#joel soisson

[sesiondemadrugada]

Dracula 2000 (Patrick Lussier, 2000).

[movie-titlecards]

The Supernaturals (1986)

My rating: 4/10

Somehow they managed to make Nichelle Nichols and LeVar Burton fighting undead racists extremely dull and unpleasant to watch. It's almost impressive.

[bens-things]

The Prophecy: Forsaken (2005) dir. Joel Soisson

[unlikelyfanhairdoalmond]

Who remembers a post with what seemed to be a screenshot, of Téa sitting on stairs, and we could only see her back? It was from a post saying they were shooting in South Africa… I can’t find it anymore. 🤔

Anyway, seems like it was for « Bird Boy », a movie that « should be out relatively soon ». The IMDb page (link below) says South Africa as filming location, confirms Téa as cast but there’s no other info! 😅

[brokehorrorfan]

Dracula 2000 will be released on Blu-ray on May 14 via Scream Factory. The 2000 action-horror movie is produced by master of horror Wes Craven.

Patrick Lussier (My Bloody Valentine, Drive Angry) directs from a script by Joel Soisson (Piranha 3DD, Trick or Treat). Gerard Butler, Christopher Plummer, Jonny Lee Miller, Justine Waddell, Omar Epps, Colleen Fitzpatrick, Jeri Ryan, and Jennifer Esposito star.

Dracula 2000 has been newly scanned in 4K from the original camera negative, approved by Lussier. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio commentary by film critics Emily Higgins and Billy Dunham (new)

Audio commentary by director Patrick Lussier and writer Joel Soisson

Interview with director/editor Patrick Lussier (new)

Interview with production designer Carol Spier (new)

Interview with composer Marco Beltrami (new)

Deleted & extended scenes with optional audio commentary

Behind-the-scenes featurette

Auditions

Theatrical trailer

When a team of techno-savvy thieves breaks into a high-security vault, they don’t discover priceless works of art … they find a crypt unopened for 100 years! Suddenly, the ancient terror of Dracula (Gerard Butler) is unleashed, and his first destination is the city of New Orleans – a place where he feels right at home. Not far behind is a vampire hunter (Jonny Lee Miller) determined to save a young woman (Justine Waddell) with whom Dracula shares a dark legacy.

Pre-order Dracula 2000.

[lizardsfromspace]

Halloween Movie Challenge

Every day in October, except the days I don't, I am watching a randomly chosen Halloween-themed horror movie for the first time. Or for the first twenty-four days of October bc my list runs out then.

The first two weeks...are below

TRICK OR TREAT

1986 / directed by Charles Martin Smith / written by Joel Soisson, Michael S. Murphey and Rhet Topham (and Glen Morgan & James Wong, uncredited)

A heavy metal-themed Nightmare on Elm Street clone (the villain even does the "hands reaching through the wall" thing, but with a speaker), with cameos by Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osbourne, the latter playing a Satanic Panic-spewing TV preacher. This one has a strange legacy on the whole: future X-Files scribe (and uncredited co-writer) Glen Morgan is featured in his only acting role, and the director went on to make Air Bud...and then define his career around animal movies. Fair enough! This one's pretty fun, with a long first act of high school bullying highlighted with a energetic chase sequence, though not especially Halloween-y, given its name (though the version I watched was titled Ragman?)

🎃🎃🎃.5/5

TALES OF HALLOWEEN

2015 / directed by [a lot of people] / written by [a lot of people]

The top Letterboxd review calls this "Trick 'R Treat if it was designed by a committee at a horror convention" and that just about sums it up. It has the requisite horror cameos - a litany of 80s final girls are joined by Joe Dante and John Landis, and John Landis is convincing in the role of a terrible person whose son is a monster for some reason. This one has way too many segments, and they're unsurprisingly same-y. Two stories have a twist where a child-sized killer turns out to be a demon, two of them feature gangs of evil kids, and none of them are very fun, though they feature so many of the winking in-jokes filmmakers mistake for fun. This is the type of movie where a candy will have the word "Carpenter" on it, written in the Halloween titles font, because hey. Remember John Carpenter? Remember? Remember John Carpenter? The oddest part is that this movie's format is very close to 2015's better A Christmas Horror Story, but they're totally unrelated?

🎃🎃/5

HELL HOUSE LLC

2015 / written & directed by Stephen Cognetti

Found footage movie that makes decent use of its rundown-Halloween-haunt setting & has some good scares with evil clown dolls, but is pretty routine, and does that mediocre found footage thing where it can't let any of the background scares breathe without a crash zoom and a scare chord.

🎃🎃🎃/5

MAY

2002 / written & directed by Lucky McKee

To call May a slasher movie doesn't really represent it. As a portrait of a loner among urban alienation, it's of a kind with Taxi Driver and the first act of Beau is Afraid, with unbearably real performances by Angela Bettis and Jeremy Sisto. May is psychological and restrained, striving for a queasy discomfort before it escalates into full-on bloodshed. This is the least Halloween-y film so far, but the final act is on Halloween night, and culminates in a shot that's haunting and lyrical in equal measure.

🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃/5

HACK-O-LANTERN

1988 / directed by Jag Mundhra / written by Dave Eisenstark & Carla Robinson

Direct-to-video horror classic featuring a deeply apathetic son of the Devil and a musical number featuring deaths-by-magic-guitar. Alternatively tediously padded and gloriously deranged, but then again, that's direct-to-video horror babyyyyyyy. Jag Mundhra had a career directing direct-to-video sleaze in the US, but made prestige movies in India?

🎃🎃🎃/5

DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW

1981 / directed by Frank De Felitta / story by J.D. Feigelson & Butler Handcock, teleplay by Feigelson

A TV movie, but you'd only know it from its 4:3 ratio & commercial break fades-to-black. Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a creepy gem, well-directed by de Felitta - a novelist with a sideline directing TV movies - with an eye towards the details of small town life. The lack of gore is made up with by stark, elemental horror imagery, and the horrors of humanity: a mob murders a developmentally disabled man for a crime he didn't commit, and gets off the hook for it - gets cheered, in fact, by the townsfolk. But soon a mysterious scarecrow is appearing in the fields, and the killers start to die...not a killer scarecrow movie, but something subtler, chillier, the horror of barns and grain silos and farmer's fields.

🎃🎃🎃🎃/5

HAUNT

2019 / written & directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods

Extreme haunted houses are stupid.

While some use it as a mere William Castle-ian conceit, others take it seriously. Who could've guessed that if you replace themed scares and actors with people who will literally, actually hurt you, you'd still be scared? Only the Einsteins who act flabbergasted when the actors they hired with the pitch "you can hurt people and they signed something that said they can't sue you" turn out to disregard safe words. In Haunt, an extreme haunted house is a front for a murder-cult, which is more respectable than it being some guy doing the Evermore Park of frights. Haunt is a very pedestrian slasher, but a sincere one, and a modern one (the victims check the creepy house's Yelp reviews), which I'll take over a winking 80s homage any day.

🎃🎃🎃/5

THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

1985 / directed by Jack Bender / written by Bill Bleich

Delightful little made-for-TV number, heavily inspired by Thriller. In 1985, this was trashed for its cliches, but now it's the cliches that make it so endearing. This one has its own musical number, a starring turn for LeVar Burton, some quality zombie effects and a lighthearted air, and excellent Halloween-y vibes to it, of course, courtesy of future Lost director Jack Bender. It also has a weirdly overqualified soundtrack; I really didn't expect to hear The Smiths repeatedly in a made-for-TV Halloween movie, but here we are.

🎃🎃🎃🎃/5

NIGHT OF THE DEMONS

1988 / directed by Kevin S. Tenney / written by Joe Augustyn

Night of the Demons has a gnarly final act, but spends way too much time getting there, and too much of that time is spent with interchangeable assholes bumbling about.

🎃🎃.5/5

THE CHILD

1977 / directed by Robert Voskanian / written by Ralph Lucas

A classical Weird 70s Horror Movie, which means a relatively simple plot told in the most inscrutable way possible, a lot of stark tight close-ups and quick cuts, and a preoccupation with psychics. The last act is a bit of a conventional zombie runaround, but everything before that is chilly 70s gold. By far the least Halloween-y film here, but there's an amazing moment with a Jack-O-Lantern.

🎃🎃🎃.5/5

SCARY MOVIE

1991 / directed by Daniel Erickson / written by Daniel Erickson, David Lane Smith, and Mark Voges

No, not that one; this one is a regional horror flick from Texas, from 1991, and starring John Hawkes as a gormless nerd touring a haunted house - the type so anxious to avoid a snake pit he ends up falling into a snake pit, which, relatable. The wonderful aesthetics of a local haunted house dominate this film, directed with sly attention to detail by Erickson, which follows Hawkes' character as an escaped madman lurks in the haunted house. Or does he? A surreal psychological story more than a slasher, it takes a while to get somewhere, but that a while is full of local atmosphere (similar to Tobe Hooper's classic The Funhouse).

🎃🎃🎃🎃/5

Anyway

[blood-red-reviews-blog]

Hellraiser 8: Hellworld (2005)

Written by Joel Soisson and Carl V Dupre. Directed by Rick Bota. Starring Doug Bradley, Lance Henricksen, Kathryn Winnick, Henry Cavill and Christopher Jacot. Plot: gamers playing a Hellraiser video game are invited to a party where, as it turns out, cenobites are real. The writing is piss-poor, it’s just bad cliche after bad cliche. Despite the cast, the acting didn’t seem great, although that…

[mysangrelatina]

JUST DROPPED! OFFICIAL TRAILER & POSTER for "SEVEN CEMETERIES"

Starring Danny Trejo, Efren Ramirez, and Maria Canals-Barrera – Hitting Theaters, Digital, and On Demand October 11, 2024! DIRECTED BY John Gulager WRITTEN BY Joel Soisson, John Gulager STARRING Danny Trejo, Sal Lopez, Samantha Ashley, Efren Ramirez, Vincent M. Ward, Lew Temple, Richard Esteras and Maria Canals-Barrera SYNOPSIS A recent parolee (Danny Trejo) gets a Mexican witch to resurrect…

[saturdaynightmatinee]

CALIFICACIÓN PERSONAL: 5 / 10

Título Original: Hellraiser: Hellworld

Año: 2005

Duración: 91 min.

