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Re: The Guest, yeah, it's inclusion for that category makes the word "yuppie" meaningless, but it's an excellent film and it's on the official list so I'm all for people checking it out. My wife is into Downton Abbey, but The Guest was my introduction to Dan Stevens, so it was really fun when we each got to watch the other project. He's a fine actor when I've seen him in other things, as well. Actually, Apostle isn't a bad recommendation for a Dan Stevens flick that would fit for the period piece category, maybe others.
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Oct 7, 2022 01:31
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 8. Pulse (Kairo) (2001) [Glitches] Probably my least favorite of the late 90's/early 00's wave of J-horror that I've seen so far, but there's still plenty to like. The look of Pulse is very striking, with a sort of gauzy soft focus that makes things really atmospheric. There's a lot of people standing around in dark, dingy rooms which makes the times when Kurosawa lets a bright glare from a window or spotlight completely blow out the camera more impactful. It all adds up to heightened realism, where everything is just off enough to be creepy instead of the real view outside your window. The story is fine, but nothing really special. The idea of the internet being isolating was already a bit old hat in 2001 and it's been explored plenty since, and there's nothing particularly special about the way Pulse explores this aside from making the disembodied voice on the other end of the connection an actual ghost. The two stories running in parallel didn't really add anything aside from a brief bit of confusion at the start, and the way the story escalates off-screen in the end borders on comedic. 3/5, but a pretty mild 3. 
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Oct 7, 2022 01:37
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Are Godzilla movies accepted for this by the way? I'd include one or two if so. He may be evergreen, but he's also king of the monsters.
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Oct 7, 2022 01:46
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Heavy Metal posted:Are Godzilla movies accepted for this by the way? I'd include one or two if so. He may be evergreen, but he's also king of the monsters. In years past they definitely were. I remember at least one poster doing them for the whole challenge.
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Oct 7, 2022 01:49
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Basebf555 posted:In years past they definitely were. I remember at least one poster doing them for the whole challenge. Nice!
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Oct 7, 2022 01:50
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Darthemed posted:
Shock is memorable for me if nothing else for that one jump scare with the kid running down the hallway.
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Oct 7, 2022 02:00
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 4. Viy (1967) Simple tale of a holy man's encounter with the unknown. The first half of the movie is pretty silly and endearing. The middle portion slowed its pace down a bit too much for me but there were still some enjoyable parts, like the road trip. I thought the effects, costumes and set design were really charming I just wish there was a bit more of it. Overall I felt like it was a decent experience but the finale is really something special and really the reason to watch the movie. I would probably recommend checking it out based on the last 10 minutes alone. Based on a horror novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol so I'll use it for 'Paperbacks From Hell' bingo spot. recap/bingo:  1. Eyes of Fire (1983) | 2. Leptirica (1973) | 3. Witchhammer (1970) | 4. Viy (1967)
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Oct 7, 2022 02:12
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EL BROMANCE posted:Tetsuo is on Criterion channel but I don’t think it’s part of the actual collection? I dunno, it's one of those. I went to the website and clicked on horror and Tetsuo was an official Mr. Criterion option of some kind.
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Oct 7, 2022 02:12
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Is Viy in English? 6: Friday the 13th part 3 Never seen it. This was a background watch. It seemed okay but nothing remarkable. I think I like the Halloween franchise more than Friday and H3 is way better than this. 2 spoops out of 5
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Oct 7, 2022 02:16
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worms butthole guy posted:Is Viy in English? Have you seen Friday 4 and 6? Those are mondo cool. Though I also liked 3 a bit, first one I saw on VHS. Rented it since it's the first hockey mask one at the time. The ending is pretty striking and rad I find. (5 is also fun) Agreed Halloween 3 rules!
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Oct 7, 2022 02:17
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Nope! I'll definitely check them out though. I think I might end just not been in the mood for Froday today tho because I did enjoy F1 and F2
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Oct 7, 2022 02:20
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worms butthole guy posted:Is Viy in English? It's main language is Russian but I ended up switching to the dubbed version towards the end because reading was making me sleepy.
