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V/H/S is definitely uneven and the connecting bits are really bad, but a few of the individual pieces are good.
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Jan 3, 2013 22:15
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Mechafunkzilla posted:Doesn't sound like the horror genre is really for you. We All Like Different Things. Horror is one of my favorite genres but I really disliked V/H/S also, so it's not just Junkie Disease. It's at least two of us!
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Jan 3, 2013 22:34
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Zwabu posted:We All Like Different Things. Horror is one of my favorite genres but I really disliked V/H/S also, so it's not just Junkie Disease. It's at least two of us! I was poking fun at his characterization of it as "a bunch of shallow unlikeable characters run into a Bad Thing." Which you could use to describe roughly 99% of horror films. I haven't even see V/H/S yet myself.
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Jan 3, 2013 22:43
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I'm watching it right now and it's pretty terrible. The acting is awful, the stories are largely dull, and while there are a few mildly interesting touches they don't make up for the overall experience. At least the format meant that the individual pieces didn't drag as much as if they tried to make one of them a full-length film. I did crack up a little at the whole "spider bite" thing since it's a widespread running joke that every time someone comes in the the ED with an abscess they seem to attribute it to a spider bite, even though no one has ever seen this mysterious spider. Practical effects were pretty good, though. Overall a big disappointment, and I like horror and found footage.
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Jan 3, 2013 23:14
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If for some reason you haven't seen it already, The Untouchables is now streaming. It would be worth watching for the soundtrack alone, but its pretty great. The train station scene near the end has me riveted every time I watch, and I've probably seen it 10 times.
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Jan 4, 2013 00:02
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Yeah, I was pretty disappointed by V/H/S independent of horror geeks declaring it to be one of the best horror movies ever when it first hit film festivals.
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Jan 4, 2013 00:12
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Welp, guess I'm not watching it.
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Jan 4, 2013 00:15
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Is V/H/S really violent and bloody? I'm a big horror fan but not especially into goreporn stuff like Human Centipede or the Saw or Hostel movies.
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Jan 4, 2013 00:18
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cheerfullydrab posted:Is V/H/S really violent and bloody? I'm a big horror fan but not especially into goreporn stuff like Human Centipede or the Saw or Hostel movies. It's gore separated by stretches of boredom and high-school theater acting.
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Jan 4, 2013 00:27
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To counter what people seem to be saying about V/H/S, it was one of my favorite film of the year. I wrote way more about it in the OP here.
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Jan 4, 2013 00:36
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V/H/S had some great moments (the realization of who was holding the camera at night in the motel, the whole BOO! haunted house sequence at the end) and some clever ideas (the killer glitch, the last section's twist) but it's not a great horror movie. It's also not a bad one so if you're into horror give it a watch, it's worth a shot.
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Jan 4, 2013 03:06
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cheerfullydrab posted:Is V/H/S really violent and bloody? I'm a big horror fan but not especially into goreporn stuff like Human Centipede or the Saw or Hostel movies. It has gore but it doesn't focus on the gore. If you're ok with your basic slasher movie then it's about that level.
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Jan 4, 2013 03:07
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It's not as gore focused as something like Hostel, but there is still some severe poo poo going down.
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Jan 4, 2013 04:22
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stimpy posted:If for some reason you haven't seen it already, The Untouchables is now streaming. It would be worth watching for the soundtrack alone, but its pretty great. The train station scene near the end has me riveted every time I watch, and I've probably seen it 10 times.
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Jan 4, 2013 04:53
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I just watched The Queen of Versailles since a few people recommended it earlier in this thread and I was pretty engrossed. It was simultaneously horrifying and fascinating.
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Jan 4, 2013 05:44
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I should have listened about V/H/S, but I let all the buzz from last year get to me. The 50% rating it sits at everywhere is definitely well earned. It's not typical anthology problem of mixed segments, the pacing is downright terrible all around and leaves you waiting for something interesting to happen. The gender politics are questionable as gently caress (not in a subtextually intriguing probe, just often gross), and the one segment that doesn't demonize women (the forth one, also the most intriguing one all around) still has gratuitous bookend tit shots. It manages it evoke the feel of torture porn with these hateable non-characters and sexual violence without actually being one (me using "torture porn" is lazy short hand here), but anytime it happens you welcome it because you've been bored for the last ten minutes. Any curve-balls are easily foreseeable or outright terrible (the second segment being the worst at that). The one (and I do mean one) positive thing in this movie was the effects. I was seriously impressed by the work they did on such a minimal budget. It'd almost be worth watching if Netflix could play at 1.5x speed for those alone. EvilTobaccoExec fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Jan 4, 2013 |
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Jan 4, 2013 07:49
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I watched it after coming off a string of crap horror too. Did Woman in Black, The Divide, then VHS. I suggest a nice minty mind wash of seldom seen quality horror. Rare Exports It will take the dull torture that is those films and wash it away.
