Best Halloween Cheese?

I saw the WNUF Halloween special on Shudder and want to watch that one. Is it more genuine horror or intentional comedy?

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There was a terrible 1977 “prequel” to How the Grinch Stole Christmas called “Halloween is Grinch Night”. It’s terrible on all levels and represents the worst of the 1970s animation style with weak musicals and a largely incomprehensible plot. Compared to the classic Christmas show it’s abysmal, but it is a highly stylized, freaky-deaky Halloween experience.

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Intentional comedy and a bit of a love letter to mid-80s television.

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I remember watching that. The animation was so bizarre. 70s cartoonists were so intent on making everything stark and surreal.

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I’m pretty sure the entire production was fueled by hallucinogens and cocaine.

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basketcasebelial

Belial trashing the room is everything.

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In a movie full of great goofy dialog it contains one of the greatest death scene soliloquies in cinema, but I won’t spoil it.

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Dead Alive
Theatre of Blood
Malignant

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I had a Tom Atkins/Bruce Campbell crossover fest, and I’d like to throw it out there:
Halloween 3, Night of the Creeps, Maniac Cop, Evil Dead 2, and Bubba Ho Tep

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Oliver Reed and Garett Morris, nooooo! You’re been in much better cheesy movies than this.

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Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Nancy Sinatra collide with Tommy Kirk from Catalina Caper and Village of the Giants to annihilate the proceedings like pure acting antimatter. Were George Barrows, who played Robot Monster and once again appears in an ape suit, or Susan Hart who was also in The Slime People, spared? Who the hell knows. With plenty of terrible songs of course!

(It looks like about half the cast was also in the Dr. Goldfoot movies so maybe it’s not all that bad.)

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Hillbillys in a Haunted House
Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Ferlin Husky, Merle Haggard and Joi Lansing

Country singers on their way to Nashville get in between a shoot out between Spies and the local Sheriff, forcing them to stop at an old haunted mansion. Soon they realize that the house is not only haunted, but is also the headquarters of a ring of international spies after a top secret formula for rocket fuel.

Unriffed

Riffed

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“My life…was a lie…”

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Halloween cheese is at its ripest with stop-motion monsters, right? Here are some of the top-shelf cheesiest and stop-motioniest.

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The trailers for this freaked me out as a kid, because yeah it invokes a primal kind of fear. But, it is a satisfying cheesy movie with an inventive monster. It’s also only one of two movies where John Saxon plays a beach town cop (the other being the slasher movie Nightmare Beach (1989)).

It’s good to see him stretch his wings after playing a big town cop, a small town cop, a Canadian cop, an Italian cop, a military copy and an international cop.

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Hey now, he branched out when he played a toe-sucking Werewolf that one time…

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There was a DIY riffer whose name I forget. But their take on (original) Black Christmas dissolved at the end into snickering, almost incoherent berating of the cops in it as too incompetent to tie their own shoes, much less protect the public from serial killers. :smiley:

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Will Vinton’s Claymation Comedy of Horrors. It’s also one of the few ones with the Wilshire character that I can actually stand.

The little known subtext to John Saxon’s roles is that by contract they were all toe-sucking werewolves. Sadly, most of the relevant scenes were left on the cutting room floor as “not germane to the plot”. In Maureen O’Hara’s autobiography 'Tis Herself she relays the following story that took place during the casting of Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation.

Producer: “All right, John, in this movie you’re going to co-star with Jimmy Stewart and Maureen O’Hara!”
John: “Wow, that’s great! I can only imagine my career going up from here.”
P: “You’ll play a college professor—”
J: “Who’s also a werewolf who sucks toes…”
P: “I’m sorry, what?”
J: “I’m playing a college professor!”
P: “Yes, exactly.”
J: “And when the moon is full, I sneak into women’s bedrooms and suck toes!”
P: “No, no, just a regular, non-weird, non-werewolf professor.”
J: “First of all, I resent the label “weird”. Second of all, it’s in my contract.”
P: “It’s in your…!”
[producer checks contract]
P: (muttering) “I’ll be damned. We need better lawyers. Too expensive to fire him now.”
P: “OK, John, I guess you’re a toe-sucking werewolf!”

Oddly, Saxon never noticed those scenes got cut because he never saw any of his own pictures.