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Oct 7, 2022 02:21
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Hopefully it's not too late to announce my goal of 31 movies. To start, here are the first nine of the month. I'll put the Bingo category they correlate to in parentheses. 1. Everyone Will Burn (Children of the Damned)  Basically a Spanish horror telenova, overstuffed with scenery chewing performances, melodramatic twists, and a huge web of characters with complicated relationships. The movie follows Maria Jose (played by Macarena Gomez, famously of Stuart Gordon's Dagon), a woman suffering from the loss of her son and her subsequent shunning of her small town. Just as she's about to jump off a bridge, she encounters a little girl with demonic powers and they team up to take revenge on the town. The huge performances are a lot of fun and the overcomplicated plot constantly introduces wild developments, but at two hours it's just too long to sustain its trashy mood. 2. Nightsiren (Perfect Getaway (Slovakia)) After escaping from her abusive home and accidentally killing her sister as a child, Sarlota returns to her village in the Slovakian mountains to see about an inheritance. Once there, her liberated cosmopolitan ways earn the ire of the suspicious villagers, putting her in mortal danger as their fear escalates. If this sounds like an overbearing Euro folk thriller, you're absolutely right. Nightsiren is a technically accomplished movie, with beautiful cinematography and locations and some charismatic characters, and it's certainly well worth watching, but in a Fantastic Fest slate full of Euro horror it starts to get a little much. I just hope real Slovakians don't act anything like how they're portrayed in this movie. 3. The Third Saturday in October Part V (Picnic in Hanging Rock (1993))  The opening crawl to Third Saturday 5 explains that in the late seventies, an independent studio released The Third Saturday in October, an early entry in the slasher genre that was celebrated for its off-beat style. Part V is the fourth sequel to that movie (in reality, this was the first movie in the series made). Although Third Saturday 5 is supposedly from 1993 (in reality, filmed this year), it more closely resembles Halloween 5 and Friday the 13th 4 from the eighties. Its tone is more of a pastiche than a parody of those movies, and quality wise it lies somewhere between the two. Like its inspirations, Third Saturday 5 has a very jokey tone, with over-the-top kills and a killer with a weird sense of humor. Importantly for a slasher, all the characters are plenty likeable and the digressions before the killings start are very entertaining. I shouldn't need to tell you what the plot is: there's a house of partying teens, a little kid that is improbably brought along to the party, and a killer. 4. The Third Saturday in October (Horror Noire)  The sequel/prequel to Part V, The Third Saturday in October definitely succeeds in emulating the tone of Halloween, though it has its own unique mood. It's melancholy throughout, beginning with an execution by electric chair. After Jakkariah Harding naturally resurrects himself and goes on a killing rampage, the film follows the parents of his original victims Ricky Dean Logan and Vicki Newton. To me, The Third Saturday in October gets to the heart of what I like about slashers. The movie is allowed to structure itself around observation, painting a beautiful nostalgic picture of a small town. Moments like Ricky Dean Logan stomaching racist comments and allowing himself to befriend his antagonist, final girl Heather Hill going on a date with a strange townie, only to be annoyed to no end by his obnoxious cocaine-fuelled buddies, and a dialogue-free solo dance sequence are allowed to breathe. While Jay Burleson and the other great slasher writers don't necessarily have the particular talent of a Woody Allen, Mike Nichols, or Paul Thomas Anderson to tie these observational moments into a conventional plot, they share their insight into human character. The slasher genre simply puts a structural framework on which to hang these moments. The killer removes characters when the writers have nothing else to say about them, provides a motivation for the different characters to keep moving, and provides a natural struggle around which to unite these disparate stories. The Third Saturday in October understands the appeal of the classic slashers like very few contemporary slashers. 5. Give Me an A (Femme Fatale) Give Me an A is a horror anthology made in a few months after the overturning of Roe v. Wade was leaked. Obviously, a multi-filmmaker topical anthology that went from conception to realization in a matter of months is going to be uneven, but the good parts are good enough to make the whole anthology worth watching. The bad parts tend to center around very obvious metaphor while the good parts engage in some brilliant speculative satire. 6. Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters (Behind the Screams)  The Hellboy movies aren't technically horror, but I think you could definitely describe many Hellboy comics as horror, so I'm choosing to count this for bingo. This documentary describes the career of Mike Mignola, starting from his childhood to his breakthrough creation of Hellboy to his involvement with the Hellboy movies to his captainship of a shared universe. It's definitely not just a fan convention puff piece. In particular, it does the great and difficult thing in talking head documentaries where it describes conflict - namely, Mignola's reservations about the Del Toro movies and the expanded Hellboy universe - even though the talking heads are being polite and elliptical about it. Because of that, Mignola and the artistic process in general are portrayed as much more complicated than it would be if it was just a bunch of fanboys talking about how much they like Hellboy. That's not to say that there's none of that, though, and the supporting heads are very well selected with some incisive criticism. Jorge Guttierez, Victor LaValle, and Rebecca Sugar are particular highlights. A lot of scholarly support to describe the comic business as Mignola began his career is also welcome. 7. Flowing (Goodnight Mommy)  A mysterious gas is rising from the sewers of Rome, causing hallucinations that drive the citizenry into murderous psychodramas. Amid the chaos, a family suffering from a traumatic past (dead mom) is driven into conflict. If this sounds like overbearing Euro horror, you're right! If this sounds like a Hereditary rip-off, you're less right. For my money, Flowing distinguishes itself with innovative imagery, charismatic performances, and creative set pieces. The infected get some great make-up, and the way balloons are used as a visual motif is certainly eerie. The kills are also distinctive, and even though the family with a secret trauma trope is overdone, the way the actual event is only revealed late into the movie is refreshing. Recommended. I have a feeling that "dead mom" might not count for Goodnight Mommy, but there is a specific scene that absolutely qualifies it: the father and son begin to simultaneously hallucinate the dead mother, driving both of them to blame the other for her death and try to kill each other. The way she manipulates both parties is ingeniously written and definitely says a lot about motherhood, especially when paired with the mother's character in the flashback. 8. VHS '94 (Thrilla from Manilla)  A horror anthology with no duds! Is it possible? Actually, it's not possible, because the framing story is a trainwreck. Each of the four segments is conceptually interesting and brilliantly implemented. They all feel complete, telling substantive stories in their runtime that aren't just testruns for a feature film. Unfortunately, I don't think any of them are truly great either. The stories they tell play it pretty safe and for that reason don't challenge their audience in a resonant way. If I had to rank them, I would go The Subject (2nd half) > Storm Drain > The Empty Wake > The Compound > The Subject (1st Half). 9. Razzennest (The Devil Made Me Do It)  Someone had to make a cursed director's commentary film! Razzennest is director Johannes Grenzfurthner's follow-up to last year's excellent Masking Threshold and centers around the arthouse film "Razzennest", whose director, producer, and DP meet with a film blogger to record a commentary. "Razzennest" is a film about the Thirty Years War, told in a montage of contextless images from the Austrian countryside. DP Hetti Friesenbichler was instructed to "capture the souls of the fallen" with his camera, and unfortunately for this recording session, he might just have succeeded... Razzennest is a film in two modes, the satirical mode giving way to horror, and both segments are huge successes. The satire is hyperspecific and all the funnier for it, and the horror does an unbelievable job at combining what is essentially a radio play with eerily appropriate imagery and a chilling electronic score to create a bleak sense of place. Of the horror films I saw at this festival, this gets my highest recommendation. 
pospysyl fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Oct 7, 2022 |
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Oct 7, 2022 02:52
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Everyone should be watching Viy.
