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Sorry for the incoming Wall O' Text, but I decided yesterday was "Full Moon Friday" and meant to celebrate as best I could.Franchescanado posted:
 #9. The Curse of the Werewolf (Peacock) A young man living in Spain in the eighteenth century discovers he is a werewolf. When it comes to Hammer films, in the past I'd always gravitated towards the big series based off established horror franchises - your Draculas and Frankensteins - while eschewing away from the smaller series or one off titles. More recently, I've been going back and catching up on smaller franchises, like their Mummy series, and the more esoteric one offs, like Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. I'd always danced around their one Werewolf outing, but had never made time for it. Turns out, I needn't have bothered. I can appreciate that it wants to try and be its own thing and goes for something totally different from other werewolf movies that have come before it, but following our main character from before he was even born ends up dragging the whole thing out so much longer than it needed to be. (That's not even getting into how gross and unnecessary it was for our main character to be a product of rape in the first place.) Oliver Reed does fine with the role of "tormented young lover", but he doesn't show up until the halfway mark, while he doesn't turn into a werewolf until around the hour mark. There's just so much unnecessary padding here; the killer werewolf - you know, the main draw of these things - is on screen for less than 5 minutes. There's also a lot of weird cuts throughout, where it looks like a lot of the violence was excised by censors at some point. (Oh, but we can leave the rape in, right?) It's drawn out, boring, and curiously lacking in terms of anything you were ostensibly here to see. Not recommended.  /5Franchescanado posted:
 #10A. "Werewolf By Night" (Disney+) - 54 mins It's familiar Marvel paint-by-numbers construction, and at this point you're either fine with that or not. (I'm a sucker who's totally bought in at this point, so I'll show up for pretty much whatever live action slop they throw out there.) You can tell the basic beats well before they show up - this is the one dramatic emotional scene, here's the part where the two characters get together for a jokey dialogue scene that goes on too long to pad the run time, here's a CGI-heavy action scene, no deviating from formula too much. Director Michael Giacchino - who I only knew as a composer - tries to keep things interesting by making it a 1940s pastiche, and using the black-and-white to sneak in a surprising amount of (bloodless PG-13) violence, but it's still only averaging out to okay. I was promised werewolf action in a Marvel movie, and they kinda deliver, but only the minimum amount that they can get away with at the end. Man-Thing, our surprise cameo character, gets far more chances to show up and incinerate people, which I appreciate it, but it's not what I was promised on the tin. I don't know if you could extend this out a little further, or add some more story bits in the beginning to explain what is going on with Gael Garcia Bernal's character and how and why he's a werewolf, to make this into a proper movie. With the right budget and expectations I think it could work, but I also fear that the special proves that there's not enough character or story there to really make it necessary to try.  #10B. "The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror X" (Disney+) - 22 mins I chose this one because of the Werewolf Flanders reveal - it's odd that the Simpsons Halloween specials rarely went to The Werewolf Well for their stories - but it ended up being an interesting episode choice in its own right. When it comes to "Golden Age 'Simpsons'", I'm a little more lenient than most, since I extend out as far as Season 13 for the "it's fine but not quite as good as what had come before it" level of acceptability. (It might be a very "rock and roll stopped being good when I left high school" kind of thing, but hey.) While the story selection might be a little weak for a big 10th anniversary, it is an interesting time capsule of the late 1990s and where the show's satirical leanings lay - I Know What You Did Last Summer, "Xena: Warrior Princess" and Y2K is an odd melting pot of pop culture for them to be working against, but they mostly manage to make it land. I can't ever be too mad at an episode that agrees that we should be launching Paulie Shore into the sun, after all.  #10C. "Dinosaurs - Little Boy Boo" (Disney+) - 22 mins "Dinosaurs" is a largely, and unfairly, forgotten show, but this Halloween episode unfortunately doesn't include most of its best elements. The main family is mostly absent, focusing almost entirely on the Robbie/Baby dynamic, telling a story of how Robbie turned into a were-caveman. And while the environmentalism messages that were frequently peppered throughout the show are missing here, so too is any other message to take its place. There's no satirical point to be made about the season or its commercialism or anything like that. Instead there's just a hollow retread of the 1941 Wolf Man movie, pentagrams and all, but with no real depth to anything. In fact, it was so short that they had to pad it out with a music video (seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y4qnQ0tEUE). It's just fine and all - "Dinosaurs" was never worse than "just fine" - but it does make me want to go back and revisit the better episodes. All three episodes rated /5 Watched so far: The Empty Man, Hocus Pocus 2, Smile (2022), It Came From Outer Space, Watcher, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, Bats, Choose or Die, The Curse of the Werewolf, "Werewolf By Night"/various Halloween episodes
