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Strange Colour is one of the few legitimately good new giallos, just gorgeously phantasmagorical. I really dug both of Noe's movies so chances are I'll also like Enter the Void, it's gonna be a hard choice perhaps. Then Fulci will win cause the arthouse voting bloc is split in two.
married but discreet fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Jul 13, 2021 |
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Jul 13, 2021 17:12
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I'm really not a fan of Strange Color or Enter the Void. I feel like both are visually striking, but substantially hollow. I have to admit to not remembering a ton about Strange Color so perhaps I owe it a rewatch but it just did nothing for me and left no impact. Enter the Void, however, struck me as an immature film with dorm room level philosophies of Buddhism and life after death. It's also just repetitive as hell -- the film is two and a half hours long but it says everything it has to say in the first 10 minutes then just runs the same ideas into the ground for the remaining 140 minutes. Really it's all downhill once the opening credits end.
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Jul 13, 2021 17:52
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TrixRabbi posted:I'm really not a fan of Strange Color or Enter the Void. I feel like both are visually striking, but substantially hollow. I have to admit to not remembering a ton about Strange Color so perhaps I owe it a rewatch but it just did nothing for me and left no impact. Enter the Void, however, struck me as an immature film with dorm room level philosophies of Buddhism and life after death. It's also just repetitive as hell -- the film is two and a half hours long but it says everything it has to say in the first 10 minutes then just runs the same ideas into the ground for the remaining 140 minutes. Really it's all downhill once the opening credits end. I will concede that Enter The Void could shave off an easy 45 minutes and be a better film for it. Maybe even an hour. It's 2 hours and 41 minutes, and while I don't agree that it's immature or shallow, it is repetitive. I forgot it was that long, and that may very well be it's death knell. Strange Colors is 1 hr 40-ish minutes, and Manhattan Baby is 89 minutes long. Although the latter has... 1/2 a star from the only person on my Letterboxd friends that has seen it??
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Jul 13, 2021 18:06
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Franchescanado posted:Strange Colors is 1 hr 40-ish minutes, and Manhattan Baby is 89 minutes long. Although the latter has... 1/2 a star from the only person on my Letterboxd friends that has seen it?? It's got a spread between 2.5 to 4.5 for my mutuals so it seems like a YMMV movie but who knows! Predicting that Strange Color will win this round though but I feel like I'm going to like the Fulci best.
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Jul 13, 2021 18:52
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From the reviews and ratings I've seen Fulci's seems to be a case of if you enjoy Fulci this is weaker but very much Fulci. And Fulci movies are always kinda sloppy and loose so it comes down to how much you like him. And I also like Tarantula, and I guess I'd be a "Jack Arnold defender." But its definitely not as good as Creature or Incredible Shrinking Man. Its got good visuals but otherwise is a pretty generic 50s monster film. So yeah I expect this to be the end of his run unless people really hate Troll Hunter for some reason. I don't know if I'm up for Enter The Void. I'm gonna try everything else but I swore off Noe and a nearly 3 hour bad trip feels like a bad time to abandon that. But its a long "week" so I'll see. TrixRabbi posted:I mean I don't think we should move the goal posts after it was already drawn, but I just was wondering what happened with that rule cause I know we voted on it. Did I misremember and it actually lost? It was a pretty split vote on people for and against it, and since it was so divided and since there was such a competitive difference in jumping from Tetsuo III to Tetsuo I I just decided it was best to stick with the draw. Its come up a few times, off the top of my head Ghostbuster II and Nuke Em High 5 both were elimination movies that might have been victories if we defaulted to the OG, and just last week we did Land of the Dead instead of defaulting to Night. STAC Goat posted:Rules
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Jul 13, 2021 19:13
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STAC Goat posted:I don't know if I'm up for Enter The Void. I'm gonna try everything else but I swore off Noe and a nearly 3 hour bad trip feels like a bad time to abandon that. But its a long "week" so I'll see. You should skip it. If you only take my advice one more time as long as you live, make it this time.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:16
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I'll be interested to see if anyone has a negative reaction to Troll Hunter because for me it's like a top-3 found footage film of all time. Maybe it's just nostalgia I have for like, classic troll-related fairy tales with those really evocative illustrations I used to read as a kid. Three Billy Goats Gruff and all that.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:18
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Troll Hunter is super cute and something that both horror and non-horror fans can enjoy.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:23
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I guess people could just find the premise too silly or the film too actiony or something. I dunno. It definitely feels like the favorite in that matchup but I'm assuming Tarantula won't click and Tetsuo III is as bad as reviews say. But you never know what will click with people and 3 ways can be messy.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:27
