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TOOT BOOT posted:I wonder where there aren't more Lovecraftian horror movies being produced given how popular that subgenre is in other media. Stuart Gordon is just busy, that's all.
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Mar 17, 2013 14:51
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:So much film horror is coming up with creative ways to suggest what you can't show. That's true, but let's also accept that a lot of directors are really not good at that and would rather do something easier.
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Mar 17, 2013 16:03
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LtKenFrankenstein posted:That's true, but let's also accept that a lot of directors are really not good at that and would rather do something easier. Which is why that mini-Lovecraft boom Re-Animator sparked in the 80s - early 90s was just chock full of goofy monsters.
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Mar 17, 2013 17:56
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penismightier posted:Which is why that mini-Lovecraft boom Re-Animator sparked in the 80s - early 90s was just chock full of goofy monsters. You have to give a ton of credit to Screaming Mad George and Rob Bottin.
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Mar 17, 2013 18:18
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:You have to give a ton of credit to Screaming Mad George and Rob Bottin. They made some terrific goopy designs back then. I'm glad this thread turned me on to Bride of Re-Animator because Screaming Mad George goes loving hogwild in that one.
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Mar 17, 2013 18:20
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Rageaholic Monkey posted:The first half of Chernobyl Diaries was loving awesome, and is the best portrayl of Pripyat I've seen in a big feature film yet. Then it turned into a stupid generic slasher movie. I still kind of enjoyed the second half, but it definitely dragged down the quality of the product as a whole. i agree that it started to lose some steam toward the end, but I did like just how relentless that last section was. No hope, everyone left behind.
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Mar 17, 2013 18:21
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penismightier posted:They made some terrific goopy designs back then. I'm glad this thread turned me on to Bride of Re-Animator because Screaming Mad George goes loving hogwild in that one. Ever seen The Guyver?
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Mar 17, 2013 20:01
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Ever seen The Guyver? Is that the one with the weird metal suit? Haven't seen it but I remember the VHS trailer quite clearly.
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Mar 17, 2013 20:08
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It stars Mark Hammill and features Mark Hammill mutating into a gigantic space cockroach.
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Mar 17, 2013 20:13
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:It stars Mark Hammill and features Mark Hammill mutating into a gigantic space cockroach. Oh thank god.
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Mar 17, 2013 20:16
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:It stars Mark Hammill and features Mark Hammill mutating into a gigantic space cockroach. Man. This is pretty gross. I think it's the noises more than anything else, Hammill sells the poo poo out of it.
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Mar 17, 2013 20:24
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Crackerman posted:Man. This is pretty gross. I think it's the noises more than anything else, Hammill sells the poo poo out of it. "I won't let you down." You're a super hero who just stood by and did jack-poo poo while his friend painfully transformed into a monster. You could make the case that he already let him down.
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Mar 17, 2013 20:29
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Crackerman posted:Man. This is pretty gross. I think it's the noises more than anything else, Hammill sells the poo poo out of it. Look at that poo poo. It's not just gross, it's positively Lovecraftian!
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Mar 17, 2013 20:42
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Look at that poo poo. It's not just gross, it's positively Lovecraftian! Lovecraftian means laughably stupid?
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Mar 17, 2013 21:19
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Oh man, The Guyver is an amazing movie. I remember renting it on VHS when I was like 12 and being highly entertained. The "Zoalord" at the end was amazing, haha. Fun fact: A sequel was made, called Guyver: Dark Hero, which was lighter on comedic elements and heavier on alien blood and guts. Naturally, this one is fairly awesome too.
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Mar 17, 2013 21:40
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hypersleep posted:Oh man, The Guyver is an amazing movie. I respectfully disagree. Best thing about Dark Hero is it starring a young David Hayter.
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Mar 17, 2013 21:43
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Crackerman posted:I respectfully disagree. Holy. poo poo. I'm going to have to see this. And I have a feeling it's going to be painful.
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Mar 17, 2013 22:26
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Look at that poo poo. It's not just gross, it's positively Lovecraftian! It's Kafkaesque. 
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Mar 17, 2013 22:29
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Sire Oblivion posted:Lovecraftian means laughably stupid? Yes? Haven't you ever read Lovecraft? However I assure you when I saw this on HBO aged 9 or whatever I was definitely not laughing.
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Mar 18, 2013 01:56
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Sire Oblivion posted:Lovecraftian means laughably stupid? In theory no, in practice yes.
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Mar 18, 2013 01:58
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LtKenFrankenstein posted:I mean, Lovecraftian stories are kinda inherently hard to film since most of them revolve around an indescribable, impossible to depict horror.
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Mar 18, 2013 03:28
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They should make a movie based on "Alone in the Dark", that game was pretty lovecraftian! What? Oh.. Oh.. 
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Mar 18, 2013 03:39
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SubG posted:Character dramas are hard to film for very similar reasons, and so many horror films fail because they're unwilling to be, first and foremost, about character. If you wanted to do a good `lovecraftian' horror flick, I think you'd be better off (in terms of the quality of the end product) making a film about, I dunno, Ray Winstone or somebody alone in a room than throwing a huge wad of cash at ILM. But I don't think horror audiences, as a rule, would prefer watching two hours of Ray Winstone alone in a room over two hours of special effects. I would if it was Ray Wise.
