31 DAYS OF HORROR 2025-Day 1: NOSFERATU (2024)

Nothing like the love of an undead suckface.

So, a remake of the 1922 vampire classic NOSFERATU, from. the director of the superb THE WITCH (2015).

Basically Bram Stoker's DRACULA with character names changed, you know the basic story, so I won't bore you with a recap. What you need to know is that it's well-crafted and thick with eerie, dreamlike atmosphere, but it's also glacially slow and dull. The performances are all strong and that they kept the vampire a revolting monster instead of yet another rote sexy undead suckface seducer was a welcome bit of trope defiance, but I feel the same way about it as I felt about the 2010 remake of THE WOLFMAN. It came off to me like a particularly turgid and overlong installment of MASTERPIECE THEATER in Hammer drag, but Hammer's films generally moved briskly, were lavishly colorful, especially when it came to its signature bright red "Kensington gore," and I found myself connecting with the characters far more than I did with almost anyone in this remake. Yes, there are moments of genuine creepiness and eeriness, and some of the set pieces are outstanding — the squirming throngs of plague-infested rats are especially douche chill-inducing — and the sequences featuring the vampire absolutely deliver, but there's too little of him and far too much of the boring human characters, though there were standouts among them, with Lily Rose Depp being the MVP.

As for the fear factor, I personally found none of it scary, but it is undeniably eerie, so there's that at least. It's a very slow burn, with it taking far too long for the vampire to enter the narrative. In fact, it's a good half hour before he shows up at all, and the first half hour could have been excised entirely. The film could have been much tighter if it simply opened with the solicitor rendezvousing with Orlock's carriage and filled the audience in from there.

Orlock's scenes are great monster stuff — the way Count Orlock feeds is original and chilling, very beastlike — and when we finally get a decent look at him, he's a hulking presence that resembles what we got for the titular creature in KRAMPUS (2015), only minus the horns, beard, and Santa gear. This vampire is a predatory embodiment of disease, a living plague, if you will, and he exudes a malevolence that few cinematic vampires have wielded over the past four decades, so that was a plus. His decimation of several characters over a three-night period is quite nasty, including the unflinching depiction of him feeding on two adorable little girls. (Fuck spoilers. It's a monster movie, and monsters are gonna monster, provided that the filmmaker isn't a pussy, which Eggers certainly is not.) I just wish we had more of him instead of all the other Merchant Ivory costume drama.

Overall, I found this iteration of NOSFERATU to be an unnecessarily overlong slog, but I’m glad I saw it so I can join the discussion and write about it. That said, I won’t be revisiting it. The original silent version from 102 years ago is far superior, and I had a hell of a lot more fun with the vampire mayhem in 2024's ABIGAIL. Totally different flavor of vampire, to be sure, but I came to be entertained, not offered a Gothic soporific.

 Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2025-Intro

Another year, another 31 scary items to discuss.

If I may be candid, it has been one hell of a year. I survived a cardiac arterial bypass graft procedure, I've been bearing witness to my 92-year-old cancer-ridden mother's slow fading away, and a bunch of other shit, so being able to retreat into daily doses of spooky stuff will be a tonic for my soul. This year will be the usual hodgepodge of the good, the bad, and the fucking ridiculous, so saddle up and get ready for the ride!

 -Yer Bunche 

 

MONSTER A GO-GO (1965)

The horror...The horror...Or not...

Bad horror movies happen all the time. In fact, it's not a stretch to state that bad horror movies outnumber the worthwhile ones by an almost incalculable degree. But then there are bad horror movies that go above and beyond with their cinematic wretchedness to find themselves numbered among the very worst works that the entirety of cinema has to offer, films that provide nothing by way of scares, interest, or anything of note to prevent the audience falling into a boredom-induced torpor. Such a piece is MONSTER A GO-GO, an infamous, turgid stink bomb from director Bill Rebane (THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION) and an uncredited Herschell Gordon Lewis. Yes, Lewis, the "Godfather of Gore" himself, the man who opened the floodgates of cinematic visceral excess with such stomach-churners as BLOOD FEAST (1963) and TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964), was somehow involved in this dead cat of a movie, and while his own solo filmography is not stocked with any works to rival those of Cronenberg or Romero, even the most poorly-regarded flick in his roster looks like PSYCHO when measured against this floater.

 

Yer Bunche, with Herschell Gordon Lewis.

An astronaut returns to Earth as a hulking radioactive monster and embarks on an aimless non-rampage that's tracked by military investigators and scientists. There's much wandering around in barren fields, plus tons of un-involving, poorly-acted dialogue, and the end result could kindly be called an endurance test to try the patience of even the most die-hard of bad movie veterans. In short, the film is seventy minutes that subjectively feels like four hours and is practically guaranteed to serve as a cinematic soporific. So why I am I bothering to bring this complete and utter dog to your attention, you may ask? Simple. Because it possess an ending of such jaw-dropping content that it practically dares you to witness it for yourself. After making the hapless audience suffer through virtually nothing happening over its entire running time, the film ends by announcing that the astronaut had actually splashed down unharmed somewhere in the North Atlantic and that there was actually never a monster at all, so everything that we'd watched was just superfluous, time-wasting bullshit. Here's the actual narration from the film that outlines that "twist" and pretty much raises a huge, stiff middle finger to  moviegoers:

As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called "Douglas" to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness! With the telegram, one cloud lifts and another descends. Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well, and of normal size, some eight thousand miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled? Case in point: The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?

Absorb that galloping horseshit for a moment. Things like that don't just spontaneously happen. That so-called ending was deliberately perpetrated and knowingly released with the intent that innocent people would shell out their hard-earned cash to see it. It was downright criminal and I would have given a lot to be there to see how audiences reacted upon finding out they'd just been so frustratingly ripped off while simultaneously being bored nigh unto death. If MONSTER A G-GO had played at my home county's most notorious grindhouse, the late, lamented Norwalk Theater, I can tell you with a certain amount of authority that the irate audience would have stormed out of the auditorium and killed and spit-roasted the theater's staff right there in the lobby, not a stone's throw away from the popcorn machine.

Poster for the original theatrical release.