Nosferatu: The Vampyre (1979)- This is a pretty good telling of the Dracula story, with a Nosferatu style twist. Isabelle Adjani is STUNNING as Lucy Harker (yes, a deviation from the book), seriously looking just about as gorgeous as a woman can; Klaus Kinski is pretty creepy as Dracula too... I love the Nosferatu look. The way it ends is interesting to me; it's nothing like the book, much like the rest of the movie, but it's still effective. If you love vampire movies, you need to see this one.
The Keep (1983)- This is seriously one of the most underrated and mishandled movies of the 80's. The Keep is a sweet bunch of Michael Mann (Manhunter,Heat,Collateral) goodness; A bunch of greedy Nazi's decide to steal some gold crosses from a keep that their holed up in, pissing off the Demon who lives there. The best part? Only a Jew can stop the Demon. I love that little bit of irony. Mayhem naturally ensues. Visually this movie is stunning; unfortunately, the studio forced Mann to cut the film which made it an almost Dune-like mess, but it's still a hell of a movie. Then again, I also love Dune.
The Exorcist III (1990)- I told myself that I didn't want to include sequels on this list, letting the originals speak for a series if need be, and to allow more unique movies to make the cut, but I had to include this one. The second sequel (the first one really blew) to arguably the best horror movie ever made, was pretty good and gave me a few scares that I wasn't quite expecting. The scene with the nurse is one of the scariest scenes ever filmed. In a pretty weak decade for horror, this was a solid movie that managed not to crap on the original.
House of 1000 Corpses (2003)- This movie seems to be hated just as much as it's loved by horror fans, but I think it's fantastic. In a time when Hollywood was churning out cardboard cut out fluff that they called horror, along came Rob Zombie and brought it back to the grimy exploitation style of the 70's. You can tell he's a horror fan, and though it's far from perfect, it was at the very least fresh and different. House of 1000 Corpses gave us a much needed change of pace from the mundane state that horror found itself in earlier this decade. Good effort for his first film.
See you tomorrow with #30...