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Tarnop posted:You should skip it. If you only take my advice one more time as long as you live, make it this time. Yeah. There's no way you're gonna enjoy it, STAC, and it deals with situations you find triggering and unpleasant. The main character's parent die tragically. He and his sister only have each other. Their relationship's intimacy become unhealthy and incestuous, although it somehow avoids being explicit in that regard. Her life gets even sadder after he dies. There's an implication he is reincarnated as her child or something.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:39
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Doesn't mean you should abstain from voting though. Just because a movie is so clearly not your thing that you don't want to watch it doesn't mean you can't still vote for stuff that actually is your thing. There's no rules here baby it's Thunderdome.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:41
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I'm not going to do a big effortpost because that is not my style, but: 2. Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: the Bullet Man vs. 7. (STAC Goat’s Creature Features) André Øvredal’s Troll Hunter vs. 11. (STAC Goat’s Team Universal) Jack Arnold’s Tarantula Tarantula is cute. It has some neat visuals, but the story is extremely dry and boring and there's not much to it. None of the magic of the other Arnold films I've seen (Creature and Shrinking Man). I didn't dislike it, but I wouldn't revisit it. Great movie to have on in the background of a party or something like that. Tetsuo: the Bullet Man was kind of interesting. I only watched the original Tetsuo: the Iron Man last year for the first time and it absolutely rocked me. This... not so much. It feels like a made for TV rehash to some degree, with a lot of time spent wheelspinning and providing back story that I didn't really care about. There are still some very cool moments of A/V madness, but it didn't capture my attention the way the original did. A bit of a shame. That said, if the one that everyone says is the worst of the three is still this decent, I will at some point make a point of watching Body Hammer. I watched Troll Hunter for the first time back in April so I didn't feel the need for a rewatch, but it definitely has my vote in this match-up. It's so much fun (and really funny), the story that is edited together from found footage is exciting (and I love the government cover-up stuff). Beautiful scenery, cool creature design, easy vote.
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Jul 13, 2021 20:15
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Someone in this thread must work for Criterion, they just announced The Incredible Shrinking Man as one of their October releases.
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Jul 15, 2021 17:58
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Manhattan Baby vs. The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears vs. Enter the Void Beginning with Manhattan Baby, to get it out of the way, the film is incredibly dull and meandering. What dreamlike Fulci touches there are, are few too few and far between. The film also contains a real snake being killed, which is an instant veto from me. I'm not here to watch animal cruelty. Enter the Void was a lot more interesting and ambitious, but I had many issues. The most obvious issue is the length of the film, which I wouldn't necessarily have a complaint with ordinarily. The film uses its length to slow down and present a more free-flowing narrative, mirroring its soul-like wispy floating nature. The issue comes with the fact that I felt my engagement slipping quite severely. The film has a distinct structure that could lend itself well to an episodic format, but because the narrative isn't particularly bold, we as the viewers have precious little idea of where the film is headed at any particular point, and as a result, I felt my sense of investment nosediving frequently. My largest issue, and the thing that actually made me turn against the film, was the depiction of the sister character. I don't have an issue with sex or sexuality or sex work being depicted in the film. I do, however, have an issue with women being depicted as agentless doe-eyed naifs. When we meet the sister as an adult, she's seen clutching a teddy bear, a symbol of her innocence so unsubtle that it made me audibly groan. She is then sexualised and objectified by everyone she encounters, including her brother, with zero pushback or revealed preference or seemingly any choice made on her part. She exists in the film entirely to be a vessel for the desires of the men around her and nothing else. She seems to have zero personality, and she's also so central to the plot that she's practically the main character! This is just an unforgivable issue for me. Perhaps in working with English-speaking actors and relying on improvised dialogue, something was lost from Noe's initial vision. I can envision a version of the film in which the initial trauma of parental bereavement and separation could result in the kind of relationship depicted in the film, but it would take far stronger and more forceful performance to convince me of it, and instead what we get feels closer to leering and unjustified lasciviousness. Onward to Strang Colour, I love this weird film in all of its technical and artistic majesty. It's a masterclass in shot composition, execution, and editing, it's breathtaking, absolutely stunning. You could easily take any ten-minute fragment of this movie, release it as a short film, and I would be singing its praises. Does it work so well as a complete vision? I think there are certainly elements here where the cinematic playfulness overtakes niceties, like coherency. I felt unsure at several points of where the story was headed, possibly mirroring the experience of our protagonist, who is similarly lost, but I never felt bored or betrayed. In fact, some of the shots were so absolutely mesmerising that they still haunt me now. For me, it's an easy vote for Stange Colour, and while I didn't particularly enjoy the other films, I'm glad I finally got to experience Enter the Void. While it didn't work for me, I applaud it as a much-needed experiment.
