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Good god drat what a week last week. Just work work work to the point where I had to take care of my mental health from all the stress (I'm doing well and much better today). Now back to it. 11. Halloween (2018)  Hey, with the new one coming out I might as well brush up and watch the original of this (what?) second reboot they’ve done of the series? Jokes aside, this was great to watch in the theatres and had me pumped because this was the year I first started to seriously do this challenge. Though I never got around to including it in my 2018 challenge (long story short: social circle drama meant people weren’t willing to go until NOVEMBER) so here it is now. It’s funny how I put off V/H/S/94 again because gently caress work. Then began watching this one THEN the Spooky Bingo card dropped. So now I have to polish Halloween 2018 off, get around to watching V/H/S/94 THEN start the Spooky Bingo. Ah well, at least I have days coming off early next week. Anyways, this is interesting for me to look back on now because it really is the soft reboots of all soft reboots. That means it is a sequel to the original in the franchise but it follows the exact same story beats and moments of the original (making it a remake by definition). But because it’s a sequel and set in the modern day you don’t really notice it at first. For me, Kevin Smith explaining soft reboots in “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot” which is also a meta soft reboot itself clued me in. Though that doesn’t make it a bad film, just a curiosity in Hollywood’s design nowadays. It’s brutal, its violent, Michael Myers is still a threat and has some great kills. A weirdness of this film though is, drat, are there some jokes and lines in this movie that has Danny McBride’s signature style all over it. He was a screenwriter. I still recommend it.  /4 Spooky Bingo: Don’t Torture a Duckling12. Corpse Bride (2005)  Just from the opening credits alone I can tell this is going to be a very Tim Burton film. Everything from Johnny Depp in the main role to Danny Elfman scoring to Michael Gough having a small role. Then it starts and it’s shades of The Nightmare Before Christmas with German expressionism. Yeah, at that point in time I figured I might as well just go all in. If I sound like I’m making GBS threads on Tim Burton it’s mostly because this film came around the time people clued in that he was becoming settled in his ways. Finally getting around to watching it, oh man, now I see what people are talking about. If you get over that, though, it’s got a good story at its heart with some incredible stop-motion animation (courtesy of Laika who would go on to be masters in the style but have yet to find commercial success). It’s about a man who is made to go into an arranged marriage he is not ready for to a family that just wants it done for their own reasons. He accidentally puts the ring on a skeleton, making him his bride, and he comes to understand what marriage means. It’s a story deep down of respect and understanding before going through into a marriage. The protagonist really isn’t that good of a person even though on the surface he seems like a decent guy. He has some development and maturity to go through to become a better person and that’s up to him. His actions and decisions affect those around him for better and worse. The rest of the cast is both involved and conflicted with the events. A big theme for me was simply understanding what relationships and marriage are and to reject any idea of what they are “supposed to be” and what they truly are. I know I might be talking about a sensitive subject for most but I think we all learn through life about this kind of thing. I’ll leave this write-up with ambiguity. /4Spooky Bingo: They Always Come Back13. Thirteen Ghosts (2001)  Heh, see what I did there? This one is a remake of the 1960 film “13 Ghosts” and a film I’ve actually been meaning to see for years but never got around to it. I forgot how much I love a good haunted house film. There is just something so simple, fun and tension-filled about a group of people trapped in one and dealing with horrors they cannot comprehend. The Shining and even Event Horizon (if you stretch the definition) are all classics and this one really slipped under the radar for a lot. I read a while back that it has a strong cult following and I can see why. The imagination of this film is impressive. The story goes that a man who fancied himself a ghost hunter built a house designed to contain those he caught. He would enlist the help of a psychic to assist him in locating them, capture them then literally lock them in his basement. After his passing, he left the house to his nephew and his family who move in and ghostly hijinks ensue. The film has a really drat good execution of this premise just laying out its lore and characters. Of note is Matthew Lillard who plays the psychic mentioned before who is really drat underrated as an actor because he just makes it all work. I really did not expect much here but this film really is one of those “had a flawed concept but the filmmakers put effort into making it work out”. /4Total: 1. Blade (1998), 2. Final Destination (2000), 3. Final Destination 2 (2003), 4. Venom: Let There be Carnage (2021), 5. Braindead (1992), 6. V/H/S (2012), 7. V/H/S/2, 8. V/H/S Viral (2014), 9. The Descent (2005), 10. Final Destination 3 (2006). 11. Halloween (2018), 12. Corpse Bride (2005), 13. Thirteen Ghosts (2001) Spooky Bingo Card  Total: #1 Don’t Torture a Ducking: Corpse Bridge (2005) #2 They Always Come Back: Thirteen Ghosts (2001)
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Oct 18, 2021 23:54
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Russian Guyovitch posted:I'm guessing Kazzah is talking about how at one point when the poo poo really starts to hit the fan, the new crew decides to get the hell out of the asylum and does. They manage to run out the front door, get to their van, and head back to their hotel. They pack their bags and head down to the lobby to just leave the whole project behind them, but when the elevator door opens, they're right back in the halls of the asylum. Yup, that's the one
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Oct 18, 2021 23:56
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Okay, I wanted to tackle the Short Cuts bingo square, so here we go. Last time around I grabbed random shorts off YouTube, this time around I had a few saved in my YouTube 'Watch Later' specifically for this. All of these are new to me. Captain Voyeur (1969) IMDB Letterboxd 6:59 runtime, watched on YouTube John Carpenter's first film as a student, following an office worker who dons a ski mask and peeps in a number of windows. It's interesting to watch this with the context of something like Halloween, thinking about creeps in masks and playing with shadow and so on. Cool. Saw (aka Saw 0.5) (2003) IMDB Letterboxd 9:45 runtime, watched on YouTube I almost watched this during the summer when I went through the whole Saw series, but I saved it knowing there'd be some horror short-watching come October. This has solid production values and is basically Amanda's introduction from Saw, except Leigh Whannel is the one with the reverse bear trap on his head. It has all the trappings of a feature-length Saw movie: game playing, weird green lighting, being told to make your choice... pretty solid. Also, in this version, Billy the puppet wears a hat. Geometria (1987) IMDB Letterboxd 8:53 runtime, watched on YouTube Some very early stuff from Guillermo del Toro in which a kid doesn't want to do his geometry homework so he summons a demon while a weird riff on The Exorcist theme plays. The quality available online is a little rough around the edges but this one is recommended. The punchline is absolutely hilarious. Curve (2016) IMDB Letterboxd 9:51 runtime, watched on YouTube I think I flagged this as a to-watch thanks to Darthemed, so credit in their direction. Great concept for a short - a person wakes up on a steep, curved concrete ledge with no explanation how they got there, a seemingly impossible situation. I don't want to say much beyond that, but this has a ton of tension and great sound design. The Black Tower (1987) IMDB Letterboxd 22:56 runtime, watched on YouTube A man thinks he is being haunted by a black tower that is somehow following him around London. This is interesting, it gets brought up here pretty often and I've had it flagged to watch for quite a while. It's more like a slideshow with narration (for the most part). Surprisingly eerie. Tickle Monster (2016) IMDB Letterboxd 4:15 runtime, watched on YouTube A man is chilling with his girlfriend at her place and she mentions that her apartment is haunted by the tickle monster. This is a fun little short one that you should watch with headphones on. Total runtime: 62 minutes, 39 seconds The Berzerker fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Oct 19, 2021 |