País: Estados Unidos  

Dirección: Rick Bota

Guion: Clive Barker, Joel Soisson, Carl V. Dupré

Música: Lars Anderson

Fotografía: Gabriel Kosuth

Reparto: Lance Henriksen, Katheryn Winnick, Christopher Jacot, Khary Payton, Henry Cavill, Anna Tolputt, Victor McGuire, Doug Bradley, Stelian Urian, Magdalena Tun, Gavril Patrv, Desiree Malonga

Productora: Miramax, Dimension Films, Castel Film Romania

Género: Horror

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0354623/

TRAILER:

[moviesandmania]

SEVEN CEMETERIES Danny Trejo resurrects his dead posse - trailer

‘Heroes aren’t born they’re raised‘ Seven Cemeteries is a 2024 supernatural horror film about a parolee who enlists a Mexican witch to resurrect his dead posse to save a woman’s ranch from a drug lord. The movie was directed by John Gulager from a screenplay by Joel Soisson. The 7C Productions-Rebellium Films co-production stars Danny Trejo, Efren Ramirez, Lew Temple, Terri Hoyos, Richard…

[80smovies]

[davidosu87]

[bens-things]

The Prophecy: Uprising (2005) dir. Joel Soisson

[facesofcinema]

Children of the Corn: Genesis (2011)

[brokehorrorfan]

Scream Factory has revealed the specs for its Phantoms 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray, releasing on July 16. The 1988 sci-fi horror film is based on Dean Koontz’s 1983 novel of the same name.

Joe Chappelle (Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers) directs from a script by Koontz. Peter O'Toole, Rose McGowan, Joanna Going, Liev Schreiber, Ben Affleck, Nicky Katt, Clifton Powell, and Michael DeLorenzo star.

Phantoms has been newly scanned in 4K from the original camera negative, approved by Chappelle, with Dolby Vision. Special features are listed below.

Special features (on Blu-ray disc):

Interview with producer Joel Soisson (new)

Interview with director of photography Richard Clabaugh (new)

Trailer

TV spot

In the small village of Snowfield, Colorado, something evil has been awakened from its centuries-long slumber … something with the power to wipe out humanity as we know it. The unsuspecting Dr. Jennifer Pailey (Joanna Going) brings her sister Lisa (Rose McGowan) to Snowfield, only to find the town empty but for a few survivors. As the tension and terror mount, only the few who have been left behind — the Pailey sisters, a noted journalist (Peter O'Toole), the town sheriff (Ben Affleck), and his deputy (Liev Schreiber) — stand between the mysterious entity that lurks beneath Snowfield and the rest of mankind … if they can survive.

Pre-order Phantoms.

[byneddiedingo]

Dracula 2000 (Patrick Lussier, 2000)

Cast: Gerard Butler, Christopher Plummer, Jonny Lee Miller, Justine Waddell, Vitamin C, Jennifer Esposito, Omar Epps, Sean Patrick Thomas, Jeri Ryan, Danny Masterson, Lochlyn Munro, Tig Fong, Tony Munch, Shane West, Nathan Fillion. Screenplay:  Joel Soisson, Patrick Lussier. Cinematography: Peter Pau. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Peter Devaney Flanagan, Patrick Lussier. Music: Marco Beltrami. 

The cross as vampire repellent has become so much a part of the Dracula legend that Roman Polanski saw fit to spoof it in The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). Threatened with a crucifix, a vampire reveals himself as Jewish: “Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire.” But Patrick Lussier doubles down on the Christian mythology in Dracula 2000: His vampire isn't threatened by the cross so much as he hates it. It turns out that Dracula is really the biblical Judas Iscariot, who when the rope broke as he tried to commit suicide after betraying Christ, was condemned to walk the Earth for eternity as one of the undead. Nobody else knows this except Abraham Van Helsing, who is still alive 103 years after Bram Stoker fictionalized his exploits. (In the film, Van Helsing dismisses Stoker as just a drunken Irish writer.) In 2000 he is posing as Van Helsing's grandson, the owner of Carfax Antiquities in London. It seems he kept himself alive after capturing Dracula and imprisoning him in a silver casket filled with leeches that feast on Judas/Dracula's blood. Somehow Van Helsing harvests the occasional leech from the casket and injects himself with that blood to keep himself alive. Unfortunately, this twist in the Dracula legend -- borrowed from the legend of the Wandering Jew -- is about all Dracula 2000 has going for it. Gerard Butler is not a particularly compelling Dracula, and Christopher Plummer doesn't invest much of his considerable talent in playing Van Helsing. Jonny Lee Miller, as Van Helsing's assistant, seems more confused than dashing in the romantic lead, and strikes no sparks with Justine Waddell, who turns out to be Van Helsing's estranged daughter. It was a critical and commercial flop, though there are those who regard it as underrated, so it may some day re-emerge, like Dracula himself, as a cult film.