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Oct 8, 2022 16:57
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Franchescanado posted:
 34) The Living Skeleton - 1968 - Criterion Channel For decades, the only bit I knew of this film was from a publicity still that does not exist in the movie and is a skosh misleading. Still, this one was pretty good. Plot starts off with a group of pirates hijacking a ship and murdering everyone on board. Story then skips ahead three years to the surviving twin of one of the murdered. After she discovers the chained together murder victims from the ship on a scuba diving trip, the unquiet dead begin their revenge. While most ghostly revenge films tend to follow a pattern, this one does and doesn't. There were a few plot swerves I didn't expect which was pretty nice. The stylistic cinematography really slathers the mood around making this quite a treat. Definitely a recommend from me, even though, I still would've liked to've seen something like that publicity still I've known for so long. Franchescanado posted:
 35) Macabre - 1958 - TubiTV William Castle's long been a favorite of mine. If I could go back in time, it would be to see any of the gimmick films during their heyday. If not that, totally would love to go see something in the original three screen Cinerama. Macabre is Castle's first gimmick film. Story follows a small town doctor who's child is kidnapped and buried alive with the doctor having five hours to find her. The gimmick here was offering certificates for a $1000 life insurance policy in case the movie frightened you to death. Some theaters would have 'nurses' in the lobby and/or a hearse parked out front. Overall, it's a pretty decent mystery with plenty of red herrings. The runtime ensures everything moves along at a good clip. The animated end credits were a nice touch. A long time fave of mine and a recommend. 
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Oct 8, 2022 17:01
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 14. Death Line aka Raw Meat (1972) Most of this is a dry police investigation (complete with Inspector Donald Pleasance sniping at MI5's Christopher Lee over jurisdictions and responsibility), but when we get into the subway tunnels under London it's pretty good, since there's a cannibal living down there chomping away on tube riders and maintenance workers. A little slow, but the cannibal's lair has that grody TCM feel that amps up the atmosphere. A solid watch.  3/5 -- Bingo Square: To Serve Man 15. Night Terror (1989) This is a low budget indie horror anthology and it's pretty great! The framing story is a guy wandering a hospital dipping into other peoples' nightmares. First story features a master cocksmith, second is a haunted roller coaster, and then I am a happy teddy bear. Final segment ends the wraparound and is truly bonkers. Available on YouTube. /5 -- Bingo Square: Tales of TerrorTotal Watched: 15 // First Time: 13 
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Oct 8, 2022 17:40
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18. Orca USA, 1977. Dir. Michael Anderson Wild Beasts A heroic killer whale seeks vengeance against the bloodthirsty, cowardly fishing boat captain who took from him everything he ever loved. This was one of many Jaws ripoffs to come right after the original sunk its rows of teeth into our collective unconscious, and the only one to make any lasting impact simply because it didn't try to be "Jaws, but with a different animal." This is a very different story, with, at times, actual emotional weight behind it. The killer whale effects looked great, and never took me out of the movie until a shot at the very end that looked really janky. The film was often nicely suspenseful and had a compelling story, but kinda shot itself in foot during the final act when it slowed down to a crawl and spent too much time just sitting around and waiting. Decent recommend. 6/10. Stray thoughts: You knew it was coming early on. Big bad killer whale's gotta kill a great white shark, let everyone know that this ain't your daddies Jaws. Also not a great prop for the shot of the orca slamming into the shark. Very stiff. Appreciated that they tried to give the captain an almost identical tragic backstory involving a drunk driver. Didn't even remotely get me to give one drop of sympathy for him. What's this patriarchal, nuclear family garbage? "Killer whales mate for life, blah blah blah." Bullshit. Orca are Matrilinear. In any population size larger than a transient adult female with 1 or 2 of her possibly adult children, resident orca (like in this movie) will almost always live with their mothers, and they with their mothers, and so on, for their entire lives, up through the oldest living female in the pod who may be a great-great-great-grandmother at that point. A pod of killer whales can be thought of as one giant family tree. Sorry not sorry, a marine biologist has to nerd out every now and again. And so our hero swam off into the sunset, having murdered that worthless human bastard. He may have lost a wife and child, but he gained millions of adoring fans. 