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Oct 19, 2021 00:20
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 #18: H20, or possibly Halloween 20, Halloween: 20 Years Later, I'm not really sure Bingo square: Holiday Massacre I watched the original Halloween a few years back and wasn't really blown away by it. And I'd heard that the sequels were bad, so that's where I left it. But I've been hearing good things about how they rebooted the franchise to ignore all the sequels and bring back Jamie Lee Curtis, so I thought I'd give that a try. And Halloween 20: H20 Years Later isn't bad! It's not really a reboot since it brings in lore that is not in the original so I guess must've been from the sequels. Michael Myers is Laurie Strode's brother? That's stupid. All the characters are well established, and I liked how they had both the teens and the parents sneak off to gently caress at the same time. It's like, the teens aren't being irresponsible, everyone thinks they're safe and can gently caress tonight. The characters overall are pretty reasonable. Laurie has an understandable phobia about Halloween, and that guy from the 2000s who plays her son has a reasonable desire not to let his mom's hangups interfere with him having sex. The final fight was a bit silly at times. She throws the pointy stick at him? And then spills the drawer of knives on the ground to dig through them on her knees instead of just taking knives out of the drawer? And there's no way he could've gotten on that table without her noticing. LMAO at LL Cool J, very reasonably from his perspective, stopping Laurie from stabbing a dead man. Only for Lauri to say gently caress THAT and grab a cop's gun and properly finish Michael off. That was great. Always glad to see a cop's gun get grabbed. The main weaknesses of the movie is how long it takes to get going. The entire first half is all set up. And when the kills do start, there aren't many and they're a little weak. And the incredibly obvious set up for a sequel. Why did "Michael" react in shock about the mask when he came to pinned under the car? Come on. I'd say Halloween 20 Halloweens Later is a meh slasher. Not terrible, not great. Good acting and characterization vs lame violence and not much of it. 
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Oct 19, 2021 00:22
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24. The Burning Summer camp... with spooky results. There's something weirdly soulless about this movie. Like, it's very technically proficient but no one making it was doing so for any reason other than to make money. No one ever came to set excited with a new idea and got everyone else excited. It's kind of proto-slasher, as well. The rules weren't really set yet, so it does it's own thing, kind of. It seems like it's trying to set the stage, let you get to know the kids, build some suspense and then hit you with a big final act. But the whole hour of setting the stage isn't good. The kids are 1-dimensional. I can't even remember any of their names, so why do I care what happens to them? There's even so many of them they don't have enough single dimensions for everyone. I think that's part of why it was banned. That feeling of trying to be just a summer camp story that goes horribly wrong. I can understand some olds feeling like that's too much, before movies like this were normal. 2.5/5 
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Oct 19, 2021 00:37
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Gripweed posted:#18: H20, or possibly Halloween 20, Halloween: 20 Years Later, I'm not really sure Um... I think you watched the wrong one? It goes like this... Halloween > II > 4 > 5 > 6 Then 20 years after the original they did a soft reboot choosing to ignore 4/5/6 (the "Thorn Trilogy") but keep in II (where its revealed Michael is Laurie's brother) and bring back JLC. At which point it goes... Halloween > II > H20 > Resurrection Then 40 years after the original they did it again, another soft reboot bringing back JLC and this time ignoring II as well (thus eliminating the brother thing) making it... Halloween > Halloween '18 > Halloween Kills (just released this week) > Halloween Ends (future movie) So I'm guessing the soft reboot buzz you heard was for '18 since its sequel was just released. Also because I think '18 is generally better regarded than H20. That being said you didn't like Halloween or the last part of H20 that is more well regarded as a followup to Halloween than the rest of the movie so I wouldn't recommend the new one for you.
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Oct 19, 2021 00:39
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11) Doom Annihilation videogames cause violence First time watch This was dumb. It finally answers why videogame movies change poo poo around - because videogame stories are more fun to play. A crew of crack space commando marines spends 40 minutes establishing that they're all kind of cool but troubled, then they get to the UAC research station where DooM3 E1M1 just happened. There's a lot of nods to the game. A LOT. sound effects, HUD graphics, weapons, monsters, chainsaw kills, but it's more like a cosplay stunt show than a movie. Production is all over the place. Rubber monsters, bad zombie effects, serviceable CGI, sets that look exactly like the game... but it never ends up looking as good or stylish as the game. And I think that comes back around to lighting and atmosphere. It feels like they're trying to jam the story beats and game references in, along with action and horror tropes. One of the marines quips "It's aliens!" as they're gearing up, and that's why you never reference a better movie. There's also a jarring Christian angle to one character, and that seems like something nervously shoehorned in to counteract all the demons. The movie ends on a cliffhanger, and you just don't care what happens next. It feels like a wasted license. 1/5
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Oct 19, 2021 00:41
