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1. Hilde Warren and Death (1917,  "Eat your loving slop!" ) - Comes out to a 2.67 average on Letterboxd, which I'm pretty sure makes it the most poorly rated silent horror film that's at least an hour long. Directed by Joe May from a script by Fritz Lang. Upon review, I don't think the low rating is because it's bad, it's because it's unrelentingly, horrifically bleak and basically makes an argument in favor of suicide. Spoilering everything.Watched here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsFa8tsisWk - using my phone to translate the Russian title cards. In four acts, we see young actress Hilde Warren having suicidal thoughts due to stress; marry a ne'er-do-well, see him gunned down by the police, and contemplate suicide while pregnant; reject the advances of a long-time friend and contemplate suicide after he commits suicide; and finally shoot her ne'er-do-well son, go to jail, and accept death's embrace. Each time, Death himself is there to tempt her into ending things, and the film ends with Death saying "I am the Deliverer. I deliver you from all worries and sorrows, sorrows and fatigue with just one kiss. The door that leads to freedom is open." For gently caress's sake. This is largely composed of scenes of people talking, although Lang's script covers a whole lot of territory (all of it incredibly dark) in the course of 61 minutes. Every single member of the cast does a great job emoting to convey the nature of their character, even the 4-year-old playing the little brat who will go on to follow in his father's footsteps (bank robbing). And because it achieves exactly what it set out to do, 5/5. 2. The Last Performance (1929, Moonlighting ) - Conrad Veidt, not Caligari, Man Who Laughs, or even Orlac, plus Mary Philbin, not Phantom or Man Who Laughs again.Here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiGf6Z-_mis It's strange to see Veidt and Philbin go from playing peers and compatriots a year earlier in Man Who Laughs to this, where the 36-year-old Veidt, with the help of an artificial receding hairline and gray hair, is playing a much older stage magician Erik the Great creeping on his not-quite-18 assistant Julie, played by a 27-year-old Philbin. The classic "love triangle, but one of the guys is completely out of line, turning outright psychotic" storyline. It builds tension well in the first half and peaks when Veidt discovers Philbin with her more age-appropriate suitor Mark - there are two great shots in a row, one of Erik's shadow looming over them, followed by a closeup of his face as you can see him snap. Unfortunately, it kind of breaks the suspension of disbelief from there. The climax doesn't work unless you are, in fact, in a silent movie. Erik frames Mark for murder by having him perform the "sword through the box" trick with another assistant, when Erik has blocked the escape from the box. I'd assume the victim would be screaming his head off. This leads to Mark's trial, where Erik inexplicably confesses - nominally because he's realized Julie will never love him, but the film doesn't put a lot of work into justifying that. 3/5 Also, I'm now 2/2 on movies that end with the protagonist killing themselves... Sono fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Apr 30, 2024 03:22
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 #1: The Alpha Incident 1. "Eat your loving slop!" 3.9 on IMDB. Which I would call extremely generous Five people in a rural train station get infected by a disease from Mars where is you fall asleep your head explodes. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to stay awake to stop your head from exploding, don't watch The Alpha Incident. Your head will pop before the third act. Because this movie will put you to sleep! You'd think with a premise like that the whole point would be seeing the characters change and become paranoid or crazy but nope. Literally the only character who changes is the woman, who becomes sluttier. Other than that they all start off boring and unpleasant and maintain the same level of boring and unpleasant until the movie ends. You don't even see anybody's head explode until ten minutes from the end! And the effect, while decently gory, isn't spectacular.
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Apr 30, 2024 03:23
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A True Jar Jar Fan posted:If you haven't seen it and want an actual good sixth installation or later, watch Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein Agreed. Also, The First Omen and Godzilla x Kong qualify if you're looking for something new. (Minus One is available nowhere right now, right?) Or exploit the technicality that, with comedy-horror and kids horror fair game, and with four previous movies and two TV shows, Frozen Empire is "a film that is the sixth or later entry in a horror franchise."
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Apr 30, 2024 03:49
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Finished work early today so figured I'd dip into some of the more painful ones 1- The Happening Eat your loving SlopWhat the hell, I'd never actually seen it so this seemed like a good opportunity. It definitely earned its reputation. It's too bad, because there is a good movie in here, it's just hidden under terrible writing and some truly awful acting. A pass through by a better director and a full recast (I guess Leguizamo can stay) and you have a decent idea here. 2-West of Hell Moonlighting Decided to just search for Tony Todd and pick something that looked half decent. This was not it. Story goes nowhere, people do things for no real reason, and nobody seems to care about anything that's happening. It Stinks!
