For the past twenty-seven years, one of my annual Halloween watches is the little known horror comedy The Midnight Hour. It first aired on ABC on November 1, 1985 (Yep, one day after Halloween and two days after Garfield's Halloween Adventure aired on CBS) when I was a four-year-old. At the time my parents and I lived in a two-story farmhouse in the country (which was also haunted) and my parents recorded it onto a VHS tape. I would pester my mother into letting me watch The Midnight Hour, even though The Elf would always freak me out.

The Midnight Hour is set on Halloween in the small town of  Pitchford Cove, New England. Five high school seniors, Phil (Lee Montgomery), Mary (Dedee Pfeiffer), Mitch (Peter DeLuise), Vinnie (LeVar Burton), and Melissa (Shari Belafonte), break into the town's museum. They steal (or should I saw "borrow") a few costumes and an old trunk. They open the trunk at the local cemetery, in which they find a mysterious scroll. Melissa reads the scroll aloud, unleashing a horrible curse.

A few minutes after the kids leave the cemetery, the undead rise from their graves. The undead's leader is Melissa's own ancestor, Lucinda Cavender, who was put to death over 300 hundred years ago for being a vampire.

Trick 'r Treat
Director: Michael Dougherty
Starring: Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Dylan Baker, Rochelle Aytes, Quinn Lord
Studio: Warner Home Video
ASIN: B002LMSWN2
Release Date: October 6, 2009
Running Time: 82 minutes
Rated R for horror violence, some sexuality/nudity, and language

Annually, my local Walmart sets out a few horror/Halloween themed movies. It's not even October and this year’s Halloween DVDs/Blu-Rays are already out, in which the majority of them are a mixed bag of good and bad treats. I already own all the good ones and a few that I don't are not my style, but I did pick up Trick ‘r Treat only because Anna Paquin was on the back cover.

Trick 'r Treat was released to one theater in December 2007 followed by a handful of screens in 2008 and 2009, mostly at festivals. The movie was finally released to DVD on October 6, 2009 and received mostly good reviews to the small amount of critics who viewed it.

In this anthology in the style of the Creepshow, a short trick-treater, Sam, wearing a worn-out orange pajamas with a burlap sack over his head, keeps popping throughout the movie. Emma (played by Leslie Bibb) and Henry are the couple that opens up the movie. Henry loves the holiday and has over-decorated their yard with ghost-scarecrows. She demands that he cleans up everything on Halloween night, but he says he'll get to it tomorrow, which she knows he is a lying. He goes inside the house while Emma begins to take down the scarecrows and comes face to face with horror.

Charlie a trick-or-treater stops by Principle Wilkins house and steals a few pieces of Halloween candy that was on the front porch, but he is in for a shock when the candy turns out to be poisoned. It seems that Principle Wilkins drags Charlie's lifeless body inside. Later that night, he digs a hole in the backyard and tosses Charlie on top of another corpse. He is in a hurry to get the bodies covered up, help out his son carve a unique jack-o-lantern, and get ready for his date.

4 Movie Collection: Hollow Man/ Hollow Man 2/ Fortress 2/ The Harvest
Directors: Paul Verhoeven; Claudio Fäh; Geoff Murphy; David Marconi
Starring: Elisabeth Shue, Kevin Bacon, Josh Brolin, Peter Facinelli, Laura Regan
Studio: Mill Creek Entertainment 
ASIN: B008XAT0OG
Release Date: October 9, 2012
Running Time: 394 minutes
Rated R

Review:

I've always been a fan of The Invisible Man film series that blended horror and science fiction together. Tower PR and Mill Creek Entertainment kindly sent me a complementary copy of the two discs movie collection, containing Hollow Man, Hollow Man 2, Fortress 2, and The Harvest, for me to review.

Hollow Man is an updated version of The Invisible Man that was released back in 2000. Kevin Bacon plays Sebastian Caine, a scientist, who has created a serum that can turn a gorilla invisible, but now he wants to experiment on himself despite the objections of his ex-girlfriend Dr. Linda McKay (played by Elizabeth Shue)and her boyfriend Dr. Matt Kensington (played by Josh Brolin). Within days, Sebastian starts to go mad with his new power of invisibility. At first he is just pranking his fellow colleagues, but then he starts killing them one by one.

I saw Hollow Man when if first came out and now again on DVD. It's not as bad as other reviewers have claimed it to be. Yes, the characters are not well developed, but horror movies never have much character depth. Even twelve years later, the special effects are pretty amazing.

Three months after the worldwide zombie outbreak that wiped 99.9% of the population, a small group of British survivors are trying to survive. They have heard that there is a ship at sea that is taking the remaining survivors to safety. The group is lead by Maddox (played by Philip Brodie) whom has just taken in a few more survivors at the beachside compound, which includes the sole survivor of the first movie's film crew, Leanne, (played by Alix Wilton Regan who is replacing Victoria Summer). Before long the zombies invade the compound causing Maddox, Leanne, Jonesy, who is constantly filming with his camera, and a few others to runaway.

With no vehicles, they run on foot looking for any place for shelter. Eventually they come across some booby-traps and the remains of headless zombies in a wooded area. The carefully survey a cabin from a distance where a group of human bandits are watching another man sexually assault a female zombie. The deadly Goke (played by Russell Jones) comes out of the cabin and murders the man. That is when Leanne recognizes Goke and his henchman Manny as she had encountered them in the first movie.

Howling IV: The Original Nightmare
Director: John Hough
Starring: Romy Windsor, Michael T. Weiss, Antony Hamilton, Susanne Severeid, Lamya Derval
Studio: Echo Bridge Home Entertainment
ASIN: B00023BM4S
Release Date: June 15, 2004
Running Time: 94 Minutes
Rated R 

Unlike the previous films in the series, Howling IV: The Original Nightmare was released to direct-to-video (aka VHS) in 1988, originally released by Warner Bros., but Echo Bridge Home Entertainment now owns the rights to it.

I've only seen a handful of the Howling movies out of the eight movies that have been made so far, the last one, Howling Reborn, came out last year. I recall seeing this movie advertise on a local channel in the early 90s and of course my mom let me watch it probably just so I would stop pestering her about it. The movie had commercials, so naturally it would be edited for broadcast television. For the actually movie, I only remember bits and pieces of it until I finally bought the DVD a few months ago for only five dollars.

For anyone who has actually read Gary Brandner's The Howling novel, you'll know that the first movie barely went by it, but Howling IV: The Original Nightmare is the only movie that almost completely goes by the book except that the names have been changed and there is no rapist in it. The film was made for fewer than two-million dollars. It won the 1988 Golden Chainsaw award for Best Direct-to-Video Feature from Fangoria, but it received mostly negative reviews from fans due to the small amount of time the werewolves appeared.

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