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8. Till Death (Netflix) Dir. SK Dale Megan Fox stars with Gerald's Game co-starring. A woman is taken to a remote cabin where she ends up handcuffed to her dead husband. Megan Fox does a pretty great job and, Gerald's Game jokes aside, the initial concept is unsettling and incredibly vindictive. It never really goes off the rails but a lot of the intensity is lost when other characters are introduced and the isolation is removed. 3/5 9. Halloween Kills (Peacock) Dir. David Gordon Green I am an awful, awful person to attempt to critique a Halloween film in any form or fashion. If it's got Michael Myers and some Carpenter soundtrack, I'll most likely be on board to some extent. This is no exception. It's got flaws. It's got lots of flaws. I could understand someone arguing that it's mostly flaws and scenes like the street beatdown rival the druids and Busta Rhymes fighting Michael for sheer stupidity. But Michael is in it and he stabs people and Carpenter is composing, so it's whatever. 3.5/5 10. Superhost (Shudder) Dir. Brandon Christensen Two travel vlog 'influencers' check into an AirBnB to see if the perfect reviews are accurate. The main two characters do a great job of being your stereotypical YouTube influencer couple, to the point that it's difficult to embrace them at all as protagonists. The obnoxious "Like and SMASH THAT SUBCRIBE BUTTON" delivery is both hard to stomach and extremely well done. The host, played by Grace Phipps, is where the real fun comes in though. She does an incredible job of portraying this unhinged counterbalance to the saccharine internet vloggers. It's not doing anything that Creep or other similar films haven't done, but its fun, deliberately cringy, and Grace Phipps carries the whole thing on her back. 3.5/5 11. Ruin Me (Shudder) Dir. Preston DeFrancis A couple pays to spend a weekend to live a simulated slasher-movie experiences out in the woods. The concept isn't bad, and could potentially be a refreshing twist on the "extreme haunted house" thing you seem from The Houses That October Built or Haunt. The problem is the movie radically changes tones and concepts three separate times and the end result is a gigantic mess where it feels like the filmmakers didn't have the budget to decide on which horror movie to make, so they crammed several scripts together and tried to play out every twist that sounded interesting. 1.5/5
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Oct 19, 2021 00:47
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SPOOKY Challenge: Video Nasty #58) Don't Go in the Woods (1981; digital) DEATH STRIKES IN UTAH! A group of campers wanders into a slasher film, and nature takes its course. Early on, the film tries to play things as though it might be a bear causing the killings, an angle that at no point seems plausible. One touch that sets this slasher apart from a lot of others is that the police are involved almost from the start, trying to solve the case. The victim characters aren't the worst I've seen in a slasher, but they're angling pretty hard for that position. On top of being low on personality, they also pull some extraordinarily stupid poo poo when they know people in the area are being killed. Like stuffing a friend in a sleeping bag and hanging it from a tree, in some weird attempt at flirting. Or standing perfectly still while someone hurls spears at them. And then there's the issue of characters just appearing out of nowhere, only to be killed immediately, or hang around adding to the generally baffling events of the movie. The killer is one of the most absurd slasher villains I can recall, and would be even if the victims reacted in a normal way to his presence, instead of acquiring the defense mechanisms of rabbits. One of them grabs a big spiked club to confront the slasher, turns around and finds him, and without even taking a swing, drops the club and finds the nearest corner to back themselves into. Then there's the delivery of dialogue like it was learned phonetically, but they only had one take available. For all the whacking and chopping and impaling and decapitating, there's not as much blood as you might expect. Someone does get a spike trap to the face, though, which (along with a lengthy sequence of killing the villain) probably sealed the deal for this ending up on the Video Nasties list. “If you're lost and scared, you ain't gonna make it.” Rating: 4/10 
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Oct 19, 2021 00:51
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STAC Goat posted:Um... I think you watched the wrong one? It goes like this... poo poo, if they dropped the brother thing for the second reboot cycle I should've gone with that one. It's so dumb. But H20 did cement for me that I don't think Michael Myers is a very good villain, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered that much. I got one more Halloween movie on the slate though Gripweed fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Oct 19, 2021 |
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Oct 19, 2021 01:02
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11. Dolls (1987) 🇺🇸 Stuart Gordon’s theatre background is often mentioned when discussing his work, and perhaps it’s a bit old hat but I really felt that peeking through in Dolls. It all takes place in one location and like a lot of Gordon films, features a cast of character actors (including the Puppet Master himself, Guy Rolfe) stuck in some sort of high-pressure situation, and has a wonderful dark fairytale vibe that just felt very theatrical to me.  But it is still an effective horror story, I mean these dolls are just inherently unsettling. There is some surprisingly great gore and kills for a film that feels more geared toward kids than his previous work. It’s a delicate balance between genuinely scary and silly when you are working with a plot like this but Gordon knows what he is doing. The little toy soldiers firing squad complete with drummer and trumpeter should be a farce but the kill scene with them ends up being rather brutal. At the same time there are sweet moments between the little girl and the oafish but kind-hearted lead. It was appropriate that I picked this one for the “Masters of Horror” because only someone with the skill, vision, and confidence of Gordon can take a very generic and possibly completely un-thrilling concept and execute it so well. It joins films like The Gate as a horror story that is about a kid(s), focuses on themes kids relate with, but doesn’t dumb itself down or hold back on the actual horror. It’s not afraid to be sad or scary while also being whimsical and familiar. Gordon was simply one of the best in the genre. RIP.  4/5 = Film list (ranked) 1. Demons* (4.5/5) 2. Demons 2* (4/5) 3. Scream, Blacula, Scream (4/5) 4. Dolls (4/5) 5. V/H/S 94 (4/5) 6. The Slumber Party Massacre (3.5/5) 7. Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (3.5/5) 8. City of the Living Dead (3/5) 9. Skull: The Mask (3/5) 10. The Mortuary Collection (3/5) 11. Night Train to Terror (2.5/5) *=rewatch WeaponX fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Oct 19, 2021 |
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Oct 19, 2021 01:03
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I'm so glad I decided to participate in the SPOOKY challenge, because thanks to it, I found one of my favorite Dracula movies. For the criteria "As Seen on TV", I watched Count Dracula -1977 available on Amazon Prime I had no idea what movie I was going to watch for this criteria, so I just googled it, and saw this one. It's a 1977 movie that aired on BBC, and it is excellent! I didn't recognize any of the actors, but they were incredibly talented, and for the plot, they just followed the book, which turned out to be the best way to handle the story. It is 2 and a half hours long, but it didn't feel like it at all. I highly recommend this movie, if anyone has access to Amazon Prime and hasn't seen it. Rating: 5/5 
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Oct 19, 2021 01:05
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Gripweed posted:poo poo, if they dropped the brother thing for the second reboot cycle I should've gone with that one. It's so dumb. But H20 did cement for me that I don't think Michael Myers is a very good villain, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered that much. Really, nearly everyone agrees that the first film is the best and a stone cold classic and the sequels in any continuity are just chasing that. So if you weren't big on the OG I don't think any of the sequels or continuities are gonna change your mind. But if you are determined to try '18 is probably your best bet.
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Oct 19, 2021 01:07
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Gripweed posted:
Woah, hold up. Was the switcheroo that got explained in Halloween: Resurrection planned in advance by the H:20 writers? I always thought they had to cook up an excuse to bring Michael back but the original intention was that he got finished off in H:20. BUT, it does seem weird how Michael grabs his mask in confusion.