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Apr 30, 2024 04:13
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1. Bats (1999) (first viewing) (watched on Amazon Prime)  The military has genetically engineered super-intelligent, hyper-aggressive bats which, naturally, have escaped to infect the local bat popular in rural Texas. Lou Diamond Phillips, playing the local sheriff, is first billed, but Dina Meyer, the bat expert, is the true protagonist. I certainly can't fault the title of this one, as we get the first bat attack in the first two minutes of the movie. The huge bat swarms have extremely dated late '90s CGI, but the puppets and sparing use of live bats hold up better. There's an awful lot of people firing guns ineffectually into swarms of bats, but a centerpiece when the bats punish the locals who didn't evacuate is pretty solid. The main problem here is that the script is just generally kind of dumb, but not dumb enough to be a good bad movie. I can forgive stock characters--would you believe the bats were created by a shady scientist who's more interested in his creation than human life? But it's a bit much when an entire military company is summarily wiped out in two minutes because they inexplicably decide to launch operation "bomb the bats" in the dead of night even when a soldier goes "Sir, they're nocturnal, maybe we should wait for dawn..." The script is so sloppy I'm not sure if the comic relief assistant zoologist referring to Antarctica being "up there" is supposed to be a joke. This low-budget bat attack flick got a theatrical release and quietly made a few bucks (not exactly franchise money, more like "Sci Fi Channel original sequel eight years later" money). Very '90s, very inoffensive. CHALLENGE: BATS AREN'T BUGS!! SPOOKY SCREENINGS (1 and counting): Bats (1999)
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Apr 30, 2024 04:45
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This is my first time doing the challenge month and looking at some of them I can’t sit to shovel some pure garbage into my eyes
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Apr 30, 2024 05:11
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Had to get my toes in the water as fast as I could. 1) The Friendship Game - 2022 - Shudder At first glance, this looked like it had some promise. A murderous game getting played and it has Peyton List who I really liked in the Cobra Kai series so I dove on in and...ooof... The game's premise is it tests friendships so you'll know who your true friends are. Okay, that has potential and the friendgroup here has just graduated high school and are at that crossroads of moving on to the next stage in life. Right there, that sounds like a good start, but that's about it. What we get is a mess of perspective changes, possible alternate realities, a creepy teen who's semi connected to the friendgroup who's hacking into everyone's computer watching them during all of this, and an ending that's insultingly cliche. It's as if the writer and director had a concept, then promptly threw every and any idea whether it fit or not at the wall. This film is so disjointed that at one point I started the film from the beginning because I thought I missed something that would make it all come together. Narrator: No, she didn't. Nothing in the film sold me that the friendgroup as friends. I swear, I had closer friends during smokebreaks when I worked at the call centers where I kept things work only. This film was just beyond awful. I can't even recommend it in a snark with friends while drunk way. At least the poster for it looks nice enough. Crescent Wrench posted:
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Apr 30, 2024 06:55
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 1. Late Night with the Devil (2023) Written and directed by Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes Watched on Shudder That was a fun time. Its been all the buzz these last few months for good and bad so this was one of the films I was not only very curious to watch but decided to save for May and it felt like the right movie to get me going. And its a fun time. Its gonna get compared to Ghostwatch since they both have a similar cool premise that not many others have. But whatever, I’m not gonna compare the two. This is fun. David Dastmalchian really nails that cheesy talk show host thing well and helps make all the buildup entertaining enough. And all the little allusions to Satanists or parapsychology or The Groove all work to kind of tell your story without laying it on too thick. I’m not sure if the film is going for a found footage thing or what and that doesn’t quite work but that doesn’t really matter. I think the finale just didn’t click for me. It felt more like a rehash of what we’d already been through with nothing quite big enough to match all the buildup that preceded it. I wouldn’t say it finished as a disappointment or anything but I definitely didn’t end on a high the way I had hoped. But still its a fun watch with a relatively unique idea and some pretty good execution. A stronger finish and i would have been all over it. But I had a good time.  - (2). Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995) Directed by Ernest Dickerson; Written by Mark Bishop, Ethan Reiff, and Cyrus Voris ”You know this Hell on Earth business? Big loving deal. I got hemorrhoids.” Don't you love it when a film you've loved forever just gets more relatable the older you get? Like I said I love this film. Its great. Its got everything. A great cast of character actors. Lots of goopy violence and puppet work. A great sense of humor and balance with the horror that nails the spirit of the show and maybe does it better. A very cool little play on Christian mythology in a way that makes it unique and sets it apart from all those other films that play with the same original elements. And it does a great job building its own world so much that even though I think its a great stand alone film I’ve always kind of wanted to see the next adventure of demon knights And oh yeah, Billy Zane is here chewing all the scenery and having the time of his life. And Ernest Dickerson is one of the most underrated filmmakers of my lifetime. I’ll die on the hill. Juice exists so I won’t quite call this his opus or anything but if you want a good time you should check out Def by Temptation (which he ghost directed) and Bones because you can really see the evolution of his horror ideas through the three films until they really turn into something special here. And Def and Bones are both good and fun for their own reasons but Demon Knight really does just pull it all together and is Dickerson finding the budget, collaborators, and personal ability to make something great. And thats’ what this is. A great fun time I have watched over and over because its always a good time.
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Apr 30, 2024 07:15
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Starting off with a double-bill They Ruined It! The 50s and the 80s are the two strongest decades for US sci-fi horror so I was keen to do this comparison. 1) The Fly (1958)  This is one I've been meaning to see in a long time but I somehow didn't know it starred Vincent Price. It starts out surprisingly gnarly for a 50s movie with a bloody murder scene where a woman has just squished her husband's head under a pneumatic press. The victim is the title character and the story is told in a flashback to say how we arrive at this scene. We all know the concept - scientist creates teleportation pods, doesn't notice a fly is in there with him, they get mixed up. I didn't expect the scientist, Andre, to kill his cat in an experiment. It's not gory, but still kind of shocking for a movie of this time. I'm glad Cronenberg used a baboon tbh, I don't like cats dying horribly in movies. The pacing and acting is very standard 1950s American sci-fi horror. Lots of standing about explaining things, interspersed with a shocking moment and a lady screaming. I always enjoy Price, but his character is just an observer and exposition guy in this. The ending wasn't quite what I expected - the "Help Me!" fly caught in the web has been referenced/parodied often enough, but I didn't expect the inspector to just splat it with a rock. Overall, I liked it ok. 2) The Fly (1986)  I've seen this a couple times and it's every bit as good as I remember. It's one of a small list of films I saw at a friend's house age between 7 and 11 that my mother would have been appalled to learn I saw and as such holds a special place in my heart. It has the same basic premise as the 50s movie, but is so completely different otherwise. The pace, the tone, the wonderfully nasty Cronenberg body horror and gore. I was a sympathetic puker as a kid and had to look away durign the Brundlefly barf attack. Jeff Goldblum excels in this, he really sells the transformation of his character. Contrast with the first, where the scientist Andre can't talk or reveal his face after the incident, which really limits the film's ability to show us what he's going through internally, although they make an effort with body language and his declining ability to write on the blackboard. Whenever people talk about remakes that are better than the original, this is a go-to example, up there with The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and yep, I agree. Respect to the original, but this is an all timer. Total/New to me: 2/1 The Fly (1958); The Fly (1986)
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Apr 30, 2024 10:18
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3. Infested (2023) Man, I love a good creature feature. A low-level hustler and bug collector buys a pet spider that happens to be a species that is both aggressive and very full of eggs, leading to the inhabitants of his tower block having to fight back against the infestation. This movie rules! Super fast paced, funny (the scene in the bathroom trying to catch a spider in a glass and the smash cut to everyone outside duct taping the door shut is comedy gold), goopy as all gently caress, and just goes all the way in on "however many spiders you think a scene should have, triple it". Lots of comparisons to Attack the Block in its whole setup and tone, which is obviously a massive compliment. Anyone who's ever cleaned out an old attic or garage, where you move a box only to discover far more spiders than you thought could live under it, so many reveals in this movie absolutely nail that feeling, if you've got a problem with arachnophobia, this movie will give you loving palpitations. "Some people have labradors, he has scorpions, it's his thing!" 4 out of 5! Challenge: BATS AREN'T BUGS!! (Spiders is bugs, however.) Watched so far: Mirror Mirror 2, Tremors 7, Infested
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Apr 30, 2024 13:22
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STAC Goat posted:And Ernest Dickerson is one of the most underrated filmmakers of my lifetime. I’ll die on the hill. Juice exists so I won’t quite call this his opus or anything . I think I'm gonna use Juice for the Gates Are Open(non-horror) Challenge. Tupac is really scary in that movie, he's basically a slasher villain.