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Oct 7, 2022 02:53
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 The Masque of the Red Death, 1964 A Roger Corman movie with Vincent Price? Based on Edgar Allen Poe? You know this movie will be great. The original Poe story is about rich people feasting while poor people starve and die of this plague called red death, only to find out the hard way that death don't care about wealth or class. This move greatly expand on it by making the prince played by Vincent Price a truly cruel monster of a man, and as we quickly find out, a head of a satanist coven. He surrounds him self with death and misery, and is just a great evil villain over all in all the ways you want to see from a Vincent Price performance. I don't really need to go into more details. Everything in this movie looks great and have that magical look and feel. Just beautiful and colorful. Very much a obligatory watch for any classic horror fan.
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Oct 7, 2022 02:54
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7. Gargoyles (1972) Directed by Bill L. Norton 🎃 TerrorVision 🎃 "Hmmm, bones. I smell old bones."  It's a TV movie with people in rubber suits and a relatively young Scott Glenn playing a dirt bike guy. Nothing about it is especially good. There's a lot of random slow motion that really just pads the run time. It's a little goofy and awkward, but played very straight, which makes it feel like a throwback to earlier science fiction. There doesn't seem to be any clever subtext or message here unless this movie is advocating genocide. 👻👻/5 October Challenge 3/31 1. Blood Feast (1963), 2. Sunshine (2007), 3. Relic (2020), 4. Mortuary (2005) Spooky Bingo 3/36 1. Rodan (1956), 2. Carrie (2013), 3. Gargoyles (1972)  Total 7/? twernt fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Oct 7, 2022 |
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Oct 7, 2022 03:11
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Franchescanado posted:
 26) Dark Glasses - 2022 - Shudder I caught this on Shudder's secret showing and I freely admit to being a skosh disappointed it wasn't V/H/S 99. But hey, Argento does another giallo? Well, why not? As far as gialli goes, it's fine. This would fit fine in a classic giallo marathon. Argento hits all the traditional beats here, though there are some pacing issues that could use a bit of tightening up. Franchescanado posted:
 27) Sideshow - 2000 - TubiTV For how much Full Moon films were such a significant part of my horror watching as a teen, I'll always have a soft spot for them. This applies even when the finished product could use a bit more refining. Thankfully, here this film's a nice throwback to the single shot Full Moon films of old. Story centers around a carnival sideshow that's more than it seems. While nothing new's brought to the table here, this was still an enjoyable watch for me. Phil Fondacaro absolutely shines with just the right amount of discreet menace as the owner of the freakshow. This is definitely a recommend in a Full Moon marathon of their 80s classics. Franchescanado posted:
 28) Island Claws - 1980 - Youtube For years I've been searching for the film adaptation of Guy N Smith's Night of the Crabs that's been said to exist. All I've found so far is mention it was made, but that's it. Nothing as to possible different title, casting or plot changes. In my latest appeal to my various movie discussion groups, this one was brought up as the adaptation. While I'm still not 100% on this being it, unless someone suggests something else, I'm stuck with this possibly being it. While the book and later series focuses on giant mutated crabs feasting on people up and down the coast of Wales, about the only thing this movie has in common with the book is it's killer crabs. With the books, a mutated crab the size of my neighbor's marshmallow of a bulldog is something to be scared of. With this movie, I can dig out my big pot and some Old Bay and I got this in hand. I totally get the budget issues for early 80s horror, but this was hurting fierce even in the low budget range. It's so generic you could swap out the crabs for any other animal and nothing would really change. The crabs are shown so little, the bulk of their presence is everyone talking about them. We only get one properly giant sized mutant killer crab near the end. Overall, this was a disappointment. 
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Oct 7, 2022 03:25
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#11: Leprechaun in the Hood Dead & Buried RIP Coolio  "I hope you had sex last night because I'm gonna go over there and cut off your dick" I understand why this movies has always kinda been around, without ever becoming a cult classic or getting cancelled. It's largely fine. A horror comedy with ok horror and comedy and not really enough of either to fill the running time or any real standout moments. And it's not as racist as you'd expect. So it falls in a bad middle ground where it's not funny or creative enough to be enjoyable on it's own merits, and it's not objectionable enough to post screencaps of it on Twitter for likes and retweets, but it's not bad or forgettable enough to ever be fully forgotten. You hear Leprechaun in the Hood and are like, "oh man this is gonna be a tranwreck!" but then you watch it and it's just basically alright. And while it isn't racist, it is transphobic. Not as hateful about it as a lot of movies from that era, but still more than enough to put me off the whole movie. 