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Oct 19, 2021 01:33
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Mokelumne Trekka posted:Woah, hold up. Was the switcheroo that got explained in Halloween: Resurrection planned in advance by the H:20 writers? I always thought they had to cook up an excuse to bring Michael back but the original intention was that he got finished off in H:20. Ok, so 20 years after Halloween Jamie Lee Curtis gets the idea that it would be cool to reunite the band do one final definitive Halloween sequel where Laurie confronts Michael and fights back. But eventually Carpenter and Hill dropped out over financial/creative stuff and Kevin Williamson was brought in. And when JLC gets the script it has an ambiguous ending instead of the agreed upon reason for the film of Laurie killing Michael. JLC threatened to quit the whole thing and the studio revealed that there was something in the contract that said Laurie can't kill Michael. So Williamson wrote the ending as a sort of compromise to dupe Laurie into getting what she wants even thought it wasn't true. JLC agreed for the payday on the grounds that they do the Resurrection start of Laurie finding out she killed an innocent man, losing her mind, and getting murdered by Michael so she'd never do it again. Or hear it from her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN59pa7cyiI
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Oct 19, 2021 01:45
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12) Ghosts of War first time view E: Hausu for bingo It's WW2 and a team of US soldiers are tasked with holding a chateau in France until their relief arrives. But it's, get this, a haunted chateau. There's a whole season of Hill House and maybe two Insidious films' worth of supernatural goings on. It's kind of effective! The cast is pretty great, Theo Rossi is a treat. And then, oh no. There's a twist and it's real bad. That's a pretty big spoiler. The whole thing is a Matrix simulation to help critically wounded Afghanistan war vets process their failed mission. And the computer is haunted That's a massive ending spoiler. I'm just going to give this 2/5 and move on. It was neat but sheesh. moths fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Oct 19, 2021 |
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Oct 19, 2021 02:11
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October 18 WNUF Halloween Special Thank you, Lumbermouth, you've given me an opportunity to watch something I've wanted to see for quite a while. Lumbermouth posted:17. WNUF Halloween Special It's the 1987 WNUF Halloween Special where a local reporter takes some psychics and priest into a haunted house and the live broadcast doesn't go as planned. I hope the people who made those commercials did it on a real copy of Video Toaster. Even setting aside the commercials which people talk about for good reason ("Pray nobody leaves the stadium dead!"), this does an absolutely spectacular job of recreating the mood and feel of cheesy local programming from the mid-80's. The plot feels a bit minimalist, but I think trying to have an actual arc would have made it feel less real. This kind of broadcast was all about spinning wheels and filling time while promising something special just to keep people from changing channels. So I think the clunkiness actually works to replicate the feel of what they wanted. I can understand why some people would be turned off by that, though. I had a lot of fun with this even though there wasn't that much happening. I think it does help that they could keep throwing the horror story to comedy skits in the commercials and then go back again to the latest weird thing being dragged out for five minutes. It is a "you had to be there" film, though. I guess I'm putting this one down for [REC] on my SPOOKY card since there's a real chance I won't watch any more found footage this month...  Lumbermouth posted:Verisimilitude is very important to me when it comes to paying homage or parodying a specific era and WNUF nails the look and feel of its subject matter. I believe that the reporters, the news desk and the crowd are all real people, which makes the horror that comes that much realer. There's one place where I think they failed and that's in the commercials for movies and some of the TV shows. They would have been shot on film rather than video like the rest of the movie was and would have a different look to them. But that's a nitpick because everything else nailed the atmosphere. Gripweed posted:poo poo, if they dropped the brother thing for the second reboot cycle I should've gone with that one. It's so dumb. But H20 did cement for me that I don't think Michael Myers is a very good villain, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered that much. Er... that would be the third reboot cycle. Rob Zombie rebooted the franchise about ten years ago and there was a sequel to that one. They stand alone at least so you don't have the confusing "which films count?" stuff. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Oct 19, 2021 |
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Oct 19, 2021 02:12
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Random Stranger posted:
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Oct 19, 2021 02:24
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#19. A*P*E (Spooky Bingo- Wild Beasts) A 36-foot-ape, captured by humans, breaks out of the ocean liner where he was imprisoned, battles a giant shark (because Jaws came out the year before) and comes ashore in South Korea. Here he vaguely menaces people before fixating on an American actress (Joanna Kerns, going by Joanna de Varona) shooting a film in Seoul. The skeptical military eventually get wise that there's a giant ape on the loose and send in the military. Also there's an American reporter (Rod Arrants) who doesn't do much of anything. You may remember this from the video box whose back cover bore the image of the titular Ape giving the finger, but it's something of a lost cult icon. Filmed in 3D (there are plenty of scenes where things get thrown at the camera) and released a month before Dino De Laurentiis' megabudget King Kong remake, this goofy cash-in is something I'd wanted to see for a while, and surprisingly it doesn't disappoint. It's pretty awful but in a consistently fun way, full of bizarre dialogue and comical scenes where innocent extras run around and do stuff before suddenly noticing the giant ape watching them. Alex Nicol plays the scene-chewing Col. Davis, who first is extremely violently skeptical of reports of a giant ape, and then extremely violent in wanting the "hairy son of a bitch" killed. The film plays the Ape as innocent in some scenes but then establishes offscreen that he's levelling entire villages and killing dozens of people. Which I guess is the standard King Kong approach but it feels more confused than usual here. The miniature work is alternately ambitious and really goofy (the monster "escapes" from an exploding toy boat that is nowhere near the same scale as the costume), while the suit is hilariously ill-fitting, with fur like a shag carpet. At times it's like a kiddie movie but there's also brief nudity, lots of swearing, and jokes about the actress filming a rape scene. There's also a bit where people are filming a martial arts movie, notice the ape, and so the actors(!) take the prop bows and start firing flaming arrows at him (and the camera)! Ultimately the story is so threadbare that it does get a little repetitive after a while, but while it lasts there are plenty of good times to be had. I saw this streaming on a free ad-supported channel called Kino Cult, if you're curious.
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Oct 19, 2021 02:27
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 The Raven, 1935 You can't go wrong with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in the same movie. Bela Lugosi plays a brilliant doctor with an obsession with Edgar Allen Poe and torture. As a brilliant surgeon, Bella gets pulled out of retirement by a desperate father who wants to save his daughter. Our mad doctor get infatuated by her and really don't like that she is going to get married to some other guy. Boris Karloff is a convict on the run from the law and want the doctor to change his face. Bela's character deforms Boris's character and tells him he got to do Bela's evil deeds if he wants his face fixed. This movie gets real cool and fun towards the end when all the plans of death and torture gets put into action. On its own, The Raven is a great piece of your typical Universal Pictures horror from the 30s. The only issue, this movie was done better just the year before with the same actors, only with their roles reversed, in The Black Cat. It is the superior movie of the two, was just rewatching this one first in order to build up to when I watch The Black Cat tomorrow night. Would have been a bit of a let down if I watched that first and this one next. Again, real nice movie, just that the other is superior to this one.