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Jul 18, 2021 23:26
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2. Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: the Bullet Man vs. 7. (STAC Goat’s Creature Features) André Øvredal’s Troll Hunter vs. 11. (STAC Goat’s Team Universal) Jack Arnold’s Tarantula Tetsuo: the Bullet Man Having seen all three Tetsuo movies this year I am now definitely an expert on the series and I think that Bullet Man is the worst of the three. To be fair to Bullet Man, I think I would have liked it more if I hadn't seen the other two. It definitely seems like an attempt to make a more “conventional” Tetsuo movie, but it just doesn't work. Too much of the runtime is devoted to trying to build out the lore of the Tetsuo Cinematic Universe. Even with this exposition, the story is still too strange and the attempts to make it not strange just feel awkward and forced. Tarantula Tarantula (or Tarantula!) is a creature feature distilled down to just the essentials. There's a creature. The creature kills some people. The authorities kill the creature. Jack Arnold hints at a few interesting subplots, but they never seem to go anywhere. What happened with Professor Deemer and his coworkers? Are Dr. Hastings and Stephanie “Steve” Clayton ever going to develop any kind of chemistry? Will anyone become step up to become the moral center of the movie and delivery a soliloquy about the dangers of science and our place in nature? There are definitely some nice effects here, especially for a 50s movie, but it never really grabbed me. Troll Hunter Troll Hunter is definitely my jam. I love the matter-of-fact magical realism of it. The found footage style doesn't feel gimmicky and instead provides a framework for moving things along without a traditional plot. The scenery is also beautiful and we get to see plenty of it. Troll Hunter is an easy pick for me in this matchup.
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Jul 19, 2021 18:04
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2. Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: the Bullet Man vs. 7. (STAC Goat’s Creature Features) André Øvredal’s Troll Hunter vs. 11. (STAC Goat’s Team Universal) Jack Arnold’s Tarantula So I did what I always do and watched all three Tetsuos even though they’re not really continuity connected. Honestly that did Tetsuo III a disservice since its basically a cascading series of remakes each a little more “dumbed down”/more mainstream focused than the last and they’re all made worse for it. I don’t really dig the first one because its not my thing, but its a good, unique, effective art piece that conveys its idea well and I get why it hits for people. The second is a more linear narrative, detailed, and bigger thing but it feels like a mess of half finished ideas and not as effect effects. The third one’s just dumb. I guess its intended for a western audience with english and a white lead and a poo poo load of exposition but its just dumb. Real dumb. And boring. And lame. And nauseating. And head ache inducing. All three films had that affect on me but this one was the worst. Its action scenes were basically just someone shaking the camera insanely widely while someone banged some pipes in a really steamy boiler room. Then a video game cut scene very slowly explained the next part of the inane plot and then shaky boiler room time again. I hated that movie and now I hate you too, Shinya Tsukamoto. I quite like Tarantula even though its not really up to Arnold’s other classics. Tarantula’s spider effects scenes are really great and striking. Instead of going with puppets or props Arnold largely uses a spider in silhouettes and darkness and plays games with perspective and shadows and it works really great. The big scene where the spider approaches the cast and plays peeper is really amazing and haunting. It even found its way into a nightmare the other night. Unfortunately there’s not a ton of spider stuff in here, as is the case with a lot of these old monster movies that can only do so much. But