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Oct 8, 2022 17:46
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 - (19). Zombieland (2009) Directed by Ruben Fleischer; Written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick Watched on Peacock A good and nice and easy rewatch. I've seen it a few times and remembering loving it the first time through. I remember being a little more down on it last time I watched with the sequel but that could have been diminishing returns with the sequel. As with all comedies of the 2000s I worried it would just age terribly but it was pretty fine. It could be easy to look at Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg's characters and see those bad attitudes of the era but they're largely played in a self deprecating or self aware way. Emma Stone and her sister constantly make fools of them and when they're alone together they tend to show a lot more humanity. To that end for a dumb comedy the film does have a really nice heart of the need for companionship and human interaction. We are social beings so even these characters who are actively avoiding people or might have been pretty cynical and misanthropic in the old world just kind of need it. They're attitudes might have helped them get this far with no attachments or a comfortable detachment from the sheer horror and madness of it all. But once they all start letting people in they realize what they've been missing and why it might be worth it after all. Most zombie stuff plays that angle to some degree or another, but Zombieland does a good job doing it in this comedic setting. And yeah, the comedy doesn't age too badly. You could certainly be annoyed by any of the characters and their cliches but I mostly laughed at them. I wouldn't say I loved it or that it felt super revolutionary but of course its been over a decade. We're on the tail end of the zombie revival and quippy action comedies are very prevalent to the point that "quip" has become a four letter word to a lot of people online. But its fun and does a good job being light while still having some pathos. I also kind of found myself thinking of the structure of the movie this time with the flashbacks and goofy side jumps. I wonder if at some point it was a more linear story and then they just decided to jump right into the "Zombieland" and catch us up as we go. Dunno but it works. I had a good time and while it didn't make my October or anything it was a nice and easy casual watch. You need some of those between all the big stuff during these or you'll burn yourself out.  16 (20). Morbius (2022) Directed by Daniel Espinosa; Written by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless Watched on Netflix That was pretty bad but I dunno… I expected a lot worse for how much the internet did that overreacting thing the internet always does. Everything is either the worst thing ever or the best thing ever. Morbius is just kind of a middle of the road film that leans a bit more bad than good. One thing I actually really liked was the very gothic vampire feel of the first act. It seemed pretty clear to me that this was conceived as a kind of modern Dracula and there’s a lot of cool vibes there from the cargo ship massacre to Morbius’ purple lined coat. For the first act of the film I was actually really enjoying it and I think if it had committed to the horror approach this could have worked. Unfortunately it shifted into the formulaic super hero thing. And while I like super hero things there’s still good version and bad ones. Matt Smith is a lot of fun but its all him elevating the role with his charisma. The character as written is just completely generic and there’s just nothing there. There’s nothing wrong with doing the classic story of Morbius foil and friend who gets corrupted by the power and embraces being a monster. But the movie just does nothing with it. And that’s a common problem. There’s some real value in the basic idea of Morbius trying to control his bloodlust or willingly allowing himself to be imprisoned as a solution. But again, the film doesn’t do anything with it. None of that cop and prison stuff leads anywhere or factors into the last act and he’s just driven to leave it by the bad guy pushing him. So it just all feels like a waste of time. And Adria Arjona’s love interest character was another big frustration for me. She’s such a lazy nothing character. I honestly had no idea what to make of her through this. Was she just weirdly chill with the idea of vampires and murders as an extension of the lines she was willing to push with her medical research and experiments. Like she just accidently created penicillin so time to test that poo poo out? Or was it that she was so deeply in love with Morbius that she was willing to go along with everything no matter how scary and insane it was? Or was it more malicious? I had this thought late in the film that maybe she was the mad scientist this entire time. That she was going along with the murder and vampirism because that stuff didn’t bother her, she was trying to harness the power herself. That would have been a pretty interesting route to go and it feels vaguely teased for a sequel, but again its all left on the table here. And I honestly have no idea if it was really there or if I was just making stuff in my head because she was such a blank slate. Also, I’m not someone who generally complains about CGI. The vampire faces were 50/50 but what was the point of that weird blurring effect when the vampires moved? I don’t get what it was meant to be doing and it just kind of looked ugly and distracting. It felt like a choice made purely for style’s sake but it didn’t work. And I started to wonder if its purpose was just to blur the lines of the cheap CGI so you don’t see the seems more clearly. I dunno. So I mean, its a bad film. And any positive feelings I had about it were dashed away by the nonsensical and shameless post credits attempts to confuse the audience that this isn’t a MCU film. You could complain about it specifically but its not worth the hassle. Its just lame. But I do think there’s a decent movie in here somewhere. If they had zeroed in on the horror/dracula stuff and give Smith and Arjona more development and time. Probably cut the cops and prison stuff and just focus on character stuff. Cut down the action a bit. But that’s not the film we got and while I don’t think this was unwatchable or especially worth all the attention its gotten its still basically a bad failed attempt.