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Oct 19, 2021 02:33
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 #19: Halloween Resurrection Bing square: fear dot com OK. I gotta be honest. I really enjoyed Halloween Resurrection. I praised H20 for having reasonable characters, but Resurrection does not. These are big slasher victim characters. Busta Rhymes is the star, and he's great. Tyra Banks has a smaller role but is also a delight. The others are all fine. One of them is even the lady from the Star Wars show. I really liked how ill fitting the Pup Fiction costumes on those two nerds were. Wearing an ill-fitting black suit because of Tarentino movies and trying to get people at a party to watch something on the internet. For a certain type and age of nerd that's Proust's madeleine dipped in tea. Not me though, I didn't do both of those things, I was cool. I could even take Michael Myers more seriously in this. His stupid outfit works better in a dumber movie. He does more creative kills, and it's a more confined setting and a shorter timeframe so it's easier to take just some fuckin elementary school drop out with a knife as a serious threat. Hlloween Resurrection is a goofy fun time. 
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Oct 19, 2021 02:35
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 14. Slumber Party Massacre II (1987), dir. Deborah Brock I am just continuing to roll with this series for a bit, but this was definitely less my speed while still being a fun time. I think the original was really fun because it really felt like girls hanging out, but the main characters in this have much less personality and are much more one dimensional. It also includes one my least favorite tropes which is the hero from the previous movie turning out to having lost their minds in between films. The main positive is the killer who is a blast, but he really doesn't get many great kills. It honestly would have been fun to see some Freddy style dreamlogic kills to match his musical numbers instead of just going with the drill. But he's a slasher with musical numbers, so that justifies the movie alone. /5
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Oct 19, 2021 02:36
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 71) Grandmother's Farm - 2013 - Netflix A Perfect Getaway I admit I do cringe slightly at the 'watch a movie from a country you haven't seen a movie from yet' challenges. With how many movies I sit through and only so many countries on the planet, it's only a matter of time before I've covered them all. But for now, still good. Just involves some more intensive Googling. This one is from the United Arab Emirates. Story follows a group of friends on a road trip to one's grandmother's farm out in the desert for a vacation, once there, a strange guest gatecrashes the party. Of course, the gatecrasher's a djinn. I found this film incredibly fascinating on several levels. I really know little about the UAE beyond when it's mentioned on the news. Also since I live out in the desert, I'm curious to see how other cultures manage in the same type of climate. The film is listed as a horror comedy, but doesn't come across as much of either. Unlike other films that bill themselves the same and focus on one or the other, here it feels more like a cultural thing. Because of my unfamiliarity, this film feels more like a road trip/slice of life thing. The djinn is depicted more as a possessing spirit than what I've seen in other films depicting them. When looking for a poster image, I saw reviews savaging this one something fierce. If I went in expecting what I've seen in Western films, then I can see being a bit salty. For now, I'll file this one under 'Okay' and revisit it after I've sat through more films from the UAE.  72) Spontaneous Combustion - 1990 - Youtube Starring Brad Dourif This one was harder than I expected. I know Dourif's been in films other than Chucky such as Eyes of Laura Mars but my mind completely blanked on them and all I could think of was his TV work like Brother Edward in Babylon 5. Took a bit but I found this one. I remember it had a kinda lame looking coverbox on the shelf at Blockbuster. The film follows Sam, a man who learns he has pyrokinesis and electrokinesis from his parents being test subjects in an atomic bomb experiment. Essentially this story would fit as a '50s era atomic horror entry. And this is one of the few sympathetic roles Dourif's taken. I really felt for Sam slowly uncovering the truth as his powers flare up. Tobe Hooper followed the same selective touch he used for Texas Chainsaw Massacre here in that the gore is handled with a light touch. We see plenty of walking human torches, and hear worse off screen, but as far as burn wounds go, we're not shown much which adds to the mental imagery of what's going on. I really liked this one and I recommend. 
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Oct 19, 2021 03:27
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It's not horror but if anybody is looking for some quality Dourif outside of this challenge, don't sleep on The Wild Blue Yonder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pksyIwiP2Cs
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Oct 19, 2021 04:11
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STAC Goat posted:Yeah, Zombie does a full reboot/remake that's just off on its own, so I don't really count it in the same pool. The multiple "soft reboots" from Carpenter's Halloween creates a mildly confusing multiverse that has to be explained. Zombie just did a remake. Then there is Halloween 3 which is a stand-alone film in the entire multiverse. I can't wait until the inevitable Halloween H60 where an elderly JLC has a cameo.
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Oct 19, 2021 05:08
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#15 SPOOKY BINGO - Video Nasty Faces of Death John Alan Schwartz, 1978  I grew up in a strict United Methodist household. R rated films - and hell, even lots of PG-13 films - were off limits to me. Browsing the video stores ca. 1991, with row after row of tantalizing horror films that I wasn't allowed to touch, was a mystifying ordeal. "These movies must be REALLY bad" I'd think to myself as my eyes were glued to them. But there was one film, one granddaddy of all horror films, whose reputation, passed along by word of mouth on my early elementary playgrounds, was beyond that of any typical horror film. This was Faces of Death. A film that depicted AUTHENTIC, heinous deaths. The mere mention of this film shook me to my core. To an 8 year old preacher's kid, Faces of Death was more than a movie. It was the most evil thing conceivable. A dark, vile abyss of the worst images humans had the ability to capture on a VHS tape. Of course the movie's mostly bullshit and even the stuff that is real is relatively tame. But my young self sure didn't know that. Watching a horror film that purports to be authentic is something you don't get to see every day. My mind went into scrutiny mode, carefully analyzing the scenes to determine what's real and what's fake. Honestly though, it's pretty obvious. Skydiving guy? Real. Bear attack? Fake. Autopsies? Real. Murder cult? Fake. Etc. etc. Nevertheless, it's an oddly enjoyable mindset to be in and a strangely entertaining experience. So now, after all these years (some 30 or so), I've finally watched Faces of Death. Will I ever watch it again? Doubtful. But as a diehard horror fan it's nice to finally check this legendary film off my list. 2.5/5  15 Films watched: 1. Titane (2021), 2. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), 3. The Lair of the White Worm (1988), 4. Maniac (1980), 5. Maniac (2012), 6. Possum (2018), 7. We Are the Flesh (2016), 8. V/H/S/94 (2021), 9. Antropophagus (1980), 10. The Boy Behind the Door (2021), 11. A Cat in the Brain (1990), 12. Grotesque (2009), 13. Sleepaway Camp (1983), 14. Possession (1981), 15. Faces of Death (1978)
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Oct 19, 2021 05:30
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20. Black Christmas (1974) (challenge: Holiday Massacre) "I should be so lucky as to have a stranger come in my room."  Black Christmas is good as hell, go watch it. It makes total sense that this is credited as one of the mothers of the slasher genre, but I think it also loses little to its age or its foundational nature, largely because it leans heavily on its feminist themes both for big laughs and chilling scares. Make no mistake and be warned, it's unrelenting in its depiction of misogyny, but its heart is with the women as they try to navigate being alternately targeted and not helped by the various men around them. Certainly the scale of the film took me off guard - I was assuming it would be your standard killer-versus-group one-night stand, but certainly not. And the size of the cast, specifically the number of lovely or useless men the women have to deal with, lends the core slasher narrative a very nice whodunit aspect rife for exploration and contortion. It's also a nice touch that as far as I remember the cops do not accomplish a single thing in the entire movie. Really impressively shot with some nice sound work to boot. Just really ambitious with execution to back it up. 9/10 
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Oct 19, 2021 05:39
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18) The Flesh and the Fiends [Picnic At Hanging Rock] More Pleasence than Cushing in this one. Something about Pleasence or his wardrobe reads as metropolitan cool guy rather than grave robbing henchman. Not much gore but there are lots of fun stranglings and bad fights. I love the many drunk crowds whooping it up and the torch bearing mob with lots of top hats. I think I prefer The Body Snatcher with Karloff but this is a solid take on the Burke and Hare case. I need to watch the Freddy Francis version with Timothy Dalton next. 19) Dracula, Sovereign of the Damned [As Seen On TV] The perfect kind of garbage. A terrible anime movie that is plodding until the wild infodumps and year long time skips. Enemies of Dracula include Satan and his cultists, God, Harker and his misfit team of a martial arts guy and a woman with a crossbow. Dracula gets owned at every turn and it's a scream. There is bad narration every ten minutes like recapping a syndicated DiC series. Get drunk and watch this with some friends. 