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Jan 4, 2013 08:11
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Just watch The House of the Devil.
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Jan 4, 2013 08:20
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I'm gonna try and keep this from being another topic where I rabidly defend V/H/S (even if some of the things being said are kinda odd ("feels like torture porn"?!?! I don't even know what that means)) but I feel I need to argue against the idea that misogynist. In many ways I find V/H/S to be pretty progressive for a genre film like it is. In most horror women are punished for being sexual. Men can objectify women in these films all they want but if a woman show any interest in sex, they're dead. This is a film where men are punished for their sexual crimes. Like I always find it odd when people say this movie just has gratutious nudity when all the scenes that feature it are unsexy as hell and used to demonize the person filming it. Like the thing that established the guys in the wrap around segemtn as scum is them sexually assaulting women and violating them with the camera in other ways. It also shows them smashing up a house but the majority of the stuff that's used to make them into the bad guys is their violence against women, which in the plot someone sees and deems that they're worthy of punishment for it. In the first segment the guys are pretty much rapists and they are punished severely for it. I mean yes the woman is a demon but the message isn't really women are evil anymore then the message of Friday the 13th is that hockey masks are evil. In the second segment is the closest I can see to getting that message but that's still a segment where the wife is constantly demeaned by her husband in various ways including filming her without her consent and just generally talking down to her. The ending does complicate things because ti recontextualizes alot of his behavior but it still keeps the theme of men being punished for their sexuality while women use it to dominate the situation from the first segment. In the third segment the tropes of a horror movie are used to draw out a killer and the central character essentially uses her sexuality to her own advantage. In this segment this does turn on her though when in the end she becomes the thing she was hunting down in the first place. In the last segment a bunch of nice guys assume that the woman is helpless and needs them to rescue her and they are severely punished for it. The fourth segment is the only one that really goes against this pattern but that one is way weird with the way it does things. In the fourth segment the sexual nature of it is what pushes the guy from being a guy just doing a job to a guy that is taking advantage of women and enjoying it. Without the sexual nature of it he's just some guy working for those aliens. He's not really getting anything out of this. With the inclusion of the first and last shot he basically becomes a sexual predator, using his job as an excuse to take advantage of young women. I wrote alot more about this one in the movie's thread. I mean, I can't make you like the film and I'm disappointed so many people seem to be hating what was one of my favorite movies of the years but saying it's anti-woman is just right out.
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Jan 4, 2013 08:46
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Any of you using Amazon Prime streaming with any regularity? I wouldn't normally bother but I just signed up because the 2 day shipping is the bomb and the streaming service is a nice extra.
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Jan 4, 2013 09:03
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The problem is V/H/S doesn't say anything worthwhile with those elements. Here's male gaze and these guys die cause it's bad. Here's sexual violence and it's bad. Here's emotional and sexual vulnerability and this guy is a creep for enjoying it. The end Yet it's also criticizing something with violent outcomes that it also participates in, sending inconstant messages that fail to generate effective commentary. I can see the interpretations leading to someone walking away with a feminist reading of the film, but those fall way short for me. It ends up being what it is by circumstance, and that's the product of six independent storytellers coming together with stories (almost) all about being deathly afraid of women. Intentional or not, the meta-message comes off feeling far more MRA than feminist, especially ending on a note with the predictable outcome that saving seemingly victimized girl is actually bad and gets them killed. I could buy the post-feminist interpenetration of "damsel in distress" twisting were it on its own, but the message comes off differently attached to the succubus, lesbian wife murdering husband, and girl's reckless use of friends as bait. The ending, in the context of nearly every story of women being crazy and villainous, almost comes off retroactively justifying the sexual violence and misogyny; because often there's little cause/effect between the negative behavior and the dangerous outcome, there's chicken/egg where it's unclear whether men are punished for being bad to women or if men behave how they do because "bitches be evil" I usually don't speculate about film-makers from the films they make, but I certainly walked away from V/H/S feeling a common trait among the creators. It's not that they (or the film) are anti-women, but it comes off as being entirely driven by their fear of women. EDIT: As an addendum to my comments, I haven't stopped thinking about V/H/S since finishing it. Definitely not a bad thing to garner such a strong reaction at least. For a film I struggled with and really disliked, I find myself planning to watch it again, although maybe at a quicker pace. EvilTobaccoExec fucked around with this message at 10:55 on Jan 4, 2013 |
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Jan 4, 2013 09:51
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EvilTobaccoExec posted:The one (and I do mean one) positive thing in this movie was the effects. I was seriously impressed by the work they did on such a minimal budget. It'd almost be worth watching if Netflix could play at 1.5x speed for those alone. So you complain about it feeling like torture porn and then say people should watch it just for people being mutilated in a realistic looking way. Like, yeah, the effects are impressive, but considering what the effects represent I can't see watching them for enjoyment without the context of story and character. They're cool in the context of a film. They're nothing but disturbing just watching snippets of people being butchered but not for real. I dunno man. I'm through 4/5 stories and I've found it reasonably entertaining for lovely low budget horror. And I will say at least it balances the gratuitous female nudity with lots of male nudity. Plenty of horror movies have tits all over the place and then no male nudity to speak of. I think it's progressive in that sense at least, even if you find the subtext problematic (although I think you are reading way too far into it in this particular case).