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Oct 7, 2022 03:38
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October 6 - World's End Gary King is a middle aged man who hasn't moved past the glory days of when he was sixteen. he decides to try to recapture his youth by pulling together his schoolmates and attempting to complete a twelve stop pub crawl that they stalled out on. All of his old friends have moved on and grown up and become very successful as soon as they were away from him, but he suckers into going back to their hometown to do the crawl again. Except once they get there, they find that the people aren't as they remember them... I skipped World's End despite liking Edgar Wright's other movies because it looked like a movie all about how great it was to go out, get drunk, and getting drunk justified any wrong. Which is what the movie was. And it turns out that I predicted the character arcs of this movie beat-for-beat right down to how the power of being a narcissistic rear end in a top hat who no one should tolerate rebuilds those old friendships. Are the friends going to break out of the "shells" of comfortable life styles? Well, duh. Will there be a revelation that their "ideal" lives aren't so perfect? Of course. It's obvious that I was supposed to think that King was a lovable rogue and he's not: he's an abusive rear end in a top hat that everyone needed to get away from.  Beyond that, this is a film that doesn't know what it's trying to be. In attempting to merge a buddy road trip (even if the road is a single mile) with an Invasion of the Body Snatchers plot, it wound up mixing its signals a lot. Yeah there's a few very brief bits that attempt to thematically link things, but these are very few. One joke at the beginning of the film about how everything was becoming the same does not make the basis for a theme, especially when the robot duplicates roaming about town don't come across like they're being reduced to a bland mush. On top of that, the robots feel kind of pathetic as a threat which just makes the heroes seem worse. It's not until the final confrontation when they actually felt sinister instead of just weird. For the longest time I thought the movie would have a twist where they really were just trying to improve things for the community and King and company's shenanigans were the real problem because they were presented as so much worse than the robots. The fact that a middle-aged drunk could rip off their arms and smash open their heads meant that the robots weren't threatening. The build up didn't work for me either; the robots had to be aware that the group knew about them pretty quickly but they delay attempts to ensnare them for a long time. It didn't feel like there was an escalation or even mounting sense of dread here. Edgar Wright is a fine director, but everything in this movie rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like World's End needed to be about the destruction of King and instead it became about how special and wonderful he was. And the horror elements in this horror-comedy were just ineffectual. drat, I'm being a grumpy rear end in a top hat. I need to find something fun for tomorrow. Since this is a vacation that went really wrong, it wasn't A Perfect Getaway.  PKMN Trainer Red posted:Everyone should be watching Viy. I still have not found an English language version of the other horror film that the Soviet Union produced: Den Gneva.
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Oct 7, 2022 03:50
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People putting up some serious numbers , goddamn some of you all are beast. I though I was doing good with hitting 15 tomorrow.
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Oct 7, 2022 03:51
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 11. An American Werewolf in London (1981) Movies like this are much weirder to me than films that deliberately set out to be cryptic and obscure. An American Werewolf in London is perfectly approachable, good-natured even, with easygoing charm radiating from its leads. John Landis seems to have been drinking from the same water from which Ghostbusters would later sprout: ordinary Joes coping with the supernatural with a humorous practicality. Some horror beats are disarmingly goofy: a first person shot of running through the forest just like The Evil Dead footage but which pulls back to reveal a prancing naked David Naughton, a dream in which werewolves in Nazi outfits bust into a home and start machinegunning everybody, a meeting with undead victims of the werewolf where they cheerfully suggest how Naughton should off himself. Yet for all the buddy comedy joshing, when An American Werewolf in London pops off it's brutal. Creedence Clearwater Revival tunes can't make light of that agonizing transformation sequence with Naughton's whole body stretching and warping as he screams!! The wolf design and effects are stupendous, every scene with the wolf unleashed kicks rear end, especially when he rampages through Piccadilly Circus with a destructive ferocity on a scale I'm not used to seeing in horror movies - it feels like a disaster movie all of a sudden. I love it but then the ending is so absurdly abrupt (a doo-wop version of "Blue Moon" over the credits? seriously??) that you can't make out what to feel about the whole thing. It's not quite tragedy or comedy, Jenny Agutter's character seems to be missing another scene that would cement her relation to Naughton's weird problems, and come to think of it the English guys on the moors feel like a dropped subplot as well. A weird entertaining flick that isn't quite like anything else I've seen!  .5 / 5 I was going to put this down for a werewolf movie, but I realized I've got more wolf stuff lined up to watch. An American Werewolf in London kicks off with two buddies taking a scenic vacation in sunny north England before a monster tears them up, so as a vacation gone wrong it qualifies for A Perfect Getaway. 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Oct 7, 2022 |
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Oct 7, 2022 04:02
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Behind on my writeups! #1: Men (2022) A woman takes a much-needed vacation to the English countryside and encounters some strange and abusive men. The diminishing returns of Alex Garland continue. That said, there's things to enjoy in the constituent elements of this. Jessie Buckley is compelling in the lead and has a great wardrobe. Rory Kinnear makes the most of his multiple roles, even if one of them suffers from some shaky CGI. Well photographed. And Alex Garland can reuse the trick from Annihilation of making the climax a surreal dance performance as many times as he'd like, though the vaginal imagery in it is odd for a movie about toxic masculinity. Maybe this is me just not getting it, but the movie never felt like it really grappled with the problem it was addressing, and the more straightforward genre thrills and chills are fairly light and don't save the movie.  #2: The Ninth Gate (1999) Rewatch A rare book dealer attempts to verify the authenticity of a 17th-century book said to contain a ritual for summoning the devil. While making no excuses for some of the people involved in this movie, I really do love it. The low-key take on the supernatural, the wonderful character performances, how shabby the protagonist is, the slowly unwinding mystery, the beautiful but mundane look of it. It seems to have been poorly received, but the complaints about it—too slow, too unspectacular—are precisely what I enjoy about it.  #3: The One I Love (2014) Spooky Bingo: Zombie Honeymoon A struggling couple take a weekend away, where they discover idealized dopplegangers of themselves that threaten to completely upturn their marriage. Not much of a horror movie, being at best unsettling at times, I enjoyed this more as lightly comic sci-fi. This sort of high-concept movie often falls into the trap of not evolving the premise enough, of maintaining the status quo by failing to have the protagonists do anything that might upset it. Here, the two leads (Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss) engage and disrupt events, and where they don't it's solidly character-driven. Fun little relationship thriller if you're looking for something lighter.  #4: House of 1,000 Corpses (2003) A group of young adults travelling the country to write a book about roadside attractions discover an attraction they can't handle: a house filled with a family of murderous psychos. Rob Zombie's directorial debut. I wanted to watch his Firefly trilogy this year after enjoying his Halloween 2 and Lords of Salem. Had heard this was a rough start to the series, so I went in with low expectations, which probably helped. There's a lot here that I like in his later work: bold use of color, melodramatic performances, a playfulness, a sincere affection for the psychos. Unfortunately, I don't think it really adds up to much of anything, with ultimately a fairly straightforward "final girl" conclusion. But I'm excited to see where the series goes, particularly since I understand that the Sid Haig character takes a more central role, and I'd love to see more of him. 