UltimoDragonQuest fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Oct 19, 2021 |
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Oct 19, 2021 05:39
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#20. Satan's Slave Spooky Bingo- The Perfect Getaway (Indonesia for the Indonesians! Yes, and Veteran's Day!) A brother and sister whose mother has recently died start to notice strange things happening around their house. First just a few dreams and visions, and a fortune teller warning of bad luck, but then people start dying mysteriously. Is someone targeting this family for destruction? Could it have something to do with the arrival of the new housekeeper? Is it a spoiler to say, yes, probably? This was apparently something of a landmark in its native country, to the point that it's recently been remade (which is why Shudder has both this and the remake.) Without knowing much of anything about Indonesian cinema or culture, there's something to be said for a film like this which echoes a lot of popular trends in current horror cinema without straight up ripping them off. There's a parallel with a lot of recent haunting and satanically-themed horror films, and some have also pointed out parallels to Phantasm, but it feels like its own thing. (The soundtrack does use a lot of Tangerine Dream's Sorcerer music.) This is another one of those films with a slow buildup and the direction is maybe a little too pedestrian for the early portions to really stand out. There's some atmosphere and good photography, but it really only comes into its own late in the film as the horrors fully manifest themselves. That stuff is sufficiently vivid and intense enough to more than make up for everything, and while the overall theme of the film feels a bit simplistic, you could say the same for a lot of its contemporaries. Overall neat stuff. 
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Oct 19, 2021 05:56
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 17. A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)  .5/5"That was the gayest scary movie I've ever seen." -my partner as the credits rolled Whew, the buttons on Mark Patton's baby blue patterned shirts just keep slippin' off somehow!! Put the subtext aside for a moment, and this sequel definitely still strikes a different rhythm from the original. After an initial display of Freddy that feels prime from the first movie - grand display of dreamlike power, petty intimidation, mean-spirited enthusiasm - everything is chopped up and remixed. The goofball energy of Freddy's rampage is transferred to a sitcom-ready suburban household, with an idiot dad who attributes the spontaneous combustion of a bird to some kind of prank from his son who must be on The Drugs. The murders are more mundane, charged with menace that Patton may actually be the one carrying them out (there are some very effective dread-inspiring moments of body transposition in the edit!), but they also contain dumb low-budget shenanigans, with the big bad Mr. Kreuger throwing plates around in his petulance and making some beers leak instead of, like, conjuring horrid bleeding visions of the people he's killed. The threat of gore becomes body horror. The horror rules are changed, now that it's about possession instead of haunting. So even though the same emotions and energy is here, it feels like a reboot where someone is taking the previous supernatural slasher structure and repurposing it towards their own vision. After watching the sequel, it feels surprising looking back that in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, so much is made of dreams and mastering fear but Freddy Kreuger is such an external threat. He's an actual person who lived in the area and did horrific things, he's not some imaginary conjuring! To gain power over him is to gain power over an exterior world that finds its way past the safeguards of your home, no matter how people bar the windows to protect you. But in Part 2 the Freddy character is reimagined as an internal threat. The clawed hand is coming from inside the house, as most memorably depicted in a grossout transformation sequence. Yet it's also so well-supported by Patton's sweaty anxiety, and the way he wells up with frustration when he's unable to communicate any of what's happening inside of him to his parents. So: the big juicy subtext! It's very easy to read queerness onto this THING burning up Patton from the inside like a flame. The Freddy-ness coming upon him during an attempt to initiate sex with his girlfriend, the explicit callout highlighting how he flees to sleep alongside his male friend instead - I mean c'mon, the character's delirious midnight ramble into a leather bar should put any doubts on that reading to bed. The question about Part 2 isn't whether the obvious is there, it's the judgment about what's depicted. Freddy Kreuger is a depraved monster, hideous, a child predator, and making all that into a metaphor for queerness or homosexuality sounds pretty drat offensive. Particularly in a film released in the '80s, where the AIDS crisis gave an extra venomous barb to the notion of unleashed gayness murdering people. And the implication that you can just summon the willpower, overcome, pray the gay away, that's the cherry atop the poo poo sundae. But The Author is dead - the concept, not actual screenwriter David Chaskin, he's alive - and we have the liberty to interpret this film by contemporary values. I don't mean as an act of deliberate whitewashing and downplaying, I just mean that the same moving pictures summon different ideas when seen by eyes living in 2021 instead of 1985. When my 2021 eyes see a young dude being wracked with pain over his sexuality, I see the fear itself as the monster - the self-loathing, the fear of your community despising and rejecting your true self. The cavorting, murderous Freddy is the closeted phobia that being honest with the world will degrade you and harm those close to you. In the climax Kim Myers kisses the transformed Freddy to restore Patton, but when he reemerges as himself (with bits of Freddy cracking and flaking off him like a punctured eggshell!), he doesn't renew a romantic kiss - he simply holds her, and she comforts him. The acceptance of loved ones banishes the monster, and grants the healing power to become yourself without your sexuality making a freak out of you. If you think I'm stretching to get past a woman kissing a man's gay out of him, consider that the transformative kiss itself is foreshadowed by a few other platonic pecks of affection across the movie. And besides, this movie is way more lustful of Patton's chest and Marshall Bell's whipped rear end than any woman within its runtime. In conclusion, gay? Yes. Homophobic? Subjective, I say no. Fun and worth watching? Yes!  29. Saint Maud (2019)  A film that pushes you all the way up inside a young woman's business as she has a religious psychological meltdown. Lots of silence and uncomfortably close detail shots, and Morfydd Clark's uncomfortable performance in every scene carrying the load of the whole picture with its brittle, flailing quality. Writer-director Rose Glass clearly loves setting you up with assumptions and then pulling them out from under you. You think Clark might be a nervous and timid little woman, but then you see she speaks her mind forcefully and her jitters are coming from something hosed-up going on in her head. You think Clark