where a lot of these movies really mail it in with filler there’s a pretty solid little story and mystery in here. It wouldn’t win any awards on its own without the spider stuff but together it makes for a pretty fun and easy movie I’ve watched twice this week. I didn’t mean to but it kind of sucked me in. Its not great or anything but I like it. But I loving love Troll Hunter. Its so much fun and so drat good. Really the trolls look amazing, especially the big finale one, and there’s so drat many of them. The film doesn’t do that thing a lot of found footage films where it spends a ton of time having its characters argue and explain plot while recording themselves for reasons. It just jumps into its investigation and goes on a travelogue of the amazing countryside. And it doesn’t hold back like a lot of creature films do, right as you settle in you get that magic word. “TROLL!!!” And from that point on its trolls left and right. Its great. A bunch of different trolls that play out in different ways, a lot of fun folklore and silly references, and a really believable and fun story of an underfunded, undermanned, middle management conspiracy made with minimal effort that gets by anyway through inertia and apathy. That sort of thing could never exist in real life. Its all very clever and fun and the big troll finale is just absolutely amazing. I love this movie and it had my vote before I watched anything else. 4. Lucio Fulci’s Manhattan Baby vs. 5. (Deb’s Queer as in gently caress You) Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears vs. 16. (Franchescanado’s Team Vulgær) Gasper Noe’s Enter The Void Manhattan Baby is bad. Its got some of that Fulci drama logic and gore but that’s not really my think and there’s not nearly enough of it to carry the film. Instead this feels like Fucli trying to make something higher stage like The Omen or The Exorcist and just failing terribly. The story’s dull and barely much of anything and the acting and characters are all real bad and nothing. That’s all I got. I can’t even pontificate on it. Its just bad and forgettable. Strange Color isn’t my thing at all and I only kind of barely understood it but its really gorgeous. Cattet and Forzani seem to be all about using the audio and video of film to experiment and tell story without traditional storytelling. I respect that and i think they’re pretty good at that but its not my thing and in this case it feels a little too mysterious and confusing. I THINK I have an idea of what the movie was about but I spent the entire time going back and forth between thinking I’d found the plot and being utterly lost. And I get that might be an enjoyable experience for some but its a frustrating one for me. Speaking of, the intense visuals and audios of the film are stuff that certainly are the film’s strength but they also did a number on me in a bad way. I audibly gasped and “AAHH!” a bunch, got really shaky, and even had to pause the film and take a walk at one stage. And that doorbell. That doorbell broke me. There’s a lot of good here but also a lot of tough stuff. I still somehow watched it twice, hoping maybe I’d understand it more the second time. But I didn’t listen to it twice. That would be too much. I didn’t watch Enter the Void. I have no regrets. So I’m giving Strange Color my vote. I didn’t quite like it but its an objectively better made film than Manhattan Baby with a ton more going for it. Enter The Void sounds like it has some of the similar kind of visual and audio storytelling and extremes as Strange Color and they’re probably an appropriate matchup. But I hate Noe, he hurts me, and the list of content warnings actually kind of knocked the wind out of me for a second. And even the people who like it seem to agree its too long and loses its point and effectiveness. Plus I spoiled myself on its plot and I don’t want any of that creepy misogyny and incest that seems like a very common thing for Noe. Once might be a creative decision. Twice is weird. Three times is a sketchy pattern and I have questions. So yeah, Strange Color.