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Apr 30, 2024 13:54
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 2) The Barn - 2016 - TubiTV The 80s was a magical time for horror. We all know the big films of the era like Near Dark, The Thing, and Return of the Living Dead, but you also had weird and wild stuff like Street Trash and Spookies. Good, Bad, you were definitely getting something entertaining in some way. That said, it makes sense for there to be a trend to try to recapture some of that 80s magic with retro style films. Unfortunately that makes for a mixed bag as far as quality goes, especially when it involves people who didn't live through the 80s. The Barn bills itself as 80s style retro horror and luckily it hits the mark. Here we have a group of friends heading off to a concert on Halloween only to take a detour and awaken some sleeping evil hungry for blood. Everything here worked in pulling off 80s style cheesy horror goodness and the cameos by Linnea Quigley and others were a delight. It stays consistent with the lore it establishes, and it's an overall fun watch. There is a novelization which is a pretty fun read as well. Highly recommend this one.  3) The Barn 2 - 2022 - Screambox While looking for a poster image for The Barn, I found out it had a sequel. I admit to being a little hesitant on watching because I enjoyed The Barn so much, I didn't want to get let down if the sequel dropped the ball. Thankfully I had no reason to worry as the sequel's pretty on par with the first. Picking up with the survivor of the first film some years later. After the events of the first film, celebrating Halloween's been banned and only recently has the ban been lifted. The survivor's sorority decides to hold a Halloween fundraiser with a haunted barn and maze to honor those who died in the first movie. Of course, a particular evil gets reawoken. This film does being a sequel right. We have returning cast members, expanding lore established in the first film, more kills, more cameos, and the introduction of some new monsters. I highly recommend this one, especially in a double feature with the first. Crescent Wrench posted:
Ari Lehman or Doug Bradley, take yer pick.
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Apr 30, 2024 14:11
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1. Munger Road (2011) Watched On: Tubi TV Challenge: Tubin' A murderer strikes before a... Scarecrow Festival? Well ok I'm in, buddy. Hoo boy the dialogue is not encouraging from jump. They're also trying to blend a half assed found footage aspect in with our soon to be victim teens carrying a camcorder as they strike off into the night in hunt of local urban legends. I honestly wish they would have went harder on the found footage angle for this part of the movie, solidly captures the vibe of loading up in the car with your buds and looking for something scary on a Fall night. The other half of the story are a couple of cops looking for an escaped murderer that has a history with the town so they don't have to cause a panic before the big Scarecrow Festival, I actually liked parts of this too with the veteran telling grizzled stories about the killer's previous crimes. Sadly though the movie doesn't do much with the solid bones it has. It's over half an hour before anything "scary" happens. A really lazy part that stood out to me is when the two cops are searching the killer's former home just in case he went back and they do nothing to make it visually creepy, it's just a regular drat house with the lights out so there's no tension at all. Oh and the other thing, PG-13 slasher movie. Like, what are we doing here? I'm not saying it can't work, but your poo poo is going to be direct to DVD why worry about the R rating? So womp womp, you don't see any of the kills. There's about 15 minutes of a solid slasher movie here, it's a real shame about the 70 minutes they decided to make a snoozefest. Oh and it ends on a loving To Be Continued, super presumptuous of you there movie. What a stinker, do not recommend.
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Apr 30, 2024 14:38
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I watched The Remaining Could count for either slop eatin' or tubin'. I'll go with Slop eatin' just so I don't have to languish staring at a list of terrible movies and can instead roll the dice on tubin' again. I clicked horror on netflix, and netflix told me it thinks I'll love the remaining, it is a top pick for me as well. Thank you netflix. The overarching plot is as basic as it comes and there's nothing to really redeem it, even the character stories are rote. No idea why this exists other then to let the viewer know Christaganda lives on and you best start believin'. The plot is simple: It's the biblical rapture and non-believers are doomed. The movie opens with a montage featuring men in diapers and fursonas, and this is the only time you will be shocked, surprised or appalled. The main subplot is a love triangle between best friends Jack and Tommy and Jack's girlfriend. Tommy tends to be friendzoned niceguy, while Jack is the guy who has disagreements with his girlfriend, this gets played out with 0 surprises, as Tommy confesses his love for Jack's girlfriend, Ally, at some stage, and she gives him a hug later and that's the end of that story. The rest of the movie is about a bunch of assholes slowly coming to accept that it's better to die with god than of god. 3/10, 1 for the fursona, 1 for the diaper baby and 1 for the AI voice that comes onto the TV to do an emergency broadcast announcing that if they are not going to survive in their current circumstances they should simply do something else. swamp thong fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Apr 30, 2024 14:43
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The hardest part of the Tubi challenge is resisting the urge to watch something good on Tubi. I'm scanning through to find something appropriately garbage, and I keep getting distracted by actual good poo poo they have there. I loving love Death Becomes Her, that's one of the last good Bobby Z movies!