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Oct 8, 2022 18:09
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e: Piss, never mind, forgot TV shows don't count.
Gyro Zeppeli fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 18:10
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8. Werewolf by Night A group of monster hunters compete for an artifact... with spooky results. It's an OK entry-level spook. I'm not sure if the short run time helps or hinders it. It keeps it from having too much fat, but it also means I don't know who any of these people are. I was pretty confused at how the monster hunters seem to be bad guys? The cheesy old-timey aesthetic is done fairly well. Everyone is appropriately over dramatic. They do a "don't show the transformation" style werewolf transformation, and they do it pretty well. The werewolf himself looks like a furry guy, which is really what he should look like in this kind of movie. It's a bit odd though, since they have a pretty good CGI monster along for the ride. It feels very much like a Halloween special/TV event movie. I wouldn't mind seeing Marvel do this each Halloween. Just a quick, weird little baby spook that you can forget before the month ends. 2.5/5 To round out the Halloween is Special category I thought I'd see if the most recent Simpsons Treehouse of Horror is not entirely terrible but... I just can't do that to myself. So let see if the one with the 90s 3D Homer holds up. 8.9. Treehouse of Horror VI  Attack of the 50-Foot Eyesores Homer steals a giant donut... with spooky results. The weakest of the three stories, easily. There's not a whole lot going on here. It has a few good lines but nothing super great. I was really surprised at how many people die. Chief Wiggum just cold blood murders a guy on the street. Best part was when the Lard Lad gets his donut back and then just turns around and keeps destroying things. Bonus points for being the only time I can remember hearing the word ionic on TV. 2.5/5 Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace Springfield Elementary misprints their calendars... with spooky results. I totally forgot this segment was part of this Treehouse of Horror. Nightmare on Elm Street was my first horror love, so I always loved this story. It's still great. A great parody of the movies. Tons of great jokes. The furnace explosion sets Willie and nothing else on fire. He runs down the hallway and sits on a chair and nothing else burns. The origin of the two spaghetti meals meme. Martin's super nerd dream. After he dies in class his body is exposed to all the kids and then they wheel him into the kindergarten. Willie is foiled by sinky sand. Willie comes back for one last scare that's just him making scary faces across the street. The whole thing is perfect. 5/5 Homer3 Homer hides from an exciting night with his sisters in law... with spooky results. It holds up. The 3D really isn't that bad. It's obviously dated but it's what you'd see in a no-budget 3D movie today. It's not like first gen PS1 game no textures bad. Also a ton of excellent jokes in here. Homer thwarted from hiding in the closet by his kids' legal mumbo-jumbo. Patti & Selma come over with a horrible fun activity. Ned brings his ladder to search for Homer... in the living room. Professor Frink shocks everyone with 3D. Wiggum solves his problems by shooing again. Grandpa and his old-timey diving suit. Erotic cakes. The Simpsons used to be so good. 5/5 
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Oct 8, 2022 18:17
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 8)My Best Friend's Exorcism (amazon prime) Paperbacks From HellI loved the book, and it's a paperback from hell by the author of Paperbacks from hell. As for the movie, there are some changes that absolutely weaken the themes and point of the book so spoilers for book and movie The ending of the book is an inverse of the scene from Salem's Lot when Callahan's faith fails him. The "proper" exorcism fails, and it's only when Abby uses the items she has faith in, that are holy to their friendship that the demon is defeated. Now there's like a line of this in the movie, but it doesn't really work, because unlike the book, it doesn't build up their friendship at the beginning. The book does the work-showing how they meet and how their friendship grows, and why certain items and memories are important talismans to their relationship. Now, it's a 90 minute movie, and probably doesn't have time to show all that, but you could pick one? Hell, I thought they might have one of the concert tickets she tore up in the middle get stuck in her show or pocket at the end, and that's how they were going to handle it. The movie also dodges some of the queer themes of the relationship, which is kind of weird too So I think it totally whiffed the ending, but otherwise wasn't too bad. Definitely a bit of a disappointment. Probably would have worked a little better as a miniseries. /5 1)The Munsters, 2)Color Out of Space 3)Living Dead Girl 4)Collingswood story5)Mr. Harrigan’s Phone 6)Werewolf by night/halloweenies 7)Hellraiser 8)My Best Friend’s Exorcism
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Oct 8, 2022 18:43