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Jul 20, 2021 09:04
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Manhattan Baby Oscillates between boring segments and endless screaming. The first section in Egypt is a bit boring, but I did like the effect of the guy falling on the spikes. I am terrified of snakes, and think the only good snake is a dead snake, but it's still in really bad taste to shoot a cobra to death on film for a special effect. Everything about this movie is lame. There's a scene near the end where birds peck a guy to death, and while it looks good, I couldn't muster any enthusiasm for that. Normally I'm into expressionist filmmaking, and I'm one of the biggest defenders of the idea that a Fun movie can transcend quality, that a Fun Experience can deflect bad filmmaking, but Fulci just completely missed the mark. This feels like it was directed by a mindless corpse, and I will never watch it again. Also the name is stupid. Tarantula! The tarantula segments look great. All of the effects and make-up look good, actually. The desert segments also look really nice. I don't really give a gently caress about the main characters. Their motivations and dynamics flip-flop around for whatever the scene needs, so there's not much consistency with characterization. I did like Mara Corday's character. Her intrigue and involvement felt more genuine than the male lead. I think the film's focus is it's biggest flaw. The most interesting part of the plot is the mad scientist and his experiments on genetics. When we were first assessing the line-up, I mentioned that this film is a part of the Giant Animal/Monster movies that explored our fears of nuclear warfare. Someone pointed out that there's no nuclear warfare in the film, that the animal doesn't become a giant monster from radiation or anything. While I don't think a film has to be 1:1 for the symbolism to work, I realized on my watch that that goon (sorry for not scrolling back and finding the name of who corrected me) was correct, and that this film is actually about the fear of biological manipulations and eugenics. The mad scientist plot should be front and center, with an emphasis on all his experiments, and the giant tarantula should have been saved for a final act, instead of the titular monster with its scenes stretched out. I can help but feel an injustice towards the titular Tarantula. They are simple-minded predators, they are docile, and they are not violent or dangerous towards people. While this Tarantula may devour an entire field of cattle somehow, and a hapless farmer, I can't feel any horror or animosity towards basic behavior. Sure, if I encountered a giant tarantula in real life, I'd be horrified, and I find infamous giant spider segments horrific, usually. But here, I can't help but feel bad for this drat tarantula. It got hungry. And we declare it a monster and blow it up with bombs. Why? Because a deranged human defied the tarantula's nature and scientific ethics and made it a giant. That's not the Tarantula's fault. It was barely a threat to our cast, and largely experienced it's own story. RIP Tarantula. I've still got more movies to watch and rewatch, but I'm not voting for either of these.
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Jul 20, 2021 15:40
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Franchescanado posted:Tarantula! You wound me, Fran.
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Jul 20, 2021 20:15
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Class3KillStorm posted:You wound me, Fran. I'm sorry, and I love you. Here are three kisses. Mwah. Mwah. Mwah. You can decide if any of those contained tongue or not.
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Jul 20, 2021 21:21
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The characters in Tarantula do pay some lip service to the spider not actually doing anything wrong and just doing what is natural to it to survive. And its interesting that the true villain of the story dies in the opening scene. Its actually pretty similar to Creature and Shrinking Man that there really isn't a villain or a bad guy to beat, its just tragedy resulting from man and nature and both trying to survive. Of course Tarantula has a very common 50s monster movie ending which does undercut that a bit. I mean its still a tragedy but yay Clint Eastwood shooting missiles?
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Jul 20, 2021 22:22
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STAC Goat posted:The characters in Tarantula do pay some lip service to the spider not actually doing anything wrong and just doing what is natural to it to survive. And its interesting that the true villain of the story dies in the opening scene. Its actually pretty similar to Creature and Shrinking Man that there really isn't a villain or a bad guy to beat, its just tragedy resulting from man and nature and both trying to survive. It's been a minute since I watched Tarantula!, but wasn't Leo G. Carroll the villain of the piece, since he was the one meddling in everything and the one who accidentally got his assistant infected with the growth drugs, which caused him to flip out and infect Carroll shortly before dying? I mean, I know it's unintentional and Carroll is basically somnambulant in his performance, even in the face of his own personal ticking clock, but if anyone's gonna be at fault here, it's him. STAC Goat posted:Of course Tarantula has a very common 50s monster movie ending which does undercut that a bit. I mean its still a tragedy but yay Clint Eastwood shooting missiles? The real tragedy is that we never get to see a giant spider running around in town, eating people, like what was promised on the poster. Franchescanado posted:I'm sorry, and I love you. Here are three kisses. Mwah. Mwah. Mwah. You can decide if any of those contained tongue or not. Oh, you. 
Class3KillStorm fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Jul 21, 2021 |
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Jul 21, 2021 06:09
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 We also never found out why Dr. Jacobs died in his pajamas. Did he have a dream that was a premonition of his own death? Was the lab an exceptionally causal work environment? There are just so many unanswered questions in this movie.
