Welcome To Our Nightmare III: Terror, Wooley... and TAKOMA!

That's what I was counting on with this one. But I'm more than halfway through now and even though it's got some scares I just keep getting angrier and angrier with every stupid thing that people do.

I need to reply to Crumb's post still, but that's such a tantalizing question. Usually it's the beginning that movies get right and the ending that they're likely to flub. And I'll have to remember how I actually felt about it on the first viewing and not colored by my memory of the viewing experience as the whole... I'd probably need some time and luck to recall if that's happened.

Extra challenging since getting older, you also get the tendency to give a movie some time to see where it's going to go (and I usually have some type of recommendation going into a movie, so I'm often giving it the benefit of the doubt).

Victor (Johnny Depp) and Victoria (Emily Watson) are about to embark on an arranged marriage which both are dreading - they both would have preferred to marry for love and Victoria's family is hilariously awful. But the dread subsides when they meet the day before the wedding and fall immediately in love. All would seem to be well until Victor, practicing his vows, says them aloud before slipping the ring onto what appears to be a buried tree-branch... but is actually a buried bride.
He is immediately transported to the Land of the Dead where it is revealed that he has inadvertently married the titular corpse (Helena Bonham-Carter, sigh). Meanwhile, in the land of the living, his disappearance may have created an opening for another suitor, Lord Barkis (Richard E. Grant), to swoop in and claim his living bride. But what is the unsettling Lord Barkis really up to? Will Victor have to live in the Land of the Dead betrothed to a corpse? Will our corpse, Emily, ever know happiness or peace? And when the Dead rise...


...what will become of the Living?
I always feel that this movie gets punished for not being The Nightmare Before Christmas. There's no dodging that it would seem to be a spiritual (heh) sequel if nothing else, given the format, Burton, and the macabre. But that's where it ends to me. This is a good little story, well-told. The amount of talent here is really enough to carry it. Like them or not, Tim Burton, Danny Elfman, and Johnny Depp are a very talented group on their own but when you add in indisputable talents like Albert Finney, Helena Bonham Carter, Christopher Lee, Joanna Lumley, and Richard E. Grant, and for that matter, Henry Sellick’s stop-motion animation, there is nothing here not to like when taken on its own and not constantly held up to Nightmare. The craft is excellent, the story is good, the script is amusing but also efficient (it moves along nicely and doesn't pad its short run-time), all the voice performances are top-notch, and it's fun. I just don't have anything negative to say about it.


Post script - My girlfriend and I had an interesting conversation yesterday because she did have a qualm when she watched it a week or so earlier. She felt that Emily (the Corpse Bride) was kind of like an angry, spoiled teenager for much of the movie even though she was selfless in the end, making it too easy for Victor not to be conflicted and just making her unlikable. I retorted that I thought that was the point. That when first introduced to her, she was murdered as a young bride who had never known anything in life and was nipped in the bud, so to speak, when she had just been promised everlasting love. That's the context she's coming from and she has to grow up before she can be a good and selfless person... and that that growth is her arc in the movie. Which actually makes the movie better. I think it would have been very easy to make her too likable up front so that the audience gets conflicted about where Victor should be or to make her remain selfish and juvenile, making Victor's choice too easy. I thought the writers and Burton and B-C did a nice job of giving her an arc which would change how the audience felt about her and deliver us in the right place in the end.

I hope I can post some too, from an Instagram pulp account I follow:

Thrilled to have you, and these are great, thanks!

Submissions are always welcome, especially since I'm severely slacking this year. I watched my favorite movie last night and haven't even had a chance to mention it yet.

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Captain's Log
My Collection

And that movie is... ?

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I've almost watched it twice this month. I've held back because of how recently I've watched it but maybe I should just not let that matter.

Kill, Baby...Kill!

Melissa Graps says...Do it!

I knew I had seen it, but I just couldn't place it. I need to get that into my queue for this month. It's been too long!

But Ruth warns me to proceed with caution!

Do you heed the ghost or the witch? That's quite a pickle you've gotten yourself into, friend. Hope that works out for you.

Ghost versus Witch action is the best action.

So do you folks consider Evil Dead to be the best Evil Dead? I only saw Evil Dead Rise before it (and Army of Darkness like 20 years ago) and I thought Rise was much better myself. Thoughts?

I've always preferred The corpse Bride to The Nightmare before Christmas, like you said it's just so well constructed and the gothic vibe it has going for it just my cup of tea.

For my Money Evil Dead 2 is the best, it is like the perfect blend of Horror and Comedy. I guess ordering them I'd go


Evil Dead 2 (A)

Army of Darkness (B+)

Evil Dead (1981) (B)

Evil Dead (2013) (B)

Evil Dead Rise. (C)

Late Night with the Devil, 2024

Jack (David Datmalchian) is the successful host of a late night talk show, returning after some time off mourning the death of his wife, Madeline (Georgina Haig). In a bid to boost ratings, Jack hosts an occult themed show, featuring a medium (Fayssal Bazzi), a famous skeptic (Ian Bliss), and most intensely, a young woman named Lilly (Ingrid Torelli) who is supposedly possessed by a demon and her handler, June (Laura Gordon). As the show goes on, things go increasingly off the rails.

A fantastic and fun premise is bogged down by an insulting lack of faith in the viewer’s intelligence.
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.
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Again, though, the worst sin that the movie commits is its total lack of trust in the people watching it. It was patronizing, and even willing to abandon its own format in order to deliver an underwhelming exposition dump. The first five minutes are a warning shot for this, and what happens in the last 15 minutes is downright insulting. The actors are fine, and I did like the framing of the possession storyline, but as a whole it did little to raise my pulse. Please someone make a great movie about a guy whose fear of having missed his chance at big-time fame leads him to allowing a demon to possess a teenage girl live on his TV show.



FULL REVIEW

I think Evil Dead is great, I really do, but I consider Evil Dead 2 to be on the shortest list of Horror movies I have to have in my life.
Which is especially helpful since it's not exactly a sequel it's a movie that can be watched with no knowledge of its predecessor at all.

I'm actually happy to hear that because, while I don't know if I can go that far (I haven't watched Nightmare in a long time to compare), I do think this movie deserves a lot more love and respect than it gets and really deserves to be considered right there alongside at least Coraline and such. And I happen to think Coraline is pretty damn good.