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Apr 30, 2024 15:42
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 1. Shark Side of the Moon (2022) Challenge "Eat your loving slop!" Thanks to some Soviet scientists who taught sharks to read and write and had convenient access to a rocket, there are intelligent anthropomorphic sharks on the moon. It's not a good movie and takes itself only as seriously as it needs to. 1/5
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Apr 30, 2024 16:05
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twernt posted:
What a loving title 
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Apr 30, 2024 16:08
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4. Death Machine (1994) 33% Robocop, 33% Terminator, 33% Blade Runner, and with maybe 50% of the budget of any of those. Dripping with atmosphere, hilariously violent, completely nihilistic and all built around Brad Dourif just swinging for the fences and giving 110% every time he's on camera. A near-future dystopia that looks exactly like a Pop Will Eat Itself video, a script that seems to have been punched up with the instructions of "we could add at least 50 more Fucks into this", and some real great effects, including some brilliant matte paintings and a fantastic monster design in the "Warbeast". The plot is absolute standard "mad scientist turns his killer robot on his betrayers" shlock, but this is a total vibe piece where the plot barely matters. It also does the very inside baseball move of naming literally every character after a reference to other movies. J Dante, Raimi, Weyland & Yutani, literally just a character named John Carpenter. It's an entire movie produced by asking a 14 year old in the early 90s "what's the coolest thing you could imagine?", making it a perfect time capsule. My big bugbear is just this shouldn't have been a 2 hour movie, there is a drumhead-tight 90 minute movie in here that'd be remembered as a classic, but instead it kinda meanders for a good portion of its runtime. "That's a stupid reason! You're making me kill you for a stupid reason!" 3 out of 5! Challenge: Moonlighting (Starring Brad "Chucky" Dourif!) Watched so far: Mirror Mirror 2, Tremors 7, Infested, Death Machine
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Apr 30, 2024 16:11
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Movie #1: Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (6. Stop! Stop! He's Already Dead!) This incident is starting to turn into a happening. Jesus loving christ, this was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I've never seen a Puppet Master movie before, but from what I understand, in previous movies Toulon, the eponymous puppet master, was a victim of the Nazis, and used his puppets to exact revenge on them from beyond the grave. So I'd very much like to know what loving shithead genius decided that actually what we really needed was Toulon actually being a turbo nazi, who made puppets to just do hate crimes. Truly a brilliant innovation. But as reprehensible and lovely as this decision is, it's not by any means the only poo poo thing in Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich. The movie is just incompetent on drat near all fronts. Let's start with the script, which constantly feels like they bothered filming maybe 60% of what they'd written, and so the movie just constantly feels like it's jumping from point A to point D without bothering to even skirt points B and C in between. It's also full of really loving clunky exposition and some of the worst loving attempts at comedy you'll ever see. In fact I hated it so much I wrote down some of the poo poo that passes for comedy in this movie. Joke number one: "You must be Markowitz" "Why, because I look like a jew?" "Are you Markowitz?" "Yeah." "Well then there's nothing to be upset about, is there?" Joke number two: "The war did not end for Toulon in Germany. This swastika is over eight feet tall." "In Germany we never say 'swastika', we say 'Hakenkreuz'." "Oh I didn't know you were the expert. Anything more to add? I take that as a 'nein'." Only joke I actually liked: The crew are parking, as the camera follows their car it pans to some guy graphically making out with a scantily clad woman in the middle of the parking lot. Smash cut to a little girl watching the action with a big smile on her face, and immediately someone rushes in to cover her eyes and pull her away. The acting is also really loving poo poo for the most part. Everyone feels like they're doped to the gills, because for the most part nobody is really that bothered by a bunch of nazi puppets brutally murdering people in front of their eyes. Our main character also immediately has the whole plan figured out about 2 seconds after things kick off, for some bizarre reason that's never established. Possibly because he used to draw and write a comic book but now doesn't anymore. Incidentally that's pretty much his only characterization aside from "is divorced", and neither thing matters one bit in the entire god drat movie. It's just a comically (but not in a funny way) bad movie. Completely inept from top to bottom, and the thing that pissed me off the most was that this piece of poo poo then tried to somehow wrap around to having some kind of noble message because one of the main characters (an unlikeable PUA rear end in a top hat who's just a rude shithead to everyone) is Jewish and decides that THIS TIME they're gonna fight back against the nazis. And then he's immediately killed, after which some loving stock music library sad music plays and he makes a tragic death speech. And the movie ends with a literal "to be continued...." screen. gently caress you, movie. E: the thing that REALLY bothers me about this movie is that I bet the morons who wrote it thought they were being really progressive and clever and having a lot of Important poo poo to say about stuff, but were so bad at their jobs that they ended up writing a gross and offensive movie, where the only female main character only exists to have sex with our hero -- the obvious milquetoast stand-in for the writers -- and tell everyone how much she loves to have sex with him. I mean for gently caress's sake we literally have a kippah wearing Jewish man make a speech about how many Jewish people actually enjoy hateful nazi poo poo because it's empowering, and that's some loving "I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards" level writing in this movie right there. Again, gently caress you, movie. / 5The best part: Ashley's cat is incredibly cute. 
Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Apr 30, 2024 16:37
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5. The Scary of Sixty-First Why did I do this? I'm the child who saw the stove was hot and touched it anyway. Of course this movie was going to be bad, I was even warned it was bad. I don't mind exploitation movies, bad taste isn't a dealbreaker at all, but this movie is just so dumb. It's somehow slow despite clearly being padded out to feature length, every character is nails-on-chalkboard annoying, and to cap it off, the entire concept is so adolescently edgy. An entire movie with the vibes of a 9 year old who just learned their first swear. Stupid movie made by stupid people for stupid people (which now includes me). Everyone responsible for this is too dumb to be as embarassed as they should be by it. 0 out of 5! Watched so far: Mirror Mirror 2, Tremors 7, Infested, Death Machine, The Scary of Sixty-One
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Apr 30, 2024 18:30
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Xiahou Dun posted:The hardest part of the Tubi challenge is resisting the urge to watch something good on Tubi. A-m-i-t-y-v-i-l-l-e gives you more than 30 options, none of which are going to be good, most of which you've (hopefully) never heard of. I highly don't recommend the crossovers with the illustrious Death Toilet and Emanuelle franchises. ROMI and Slay are both decent Tubi originals if anyone wants to go in that direction. Festival of the Living Dead is mediocre, but it's a Soska sisters "...of the living dead" film if either of those factors piques anyone's interest.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:39
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:So I'd very much like to know what loving shithead genius decided that actually what we really needed was Toulon actually being a turbo nazi, who made puppets to just do hate crimes. This probably won’t surprise you: it was S. Craig Zahler lol As for me, 1. Festival of the Living Dead (2024) Challenge: Tubin’ Whoa! The Soska Sisters did a sequel to Night of the Living Dead! Cool! Oh. It’s a CWcore Tubi Original. Never mind. Hilariously, this was supposed to release last year in October but the successful Operation al-Aqsa Flood led to a delay and it just dropped earlier this month. I think the concept here is actually pretty fun: they don’t lean on it too hard, but the grandchildren of Ben Living Dead reside in 2023 Pennsylvania. Ash is watching her little brother Luke but her popular boyfriend has scored tickets to the 55th Annual Festival of the Living Dead, which is Burning Man but also Coachella but also the Gathering of the Juggalos. She leaves Luke behind with her friends Iris and Blaze (Blaise?) and heads out. You know exactly what happens from there, and you also know you can totally skip this. I liked the cast—I found Christian Rose who plays Blaiszszssse really charming and it’s cool as hell to see an actor who just doesn’t have any legs and nobody says anything about it at all. Pretty cool! I’d like to see him in something good!—but it’s really just Fine.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:54
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 4) Festival of the Living Dead - 2024 - TubiTV I freely admit that I've never been a fan of the Soska Sisters. I don't think they're particularly good directors, more like a pair of tryhards, and I've long had that sense that they've milked the hell out of the 'we're goth girls who like horror!!' angle despite the fact that goth women who like horror are a dime a dozen in the genre fandom. I know this because I am one. So, with that said I know you're thinking 'so why did you sit through one of their films if you don't like them or their other films?'. Pretty much I didn't notice it was one of theirs until I was already committed and the Jiffy Pop was made. They were in a crowd scene and at that point, might as well tough it through. I will admit, there is a decent premise here. Going from the point that the '68 film actually happened, there's a music festival to commemorate the event and honor those who died during it. Now that's an idea that does pull my interest, how does the world adapt/adjust to a zombie outbreak. It's a big reason why I tracked down the '78 book Russo wrote because it's a 10 years after continuation from Night and reflects on societal changes made. Here, however, other than mentions that the '68 event happened, there's a meteor on the festival grounds that someone's snorting meteor crap off of, and a badly done half reference to Ash and her brother being related to Ben from the original film, that's pretty much it. Seriously, a few seconds of googling around could've found a usable picture of Duane Jones to sell the point. We're not really given anything to have an idea beyond the festival's considered a big deal by the teens, and it's local enough to drive to. One would expect the festival to be a pretty big affair with a couple stages and a massive crowd, but what we get is some mishmash of Coachella and Burning Man by way of Wish.com. Seriously, the rave in RotLD: Rave to the Grave looked better and was far more convincing. Nothing's said about the state of zombies in the film such as do they still happen, was the events of Night handled fast so essentially the films from Day and after just never happened? We don't know beyond seeing the one guy snorting meteor crap and turning from that, which brings up one of the many major flaws in the script and connecting this to NotLD, it's never said what's causing the dead to reanimate. The Venus probe's radiation is mentioned as a maybe, but that's it. There's also the being related to Ben references. I'd have to dig out my copy to be certain, but I remember it being mentioned that Ben had a young son who was staying with his grandmother in the novelization when he's looking through the house and finds a baseball in a room likely from the dead old lady's grandson. It wouldn't make sense for the grandpa Ash keeps mentioning to be Ben because he died at the farmhouse, and assuming Ben's son was named after him, he would've been a child during this and when attempting to hash out how long events happen in the Romero films, we've got Land happening about three years after Night, Dawn being 3 weeks after Night, with Day either happening before or after Land because of the different location, that society's looking pretty normal, Day and Land definitely never happened so the grandpa Ben Ash keeps mentioning who had all this solid survival wisdom doesn't fit with the established world lore. All that said, there's also with how big the events of Night were in the news, and going with the references in Dawn of it spreading to the cities, the teens in the movie act like this was something barely mentioned at all during their lives beyond 'zombies happened in '68'. To compare with Fido showing a post zombierise world, everyone's knowledgeable about the precautions to take and what to do. One would think that any surviving film footage of the news or home cameras would've ended up on Youtube at some point in time. Even assuming the base tier stupidity of teens, the stupid shown by the teens here is enough to give one a headache. At one point we have serious dialog between Ash and Iris over growing apart and the point of fitting in while they're trying to avoid zombies in the festival grounds. Even thinking back to how I was as a teen, in this situation I'd be more focused on surviving and getting somewhere safe than calling out a friend on why they don't hang around like we used to. Now insisting the script is just a 'spiritual successor' to Night is just a cop out for this script's crap, and for how long the Soska Sisters have been involved with the genre circles with their horror love, the glaring flaws in this script should've been as obvious as blinky lights and neon flags waving around. That they carried on with this mess of a script to this finished product tells me that they either didn't give a poo poo or they're not as much about the genre as they like to spout. This film's definitely a skip this as there's far better films to spend time on watching. Crescent Wrench posted:
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Apr 30, 2024 19:19
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Challenge - "Eat your loving slop!" Death Ship - 1980 - 4.8 on IMDB, 2.5 on Letterboxd  Definitely felt a little seasick watching this one! The camera just bobs constantly. Yeah, it's an intentional choice to make you feel like you're at sea, but it's also more than a little nauseating. On other hand, there's a lot of really fun, Sam Raimi style shots where the camera violently zooms in on objects (a year before Evil Dead!) The mixed bag of inspired choices and lazy ones sums up the whole film. A cruise ship full of costumed, obnoxious party people encounters something terrible in the high seas! Their crappy party is interrupted when a derelict German ship rams into them at high speed and wouldn't you know it, the dang ship's cursed. I've never seen a ship poo poo itself all over people out of spite! Yes I mean that literally. George Kennedy is Captain Ashland; just one day away from retirement and he gets shipwrecked and then possessed by Nazi ghosts. It's not until the final 20 minutes that it really goes nuts and at that point things get pretty good, even if there aren't quite enough scenes of screaming skeletons. What a bizarre movie. Terrible, terrible child acting as the emotional anchor. The same shots of the Evil Death Ship are used at least four times in the first ten movies of the film. There's a sex scene with some really gross looking kissing. The music ranges from strong, atmospheric to cheesy action music that doesn't fit the mood in the slightest. There's a legit horrifying scene in a shower that's continuously cut away from to cut back to the dumb kids wandering around, undercutting the most harrowing bit of the film. I love spooky sea stories and even though this isn't a great one it's still good enough for me. There are plenty of solid bits, it just doesn't all come together as well as it should. Great concept, great final act, but overall just mostly fine.
