reporter.  He runs an unauthorized story about the local haunted house, which catches the eye of the editor.  He then gives Knotts a big assignment:  Spend one night in the house to see if it’s indeed haunted.  Knotts takes the job and sees all kinds of supernatural shenanigans.  He writes a front-page story about what he witnessed and winds up being sued for libel by the owner of the house.  It’s then up to Knotts to lead a judge and jury through the house and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the place is haunted. 

The bare bones of a good kid-friendly horror comedy were here.  They just forgot to put actual jokes in there.  I guess your enjoyment of the picture will depend on your tolerance of Knotts.  While he was funny playing supporting characters on The Andy Griffith Show and Three’s Company, he just doesn’t have what it takes to be a leading man.  His schtick gets tiresome quick.  I mean his bug-eyed antics wear thin in a half-hour sitcom.  A ninety-minute movie with him front and center is just a recipe for disaster. 

All the usual haunted house clichés are trotted out.  Knotts finds a hidden staircase behind a bookcase, sees a bleeding painting, and hears an organ that plays by itself.  All of this isn’t remotely scary because it’s aimed squarely at kids.  However, I don’t think kids would have the patience required to sit through the boring, unfunny sequences that don’t revolve around the haunted house. 

NETFLIX AND KILL: DREAM HOUSE (2011) ** ½

Dream House is a ghost story rife with haunted house movie clichés.  We’ve seen movies where a family moves into an old house where the former tenants were brutally murdered.  We’ve seen horror movies where a child’s ominous drawings act as harbingers of doom.  We’ve seen horror movies where the husband is an author who’s trying to get a little writing done, but ghosts and madness eventually get in the way.  Sure, we’ve seen all of this before, but this time we get to see it with James Bond in the lead.  

Dream House comes to us from director Jim Sheridan.  His filmography is all over the place.  He made a big splash with dramas like My Left Foot, but he’s also directed the 50 Cent movie, Get Rich or Die Trying.  He doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, but he handles all the would-be scares in a competent manner. 

Despite the overly familiar set-up, Dream House does have at least one good twist.  What sets it apart from countless other similar films is that the twist happens about halfway through the movie.  Though predictability finds its way back into the third act, the intriguing twist and its unconventional placement in the narrative prevents it from being just another run-of-the-mill haunted house flick.   

The performances are solid and help to anchor the movie throughout its cliché-heavy passages.  Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz have a lot of chemistry together.  So much so that they wound up falling in love and getting married shortly before the film was released.  Naomi Watts also leaves an impression as a concerned neighbor, although I wish she was given more to do.

SPIELBERG (2017) *** ½

Director Susan Lacy’s documentary on the world’s most famous filmmaker gives you a solid overview of his career.  Lacy is a veteran of PBS’s American Masters series and the film often plays like an extended episode of that show.  She covers all his cinematic milestones in fine fashion, but I for one would've liked to have seen a little more time spent on some of Spielberg’s lesser movies.  (Sometimes failures are more interesting to discuss than successes.)  At least they give a little insight into 1941.  

What I wasn’t expecting was how it delved into his personal life.  The way Lacy portrayed the relationship between Spielberg and his parents was especially touching.  Because of that, you can see how the themes in his work ran concurrent with his relationship with his father.   

The best segment focuses on Spielberg’s friendship with his fellow filmmakers (dubbed “The Movie Brats”).  If you’ve ever wanted to be a fly on the wall while Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola were hanging out and shooting pool in the prime of their career, you’re gonna love this movie.  The home movies of The Movie Brats chilling out together are just awesome.  Hopefully there’s a lot more of that footage laying around somewhere.  It would make a great documentary on its own. 

While the film is a bit obvious in parts, I liked how they showed Spielberg maturing throughout his career.  Looking back, Schindler’s List seems like a no-brainer, but it’s easy to forget that at the time, a three-hour black-and-white movie about the Holocaust was anything but a guaranteed success.   

Sure, it does run on a little long and would’ve benefited from some tighter editing in its final act.  (I would’ve also liked it if Lacy finally got to the bottom of the whole “Who directed Poltergeist” controversy.)  Despite that, it remains an entertaining and absorbing documentary that should please Spielberg’s legions of fans. 

NETFLIX AND KILL: THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT (2014) **

I've never been a walk-through haunted house kind of guy.  I've never enjoyed walking around in a herd of people inside a deserted Ames led around by some schmo spouting a corny spiel while waiting for someone in a mask from Spencer's Gifts to jump out of the darkness and grab a person in our group.  I'm not a fan of Found Footage horror movies either.  So why did I watch The Houses October Built, a Found Footage horror movie about a group of friends who go across America filming a documentary about the country's "most extreme" walk-through haunted houses, you ask?  Well, when you're trying to cram in 31 horror movies in 31 days for the month of October, you do a lot of things you wouldn't ordinarily do.  

As far as these things go, it's not terrible.  Sure, the characters are all unlikeable and say "fuck" a lot.  Sure, the final handheld sequence where they go into the “Blue Skeleton” haunt is hard to see because the camera shakes too much and it's way too dark in places.  That stuff just goes with the territory.  

There is one moment of invention that elevates the film from the usual tripe.  Of course, I’m talking about the sequence where the characters go to a strip club and all the topless dancers are wearing zombie make-up.  If anything can make a run-of-the-mill Found Footage horror movie better, it’s zombie strippers.  So, it's got that going for it.  