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Oct 7, 2022 04:03
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MrGreenShirt posted:15. Spell See, I actually secretly like that it's so clearly and obviously not even a little bit West Virginia (just like the call about the dad dying comes from Kentucky but, sure... that could work, I guess). Or how they never looked up how to pronounce Appalachia (lol). Specifically, because it unlocked a weird reading of the film I liked. If you've ever watched an American movie taking place in a foreign country you're familiar with, there's always this kind of absolute hilarious inaccuracy, right? (This applies just as much for specific parts of the US that happen to not be easy to shoot in or at the TV budget etc.) Think about how many times they shoot Canada or Northern California for Europe ; it doesn't really matter to the story, but people actually familiar with, say, Southern Germany are gonna constantly be wondering, "There are very few old Spanish missions just chilling in Bavaria, also it's not exactly famous for its low scrub deserts. Why aren't the entire loving Alps dominating half the horizon????" This is the literal reverse! And once you understand that America is being used as just kind of foreign fantasy land of stereotypes that outsiders have, lots of other parts of movie click into place. Or at least they did for me. Anyway, I wound up giving it a high score because it had a lot of ideas, even if they wound up not being fully developed. Both are important, of course, but I'd prefer bravery to polish if I must pick one over the other.
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Oct 7, 2022 04:09
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6. Nightmare Weekend SPOOKY BINGO: Glitches Holy poo poo this movie. This is going to be hard to describe, bear with me. So as best I can work out, the plot of the film is this: A widower scientist (Wellington Meffert) has invented a supercomputer program called "Apache" which can alter people's behavior by means of getting them to ingest metal spheres (which can also be used to kill people.) He's invited three girls (Andrea Thompson, Kimberley Stahl, and Lori Lewis, I think) up to his house for an experiment, offering each of them $500, and also staying there is his daughter Jessica (Debra Hunter) who likes to interact with the mainframe (named George) via a weird looking puppet. But Julie Clingstone (Debbie Laster) is out to sabotage the experiment and steal the program by turning everyone into weird psychos, and things are further complicated by Jessica falling in love with her partner/lover Ken (Dale Midkiff). This is a storyline I have pieced together based largely on empirical evidence, as this American-European coproduction seems determined to make as little sense in the telling as possible. The editing is staggeringly bad, leaping from scene to scene so abruptly you'll get whiplash; the moment any scene or sequence starts to gain any momentum, the film jumps to a completely different place and time. It feels like a film assembled from scraps, with a lot of closeups and weird reverse angles and very little coverage; it's genuinely hard to tell where some scenes are meant to be taking place. Moments as simple as a person being stabbed are presented as confusingly as possible. And it's not that this film was cut for censorship reasons either, there are multiple lengthy sex scenes (to the point that the first person asked to direct turned it down because he was trying to get out of porno) and grody gore effects shot in heavy closeup. This kind of ineptitude I can get behind. There's something comforting about a movie which is this hosed up right away, you can rest easy knowing you didn't miss any important details, you're not reading the text wrong, it just makes this little sense. Just enjoy the madness. 
Maxwell Lord fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Oct 7, 2022 |
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Oct 7, 2022 04:23
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6. 'The House That Dripped Blood' (1971), Tubi Neat little move that had a little bit of everything, although I think the story I found most interesting was the first one about the tormented writer, although things certainly escalated quickly at the end. Pretty cool seeing Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, even if they don't share any scenes together. Although the very, very end of the movie tries to tie everything together by saying "the house reflects the personalities of its occupants", it kind of falls apart when you think about it, and I wish it were a little more tightly knit in having the house be integral to the weird and spooky stuff happening. For example, in Peter Cushing's story, not a single spooky thing happens to him when he's in the house itself, which kind of undermines the movie's throughline and turns it into "weird stuff happens to people who happen to occupy the house at that moment". Maybe I'm just spoiled by the first season of 'American Horror Story', which knocked the "spooky house" concept out of the park. 1. 'Tales from the Crypt' (1972) 2. 'Trilogy of Terror' (1975) 3. 'Southbound' (2015) 4. 'The Vault of Horror' (1973) BONUS: 'Smile' (2022) 5. 'Creepshow' (1982) 6. 'The House That Dripped Blood' (1971)
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Oct 7, 2022 05:11
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11. Noroi The Curse V/H/SOne of the big things that bugs me with found footage is why they're filming and how the footage was "found", and this answers both in the first few minutes which is a great start. The format is smart too, makes the cuts and edits make more sense, and allows them to insert other material for background. I think it may have been a bit overstuffed, but it gets real creepy at times and held my interest. I'm also a big sucker for a "psychic sees something horrible and goes nuts" scene and I think this had the most of those I've ever seen in a single movie.