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Apr 30, 2024 19:27
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Time to get things started.Crescent Wrench posted:2. Moonlighting  #1. The Gorgon (Tubi) A series of suspicious deaths leads a young man - and his professor - to confront a mythical Gorgon that has apparently taken human form and is attacking the European countryside. Kind of a slow burn, kind of a weak snooze - a slow snooze of a film, if you will. The Gorgon eschews the usual bouts of Hammer technicolor red paint gore effects, trading those in for people dying of gray make-up, and is surprisingly chaste for a mid-60s Hammer effort. When you drain a Hammer movie of all of the puerile delights of gore and nudity, what do you get left with? As this film demonstrates, a whole lot of people standing around in old nan's sumptuous country-home sets, talking a lot and saying next to nothing. Or, in other words, loving boredom. Why is this a film about a gorgon, anyway? The film opens with a title crawl saying that the drat thing had been in this castle for forever, but they never really establish why - no "this is an ancient gorgon burial ground", no "it's a 2000-year-old curse come back to bite us", no nothing. We're just supposed to accept at face value that the spirit of this creature is here now, and is periodically stealing the body of this one woman in town (somehow? for some reason?) every full moon to kill people, but only on an average of about 1.5 people per year, apparently. Which leads me to my more salient point: why is this a movie about a gorgon and not a lady werewolf? The script already feels pretty find-and-replace for this kind of thing; I wonder if that's what it started as, then everyone realized that Curse of the Werewolf kinda sucked and they jumped to another, dumber monster instead. May be a bit of a cheat to use a Hammer film for either (or both) of Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing for this challenge, considering they must have made about a million of the things between the two of them. But, it was interesting to see Lee play the Van Helsing character in one of these things for once (instead of the Dracula), even if they try to put him in bad old-age fright makeup to make him seem more believable as the professorial type. He doesn't get much of a chance to do the geriatric action heroics that Cushing would occasionally get to put in, but that's okay; he doesn't make much of a dashing figure the one or two times the script asks him to do anything physical, anyway. Cushing isn't making as much of a character departure from his Baron Frankenstein character as I'd have hoped, but it's interesting that making him purely act as a tool of the ruling class here makes him seem more cowardly. Frankenstein was hardly a friend of the proletariat himself, but his bristling combativeness with the cops and lords around him at least got you to think that he wasn't such a stick-in-the-mud; it was all a front for his self-centeredness, but better that than too many repetitive scenes of Cushing dismissing someone for asking questions and then contemplatively staring off into the middle distance, which is basically all you get here. I dunno... I picked this film because of the strength of its two headliners, plus having Patrick "Second Doctor Who" Troughton in the back pocket as a decent fifth lead to give the thing some zeal when it starts to flag. Unfortunately, there's just not enough gorgon action in the film, what's there of it isn't any great shakes one way or the other, and all of the padding in between just feels so long and dull that I struggled to keep my attention on the tv screen (and off of my iPhone screen). Not recommended.  /5Unfortunately, off to a bit of a bad start this year. Hopefully things will start looking up here pretty quickly. Watched so far: The Gorgon
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Apr 30, 2024 20:00
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 2. Crimewave (1985) This is kind of the opposite of Challenge #13 - it's listed as a horror movie (in its tagged genres on Letterboxd), but it is more of a crime comedy. It has some violence and murder, sure, but I feel like this only has the horror tag because Sam Raimi directed it. In any case, this is OK - a man hires two exterminators to kill his business partner, they kill the wrong guy, mayhem ensues as they try to eliminate witnesses. Raimi wrote this with the Coen brothers and this definitely feels like them playing with ideas and character tropes that later pop up in Raising Arizona, Hudsucker Proxy and others. It's a bit too zany for my tastes (the music makes this worse) and it becomes incoherent at times but it's not a bad watch.  3/5 2. Moonlighting - Watch a film starring an actor who has portrayed an iconic character in a horror film in a role OTHER than the one they're famous for This movie features Bruce Campbell as "Renaldo, the Heel". At one point he invites a woman back to his place for "scotch and sofa"  - a true sleazeball heel if there ever was one! 3. He Knows You're Alone (1980) Slasher flick featuring a killer who is Just A Guy that hates women getting married, so he kills brides-to-be and the people in their lives for whatever reason. It avoids most of the tropes I hate in slashers as people do try to call the cops, they don't investigate spooky sounds (he mostly ambushes people who don't know he's coming), but the Final Girl definitely stops to catch her breath in the stupidest places about five times in the final chase. It apes Halloween pretty hard with the POV shots and the score (especially the score), shameless. Low on gore and the kills are mostly off camera stabbings, but there's a cool shot of a head in a fishtank and Tom Hanks is briefly here too. Good, not great. 3/5 10. I Know What You Did Last Summer -- Watch a film that a now-famous actor NOT known primarily for horror did early in their career. I thought I was going to have trouble with this challenge because I've seen most of the movies people normally bring up for this type of thing, but I hadn't seen this one and it features Tom Hanks in his first credited role on IMDB. He shows up about an hour into this as a psych student who is kind of a dingus. I think he's only in the movie for 10 minutes or so, but he's in there alright. Total Watched: 3/14 Completed Challenges:1
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Apr 30, 2024 21:34
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2. Disturbing Behavior (1998) Challenge: I Know What You Did Last Summer This is exactly what it seems like it is based on the release year and premise but it honestly owns. It’s stupid popcorn trash starring a pre-X-men James Marsden (and a mid-Dawson’s Creek Katie Holmes) that apparently aspired to more but seems to have been reduced to much dumber fun in the editing bay. Love the needle drops. My favorite part is when Steve says “be the ball” and kicks the bad guy down a waterfall that is somehow so high up the wind resistance changes his trajectory as he falls. Movies! Pretzel Rod Serling fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Apr 30, 2024 22:24
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6. Little Evil (2017) My blind dip into the Netflix Originals, and it's basically The Omen but played as a comedy. It's pretty broad and inoffensive, and a few of the gags do land pretty well (like the stepfathers of demonic children support group, or splitting the difference and looking for a demon hunter in Bethlehem, PA) and there's a few moments of fun creativity. Nothing you've not seen a hundred times before, but it's a thoroughly fine movie with some good riffs on the whole religious horror genre. Adam Scott is always worth his weight in these kinds of movies too, always has some great deadpan delivery. "Gregory Peck killed him in The Omen!" "No, he didn't, he got shot first, and even if he did, everyone would have thought he was a terrible father!" 2 out of 5! Challenge: Tubin' (alright, a Netflix original, but I can't get Tubi, so it's close enough) Watched so far: Mirror Mirror 2, Tremors 7, Infested, Death Machine, The Scary of Sixty-One, Little Evil