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Jan 4, 2013 09:57
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Terminator 2 is now streaming. Seriously that is all you need to know because gently caress yes.
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Jan 4, 2013 10:00
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mr. mephistopheles posted:So you complain about it feeling like torture porn and then say people should watch it just for people being mutilated in a realistic looking way. Like, yeah, the effects are impressive, but considering what the effects represent I can't see watching them for enjoyment without the context of story and character. They're cool in the context of a film. They're nothing but disturbing just watching snippets of people being butchered but not for real. That's not at all what I was saying or the effects I was referring to. Specifically I was really impressed with the low budget effects for the succubus, the glitch killer, and haunted house.
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Jan 4, 2013 10:03
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EvilTobaccoExec posted:That's not at all what I was saying or the effects I was referring to. Fair enough. I just assume people are referring to the gore when they like the practical effects in horror films, and there is a shitload in V/H/S. The stuff you noted was all solid and worth seeing, I agree.
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Jan 4, 2013 10:10
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Wait are we talking about a mythical balance to nudity? The Man Who Would Be Polka King mini review. So imagine a smaller scale Madoff ponzi scheme but instead of an investment firm its for a gift shop. Add trips to see the rad polish pope, beauty queen fraud, fatties falling asleep at the wheel, and polka music and you have this documentary. Extra points to the director/narrator being in front of the camera in an empty bar drinking the whole time. I would give it a B for story, and C for presentation.
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Jan 4, 2013 15:21
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Alan Smithee posted:Any of you using Amazon Prime streaming with any regularity? I wouldn't normally bother but I just signed up because the 2 day shipping is the bomb and the streaming service is a nice extra. I've used it a few times to watch movies that aren't on Netflix (Casablanca and The Wild Bunch, though the latter one is no longer free with Prime) or movies that glitch out on Netflix (Videodrome having all audio in one channel was a deal-breaker for Netflix). It's a decent client, but I don't use it often enough to give a good comparison to Netflix. PonchAxis posted:Terminator 2 is now streaming. Seriously that is all you need to know because gently caress yes. Fuuuuuuuck yes
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Jan 4, 2013 16:03
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Prime has Fringe. I use my mom's account occasionally to watch that.
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Jan 4, 2013 16:37
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I thought fringe's exclusivity was like super short. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57476938-93/amazons-streaming-exclusive-on-fringe-wont-last-long/ Not sure how much a short term wait will impact my streaming choices.
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Jan 4, 2013 16:44
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Junkie Disease posted:I thought fringe's exclusivity was like super short. That'd be cool. I'd much prefer it to be on Netflix so I don't have to hook my laptop to my TV to watch it.
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Jan 4, 2013 16:50
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FrostedButts posted:I just wanted to mention this little documentary that popped up called Cleanflix, focusing on the business in Utah of editing R-rated movies for Mormons. Ended up checking out Cleanflix because of this post and found it fascinating. Copyright issues have always been an interest of mine and I'm particularly familiar with the fair use exception details. The whole documentary was made even more intriguing to me by recent discussion in the LOST thread over the legal status of a chronological fan edit (which is a concept I'm sympathetic towards at heart) presenting an interesting contrast to the legal status of something like this which is inherently grating as censorship, but based in similar shaky 'educational purpose' exemptions. An hour in I ended up looking the timestamp and couldn't figure out how they could squeeze 30 more minutes out with all the bases covered, but I was generally not expecting the last turn although its built up well enough.