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Oct 7, 2022 05:34
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Getting some HalloweeNIT done. 13 (16). Muse (2017) Written and directed by Jaume Balagueró; cowritten by Fernando Navarro; Based on The Lady Number Thirteen by José Carlos Somoza This one blew me away. I’ve been a fan of Jaume Balagueró and consistently enjoy what he makes, so I was pretty game for this despite the low ratings and how hard it was to track down. Thanks to a friend I did get a copy and I’m so glad I did as it has been one of my favorite watches of this early October. I get it probably isn’t for everyone. Hell I’m not even sure who I’d recommend it to. Do you enjoy slow moody gothic horrors? Do you enjoy horror wrapped up in emotion and trauma? Are you a big nerd who loves when a horror works in some idea of literature or mythology that you’ve heard tons about in life but never really seen used in a horror setting? Do you like finales that build slowly and to a tense and dramatic moment but not a ton of action or gore or whatever? I can answer those questions for myself and the answer is “hell yes.” And that’s why i loved this. Balagueró does something pretty interesting with this production wise. I went in expecting a Spanish film that was… you know… in Spanish. Then when I realized it was an eclectic cast of British, German, Romanian, Irish, and other actors and had english and spanish releases I feared the worst. Dubbing. But this was filmed in english however it did kind of have a structure of those kind of italian giallo films I kind of feared this would be. That’s to say its basically a long investigative piece with a sexual stint and a fair bit of confusion. Many of the negative reviews seemed to find the story tough to follow. I actually got the basic gist of movie and its twist pretty early on, but I don’t think that’s a big deal since the film doesn’t so much use it as a surprise twist but rather a gradual reveal. And while exact details of the rules were a bit oblique or esoteric at times the core idea of these Muses was right there in the title and I think pretty clear from at least mid way through. When you release one thing or the other may vary but I think that overall understanding and the mind bending nature of it is the core tension of it. This is a classic story of people who encounter the supernatural and struggle to gain a grasp of it but more importantly to survive it. Because gods and monsters don’t tend to care about the damage they do along their way. I dunno. I’m at a loss for words with this really. I think Balagueró is a master of tension and moody tone. I love the world and tone he builds in this thing. I love the use of mythology and literature to construct his world of horror. It made me want to go read and study classic poetry and greek mythology so I can come back to the film and watch it with a more knowledgeable base. And I love that poo poo because I am a nerd. Its a really good cast. Its some really scary supernatural beings in that real classic way that otherworldly beings just do not give a gently caress. I just really loved this. At the very least I should probably read the book. I’m definitely gonna come back and rewatch this down the line. I kind of wanted to just pop it back on right as I finished. I don’t know. This may be an acquired taste or a very specific one but man it was mine. I loved it.  14 (17). The Last Survivors (2014) Written and directed by Thomas Hammock; cowritten by Jacob Forman I kind of went into this needing a change of tone from the moody slow emotional horror I had just seen and hoping this would be a bit more action based. Its not, its really kind of a pretty common and familiar feel of that moody and emotional dystopian apocalyptic thing. Coming out of the craze of stuff like Fury Road and The Hunger Games. A limited budget means it couldn’t do any kind of that huge blockbuster stuff so its more of a The Road or Walking Dead type thing. But really its kind of a lot of people moving around concerned about the lack of resources and the terrible things people do to control them. Cruel murderers controlling limited waters supplies as individuals struggle to survive it. Its not exactly new ground and nothing here feels done particularly new or well. The big praise for this tends to go to Haley Lu Richardson. I admit I’m largely unfamiliar with her work but she does a solid job here. I don’t think anything really stood out to me but I don’t think she is to blame for anything. Just really the limitations of the script and budget. The other praise tends to go to Hammock’s directing and I do think he did his best to make what he had look good. Its limited and familiar but it does generally look good. There’s also the big action finale but… I dunno. Again, they worked with what they have. But its not much and we end in two young women having a sword fight… when everyone’s been using guns the entire film. It just feels… familiar. I guess what it comes down to is that I recognized a lot of tropes and familiar elements but there was just nothing unique to this that I bought into or pulled away from it. And derivative isn’t in and of itself a bad word to me. Doing something well is still doing something ell even if its not new. And this isn’t done poorly. Its just not done particular well either. And for the most part that meant I was just kind of bored.  15 (18). Scare Me (2020) Written and directed by Josh Ruben I had a good time with this. I had never heard of it before a few days ago but I guess it had some buzz when it first came out. I have seen Ruben’s follow up Werewolves Within and I enjoyed it but didn’t feel like it fully hit for me. I mostly was pumped for this because of Aya Cash and I absolutely think she elevates this but I think Ruben does a good job as well. Chris Redd does a great job too. Its a film that relies heavily on its two mains and one supporting character and some clever banter and dedicated delivery. And I think everyone kills. Its not overly scary and I think the whole “stories come to life” thing is maybe a bit of an over sell. I actually came into this expecting actual monsters or something. Instead I get a lot of real fun stage performances, and that’s ok. I had a really good time. Matter of fact as I’m typing this I kinda wanna go back and rewatch the song they all sing. That had me rolling. I guess my criticism and the disconnect for me is that this felt like a really fun idea and a bunch of really great bits but not necessarily a compelling narrative or plot. There is one and I think it comes together pretty well for a strong finish. But I also thing 90% of the film is kind of just having a good time doing its thing. And I can’t be mad at that. I had a good time with it too. Its clever and funny and everyone kills it. But it does feel like its the main plot line took a back seat a lot of the time and could have taken the center stage a bit more. Basically we could have moved into the final act earlier and done a bit more there. The script tries to work to it between the skits (and sometimes during them) and the good news is that gives us more time for that fun stuff. But I dunno. It did feel a bit like a plot that existed so the the really fun idea could have a plot. But it is a really fun idea and very well executed by a very fun cast. More Aya Cash comedy horrors. Matter of fact I just added another Aya Cash horror comedy about a relationship to my list. Kill another challenge and hopefully have some more fun. And really a movie leaving me wanting more is basically the best praise, right?