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4. GENOCIDE, aka WAR OF THE INSECTS (1968) – I chose the original Japanese language version of this sci-fi horror oddball. For better or worse, the English dub would have contributed to its extreme “weird movie on at 4:00am on TNT in the 1990’s” vibe! Opening with a cool montage of various insects over Japanese text, a man named Joji is on the beach with a blonde woman named Anabelle. They both witness a plane crash. We soon see the plane is an American bomber and the crash is caused by a giant mist of killer bees! So unfolds a mystery in a tropical setting, getting increasingly ridiculous the more details we learn. Namely, it turns out Anabelle is a bitter concentration camp survivor who despises mankind and has been collaborating with communist forces on insect biowarfare – that’s right, she is injecting bees with hallucinatory venom that makes people go insane on a mass scale! Will the Earth survive? There is some pay-off here, and the movie isn’t terrible at least. However, the low budget prevents the exciting prospect of global chaos and we are limited to the islands of Japan. The bug action is primarily people screaming and waving their arms around while flying insects are superimposed over them. There is a cool hallucinatory scene in which insects literally declare their disdain for humanity to a scientist who voluntarily injected himself with the venom. SCORE: 5.4 / 10  INSECT CHALLENGE: WATCH MOVIES INVOLVING EACH OF THE MAJOR INSECT GROUPS The main insects are bees, which count toward the Hymenoptera group. +1 point *** 5. THE FUNHOUSE (1981) – I like this movie. A stumbling block, one which may have prevented it from becoming a classic, is the flat characterization of the four leads – as decent as the performances are. You can almost imagine a Spielbergian version of this movie with toned down violence and charismatic kids. By the way – the dudes look way too old. The strongest element of The Funhouse is its utilization of the setting. The first half or even two thirds of the movie is relatively uneventful but you are never bored with the flow of strange sights, sounds, and smells of the carnival. The main girl’s younger brother sneaking around at the carnival also keeps you guessing (he does not amount to much use in the end). “Terrifying, terrifying, terrifying…” says a carny. I suppose in the year 2022 there is something to be said about how carnival workers are portrayed. “He is not even human!” shouts one of the girls in regards to the main threat, the Carny Mutant. I don’t know where I stand here – on the one hand, this is nothing more than a campfire tale; on the other, no doubt there are interesting essays out there breaking these problematic elements down. It’s not like there isn’t a dark underbelly of the carnival scene much like everything else. SCORE: 7.0 / 10
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Oct 8, 2022 18:53
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 15. Hocus Pocus (1993) "You know, I always wanted a child, and now I think I'll have one. ON TOAST!!" The joy of camp. The daffy clowning of the witch trio is so ludicrous and hammy that I can't help but smile. Even the dumbest comedy is elevated by enthusiasm and there's a couple high quality zingers in here too (the "It is a prison for children!!" joke about school slew me), a broader and zanier update on the fish-out-of-water antics of Warlock. Also surprisingly horny for a Disney flick? '90s family movie material normally bores me silly, and granted most minutes without Midler, Parker and Najimy onscreen are minutes wasted, but this is a fun fizzy Halloween-flavored soda pop.  .5 / 5 For Spooky Bingo, a big dose of witching sews up Something Wicked This Way Comes. 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Oct 24, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 18:56
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Xiahou Dun posted:Apostle (Gareth Evans ; 2018) I'm glad you enjoyed it. Happy any time I can land a recommendation! 7. Cannibal Holocaust (1980) (first viewing) Oh hey, look, it's some Italian exploitation trash! In this extremely sleazy picture, an American documentary crew has gone missing during a film shoot about cannibal tribes in the Amazon. It's up to Harold Monroe, an anthropology professor from NYU, to find them. Which he does about 40 minutes into the movie--well, he finds their skeletons and their film reels. The back half of the movie is spent reviewing the material they filmed, presented in a kind of proto-found-footage manner. A television station wants to broadcast the footage, but as Monroe reviews it, he learns it's not so much sensational as it is repulsive. (Which will have many viewers saying "Kind of like the movie itself!") The documentary crew, which already had a reputation for staging events in prior documentaries, goes on a complete rampage to stir up trouble, including acts like gang-raping women and burning down villages. But if the fake rapes and murders weren't enough, there are also no less than a half a dozen unsimulated animal deaths on-screen. One in particular features the animal being butchered at length. There is an extremely shallow attempt to slap some social commentary on top to justify all of this. I kid you not, the last line is Munroe saying "I wonder who the real cannibals are." But, animal