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Apr 30, 2024 22:36
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9. Bite the Bullet: Videodrome Despite this movie being what anyone (including me) would imagine is right up my alley, I have actually never seen it! Time to fix that! Videodrome seemed to be a story about technology's capability to carry new threats and unforseen dangers. Despite being all about color television and VHS tapes and satellite TV, the whole story and concept seem super relevant to the modern age. In particular, the observation from Dr. O'Blivion that (paraphrasing) "What we see on the screen is reality. What people see on the screen affects their thoughts and opinions and choices more than events in their actual lives do. This demonstrates that it is in fact a superior reality." That seems even more true nowadays than it did back in the 80s. I really enjoyed this and even re-watched it a few nights later. I can't overstate how unusual that is for me. I usually find stuff like movies or books boring the second time around. But I found myself thinking about Videodrome quite a bit, and getting ideas and hankering to connect the dots better than I felt I had the first time around. So much of it is creepily unsettling. The very first showing of the pirate signal that makes such an impression on Max, the way that Dr. O'Blivion only appears for interviews in the form of pre-recorded VHS tapes (which are weirdly coherent despite not being "synced" to the interviewer), and the shock of Max seeing O'Blivion murdered on one of them... the hits just keep coming. Max's pistol disappearing into his gut, discovering O'Blivion died some time ago and his daughter Bianca runs the show, an organization hell-bent on using this technology to shape people's minds and kill anyone they don't like... it's bizarre and unsettling and manages to really convincingly portray not knowing what the hell is real. And yet, despite this it never went so far as to completely yank the rug out from under me. There's actually a real mystery going on with real-world stakes, and discovering this parallels Max's opposite spiral into a complete loss of grip on reality. And in the end, he's a disposable pawn who gets the lovely end of the stick because the other forces are the ones holding all the power. Anyway, loved it. Can't believe I went so long without watching it because gat dang I was missing out.
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Apr 30, 2024 23:35
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WeaponX posted:What a loving title You gotta do something to stand out in the field of 267 different sharksploitation movies available on Tubi. It worked on me apparently.
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May 1, 2024 02:10
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twernt posted:You gotta do something to stand out in the field of 267 different sharksploitation movies available on Tubi. It worked on me apparently. Red Letter Media did a video on what they coined "watchbait," or z-grade movies that use common words/titles like "exorcism" or "Amityville" to sell movies. They go through a bunch of "shark" movies starting around 9:35 and Shark Side of the Moon is in there too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeMadjM0ZZI
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May 1, 2024 02:18
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A True Jar Jar Fan posted:Challenge - "Eat your loving slop!" They filmed this off the coast of where I live and one of the reasons they re-use a bunch of boat shots is the drat thing broke down so they had to do all those shots in speed boats to make it look like it was moving as best they could.
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May 1, 2024 02:23
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3- Alien: 45th anniversary 4k restorationThat Gal I have seen 80% of this movie over the years: bits and pieces on TV, in classes, and just through general cultural osmosis, but this was the first time I sat down and watched it back to front in one sitting. Fantastic. I love the 80s Retro future vibe and the blue collar style; There's something about smoking on a spaceship that's just so "of the time". I haven't actually seen Aliens or 3 in full yet either and this has put the bug in my brain so I'll probably get to Aliens this week. Seeing this things back in 79 must have been interesting, imagine seeing the chestburster scene with no idea it's coming. I'll bet people really lost it there, plus not knowing what Ash's deal is must have been a trip. Opopanax fucked around with this message at 04:42 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 02:49
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2. Vampyr (1932) (first viewing) (watched on Criterion Channel)  Vampyr shot way up my priority list after watching Dreyer's silent film masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc last month for the SHAMEFUL: The greatest movies you've never seen thread (free plug, but maybe wait until June...). The plot is minimal--a traveler interested in the supernatural is staying at an inn, and gets roped into a quest to kill a vampire before a young woman who has been bitten dies. This one is actually an early talkie, but for various production reasons it's actually pretty light on dialogue. Most of the narrative comes from title cards, and most of the vampire lore is provided through lingering shots on the pages of a book. At 73 minutes, this is short, but it also felt slow. It starts and ends well, particularly with tons of creative visual techniques that are eerie even today. The protagonist's first forays into the supernatural include lots of shadowy figures that are cast by no visible person. Later, he has an out-of-body experience where he sees himself being carried away in a coffin (pictured above), which includes this transparent body wandering around and, later, POV shots peering up and out of the coffin. But the middle is very saggy, with a long stretch which just alternates between reading the book of vampire lore and the characters putting around the house. An interesting watch, but definitely much more about the stylistic flair and dream-like atmosphere than a tight story. 3. Eating Raoul (1982) (first viewing) (watched on Criterion Channel)  Paul and Mary Bland (director Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov) are a dull couple living in Los Angeles trying to eke out a living and save up enough to start a restaurant. The sexless couple are mostly just annoyed by their swinger neighbors, but after an accidental death they hatch a plan--Mary will take out ads offering to cater to men's sexual fetishes, then Paul will swoop in to kill and rob them. Along the way, they are forced to bring in Raoul (ROBERT Beltran), a locksmith/thief/all-around entrepreneur to help dispose of the bodies, for which he's somehow able to turn a profit... This is sometimes listed as horror, so I'll count it, but it's definitely much easier to consider as a black comedy. The Blands' murder weapon of choice is a frying pan, and, yes, it makes a loud "BONK" sound. And, although Mary may not actually sleep with her clients before Paul swoops in, she still has to dress the part to lure them in. This leads to endless sight gags as she dons costumes and redecorates the apartment to accommodate their fantasies, whether they're wannabe hippies, Nazi fetishists, or just plain old naughty boys. All three leads are great, but as a Trekkie, I particularly got a kick out of Beltran's performance as the sleazy, scheming Raoul. Anyone used to seeing him as Chakotay, the first wooden board to reach the rank of Starfleet Commander, will be delighted to see him delivering lines like "I'm a hot-blooded, emotional, crazy Chicano!" Despite the subject matter, the tone is pretty light here, and is more a vehicle for skewering capitalism and the sexual politics of the day. This is one I've had on my radar for awhile, so it was nice to find a way to work it in. P.S. Keep an eye out for the Blands making a cameo in Chopping Mall! CHALLENGE: What's in a Name? SPOOKY SCREENINGS (3 and counting): Bats (1999); Vampyr (1932); Eating Raoul (1982) Crescent Wrench fucked around with this message at 13:02 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 04:28