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Oct 7, 2022 05:38
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 12. Breakdown (1997) "You really want me to stop!? Because I bet this baby stops on a loving dime!!" Yuppie Kurt Russell battling rednecks in the desert to get his wife back! It made me smile seeing Russell in a baby blue Ralph Lauren polo tucked into his khakis, brandishing a cell phone the size of a shoebox. Breakdown has a juicy thriller premise, too: Russell is traveling with his wife Kathleen Quinlan, and when their car breaks down, a friendly trucker gives her a lift to the next rest stop while Russell waits with the car. Except after Russell gets the car going, wifey's nowhere to be found, no one's seen her, including the trucker who act likes he doesn't know Russell from Adam, and all the locals have quite the stinkeye for this agitated city boy who won't stop poking around. I love that story phase where Russell has no leads and she might as well have spontaneously turned to sand and blown away into the desert. There's one of those classic pans across a bunch of indifferent locals at a diner where every sullen face seems to be saying "What you lookin' at, ya fancy Mass-ee-choozits boy?" But even when the truth of what's happened comes out, things stay good. Lots of grounded action with a nice seasoning of pissed off Kurt Russell; tight chases with lovely cars, mulitple tense standoffs, and one of the more satisfying kills in genre history. It ain't Shakespeare but it's more than good enough!  .5 / 5 Breakdown is on the Spooky Bingo list for Yuppie Nightmare! 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Oct 7, 2022 |
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Oct 7, 2022 06:20
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 Masters of Horror -Pick an objective Master of Horror. Watch a film of theirs you've never seen. I choose you, Koji Shiraishi! #33.) Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Final Chapter (2015; digital) It's been a year and a half since the events of the previous movie in the series, which ended with a demon god soldier appearing in the sky over Tokyo. Director Kudo and AD Ichikawa are still stuck in time-space limbo, leaving cameraman Tashiro to guide viewers in his search for the remaining mysteries, and to hopefully retrieve his co-workers from limbo. Tashiro (played by series director Koji Shiraishi) has always been suggested to have a slight cowardly streak, but he's willing to take up his camera (now equipped to allow continuous direct streaming from wherever he goes) and plunge into the existing mysteries, while also uncovering new ones. These include life-sized dolls appearing around the city, but more important than that, there's the sudden appearance of a man named Eno, who says he owes a favor to a Tashiro from another dimension. Eno provides four missions for Tashiro to complete, saying that their completion will return Kudo and Ichikawa to this dimension. But there's a deadline of dawn, an hour and a half away, perfect for bounding the film's run-time. Having a guide who apparently knows the way gives this entry a significantly different dynamic from the previous six full-length films in the series. Time travel, space warping, transformation, and strange rituals are old hat for the series by this point, but this entry takes it to a completely new level, even considering how bizarre the previous one got. It's a fantastic spinning together of elements from all throughout the previous movies, and I can't imagine what some of the actors from the earliest ones thought when they were contacted to come back for this and got to read the script. And it really rewards being familiar with the central three characters, playing around with conceptions of how they would behave and playing them off of each other. What a ride. “To get something impossible, you have to do something impossible!” Rating: 9/10 First SPOOKY
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Oct 7, 2022 06:29
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7. The Conspiracy (2012) (challenge: Behind the Screams) "What I am is an idea, I am the embodiment of an idea, and if it occurred to me, it will eventually occur to other people as well, and then there'll be 2 people on the street with megaphones, then there'll be 10 people in the street with megaphones, then it'll be 100 people." "But what if They're not even listening?" "Are you listening?" A duo sets out to make a documentary about conspiracy theorists, but when their main subject disappears, they find themselves compelled to continue his investigation of a secret society. It's pretty good! The standout segment to me is the beginning featuring Terrance the conspiracy theorist; there is some serious nuance and pathos brought to the character while the film unabashedly cuts in real footage of 9/11 and other real events, giving the whole thing an eerie level of reality. There are some fun little jokes and touches, like someone who's gone full-blown conspiracy brain nonetheless not recognizing the name Bernstein, and a blink-and-miss-it moment where our main characters briefly fall silent during a public conversation as a black SUV drives past. This pays off greatly when they continue to catch the same black SUV following them! There is a not-insignificant amount of screentime dedicated to our characters interacting with people through a Second Life knockoff which looks hilariously dated. In contrast to the excellent acting and layered portrayal of the conspiracy theorist, one of the filmmakers goes full Pepe Sylvia immediately and carries that energy throughout. There are times the duo splits and the less-conspiracy-brained guy is still filming stuff, which requires the introduction of a "guy's friend holding the camera" character who is a total non-entity. The final act of the duo trying to sneak in to the society is entirely shown through grainy and low-quality bodycam footage, which is ambitious but kinda annoying, and their total ineptitude at blending in is distracting, but once things get moving it's serviceable. The mockumentary format is used to good effect, raising questions like "why is the Illuminati letting me watch a documentary about it at all?" and answering them well. This facilitates a specific stylistic effect in the final third of all the cult members' faces being blurred which is very cool! Also there's also a brief segment featuring a professor and it turns out he's a real-life professor talking about his actual subject of study. As a wise person once said, "Being a conspiracy theorist, even for pretend, is totally fun", and this pretty much delivers on that promise. 7.5/10 VROOM VROOM fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Oct 7, 2022 |
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Oct 7, 2022 06:37
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6. Sole Survivor (1983) A woman survives a plane crash, gets survivor's guilt and starts to see weird people staring out. Sole Survivor is just so dull, it takes so long to get the plot going it goes nowhere then. It's final destination without the interesting kills. The poster seems to come from a much cooler different movie about skull technology. Not recommended. Available on shudder
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Oct 7, 2022 07:03
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Crescent Wrench posted:Re: The Guest, yeah, it's inclusion for that category makes the word "yuppie" meaningless, but it's an excellent film and it's on the official list so I'm all for people checking it out. My wife is into Downton Abbey, but The Guest was my introduction to Dan Stevens, so it was really fun when we each got to watch the other project. He's a fine actor when I've seen him in other things, as well. Actually, Apostle isn't a bad recommendation for a Dan Stevens flick that would fit for the period piece category, maybe others. These are all great opinions so I took you up on it and checked out Apostle : this movie absolutely fucks. It's early 20th Welsh murder cultists, and they got Michael Sheen to play their weirdo prophet! In a stunning twist for him, he does a funny voice but it rules. If any of that sounds good to you, you should watch it too.