is innocent and inexperienced (especially compared to Jennifer Ehle as a dancer in declining health), but she reveals something very different when she briefly sours on her faith and retreats into old behaviors. And I definitely was suckered into thinking that this was going to be a "repressed religious lesbian" story when the camera alights on the intimate closeness of Clark and Ehle in their carer/patient relationship, shows Clark admiring Ehle's body in performance and peering intensely through a door gap at Ehle making out with another woman - and then the film pulls back sharply from sensuality to focus instead on the creepy self-importance of Clark's ambition to "save" Ehle. But I don't think Saint Maud closes the door on its main character's gayness. Clark's character has an affinity for martyrdom and self-harm; when she sexually dabbles with men we see her either flashing back to a severely traumatic past incident or picking at the bandages that cover where she's wounded herself. The performance of heterosexuality for her seems to be an act of self-mutilation, as surely as the other freakier things she does. It's just the only one that's acceptable to do in public. Clark's attempt to chase off Ehle's lover initially comes off as sublimated romantic rivalry, then as a sincere attempt to isolate Ehle for the sake of converting her into spirituality, but in retrospect I think the best way to describe it is that Clark seems deeply jealous of the normalcy with which other people become close to each other in relationships. It's nothing so trite as refusing a lesbian identity because of a perceived incompatibility with Christianity. Clark has to bash someone comfortable in their sexuality as "frivolous" because she has to degrade the value of this type of human closeness and not confront that she's terrible at it. Mental illness or no. Or more simply, she's not disturbed because she's a repressed gay, she expresses how disturbed she is through refusal of her sexuality. Oh, and the ending rules. Perfect little slice of garnish to finish the thing off. Spooky bingo: Scream, Queen! As discussed, Saint Maud delves into LGBTQ+ themes. 
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Oct 19, 2021 06:10
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SPOOKY Challenge: [REC] #59) 폐가 (Deserted House) (2010; Youtube) A camera crew accompanies a team of haunted house investigators, and everyone ends up missing. Their tapes are recovered, and there's the movie. The place they investigate is an abandoned cookie factory, where an entire family was killed following the discovery of the owner/husband's affair with a secretary there. The facts of the case, and subsequent urban legends, are shared with us through compiled interviews with townspeople, gathered by the location scouts. We're shown that this first camera crew had lots of people warning them to stay away, for their own safety. And when they do arrive at the location, there's a violent man smashing rocks and yelling at them to leave. But they don't. And then we switch over to the main group, arriving a day or two later. Does a great job of building a creepy atmosphere, with the rot and decay of the sets (which I could believe were real found locations) lingered on in shots, unsettling on their own before any supernatural activity. Reminded me a lot of the work of nana825763/PiroPito (My House Walk-Through), while the score and sound work were reminiscent of Akira Yamaoka's Silent Hill work at times. The sense of anxiety from the explorers is effective, and it makes the heavy usage of go-to tricks (camera glitching, someone suddenly falling out of frame, etc.) disappointing when the performances and dread from the sets are so strong already. “The camera won't go into standby,” the location scout cameraman mentions at one point, giving us a pass for the old 'Why are they still filming?' question of found footage films. But once we switch over to the main group, we get some characterization of their cameraman which makes him seem like he's not quite part of the group. Refusing to be part of the group photo, for instance, or surreptitiously filming a crew member who's fallen in water and drying her clothes, after she's yelled for him to turn the camera off. Adds an extra thread of tension to the proceedings, and shows that the writers had concern for fleshing out the script beyond immediate creeps and jumps. Very satisfied with this one, and I highly recommend it. “It will kill you without you knowing.” Rating: 8/10 
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Oct 19, 2021 06:17
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37. Halloween Kills (2021) (first viewing) I'll err on the side of caution and spoiler most of this. In short, this picks up directly after Halloween 2018 ended. The themes relating to trauma are continued, but the focus shifts from Laurie's family to the citizens of Haddonfield as a whole. Aside from this change in focus, it's very light on plot development. Overall, it's kind of messy, and definitely feels like the middle part of a larger story. I am not sure sidelining Laurie was the the most satisfying narrative decision--she spends 90% of the movie in a hospital bed. Instead, the people of Haddonfield form a mob and try to hunt Michael Myers down. A large part of the movie follows this chase. The rest of the movie is Michael Myers kills. The body count is huge. The movie had a pattern with most of the townies--one scene introducing them and one scene killing them off. I had a problem with the scenes where Michael Myers is slashing through groups of people like he's in a beat-em-up video game. The movie opens with this with him slaughtering the firefighters, and ends with this with him overcoming the vigilante mob. I feel like this goes against Myers being a stealthy killer who isolates and picks off his victims. I will say that this movie at least has a more even, serious tone throughout, mostly abandoning the botched attempts at comedy of the 2018 installment. 38. King of the Ants (2003) (first viewing) My third Stuart Gordon feature of the challenge, following Dagon and The Pit and the Pendulum. Sadly, this so-called thriller was a flop. An aimless young man (some awful no-namer) is working odd jobs when he has a chance meeting with some shady businessmen (George Wendt, having fun playing against type, as well as Daniel Baldwin). The man learns that a prominent city accountant (Ron Livingston) has been uncovering illicit business dealings. The man is enlisted to first follow, the murder, the accountant. But his new acquaintances double-cross him by refusing to pay, so the man seeks to expose their illegal activity and extract his revenge. The movie felt very amateurish. It's shot indifferently, with lots of unappealing dissolves and fades to black. The acting is pretty poor outside the established names. The script is a real mess, too. There's an awful subplot where the young man ends up living with and starting a relationship with the dead accountant's wife. The closing shot is even the protagonist walking away from a huge explosion without looking back. It's just baffling. This was definitely a disappointment coming from Gordon. SPOOKY Bingo: This one checks off "Asylum," as The Asylum works with a real director, believe it or not. Sadly, Stuart Gordon directs at a level appropriate to The Asylum here. Next up: A trip to Indonesia for Impetigore.