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3. The Bat (1926, BATS AREN'T BUGS!! ) - While there are plenty of bats featured in the film, the titular Bat is in fact a thief wearing a bat mask with quite prominent ears reminiscent of a Mickey Mouse costume. That said, when we finally get a good look at the mask in the latter part of the film, it is rather terrifying. It's split into two fairly distinct parts - the first third establishes the Bat's bona fides as a master criminal; the rest transitions to an old dark house, where nearly everyone, the Bat included, is trying to find a hidden stash of cash. Most of the acting is rather dry here, and the "standout" character is the maid, whose paranoia about everything is rather grating, although it does pay off in the climax. It would also seem to steal the ending of the very liberally adapted 1914 version of Hound of the Baskervilles, where the killer is impersonating the detective and the detective is impersonating/mistaken for the killer. 3.5/5 4. Nightmares (1983, "That Gal" Challenge ) - Veronica Cartwright stars in the final segment of a very uneven four-part anthology, originally conceived as a TV pilot for NBC and then shoved out as a feature film.Three of these would be bottom-tier Tales from the Crypt episodes: the good old "killer in the back seat" story with Christina Raines at least comes to a nice climax, Lance Henriksen is a priest who's lost his faith and gets chased around the desert by a demonic pickup truck for his trouble, and Cartwright's house is invaded by a giant rat. The fourth, "the Bishop of Battle," features a young Emilio Estevez as a video game master hustling the arcades and ultimately facing the titular Bishop of Battle in the real world. It features some early CGI, seems to be ahead of the curve on "video games invade real life" movies, and would be a perfectly fine Are You Afraid of the Dark episode. 2.5/5
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May 1, 2024 04:40
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 #2: Altered This is a very "holy poo poo how have I never heard of this?" -> 45 minutes later "oh ok I get it" It starts off with three good ol' boys hunting and capturing an alien. Yes, I am fully on board. From that start you might think it's going to be a fun horror-comedy, but it is not. It's pretty grim. Most of the character drama is characters constantly being mad at each other. The plot doesn't escalate in an interesting or exciting or satisfactory way. It's just people mad at each other in a garage. Not a fun watch. I'm not one to be all "why'd they run upstairs instead of out the front door? Idiots!" when watching a horror movie. But the movie never explains why calling someone is never considered as an option. The news, paramedics, the local sheriff, calling anyone would have been a very good move at any point. But they don't even bother to handwave the option away. And then the sheriff does show up and for no reason they don't tell him about the alien. And then he gets attacked by the alien and for some reason the fact that he presumably has a radio on him never comes up. I will give it props for extremely good effects. There's a couple very goopy gory deaths and they look great. And the alien itself looks fantastic. They hide it pretty well at first, but eventually just go ahead and show it in full light a lot, and the suit really holds up. Looks genuinely great. I can't say enough good things about the alien suit. Not really bad, just kinda disappointing.
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May 1, 2024 05:05
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4- Silent HouseI Know What You Did Last Summer Elizabeth Olsen's third film (I think second released though). I'm a sucker for single take stuff and this is all one (or at least set up that way, I'm sure they cheated a bit). You'll see the "twist" coming a mile away but Olsen is solid and they do some cool haunted house tricks
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May 1, 2024 05:09
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Crescent Wrench posted:All three leads are great, but as a Trekkie, I particularly got a kick out of Beltran's performance as the sleazy, scheming Raoul. Anyone used to seeing him as Chakotay, the first wooden board to reach the rank of Starfleet Commander, will be delighted to see him delivering lines like "I'm a hot-blooded, emotional, crazy Chicano!" As a Trekkie, you should be ashamed that you thought Robert Beltran was called Carlos.
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May 1, 2024 09:03
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I am on the lookout for fun movies that would complete "2. Moonlighting". I could of course just go on IMDB and look up Robert Englund's non-Elm Street movies or something, but I'm hoping people here can actually recommend entertaining movies.
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May 1, 2024 09:18
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Bite the Bullet 3) Ghostwatch (1992)  People have told me for years to see this but it's not the sort of thing to show on streaming so I never got round to it. It has a sort of Orson Welles War of the Worlds mythos built up around panicked audiences who thought it was real. It was a favourable comparison to Late Night with the Devil that convinced me to finally track it down. I'm old enough to remember 90s TV, and this feels very authentic. Michael Parkinson was a household name as a chatshow host, whose eponymous show ran from 1971 to 2007. His interviewing style is familiar and reassuring and lends a sense of reality. The show was broadcast as if live, with comments like "we're staying with this story, later programmes will be pushed back", which was a thing that happened on the BBC, usually for current events or sports. The call-in number on screen was a real one the BBC used for all their call-in stuff and I still remember the musical jingles kids TV show "Live and Kicking" used to encourage us to call. This fuckin' earworm taunting me still after 30 years https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNPyQ-OOp0 It also has Craig Charles of Red Dwarf fame as an interviewer. It's played completely straight for the first hour, with everything ambiguous enough that the sceptic guy could be right. Until the final act. If you ghosthunting or found footage that focuses on verisimilitude, this is for you. I didn't see it when it was first broadcast (past my bedtime), I bet it would have been quite an experience. It made me nostalgia for 90s UK television. RIP Parky. Total/New to me: 3/2 The Fly (1958); The Fly (1986); Ghostwatch (1992)
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May 1, 2024 10:42
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