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Oct 7, 2022 07:33
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pospysyl posted:4. The Third Saturday in October (Horror Noire) Can these be bought or streamed somewhere? Hellboy is extremely my poo poo, and the Third Saturday movies sound good as well.
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Oct 7, 2022 07:42
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VROOM VROOM posted:My read is that he totally is David and was 100% sincere in his promise to Caleb to help his family, except as we see in the movie he practically only knows how to do it with violence. So he escapes from the program and heads directly to the Peterson house to fulfill his promise and at the same time lay low as he completes his preparations to vanish entirely. But he gets his cover blown and No Witnesses Mode activates Opopanax posted:Right, guess there were a few bits like that, Suppose he's more of a realistic super soldier, just not Cap levels Captain America is how the US sees itself, David is how the rest of the world sees the US. BioTech fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Oct 7, 2022 |
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Oct 7, 2022 07:46
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Random Stranger posted:October 6 - World's End It's definitely the weakest movie in the Cornetto Trilogy, but I still liked it. I guess I'm just in the perfect age bracket where I'm a few years younger than Edgar Wright so when he made a partially autobiographical movie about a guy who's having trouble acting his age and accepting maturity, it hit hard for me and that kind of smoothed over a lot of the problems and cracks in my mind. But even saying that for me it's Shaun of the Dead > Hot Fuzz >>> The World's End.
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Oct 7, 2022 08:07
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#10 - Bait A tsunami hits the Australian coast, trapping a group of people in a flooded supermarket and underground parking lot together with two great white sharks. I'm surprised at how enjoyable this was. I had zero expectations and while it suffers from terrible acting it kept finding ways to provide thrills and never gets boring. Two different locations with their own problems, exposed power cables and rising water, more than the usual tension between survivors, there is a lot going on. It doesn't have the polish of something like Crawl, but for me Bait definitely comes out on top based on how much carnage there is. The very lovely CGI shark in the opening scene had me a bit worried, but thankfully the movie used some pretty good animatronics for most of its runtime and when it did use CGI the scenes were murky underwater shots or otherwise occluded making it way more believable than I expected after a poor start. I think you can do a lot worse for the Wild Beasts or H2O challenge than Bait. Counted for "H2O" 
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Oct 7, 2022 10:03
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16. Halloween H20 (1998) Watched On: Blu Ray  And so we begin the Miramax timeline. For years I waffled back and forth on what I think of H20 but at this point I think I've landed that this is a pretty solid entry. We have two versions of post '78 Laurie and H20 might be my favorite. H20 Laurie is just a scared lady that tried to change her identity and get as far away from the night her brother killed all her friends and tried to kill her, she hasn't been preparing like Sarah Connor waiting for the day Michael comes back, she's hoping that poo poo never happens and is even starting to warm up to the idea that Michael no longer haunts her. Of course he does and is about to directly. The worst parts of H20 are that the kills really aren't that great and you can feel that post-Scream 90's aura coming off it through the dialogue, teen characters, etc. As far as characters I really wish LL Cool J had a little more to do? His whole thing writing the romance novel is pretty funny though. And hell, if they'd stuck with it, H20 has a great end for Michael and Laurie. Laurie has finally had enough of this poo poo and it rules. No guns, no bombs, no fire, just a fuckin' axe, baby. Favorite Shot  I agree with the One Perfect Frame account. This scene of Laurie going back in after Michael is good stuff. Favorite Kill  Adam Arkin did not get done in easy by Michael. Typical overprotective older brother. The Mask  They used a few masks for H20 and while it's very brief, I gotta point out and scorn this awful CGI Michael. It's unsettling but not in the way they were going for 1/10
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Oct 7, 2022 11:00
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12: The Curse of the Cat People (1944) Golden Years Set some years after the events of the first film, Kent has remarried and has a young daughter who daydreams a lot. A strangle old lady gives her a ring that she can make a wish on and she wishes for a friend, summoning the ghost of Kent's first wife, Irena the Cat Lady. Irena's in no way menacing and it's a little ambiguous if she's a figment of Alice's imagination. The main drama is over Kent's frustration at Alice's fantasies, or lies as he calls them, which ramps up when her imaginary friend is his dead wife. The threatening force is the daughter of the old lady, who doesn't recognize that she's her daughter. She becomes murderously jealous that her mother is doting on Alice but rejects her. Ultimately she's defeated by the power of friendship I like the old lady. The whole "turning into a panther and killing people" thing goes strangely unmentioned. It much less of a horror than the first one, more like a fairy tale. It's a sweet little film but a strange direction to take a sequel. Total: 12 Scream 4; Scream 5; Burke & Hare; Pet Semetary (1989); Lake Mungo; Season of the Witch; Childsplay 3; Boris Karloff: the Man Behind the Monster; Piranha (2010); Dead and Buried; Black Sabbath; The Curse of the Cat People 
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Oct 7, 2022 12:01
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bitterandtwisted posted:It's a sweet little film but a strange direction to take a sequel. RKO: Make a movie about cat people. Val Lewton: No. RKO: Make a sequel to Cat People. Val Lewton: Also, no.
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Oct 7, 2022 12:55
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TheKingslayer posted:16. Halloween H20 (1998) I was wondering why that one shot looked so horrible...didn't know it was CGI
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Oct 7, 2022 13:10
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