cruelty and general moral repugnancy aside, it's just not a very good movie. It's kind of structured like an investigation, but it's exceedingly obvious as to what happened. There's some general historical interest for an early found footage angle, but as always the stylistic rules are flimsy at best. I particularly liked when Monroe shows the television suits "the stuff that even your editors didn't have the stomach to put together." It's got rapid-fire cross-cutting between camera angles and a score. Speaking of the music, if I did have one positive, there are a couple of cool tracks. Unfortunately, although you can apparently buy a full-length album, I swear this movie has about 6 minutes of music and two tunes. You'll hear them over and over and over again. There's one scene that goes on so long that the track ends, so they just play the other one immediately afterwards. Honestly, I didn't get too much out of this other than being able to say I've seen it. SPOOKY Bingo: This one checks off "To Serve Man." 
Crescent Wrench fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 18:59
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Franchescanado posted:
 17 (21). They/Them (2022) Written and directed byJohn Logan Watched on Peacock I’m of mixed opinions about this one. It feels well intentioned and there's a lot of stuff I like about it. Unlike a lot of slashers its got a real interest in making his characters full. And the entire situation here is so hosed up and real and has you feeling it. Kevin Bacon is as slimy and contemptible as ever playing the nice guy who tries to put a friendly face on something terrible but who pretty quickly starts to drop that act and show the monster he is piece by piece. By the mid way point of this film my mom who I was watching this with was actively yelling at the screen for someone to kill him. So to that end the setup feels like it works well for the idea here of subverting the slasher formula and shifting the targets. But I don't think it works right. It feels like the movie works itself into a corner. It could have made a story about these kids pushing back against these monsters. That's how much of it feels like its going and the slasher almost feels like a weird add on. But then once you go that route you kind of got to make a choice of how far you want to go. When you make your villains so evil and hatable you're gonna have to find a way beyond just "murder is bad" to really make your slasher worse. Look, I think murder is bad. I don't like slashers or revenge films because I think that instinct and idea is a terrible one. But you're here now. You made the choice to open this door. And I don't think John Logan really knew how to close this loop in a satisfying way. The slasher part of this film basically undercuts the revenge and pathos you built up. You've basically created a situation where either you're gonna have to lean into the bloodlust and murder stuff or find some way to make something worse. And it doesn't. So I think that leaves a film that for the most part I enjoyed feeling a little unfinished in the end. Am I saying I wanted to see it go full on psycho and killing people? No. Like I said that's not a mindset I like. But it definitely needed to do more with its finale than it did. Something. And really I think it may have just had too many ideas here and didn't quite figure out how to pull them all together. There's a version of this film that simply has no slasher and is probably better for it. Its just a survival/revenge movie where Kevin Bacon is the bad guy with no confusing extra baggage. But we did have that. I liked a lot of what we did here. I liked the performances and cast. I liked the classic slasher camp setting and the subversions on it. But it took a really big swing for the fences and I don't think it got all of it. Franchescanado posted:
 18 (22). X (2022) Written and directed by Ti West Watched on Showtime That was a trip. I'm super glad to see Ti West back making horror films. I'm a big fan and I thought he was well on his way to really finding his groove as a filmmaker before whatever happened that led him to shifting into making TV exclusively. But however he ended up back here I'm pumped he did. And this feels like the fullest of his films to date. I think West is an absolute master at building mood and tension but most of his films have a problem of building and building and building and then the ending kind of comes a little too late and doesn't fully payoff the built. Here he finds a much better balance. The first half of the film is all build as he does a great job with his 70s period piece and really getting us to know all his characters. At first glance these could all be slasher stock characters but West has us actually spend time with them and get to know them which really makes all the difference. The pivotal scene of the film is in many ways the moment where Brittany Snow and Kid Cudi just do a beautiful rendition of Landslide in full. Some people seem to have found that to be the breaking point or an odd conclusion but to me its the key. Its these characters just being in this perfectly tranquil and human moment. And its played directly against our first deep look at Pearl and the incredible sadness in her longing for what age has taken