October 14th, 2009
10:30 AM [Fox Movie Channel]
Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte
Oh, Southern Gothic at its finest. Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland are cousins who are trying to prevent their house from getting demolished. However, Olivia has a secret plan to drive Bette crazy, with the help of Joseph Cotten. And then Agnes Moorehead gets involved as Bette's housekeeper and Mary Astor's there too, and in the end, everyone's either dead or crazy in a melodramatic (and therefore, totally Southern) way.
11:00 AM [FX]
Halloween: H20
Twenty years after the original Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis is a headmistress for a school where her son, Josh Hartnett, attends. He's too busy trying to have a normal life and hook up with Michelle Williams to worry about his mom's increasing panic that Michael Myers might be back. Of course, she is totally correct and a number of people die before she can kill him for good. This being a horror movie franchise, however, did you actually think that death would stick? Pretty decent follow-up and I really wish they hadn't made the lameness that was Halloween: Resurrection.
6:00 PM [Encore Mystery]
Flatliners
Medical students try to find out what's on the other side by temporarily killing themselves. Since this involves the whole "meddling in God's domain," it doesn't go so well. Julia Roberts gets haunted by her dad, Kiefer Sutherland almost dies at the hand of a kid he accidentally killed, Kevin Bacon has to apologize, William Baldwin slept with a lot of women, and Oliver Platt's kind of just there.
Drag Me To Hell is one of those movies where at some point, I start hoping it will end well, even though I know that this type of story never does. It starts out like a morality play: young loan officer refuses to give old woman a loan and she curses her, later physically attacking her in a parking lot. But somewhere along the line, I stopped thinking that it was one of those tales designed to teach the heroine a lesson, and I remembered: it's Sam Raimi. And in Raimi movies, sometimes bad things happen to people for the only reason of being in the wrong place at the right horrific time.
And because it's a Sam Raimi, you also get those trippy visuals and camera shots that make his movies so much fun. It doesn't seem quite as crazy as the Evil Dead series, but what is? There's plenty of dirt and gore to make up for it.
She & Him - I Put A Spell On You
Jen Titus - O Death
Murder By Death - End of the Line