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Jan 4, 2013 18:44
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Yeah, Cleanflix was great. It's a small thing but I enjoyed that they didn't take the easy out and make it a "lol religion" thing and instead let the people and their work speak for themselves (like when they show the edit of Fargo where all the bloody violence is left intact but they edited out a conversation that merely referenced a character being circumcised). The only thing I would have liked was maybe a bit more explanation from a legal standpoint about why what they were doing was illegal, being marginally familiar with Fair Use makes their claims that editing the movies for "educational purposes" makes it even funnier.EvilTobaccoExec posted:The problem is V/H/S doesn't say anything worthwhile with those elements. I'd have an easier time accepting that VHS was supposed to be critical of misogyny and the male gaze if there weren't so many pointless topless bits that seemed to exist for no reason other that "woo tittays  " Or, hell, if they actually had any women working on the movie instead of all the writers and directors being men.It kind of reminds me of when people defend ridiculous half-naked superheroines and their endless boob and butt shots in comic books by going "Actually it is you who is the sexist, it's empowering and its actually a commentary on sexism and  "
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Jan 4, 2013 19:03
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I've been revisting Invader Zim and despite being a little precious (it somehow embodies pre-Internet nerd memes without any specific catchphrases to put your finger on) it's surprising how dark and weird it is. There's a plurality of episodes revolving around body horror; it's like baby's first Cronenberg.
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Jan 4, 2013 19:14
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I find it really weird to think that the nudity in V/H/S was just thrown in there to titillate because every scene with nudity it's used in such an immensely violating, creepy manner. It also all pretty much does work within the narrative.
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Jan 4, 2013 19:17
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Wow, the West Wing is really good. I had caught a few glimpses of it when it was still on the air, and always thought it looked insufferably boring. Only two episodes in, but Martin Sheen's first appearance is so fantastic. Best president ever.
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Jan 4, 2013 19:24
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Drunk Tomato posted:Wow, the West Wing is really good. I had caught a few glimpses of it when it was still on the air, and always thought it looked insufferably boring. Only two episodes in, but Martin Sheen's first appearance is so fantastic. Best president ever. Sheen's introduction late in the pilot ranks up there with one of my favorite character intros ever. They talk about him the whole episode without saying much more than, "He is the president." And that is enough to make him seem mythical. Then he shows up with that bit about the first commandment and when they show him he's just in sweats and is this short, wrinkly old man. But you still instantly respect and are kind of in awe of him. Even though he crashed his bike.
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Jan 4, 2013 19:49
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PonchAxis posted:Terminator 2 is now streaming. Seriously that is all you need to know because gently caress yes. Monkeyseesaw posted:I've been revisting Invader Zim and despite being a little precious (it somehow embodies pre-Internet nerd memes without any specific catchphrases to put your finger on) it's surprising how dark and weird it is. There's a plurality of episodes revolving around body horror; it's like baby's first Cronenberg. The show is insane and beautiful and incredibly strange, and has held up pretty drat well.
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Jan 4, 2013 19:56
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Farbtoner posted:I'd have an easier time accepting that VHS was supposed to be critical of misogyny and the male gaze if ... they actually had any women working on the movie instead of all the writers and directors being men.
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Jan 4, 2013 20:01
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Unmature posted:Sheen's introduction late in the pilot ranks up there with one of my favorite character intros ever. They talk about him the whole episode without saying much more than, "He is the president." And that is enough to make him seem mythical. Then he shows up with that bit about the first commandment and when they show him he's just in sweats and is this short, wrinkly old man. But you still instantly respect and are kind of in awe of him. Even though he crashed his bike. The pilot can be a bit dry for people not totally on-board with the show. My wife hasn't seen TWW at all but has kinda-sorta wanted to. What to do? I show her the opening from the Season 2 premier where Bartlett is being rushed away from an assassination attempt and is found to be shot (BLUE BLUE BLUE!!!) and Josh is found at the scene shot in the abdomen. It's the prefect mix of  with enough little moments (CJ talking about someone pushing her down/on the verge of tears. Toby losing it when he finds Josh.).
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Jan 4, 2013 20:12
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Thwomp posted:The pilot can be a bit dry for people not totally on-board with the show. I just youtubed that scene to see if I would be interested. They're trying to assassinate the president with pistols from 70 yards away? That is the silliest thing I have ever seen. If this is representative of how realistic the show is, I think I'll pass.
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Jan 4, 2013 20:45
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