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Mar 18, 2013 03:40
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priznat posted:They should make a movie based on "Alone in the Dark", that game was pretty lovecraftian! I think that's still the most awkward sex scene ever put on film in recent memory after Lethal Weapon 5
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Mar 18, 2013 03:53
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SubG posted:Character dramas are hard to film for very similar reasons, and so many horror films fail because they're unwilling to be, first and foremost, about character. If you wanted to do a good `lovecraftian' horror flick, I think you'd be better off (in terms of the quality of the end product) making a film about, I dunno, Ray Winstone or somebody alone in a room than throwing a huge wad of cash at ILM. But I don't think horror audiences, as a rule, would prefer watching two hours of Ray Winstone alone in a room over two hours of special effects. I don't really agree with this. Lovecraft's stories tend to have incredibly thin characters and focus way more on the creepy monsters and weirdness. I think the horror film that best captures the detached, Lovecraftian nonentity of a protagonist is Vampyr. Uncle Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Mar 18, 2013 |
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Mar 18, 2013 03:55
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LtKenFrankenstein posted:I don't really agree with this. Lovecraft's stories tend to have incredibly thin characters and focus way more on the creepy monsters and weirdness. In addition to this, they are really bad. I wonder if that's some kind of crazy coincidence?
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Mar 18, 2013 05:21
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DeimosRising posted:In addition to this, they are really bad. I wonder if that's some kind of crazy coincidence? Lovecraft was kind of a hack sometimes and most certainly a racist and misanthrope, but he could write scenes that are some of my favorites in literature. Off the top of my head I am referring to the airplane scene in At the Mountains of Madness, the first section of The Festival with the nightmare city, and Nyarlathotep's appearance and speech at the end of The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath. It seems like most adaptations of Lovecraft focus on the campy scifi elements and the crazy tentacle creatures while glossing over the atmosphere of dark occult stuff and existential terror that really make his stories work.
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Mar 18, 2013 05:42
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LtKenFrankenstein posted:I don't really agree with this. Lovecraft's stories tend to have incredibly thin characters and focus way more on the creepy monsters and weirdness. Another pattern Lovecraft uses again and again is the `I'm not crazy!' first person testimonal. `The Thing on the Doorstep' is a guy trying to convince the reader that he had good reasons for repeatedly shooting a guy in the head. The big reveal happens right at the end, and involves the narrator reading a note. `The Rats in the Walls' is a guy trying to convince the reader that (I guess I'll spoiler this) he didn't eat that guy, the rats did it. And so on.
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Mar 18, 2013 05:59
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I watched absentia tonight and it was interesting in that it is based entirely around the idea of trying to understand and rationalize the unknowable. Well not strictly lovecraftian it seems similar to what y'all are discussing. In fact, well I missed it at the time the sister trying to convince everyone that a giant centipede monster that lives in the walls took her sister/sister's husband seems to be a bit of a homage
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Mar 18, 2013 06:10
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Profondo Rosso posted:I watched absentia tonight and it was interesting in that it is based entirely around the idea of trying to understand and rationalize the unknowable. Well not strictly lovecraftian it seems similar to what y'all are discussing. In fact, well I missed it at the time the sister trying to convince everyone that a giant centipede monster that lives in the walls took her sister/sister's husband seems to be a bit of a homage Possibly. Sadly I found Absentia to be a bit weak. It didn't feel like I wasted my time, but I wouldn't want a rewatch of that.
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Mar 18, 2013 06:19
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Twee as gently caress posted:Possibly. Absentia tries to talk about missing persons in lovely horror movie form the way Other Guys tackles ponzi schemes by showing infographics during the credits. Not well.
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Mar 18, 2013 08:58
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Is it bad that I think Return of the Living Dead 3 (in its uncut form) is the best movie in the series? I love the aesthetics of the first one, and for what it is it's really loving well-made, but I just feel like 3 is a much more interesting and creative movie, and I can't think of any other movies that have explored the same territory. (It's a shame the US DVD is the R-rated version, which trims out almost every gore effect in the movie for some reason.)
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Mar 18, 2013 11:14
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Twee as gently caress posted:Possibly. Absentia was a let down to me because it's two movies that don't fit well together. I actually really like both halves but felt both needed another half of a movie to be sucessful. I would have preferred a whole movie dedicated to each threat Either a full length ghost movie or a full length monster movie Strangely I don't feel this way about The Pact, which has basically the same problem. Absentia was worth watching just to experience my wife's reaction to it though. Usually when she pulls the angry black woman thing during movies it's annoying, but it was funny in Absentia. "OH YEAH! Lets go jogging through the creepy tunnel of death again! Good Call white girl!"