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Jul 21, 2021 15:49
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Definitely voting Troll Hunter but I still need to watch Manhattan Baby tonight to decide the other matchup. Tarantula was really good though, I enjoyed it a lot. As others have said, the spider scenes are surprisingly effective. Typically I'm a very loyal Harryhausen guy and so I almost always prefer stop motion creatures to the blown-up live-action real animal way of doing things. But here I think it really does work because of how alien spiders actually are in real life. The fact that you can just zoom really far in on a tarantula's face, and that alone is creepy as hell and doesn't need any embellishment to be scary. That you can put a spider in silhouette and it instantly becomes a nightmare creature. You really don't need to change a spider too much to make it terrifying.
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Jul 21, 2021 15:58
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twernt posted:
Look, you're feeling bad, you're body's changing, you're tired... you want to be comfy. Its Wednesday! Our long week actually had two Wednesday's but its finally drawing to an end. We had 6 films this week, 8 if you did the Tetsuos so there's no squeezing all those in but if you've got one or two left then you've got like 37 1/2 hours left to get them in. Vote or change your vote until 3 AM EST July 23rd (or when I wake up). Then new round with only four movies!
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Jul 21, 2021 18:33
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4. Lucio Fulci’s Manhattan Baby vs. 5. (Deb’s Queer as in gently caress You) Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears vs. 16. (Franchescanado’s Team Vulgær) Gasper Noe’s Enter The Void Manhattan Baby Manhattan Baby is not good. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears There are a lot of great ideas in The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears. They’re not necessarily components of a single, cohesive story and I don’t think they’re meant to be. This doesn’t mean they’re not parts of a whole. It’s just that there isn’t a traditional narrative going on here. The film is made up of multiple vignettes, flashbacks, or dream sequences, each seemingly from the point of view of a separate character, with the mystery of the missing wife tying them all together. There’s something really interesting going on there with the limits of perception, subjective reality, and our interconnectedness. It’s hard to tell what should be taken literally. It seems like at least some the segments in which Dan is filmed in color are the “real” world. Otherwise, everything else (including the apartment building itself) may as well be a symbol or metaphor as far as I’m concerned. It’s a visually impressive film for sure, but the sound design also definitely holds its own. Enter The Void The title is a subtle reference to the fact that the main character Oscar enters the void, both literally and metaphorically. In Enter the Void, there is a club called The Void. Oscar enters it! The void is also the nothingness some of us imagine awaits us after death. Oscar dies! After Oscar dies, he leaves his body and relives his past, but only some of it. This could be a constraint of the runtime, but this is not a short movie. I think it’s more likely that we only get to see the parts of his past that are most likely to determine if he will be able to escape the cycle of death and rebirth. This is because Enter the Void is probably an extended metaphor for reincarnation. We know this because Oscar’s friend keeps pestering him to read The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Visually, it’s very interesting. There are quite a few extended shots where the camera seems to float over, around, and through the scene. Unless it gives you motion sickness, it’s weirdly beautiful. Sometimes, though, the visual effects go on much too long. Enter the Void is also incredibly creepy in parts. It’s a bit of a spoiler to go into the specifics but the creepiness involves very narrow family trees. I guess it’s an accomplishment of some kind? I’m not sure. It’s way too long. I even watched a version that was only 143 minutes, not the 161 minutes that Letterboxd shows. I assume I missed out on the most controversial bits. I'm definitely voting for The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears here.
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Jul 22, 2021 01:24
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I don’t find Enter the Void to be particularly shocking or upsetting, just long and boring. Like STAC I don’t think you’d get too uncomfortable watching it but I also don’t think it’s necessarily worth the time commitment.
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Jul 22, 2021 02:36
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I dunno. I've noticed a troubling pattern in Noe's treatment of women and his alarming focus on incest and from what a lot of reviews and goons have said it sounds like this gets real uncomfortable with that, or at least would for me. Either way no one's actually advised me to watch it and I've gone this long without so I'm not gonna cram it in the 11th hour.