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Oct 19, 2021 07:00
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12. House on Haunted Hill (1959) Spooky Bingo: Masters of Horror  Five strangers are invited to spend a night in a haunted house, with the promise of $10k for whoever can stay there 'til dawn. Quite enjoyable. Goddamn, Vincent Price ruled. Just such an engaging presence, straddling the line between charming and threatening. I liked it for how direct and straightforward the beginning was. No little scenes to give you some sense of these people's ordinary lives; Price just tells you what everyone's deal is. The movie is not all that scary, but it's very mysterious, and it's fun to slowly piece together that this is actually a crime thriller. I liked that you get a decent sense of how the house fits together, which exits lead to which rooms-- which is appropriate, since as mentioned, this is a crime thriller, and the house isn't some sort of endless shifting maze, it's just kinda spooky. The steady demystification works in its favour. This is my first '50s movie for the challenge, which makes 6 different decades represented; still missing the '40s, '60s, and somehow the '90s. Solid little flick/5  The lights cast these little half-skull shadows on the wall. I just thought it was neat. 
Kazzah fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Oct 29, 2021 |
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Oct 19, 2021 08:59
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 73) Anthropophagous 2000 - 1999 - Vimeo To Serve Man This is a fairly close remake of the original. If we've learned anything from the 1998 Psycho remake, it's that even following a film shot for shot doesn't recreate what made the original. Granted, the original Anthropophagous wasn't a cinematic masterpiece, but it did have some solid moments. This film, not so much by any stretch. Seriously in comparison one would think the original had the budget of a Marvel film with how woeful quality this one is. Parts that really worked in the original such as being set on a remote island are changed here to a lakeside village. The island setting really added to the tension of being trapped, while with a village it's just load up what you can in the car or wagon and go. This film does have gallons of gore as the director seemed to follow the formula of 'if 1 fetus eating = Good! then 2 fetuses (fetii?) = More Good!'. The younger me would've forgiven a lot just on the premise of ample good gore, but old fart me...I need more substance with my gore. Give me some coherent plot, or decent acting and dialog..give me something more than just gore effects. I can't in good conscience recommend this movie to anyone, it's just that crappy. If anyone still wants to sit through this, just a head's up that the one I watched on Vimeo is in German with no subs.  74) The Book of Stone - 1969 - Youtube Origin of Evil I'm coming to dread the 'watch a horror movie from your birth year' challenges since there wasn't much released then compared to the year before and the year after. I'm going to eventually run out of options quicker than the watch a movie from a country you haven't seen yet'. This one's the classic 'young child's imaginary friend turns out to not be so imaginary' plot. Overall, this was pretty good. It's not so much gothic, but more the diet coke of gothic. Ending was kinda expected. This was pretty good and I recommend it.  75) Little Otik - 2000 - Youtube It's Only A Myth This one is based on the fairy tale of Otesánek, a couple who desperately want a child end up raising a strange baby shaped log which has an insatiable appetite to the point of even eating his adoptive parents. He is killed by an elderly woman who rips open his chest with a hoe and letting out everyone he ate. The movie pretty much follows the fairy tale, but modernized for the most part. It's pretty much dark comedy with a dash of horror, but the blend works really well. I truly don't think this film would've been possible without Jan Švankmajer. His distinctive animation style is what makes this film. Any other just wouldn't've gelled with the distinctive bizzareness of the story adaptation. I first became aware of the movie when clips of it were used in a creepypasta about some video clip that drove those who watched it insane or doomed them to a horrible end. I wasn't sure about sitting through this but it was worth it. I wasn't crazy about the cat death even though it did fit thematically. It is over 2 hours long, but unlike a fair amount of films of similar length, this didn't feel overlong or bloated. The upload on Youtube that I watched does have English and Spanish or Portuguese subtitles that do overlap at times. I highly recommend this one. 
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Oct 19, 2021 09:33
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 39) Bad Channels (1992) Trailer Seen on: Tubi Fran Horror Challenge 2021: SPOOKY BINGO Full Moon -Watch a film by Full Moon Pictures A brand new radio station format change in a small town is the biggest event of the year with an over-the-top DJ at the helm! However, the proceedings are interrupted by the arrival of alien invaders who hijack the station with extraterrestrial fungus and start capturing women in the town over the airwaves, shrinking them into little bottles! And worst of all, everyone listening thinks the DJ is pulling a publicity stunt, so no one believes him! Will humanity prevail?! Man, I have watched a bunch of crappy "horror" "comedies" this challenge, and Bad Channels stands out only because it manages to be...not quite as terrible as the others? This is because the film is played so broadly and silly that it kind of doesn't matter - it's not meant to really be scary. The acting is terrible, but we're dealing more with caricatures and less with characters here, so it's ok. The biggest surprise is that former MTV VJ Martha Quinn is actually maybe the best actor in the film. The alien is a cheapo guy in a spacesuit with a styrofoam-looking head, but there are two cute little robots he brings with him, so that's neat. The alien captures women by playing songs over the radio that make them hallucinate and think they're in music videos - these are pretty standard (hair metal, even grunge) but the third is done in a hospital by a band called Sykotik Sinfoney (like an early Slipknot or maybe GWAR contemporary, they dress in costumes and masks and are very avant garde) that is pretty entertaining because it's so weird. Like any good alien invasion movie, there's something simple that kills the aliens Lysol. Look, I'm not saying this is a good movie, but it's silly enough that it avoids the trap of trying to be both scary and funny that a lot of other films fall into. 
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Oct 19, 2021 11:45
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Darthemed posted:SPOOKY Challenge: [REC] Having trouble finding this on YouTube, would you happen to have a link handy? It sounds awesome.
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Oct 19, 2021 11:50
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:Having trouble finding this on YouTube, would you happen to have a link handy? It sounds awesome. M_Sinistrari posted:75) Little Otik - 2000 - Youtube
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Oct 19, 2021 12:17
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14. Child’s Play (2019) Solid if unspectacular. I know the movie is about Chucky and Andy’s relationship but I really would have preferred to watch Aubrey Plaza and Brian Tyree Henry do well, just about anything. Hamill’s voice acting is like an old friend there to comfort and guide you through unsure waters. This really could have just started a new killer doll franchise but I guess it’s an easier sell if you throw the Child’s Play name on it. I didn’t think they went far enough with the concept of “What if “the cloud” was taken over by a psychopathic AI”. Even the final fight at the end contained it to just the one Zed Mart. The original is a really really good slasher. The Remake is ok.
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Oct 19, 2021 13:05
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Yeah, I really wanted Child's Play to just ditch Chucky and run with the smart evil toy AI idea. Its unique and wholly different and you can avoid the unnecessary comparisons. I still wouldn't mind seeing another Child's Play movie that just goes with it.
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Oct 19, 2021 13:08
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| # ? Jun 10, 2024 05:20 |
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:Having trouble finding this on YouTube, would you happen to have a link handy? It sounds awesome. I found this, it's broken into parts but it has subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL101659E21BBE8331
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Oct 19, 2021 13:31
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