Why am I still watching horror movies? Wasn’t I supposed to be finished with that after October? Apparently not.

My Netflix queue is still full of all of the scary movies I never got to in my 31 Days so I’ve still been getting a few of them in the mail. And I mean, I really, really wanted to watch Near Dark after it had been recommended to me at least 5 billion* times.

*5 billion might be an exaggeration. It may have just been 5. Whatever. It was still a lot.

In any case, I LOVED Near Dark. So much so that I bought the blu ray. Which then meant I had to buy the blu ray player. Which I then hooked up so I could watch Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil. See how that works?

Near Dark is wonderful. I watched the bar scene twice and I’ll hopefully have time to watch the blu ray in the next couple of days. I might write more about it then? I don’t know. I recommend it though!

Also finally watched Bob Clark’s Black Christmas. Yes, Bob Clark as in the guy who almost a decade later went on to direct the penultimate Christmas classic A Christmas Story. So he went from serial killer massacring a sorority house to little Ralphie and the Red Ryder BB Gun. That’s my kind of guy!

Black Christmas is a really interesting slasher to look back at though. It predates Halloween and along with John Carpenter’s film, Black Christmas sets a lot of the standards and rules for the slasher genre. You know, girl running up the stairs when she should go out the front door, the killer POV cam, a few other things I don’t want to mention in case of spoilers. Unlike later slashers though, the film isn’t about “the kill” and exploitation. Clark makes an effort to build character and drama, focuses on tension, and creates something that is genuinely creepy if not always overly graphic. It’s something Black Christmas has in common with Halloween I think.

Also relevant I think! This review by Siskel & Ebert about slasher films and feminism. They mention a lot of the same things that I sometimes talk about when I express my distaste for films such as Last House on the Left. And a lot of newer films. Also, they were saying all of this in 1980. So that’s how much things change! Women in Danger.

So then I stopped thinking about all of that and watched Tucker & Dale. Which is utterly adorable and hilarious. I heart Alan Tudyck. Have I mentioned that? More than once? Tucker & Dale is a lot of fun, playing with a lot of genre conventions in what I thought was kind of a new way. It follows something like Scream with the self awareness and the characters’s awareness of the genre. In a less serious way. I do have to say that as entertained as I was, I did find it a little draggy in the beginning. But eventually the pacing caught up to the story (or maybe it was the other way around. I’m not sure.) and the ending is really cute.

Oh but hey, I haven’t only watched horror movies. As much as it sounds like it. I did also watch Beginners Mike Mills’s film starring Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, and Melanie Laurent. It’s a really sweet story about a man dealing with the emotional aftermath of not only his father’s death, but the late in life revelation that his father was gay. The narrative switches between the before and after of his father’s death, not always following a linear path, and while I followed it easily for most of the film there were a couple of parts that lost me. But that also could have been the wine muddling my brain…

In any case, I liked it. Also, Melanie Laurent is beautiful and Arthur is the cutest dog ever.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFM3AE64bgw&w=560&h=315]