Horror Movie Month: Guilty Pleasures & Good Finds

The Loved Ones
The Stars: Xavier Samuel, Robin McLeavy
The Plot: A shy teenager asks the boy of her dreams to an end of the year dance. When he says no (he's got a girlfriend!), she and her equally psychotic father decide to kidnap him, hold him hostage, and torture him instead.
The Scares: This movie isn't scary so much as intense. And it is super intense. It's also very gory and violent. And artistic as hell! Some of the shots in this movie are so strikingly beautiful that it makes the violence feel like a gut punch even more. I know I sit through a lot of bad horror movies, especially this time of year, but it's almost worth it to find something like this, something so original and daring and borderline crazy, but also gorgeous. Also, I know this is an independent Australian film that got, probably, not much attention but McLeavy is so damn great. Her performance could easily have crossed that thin line over to the side of campy, but it never does. She is perfection. P.S. Xavier Samuel might be the prettiest boy I have ever seen in my whole life.
The Body Count: 8 humans and 1 dog (which somehow, seeing animals die in movies make me so much sadder than humans, maybe because I know the humans are all actors, but dogs are dogs, you know?)
The Grade: B

House of Wax
The Stars: Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Paris Hilton (!!)
The Plot: A group of friends en route to a football game stumble into a super creepy, mostly abandoned town whose center piece is said House of Wax.
The Scares: No. This movie is not scary at all, but somehow I like it a hell of a lot more than I should. House of Wax is a total guilty pleasure movie for me. I think it has a lot to do with Paris Hilton's gloriously bad acting. Her acting is so bad that it is deliciously good. Maybe it's because I don't take this movie as seriously as I should and, to me, it is just a giant, big, campy, fun movie. I don't know, but I most definitely love Paris Hilton so much in this movie that it almost hurts.
The Body Count: 6.
The Grade: A very generous C

Scream
The Stars: Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Skeet Ulrich
The Plot: A masked killer with a serious love of horror movies targets a group of teenagers one year after the death of one of their mothers.
The Scares: I already discussed how this is the greatest movie of the last twenty years. This movie probably scared me at the time. Now, not so much. But that doesn't make it any less smart, clever and witty.
The Body Count: 7.
The Grade: A-