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Jul 22, 2021 02:47
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I wish Manhattan Baby was better. It feels like something that should be great, Fulci doing an ancient Egyptian curse movie. I'm not in love with either of the other two options so I easily could've voted for Fulci here if he'd just given me a little bit more of a reason to. It was a tough call but I voted for Strange Color. I do feel like Enter the Void is the more accomplished film in some ways, but it's just not something I ever really need to see again and it's certainly not what I would call a "fun" watch. Strange Color isn't necessarily fun either but it doesn't feel like an emotional marathon and in some of the technical areas like cinematography it's not very far behind Enter the Void. It's also Deb's team, and if there's any tie-breaker needed here I'm gonna support Deb. For whatever reason though, Cattet and Forzani's particular brand of neo-giallo just isn't something I'm into nearly as much as some others in the horror thread. For me their best film is Let the Corpses Tan, which is more of a crime thriller of the type that were being made around the same time as classic giallo(there's an Italian name for this type of film but I can't recall it).
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Jul 22, 2021 14:20
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Poliziotteschi? See also Suspicious Death of a Minor, which I will plug at any chance I get, or Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (what a title)
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Jul 22, 2021 15:59
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married but discreet posted:Poliziotteschi? See also Suspicious Death of a Minor, which I will plug at any chance I get, or Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (what a title) Yep that's it. I knew it started with a P(I guess it means something like "police story"?)
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Jul 22, 2021 16:02
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I really loved Let the Corpses Tan, so it’s funny I really disliked Strange Colour. But I wouldn’t call it a poliziotteschi which is a very urban genre. It’s an acid western, and has very similar vibes to Roland Klick’s Deadlock if you’ve never seen that one.
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Jul 22, 2021 16:45
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TrixRabbi posted:I really loved Let the Corpses Tan, so it’s funny I really disliked Strange Colour. But I wouldn’t call it a poliziotteschi which is a very urban genre. It’s an acid western, and has very similar vibes to Roland Klick’s Deadlock if you’ve never seen that one. Let The Corpses Tan is so much better than those filmmakers' earlier movies because spaghetti western pastiche is so much less overdone nowadays than giallo pastiche
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Jul 22, 2021 21:43
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Its finally that time!  Mildly low turnout this week but actually pretty stable in the end given the combination of so many films, some tough watches, and the long out of routine schedule fuckery. Plus despite both matchups being three ways there were pretty clear winners in both so no major pressure to push it. Two of the most successful directors in this tournament fall in this round in Gasper Noe and Jack Arnold along with two big names of horror in Lucio Fulci and Shinya Tsukamoto. Bad draws? Exhausting their best movie too early? Three way chaos? Any way it happened, it happened and this tournament gets a little more open as a result. And it cement’s Deb’s Queer As In gently caress You as one of the big teams the rest of the way and puts my Creature Features team maybe in the running? At the very least it propels them into the Top 5 of teams, returns QAIFY to the Top 5, and sets up our first Elite Eight matchup in a heartbreaking Deb vs Goat clash to decide the Tokyo Conference Champion. We’ve got one conference final set, time to set up a second. And good news, only four movies this week! 3. Tobe Hooper’s Toolbox Murders vs. 7. (Team It's Not A Cartoon, Mom! It's Art! 😫) Hisayuki Toriumi’s Lily C.A.T.  Hooper has a wide and diverse catalogue of films to pull from but I honestly know nothing about this slasher that sits on the bottom half of his popular films. Except the one thing I picked up is that something about it compels Letterboxd reviewers to write poetry. That seems like a good sign for him? On the other hand nearly ever single review of Lily C.A.T. agrees that its a blatant ripoff of Alien and The Thing. Still an animated mashup of two of the greatest horrors of all time that stays under 70 minutes sounds even least painful to this anime hater. Both films sit with very mediocre ratings and this feels really wide open. Hooper’s been using big guns to take down pretty soft targets and in the process racking up Top 5 numbers and the only 100% shutout of the tourney. Meanwhile Team Anime has been taking down its own opponents for Top 5 team numbers and the best overall team ballot percentage. Matter of fact both Hooper and Team Anime are tied for second overall in ballot % at 80%. So this is a huge clash of Top Director vs Top Team but neither’s really drawing big. But its been a soft target kind of road so it makes sense, and the tournament’s been full of surprises. So we’ll have to play this one out. And combined they’re like less the runtime of Enter the Void so that ain’t bad. Toolbox Murders is on DailyMotion Lily C.A.T. is on AsianCrush, Retrocrush, Viewster, and free