The Peanut Butter Solution

aka Opération beurre de pinottes

While exploring a burned out building, Michael sees something so terrifying that all of his hair falls out. After a few days, his hair shows no signs of returning. In desperation, Michael tries a hair growth formula given to him by a pair of ghosts. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Michael's hair returns but, because he mixed the formula incorrectly, it won't stop growing. He gets kicked out of school for being a distraction and eventually gets kidnapped by a former teacher, who uses Michael's hair to make magic paint brushes. The Peanut Butter Solution might be the most infamous Canadian children's film ever made. It lives on in the minds of Canadian forty-somethings as a half-remembered fever dream. Many people who saw this movie as a child aren't completely sure whether or not the film was real or if they're actually just struggling to unpack a strange repressed memory.

Rating: 63%

(Image from Wikipedia)

House on Haunted Hill

Five strangers are invited to a party in a haunted house by an eccentric millionaire. Each guest is promised $10,000, if they can survive the night. Are there really ghosts closing in on the partygoers or is their host... a murderer? I can see how William Castle's House on Haunted Hill might have been successful back in the 1950s. One of the film's original in-theatre gimmicks involved flying a plastic skeleton over the audience. To modern audiences, the movie will probably feel a little stiff and stagey, almost like it was the film adaptation of a radio drama. However, if you're the type of person who could go for a movie where Vincent Price sneaks around the Scooby-Doo hallways of an old dark house while dramatic thunder and lightning goes off, then this movie is for you.

Rating: 62%

(Image from Wikipedia)

The Haunting of Hill House

Another spooky horror show is this ghosty adaptation of Shirley Jackson's classic book. It's got some sad parts and some scary parts and some long single shot parts where everybody better know all their dang lines. Come for the scares, stay for the feels, and also stay for the hidden ghosts.

RATING: 88%

Last Christmas!

Disney rebooted DuckTales last year and from what I gather they've been doing a good job of modernizing the show for today's young audience while simultaneously paying tribute to all things related to Disney's stable of ducks. That's certainly the impression I got after watching the recent episode "Last Christmas!" It was essentially an indirect sequel to Mickey's Christmas Carol. They've changed the designs of the three spirits, but they're clearly making a callback to that classic special. One of the ghosts even says that they first met Scrooge McDuck when they were on their way to meet up with a different Scrooge. I'll skip over the plot of the episode, as it's just another riff on the classic Christmas Carol story, but I'd be remiss not to make mention of the stellar voice cast on the show. Scrooge himself is now voiced by former Time Lord David Tennant. He even makes a joke about time travelers. Bless me bagpipes!

Rating: Wendigo traps%

(Image from DuckTales Wiki)

Insidious: The Last Key

I chose the Insidious series as my Halloween Horror Series 2018© because I figured it hadn't had time to wither like some of the longer running horror series, but they were all just mediocre. I do like that the series eventually gets an old woman as the lead. The plot in this one is there are ghosts! Imagine that. Though there is one cool part where a creepy person they think is a ghost is just the victim of a serial killer. That's a good idea for a movie that they don't stick with at all!

RATING: 61%

Insidious: Chapter 2

When last we saw our Insidii, the old psychic woman was killed by the husband person who hired her because he got possessed by an evil ghost. This movie is all about having to depossess the guy and get rid of all the ghosts, except now they don't have the powerful psychic woman to help out. The movies just a lotto loud screaming and piano crashes though - not exactly manufacturing lasting dread.

RATING: 33%

Kuroneko

A couple women are murdered and worse by some samurai so they turn into cat ghosts trying to get revenge on all samurai ever which goes pretty well until the older woman's kidnapped son/younger woman's kidnapped husband (same guy) shows up. It gets real sad!

RATING: 71%  

The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar

This half of the movie Two Evil Eyes, for which Romero and Dario Argento each adapted a Poe story. Anyway, while trying to hide a hypnotized dead body, a doctor and his mistress accidentally put ghosts into the corpse, and believe me, you don't want ghosts in a corpse!

RATING: 44%

Star Trek: The Next Generation - "The Next Phase"

Ro and Laforge get turned into invisible spirits and everybody thinks they're dead including Ro herself.

RATING: 86%

Star Trek: The Next Generation - "Power Play"

Space ghosts possess O'Brien, Data, and Troi so they take over the ship in an episode that is maybe Colm Meaney's audition tape for DS9?

