Oh Halloween...

The Fall of the House of Usher(dir. Jean Epstein)
I have a serious lack of experience with silent cinema. I'm not sure why. The score that accompanied this film was excellent. That's one thing that always seemed strange to me about silent cinema is that most of the time, they don't always have a default and "definitive" score for a film so your experience could be drastically different depending how you see it but whatever. The images were haunting and dream-like. It slightly dragged at certain parts, but other than that minor quibble, it is a masterpiece.
**** out of *****

Surspiria(dir. Dario Argento)
I spoke too soon with my comparison of him to John Woo. They obviously had really nothing in common before other than that they're great stylistically at their given genre, but now, having seen this, a more apt comparison would be to Seijun Suzuki given this film's over-stylized look. I'm starting to feel that I overrated Tenebre since it is starting to look mundane and dull because of this. The only thing Tenebre really had going for it in my mind were the overly violent murders while this contains a captivating world of horror and even more imaginative and elaborate murders. It's not really scary, but it's hard to disregard the film's creepy atmosphere, which is created mainly by the film's wonderful score by Goblin. I thought the Dawn of the Dead score was awesome, but man, this one easily dominates it. I easily consider it one of my top 5 favorite scores. The narrative doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it's easily more engaging than the mystery presented in Tenebre. The set design is amazing. The whole film is amazing. It's a masterpiece.
**** out of ****

Wolf Creek[Unrated cut](dir. Greg McLean)
I don't really understand how Roger Ebert gave this zero stars. It's not exactly pleasant, but nothing about it was out of line. Reading his review, you expect an hour and 40 minutes of women getting tortured when there's very little of that. This is an extremely well-executed genre piece that is physically and emotionally draining. It has some problems like employing basically an invincible boogeyman in it's narrative and maybe taking a little too long to get the "horror" going. It exploited it's narrative's "based on true events" aspect perhaps a little too much with it's ending, expecting this film to resonate more with the audience because it's "true." That just seems cheap and phony, but it's hard to knock the film too much since it's so tight and well-done. Now, I feel like I overrated The Thing. I highly recommend.
***1/2 out of ****