on Tubi TV, IMDB TV, Roku, and VRV. 4. (Franchescanado’s Femme Fatale) Julia Ducournau’s Raw vs. 16. (Tarnop’s Predation) David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows  Now that’s a matchup! The RNG delivers again with a thematically appropriate double feature I couldn’t have made better if I tried. Both are critical darlings of the last decade with a heavy allegorical slant. Its a matchup that’s even more appropriate for a massive clash of two of the most dominant teams in the tournament. An identical ballot percentage puts the both at second for teams and fourth overall while Predation has racked up the most points in three rounds of competition and Fatale have more points than any team that has only played two rounds. Its really impossible to draw a favorite here and both teams are loaded with accolades. And really, even having seen both films I have absolutely no idea which one might pull this off or even which one is most likely to get my vote. I think its probably one of the single best matchups we’ve had all tourney and a real testament to the stronger, narrow talent level as we get deeper into the tourney and are down to 16 or so. I’m pumped, are you? Raw is available on IndieFlix and free on Tubi. It Follows is available on Shudder and free on Pluto, Tubi, Roku, and Vudu. That’s our week! One pretty killer top tier matchup and one questionable but possibly fun looking backup. And that’s me talking about an anime film without any whining and using the word “fun”. So either I’ve had a stroke or something or the week looks good. Vote or change your vote until 3 AM EST July 30th (or when I wake up) Bracket & Noms Spreadsheet Letterboxd List Next Week! 1. John Carpenter vs. 4. The One n Dones 6. Park Chan Wook vs. 7. Family Friendly
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Jul 23, 2021 08:03
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I'm so excited for Raw vs. It Follows! If nothing else, that's going to be a fun double bill. I'm not sure how I'll vote just yet though, Raw probably has the more successful pedigree, but I think It Follows is the more entertaining experience.
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Jul 23, 2021 13:07
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Sorry to double post, but I just noticed that Angela Bettis, Juliet Landau, and Sheri Moon Zombie are all in The Toolbox Murders  even if it's terrible I know I'm going to be in my own personal heaven.
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Jul 23, 2021 14:56
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I think there's gonna be some hard campaigning for both of these films. I know Fran is gonna support Raw and I have a hard time seeing myself voting against It Follows. Two years ago when I did a list of best horror of the 2010s I had It Follows at #1. I hadn't seen Raw yet at that time but I figure Raw would've been somewhere around 10-12.
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Jul 23, 2021 14:58
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I was out the last few weeks visiting family so I missed out on the last round, but I'm back and already diving into The Toolbox Murders. Sure is a 2000s slasher so far.
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Jul 23, 2021 17:44
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Toolbox Murders was an improvement on the original, which I found almost hatefully pornographic in its depictions of the killing of women. The remake’s not much of a slasher; mostly just Angela Bettis wandering around being creeped out in a crappy apartment building. But that’s OK, because Lily C.A.T. is mostly people standing around delivering exposition. By the time something potentially interesting might have happened, I was too checked out to notice. Hooper wins easily for me here. I saw Raw and It Follows both in the theater when they came out. It Follows was practically ruined for me by months of hype beforehand leading to big expectations, whereas I went into Raw mostly blind and came away with a nice surprise. So Raw wins, since I’m not going to force myself to reevaluate It Follows now.
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Jul 23, 2021 18:23
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Servoret posted:The remake’s not much of a slasher; mostly just Angela Bettis wandering around being creeped out in a crappy apartment building. Yeah my earlier remark didn't hold, it became much more of a mystery thriller shortly after, more giallo influence than slasher E: well then the last act started and is much more slasher. Lol MacheteZombie fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Jul 23, 2021 |
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Jul 23, 2021 19:07
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I've not seen the original, but Toolbox Murders didn't do much for me. I like Angela Bettis and think she does a fine job but the movie is kind of all over the place and the building's secret was so silly I thought it was a joke. It had a couple of cool kill effects, but not something I'd revisit. Lily CAT on the other hand is 100% just ripping off Alien and The Thing but at least it's ripping off things that are good, I guess. There were some cool effects and I enjoyed the last act a lot. I think Lily CAT has my vote but I wouldn't be surprised if this went either way. The other match-up is really tough. I re-watched It Follows this morning, and I still love it. I also love Raw which I just watched in June. I'm undecided.
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Jul 23, 2021 23:03
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