AKA:  Halloween House.  AKA:  Houses of Terror.  AKA:  Halloween Night.  AKA:  Haunted Houses. 

NETFLIX AND KILL: HOUSEBOUND (2014) ***

When you think of the great horror movies from New Zealand, you think Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste and Dead-Alive.  You might also think of Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows.  I can’t say Housebound is quite in the same league as those films, but there are certainly plenty of moments here that flirt with greatness. 

Kylie (Morgana O’Reilly) gets busted for robbing an ATM and is put under house arrest.  It’s one thing to be stuck in your home with an ankle monitor.  It’s another to be trapped at home with your annoying mother (Rima Te Wiata).  Kylie eventually comes to believe there’s a ghost living in her house, and since she’s wearing her ankle monitor, she can’t leave.  As chance would have it, her probation officer (Glen-Paul Waru) just so happens to be a paranormal expert and jumps at the chance to bust some ghosts. 

Housebound contains some very funny stuff, and like the best horror comedies, the humor comes from the characters and situations.  The standout sequence comes when O’Reilly is attacked by a killer teddy bear.  This scene is a great example of how writer/director Gerard Johnstone can take something potentially ridiculous and still give it enough edge to make it induce goosebumps. The IDEA of a killer teddy bear is silly, but since it’s played with a straight face, it works.

Johnstone is unable to keep that level of mania sustained throughout the longish 106 minutes running time.  The second act could’ve used some tightening up as there are a few lulls in between the set pieces.  Still, there are a handful of priceless moments along the way.  Johnstone does a particularly fine job in the film’s quieter moments.  I mean there is a scene where O’Reilly is interrupted by ghosts while taking a pee that is funnier than most modern comedies.

NETFLIX AND KILL: HOUSE ON WILLOW STREET (2016) **

Sharni Vinson leads a team of kidnappers to snatch a young woman from her well-to-do family.  They kidnap her and take her to a dilapidated building where they begin making their ransom demands.  While doing so, the kidnappers slowly come to realize there is something different about their captive.  She seems to know their darkest secrets and later exhibits the power to project disturbing visions of their dead loved ones into their minds. 

The movie starts off with a bang.  The opening scenes of the kidnappers planning their crime run like clockwork, thanks to a strong performance by Vinson.  The strong set-up eventually gives way to repetitive scenes of characters seeing hallucinations of dead bodies/ghosts/zombies accompanied by high-pitched screaming, which is unfortunate.   

Ultimately, the movie plays with the audience’s expectations a bit too much.  They endlessly tease the kidnapped girl’s big secret, and once they finally reveal it, it’s pretty lame.  I won’t spoil it for you (although its alternate title does a good job of doing that), but I will say if they had just come out and said what was going on a half-hour earlier, the film had a much better potential of being fun.  As it is, the constant teasing wears on your patience.   

It doesn’t help that the long flashback sequence that explains everything is so damned dull.  This scene is filled with a lot of stupid “rules” concerning the girl’s condition that have to be laboriously explained to the audience by the characters.  Sometimes, the cinematography is so dark that it makes some scenes hard to make out, which is another major debit. 

For all its faults, the zombies do have a griminess about them that makes them feel like they came out of a Lucio Fulci movie.  That’s about the best thing I can say about them.  Too bad director Alastair Orr couldn’t think of a better way to use them more effectively. 

I liked Vinson in You’re Next, and she does a fine job here.  In fact, she’s the only one in the whole movie with any kind of screen presence.  Whenever she isn’t front and center, House on Willow Street really falters.   

AKA:  Demon Girl.  AKA:  Demon House on Willow Street.  AKA:  From a House on Willow Street.

NETFLIX AND KILL: THE DISAPPOINTMENTS ROOM (2016) *

Kate Beckinsale made this sorry sack of shit in between Underworld sequels.  It was directed by D.J. (Disturbia) Caruso, from a script he co-wrote with actor Wentworth Miller.  Caruso isn’t really known as a horror guy, so maybe that’s why this was such a miserable dud. 

Kate and her family are city folk who move into the country to live in a big old spooky house.  They’re only there a day and Kate is already seeing ghost dogs and having bad dreams.  She finds a locked door in her attic that is apparently a “disappointments room”, a place where rich people used to hide away their deformed children.  Gee, do you think something bad happened in there and now there are ghosts haunting the place?  If you’ve seen as many of these things as I have, you’ll probably already know the answer. 

The disappointments room is exactly where The Disappointments Room belongs.  It’s overly derivative (it blatantly rips off The Shining and The Changeling), exceedingly tedious, and not scary in the least.  It plods along at 85 minutes, but it feels much longer.  Beckinsale is easy on the eyes though, so I guess it could’ve been worse.   

The movie also teases us endlessly with the possibility that it could all be in Kate’s head.  (She stopped taking her anti-psycho pills, don’t you know.)  All this subplot does is eat up a lot of screen time and annoy the shit out of the audience.  Just when you think we’re building up to some sort of payoff, along comes one of the most infuriating non-endings I’ve seen in some time.  The only good part is a fairly juicy head bashing scene, but since the head that gets bashed in belongs to a ghost, it hardly matters. 

I did get a kick out of seeing Gerald McRaney as the head ghost though.  Remember when he played Major Dad?  Now he’s playing Major DEAD.