from here. We've got these young beautiful people with the world ahead of them and this old woman so broken by all that being gone. And that's our conflict right there. And its introduced much earlier here than in other West films so we shift into our slasher movie for the entire second half. We've had enough time to get to know our characters and the setup, and it has plenty of time to pay off in pretty insane ways. To be honest the "haha old people" stuff was probably a little too mean for me and it keeps the film from getting a higher rating for me. But I did generally love the dark sense of humor it had. Its not a comedy or parody. This is a straight slasher, but its got a sense of humor and is clearly having a lot of fun. And a lot of slashers have fun but their fun is just in killing empty characters. I hate those. But West hooks me by giving me the time to invest in these characters and by not playing the slasher as some kind of mystery but actually giving me motivation and character there too. There's a lot going on here and West deftly juggles the tones and characters and the whole way through. I'm definitely up for the prequel and sequel. And I genuinely look forward to rewatching this when I get there and seeing how the meaner edges of comedy play with me then or how this all works when I'm more familiar with what its doing. But I had a really good time with this. Its the rare slasher that I really enjoyed and its a pretty triumphant return for West to the horror genre. I hope he sticks around even once he's done with his little trilogy here. I'd love to see what he has next. 
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Oct 8, 2022 19:04
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 A Perfect Getaway -watch a film from a country you've never seen a film from. #39.) 122 (Egypt; 2019; Netflix) A man named Nasr returns to drug-dealing to raise money for a marriage to satisfy his fiancee's mother, but his fiancee (named Omneya) insists on coming along. On their way, they get T-boned by a truck; Omneya wakes up in a hospital, Nasr wakes up in an organ-harvesting operation. From there, it's a battle for the two of them to reunite, then escape. There was a lot of care for the characters built into this film. We spend time with them before the dealing attempt, getting a good sense of how the couple cares for each other, and some little quirks of their relationship. Omneya is deaf, with a malfunctioning hearing aid, which opens up a lot of tension, particularly in stalking scenes. Nasr also has a physical attribute to deal with, being groggy from post-coma effects after the collision, and both of them are worried about Omneya's pregnancy. The hospital is new, and not yet fully staffed, so there's lots of large corridors for them to run through during tense scenes. The protagonists behave intelligently, and the antagonists are shown to have existing pressures pushing them into their current behaviors. At the same time, the film feels built around 'almost happened.' A character almost opening a door in time, or almost turning the right way down a hallway, or almost getting her hearing aid reinserted in time, and so on. It happens often enough that it gets a little distracting, but the rest of the film is strong enough to make up for it, for the most part. Overall, I was very satisfied with this film. “Cheer up, or I'll smack your face!” Rating: 7/10
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Oct 8, 2022 19:07
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 9. The Hills Have Eyes (1977) [To Serve Man] I watched Last House on the Left for last year's challenge, and between that and Hills Have Eyes I've discovered that I just really do not like these early Craven movies. Just brutal, realistic bleakness and unflinching violence, with barely any fun at all in it. It's well made and all, and improves on Last House by a lot. Both families are compelling to watch in their own ways, and there's a cool dog, so that's something. This part of horror history is just not my thing, I guess. 2/5  10. The Hills Have Eyes (2006) [They Always Come Back] Making the cannibal family atomic mutants was the thing I needed to soften the concept enough to make it better fit my sensibilities, but it doesn't end up a better movie overall. Craven's version has a singular vision to it, a very specific feeling that you can't get from any other era of american horror films, but the remake has more of a generic mid-00's extreme aesthetic. I wouldn't call it "torture porn" by any stretch of the imagination but it reminds me more of Hostel or a more franchisable attempt at Aja's previous film, High Tension, than it does the original. The soundtrack is hilariously awful, and it's got that 00's look to it that ruins a lot of what would be very pretty shots of desert, but the effects are really good for the most part, especially the prosthetics work. I can't really put a finger on why this one is so much less disturbing, maybe because it's so over the top brutal? The only significant change plot-wise is the ending, and it's for the worse, so I don't really know why this exists except as an attempt to update the aesthatic, and I wouldn't have bothered. I don't know that making the villains explicitly victims of atomic testing is really saying anything that the original being set on an Air Force bombing range doesn't, but it is what it is. Really didn't need the scene with the mutant who only exists to just... say the themes out loud in case you weren't paying attention to the intro or literally anything else that happened. I'm giving this the same score as the original, but the original gets it for just being fundamentally not what I want in a horror movie despite being very well made, and this one gets a 2 for just being on the bad side of mediocre. 2/5 