RATING: 75%

Star Trek - "Wolf in the Fold"

The Enterprise has to fight Jack the Ripper's ghost and also Sulu gets stoned again.

RATING: 79%

Star Trek - "Catspaw"

The crew meets some really gothy aliens into witches, ghosts, curses, dungeons, black cats, etc. Lots of great spooky moments.

RATING: 72%

(Alternate Ending)

Enterprise S1E19 - "Oasis"

The Enterprise hears of a haaauuunted shiiiiip, so of course they investigate in order to graverob it of all its valuables. There's a kind of cool twist that you see coming a mile away, but would've been more interesting if SPOILER everybody on the whole ship was dead holograms instead of just most people.

RATING: 58%

House (1977)

This Japanese haunted house movie from the 70s won't scare you, per se, but it is sincerely the most surreal piece of nightmare fuel I've ever come across, including Jodorowsky. The plot is your average high school girls on vacation to a house haunted by the ghost of a woman's loneliness who wants to eat them type fare. It is 40% surreal humor, as when a cat dances and meows a song, 40% surreal terror, as when a girls severed fingers play the piano that bit them off, and 1800% weird nonsense. Toho studios told the director, an art director known for nonlinear experimental films, that they were tired of losing money on comprehensible films, and asked him to make something incomprehensible. Success! I've got to recommend this movie with full marks, since you'll never see anything else like it in your entire life.

RATING: 81%

V/H/S/2

So I didn't really like the first movie in this anthology series, but then a few different people told me the sequel was worth it because there was one great segment included. Unfortunately, every person forgot which number segment it was so I was doomed to watch this whole movie. Like the first one, some people are compelled for some reason to watch a bunch of snuff films, which, despite the fact that this takes place in modern times and every individual short film was shown in context to be shot digitally, have all been transferred down to big ol' unreliable VHS copies. Anyway, there's a boring ghost one, a boring zombie one, A TOTALLY BONKERS AMAZING SHORT HORROR FILM THAT DOES NOT DESERVE TO BE PACKAGED IN THIS SHITTY DEAL, and a boring alien one. Just watch the third segment and you'll be fine.

RATING: 85% (Third segment)
RATING: 26% (Whole movie)

The Innkeepers

This movie is a pretty spooky movie about (as you can probably guess) a haunted hotel. It's obviously no The Shining, but it takes it nice and slow so the scares have more impact. My only problem is that after the movie was over, I was like, "Oh, it's just about a haunted hotel." There's not really any kind of depth to it whatsoever (like what do the ghosts symbolize, man?), and it's definitely not as good as Ti West's The House Of The Devil. Also it divides itself into "chapters" for no apparent reason other than to make itself seem smarter maybe?

RATING: 61%

Poltergeist III: Oh God Just Kill Me

Ok guys I guess I was wrong about Poltergeist II being so shitty because this is the shit of the shit. The plot is Carol Anne lives with her aunt and uncle in a fancy new apartment building but the ghosts come back, oh no! There's a psychologist who claims the little girl is hypnotizing everybody, and lots of mirrors, and a really awful non-Jerry Goldsmith synthesizer score. It all adds up to awful, so you gotta feel extra bad that the little girl died during production. Whelp, the world's cruel and empty, and if you want to experience a little bit of that cruelty just watch this and see what kind of feelings you have.

RATING: 6%

The Others

I always thought of this movie as a rip off of The Sixth Sense, but I never actually saw it until today. It's pretty good I guess - the twist was ruined for me years ago, but it sounded pretty interesting because of it. One thing that sucks *SPOILERS* is that how come Nicole Kidman and her kids get to keep being the owners of the house and the servants have to keep being servants even though they're all dead? That's a pretty shitty afterlife imho.

RATING: 59%

Poltergeist II: The Other Side

Do you like stories where ghosts and skeletons and racist Indian caricatures appear? Then this is the movie for you! Nah, it's actually pretty bad in case you couldn't tell. The plot is the family from the way good first movie still has ghosts, and also HR Giger designed vomit worms. So then they get rid of them through some kind of spells and also grandma's angel, ain't it grand?

RATING: 38%

Monster Cereals

These were a lot better before I was a grown-ass man. Ow, my teeth.

RATING: 39%