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NetfliXperiments: Halloween Spooktacular
By Patrick Roland on 2004-09-28 12:08:55

It’s spooky season outside. The leaves are changing, little kids are picking out trick-or-treat costumes and devil worshippers are shining their horns. Yup, it’s October...

Experiment Volume 11: Haloween Films

There are two schools of though in choosing seasonal movies: Horribly Funny or Deeply Disturbing. To help make your choices a little easier, I dug through the Netflix Vaults for a Whitman’s sampler of each.

Deeply Disturbing

These are the truly scary movies. Not the Freddys of our dreams or the Alien’s of space. These are the truly cerebral, plausible and frightening. Like The Exorcist or Psycho before it, Peeping Tom is rooted in psychology, shock and urban legend.

Peeping Tom (1960)

First off, it’s a British film, so if all those accents don’t scare you the story will.

Our main character is a disturbed photographer who attaches a blade to his Super-8 and films himself murdering his victims. Part voyeuristic thriller, part snuff film, Peeping Tom was banned in England upon its release.

The movie foregoes the obvious opening for blood and guts and plucks the brain with a series of creepy twists that seem all too realistic.

Forty years after its release, Peeping Tom proves that my theory in high-school was dead on: Photography breeds serial killers. Wrap your head around that one next time your aunt snaps a photo at the family reunion.

Horribly Funny

My personal favorites; these are horror movies, usually done on a dental floss sized budget, that are so bad they are funny. And the baddest of the bad in this category is none other than 1996’s Uncle Sam. My first clue was the tag line, "I Want You...DEAD!"

Uncle Sam (1996)

I knew the Bush administration had its hand in the TV commercial cookie jar, but I had no clue they were making feature length movies. Here’s the proof.

Super patriot and all-around model American Sam died in the original Gulf War and through unknown circumstances, though I suspect Saddam Hussein had a part in it, turned into a zombie.

Sam’s zombified corpse is shipped home on July 4th where his nephew and Issac Hayes (?!?!?!) are leading the town in celebration. It doesn’t take long for the usual serial killer deaths happen: teenagers in love, teenagers abusing drugs and alcohol, teenagers doing anything, really. But Uncle Sam has another mission: to destroy those who hate freedom (sound familiar?). Through a brutal series of slayings, each more complicated and unrealistic (Although, realism is hard to come by when a zombie dressed in red, white and blue is shedding the blood) than the next, Sam avenges his death and salutes our country. Flag burners: dead. Kids making fun of the National Anthem: dead. Crooked congressmen: you guessed it, dead.

Although this movie was made prior to Bush’s tenure, the similarities are eerie in an un-Halloween way. Much like real life, in Uncle Sam if you oppose American idealism, you die. This film did everything short of decapitate a gay marriage to run parallel to Bush. Sadly, we don’t have Issac Hayes to save the day in our world…or do we?

More NetfliXperiments:
Netflix has thousands of films to rent. I try to squeeze in as many films as I can since I pay a monthly fee. I skip the junk you can rent at Blockbuster and go straight to the sublime, irreverent and just plain weird you can’t find anywhere else. Consider me your trash man and treasure hunter as we experiment with movies we never knew existed.

· NetfliXperiments Volume 10: Three Amigos vs. Three Caballeros.
· NetfliXperiments Volume 9: They're gonna put me in the movies.
· NetfliXperiments Volume 8: The Jazz Age
· NetfliXperiments Volume 7: TV Daze
· NetfliXperiments Volume 6: Amish Paradise?
· NetfliXperiments Volume 5: Freak Out!
· NetfliXperiments Volume 4: Leprechaun Party!
· NetfliXperiments Volume 3: Rock 'n' Roll Freakshow
· NetfliXperiments Volume 2: Ouch! My Head Hurts--Foreign Films
· NetfliXperiments Volume 1: Highway Horror & Hillbilly Fishermen

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