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Mar 18, 2013 13:36
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SubG posted:This is a weird read of Lovecraft, given how commonly he uses the first person and how little time the creepy monsters spend `on screen'. At the Mountains of Madness is a novel-length monologue by its narrator, who spends way more time talking about how freaked the gently caress out he is than in describing what's doing it, and the really scary monster is only ever seen by someone other than the narrator, and that guy refuses to talk about it. `The Call of Cthulhu' is somewhat better in that it's only around 12,000 words written in the first person and the scary monster gets around a paragraph worth of mention (much less in terms of description), but of course that's all the narrator relaying information that he read from someone else's account. Once again, the narrator spends way more time talking about how he feels about the creepy monsters and weirdness than in describing or interacting with (in the narrative) those things. `The Colour Out of Space' is structured more or less the same way. Yeah, exactly, if anything the knock is there's too much frame and not enough picture, so to speak.
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Mar 18, 2013 14:28
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SubG posted:This is a weird read of Lovecraft, given how commonly he uses the first person and how little time the creepy monsters spend `on screen'. At the Mountains of Madness is a novel-length monologue by its narrator, who spends way more time talking about how freaked the gently caress out he is than in describing what's doing it, and the really scary monster is only ever seen by someone other than the narrator, and that guy refuses to talk about it. `The Call of Cthulhu' is somewhat better in that it's only around 12,000 words written in the first person and the scary monster gets around a paragraph worth of mention (much less in terms of description), but of course that's all the narrator relaying information that he read from someone else's account. Once again, the narrator spends way more time talking about how he feels about the creepy monsters and weirdness than in describing or interacting with (in the narrative) those things. `The Colour Out of Space' is structured more or less the same way. This is all true, but what I'm getting at is he only could ever really write one protagonist. We may experience everything he's describing through a first-person perspective, but his characters remain pretty much a blank slate. Like, with that Ray Winstone idea it seemed as though you were suggesting a horror story by way of character study, and that's really not what Lovecraft's stories are. Apart from maybe "The Outsider" and "Herbert West: Re-Animator" I can't think of a story where he didn't place concept over character.
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Mar 18, 2013 15:22
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LtKenFrankenstein posted:This is all true, but what I'm getting at is he only could ever really write one protagonist. We may experience everything he's describing through a first-person perspective, but his characters remain pretty much a blank slate. Yeah, we may spend a lot of time on their feelings, but we don't actually get much content. Almost every character arc goes from curious and skeptical to kind of weirded out to totally freaked and it doesn't seem to matter who they are or what they bring to the experience (on the extremely rare occasion we even know). Lovecraft helped pioneer a cool aesthetic and a form of the horror of the unknown centered on the increasingly alienating and worrisome physics of his time, but he seemed able to articulate only one response to that horror - rising panic and madness.
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Mar 18, 2013 16:43
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DeimosRising posted:Yeah, we may spend a lot of time on their feelings, but we don't actually get much content. Almost every character arc goes from curious and skeptical to kind of weirded out to totally freaked and it doesn't seem to matter who they are or what they bring to the experience (on the extremely rare occasion we even know). Lovecraft helped pioneer a cool aesthetic and a form of the horror of the unknown centered on the increasingly alienating and worrisome physics of his time, but he seemed able to articulate only one response to that horror - rising panic and madness. In a way this formulaic approach to his characters reactions is a lot of how Lovecraft develops this feeling of dread over the entirety of his works. So much is left out that you are given no frame of reference to what the horrors of his world look like or how they act, its just stated over and over again that to witness them will drive you to madness. And the fact that ALL of his characters react this way somehow adds weight and certainty to that fact, whether they are simple farmers, scholars, seasoned adventures, etc. Whatever skill set or experience they bring with them it makes no difference, they go mad. To me it was only after reading a good chunk of Lovecraft's stories that I started to get the "feel" of his work.
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Mar 18, 2013 16:54
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WickedIcon posted:Is it bad that I think Return of the Living Dead 3 (in its uncut form) is the best movie in the series? I love the aesthetics of the first one, and for what it is it's really loving well-made, but I just feel like 3 is a much more interesting and creative movie, and I can't think of any other movies that have explored the same territory. No I would tend to agree. The first movie is a really fun one, especially with drinks and friends, the second one is alright but eh, the third one is actually a good movie on its own and the best movies of the series. Well, trilogy really it's not like they ever made any other after that. Seriously, they didn't, it stops at 3.
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Mar 18, 2013 17:25
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I've never seen the uncut version of RotLD3. But I found this while trying to hunt down information on it: http://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=783325  for gore screenshotsedit--> Can't believe I've never checked out this site before. I just realized I have the unrated DVD of Re-Animator 
Boinks fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Mar 18, 2013 |
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Mar 18, 2013 17:27
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schwenz posted:In a way this formulaic approach to his characters reactions is a lot of how Lovecraft develops this feeling of dread over the entirety of his works. Thank you for reminding me I bought a big book of Lovecraft stories that I forgot all about until now. Most (all?) are available online for free if anyone is interested from Dagonbytes. Not the most fun thing to read on a monitor unfortunately. http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/
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Mar 18, 2013 17:33
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