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Oct 8, 2022 19:25
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18. Final Destination 5 I'm counting this as my Halloween Is Special, since I did all 5 of them in the series (although out of order), and they're both Halloween favourites and guilty pleasures. Definitely a return to form after the drags that 3 and 4 were. The gymnast kill is the obvious highlight and is maybe in a nutshell what the series does best, but one thing that always gets under my skin is eye gore, so the optometrist kill really did make me cringe too. Tony Todd does his usual by showing up and stealing the show, because that's just what Tony Todd does. He really must get tired of explaining the whole Death's Design thing over and over though. I'm so used to seeing David Koechner in comedy roles, it's strange seeing him try to do something serious. The wraparound to the first movie right at the end is a fantastic touch too. These films are what they are, and even the bad ones know that. They're big, they're dumb, they're gratuitious. But drat if they don't scratch an itch for Rube Goldberg Violence. 4 out of 5!  And that makes a bingo on the diagonal! 18/31, watched: Scary Movie, Final Destination 4, Happy Death Day, Final Destination, No One Gets Out Alive, Smile, Freaky, Body Bags, Alien Psychosis, The Invisible Man, The Last Exorcism, Final Destination 2, Werewolves of the Third Reich, Unfriended, Final Destination 3, Hellraiser (2022), Deadstream, Final Destination 5 Gyro Zeppeli fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 19:30
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Was it the sequel to the remake of Hills Have Eyes that was about national guardsmen vs hillbilly murder mutant-family, or was that another, equally tasteless ripped-from-the-headlines bad sequel?
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Oct 8, 2022 19:35
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Bingo Square: Short Cuts - all new to me, some were grabbed from other posters' lists so cheers to them. White Girl (2019) IMDB Letterboxd 12:45 runtime, watched on Shudder A young white girl walks around doing nothing, until she eventually kills someone and cuts out their heart and then listens to rap. Really boring, felt like a waste of time. 1/5 Slasher (2021) (I think) - Not on IMDB or LB, Director's Letterboxd 7:34 runtime, watched on YouTube Not bad! A woman puts on a VR headset and agrees to play a new game called Slasher, but the game doesn't seem to want to let her quit, even if she takes the headset off. I liked the lead's performance and it didn't overstay its welcome, though I wish the axe murderer had an axe instead of a pickaxe, I spent too much time trying to see what the hell he was holding. 3/5 Facelift (2020) IMDB Letterboxd 15:12 runtime, watched on YouTube A woman is feeling old - her husband is cheating with a younger woman, she has some wrinkles. But a mysterious mask shows up on her doorstep and offers to make her look young again, as long as she follows a few simple rules... Overall I think this is solid. The pressure our society puts on women to not look their age is probably too big to tackle with a 15 minute short, and there are a lot of jump scares and fakeout jump scares, but this is well made, good performances, some bad CGI but some solid gore at points. The infrared LED mask thing looks expensive. Worth a watch. 3.5/5 Untitled Predator Fan Film (2013) IMDB Letterboxd 9:36 runtime, watched on YouTube Grabbed this from BioTech's earlier post since they said this was the best of the Predator shorts they watched. It was pretty solid! Takes place in WWII, the Americans find one Japanese survivor and a lot of skinned bodies. The Predator looks good (apparently the budget was only $500? it looks better than that, certainly) - the fighting is a bit corny and the cloaking is also rough but not much to complain about here, it's a good little Predator fan film. 4/5 Night Visit (2022) IMDB Director's Letterboxd 7:10 runtime, watched on YouTube A cop does a wellness check that results in him being forced to watch VHS tapes, and maybe start making them, too. Didn't do much for me, cops are not sympathetic protagonists in my house. Production values were good on the VHS stuff though. 2/5 The Sky (2020) IMDB Letterboxd 11:13 runtime, watched on YouTube Two teenage girls are watching the world end, but are they spending their final moments with the right person? I liked this quite a bit - simple premise, minimal details on what exactly is happening in the background as the world ends, but enough details on their relationships to sell the emotional beats of the story. Good performances and effects. One of the better shorts I watched this time around if not the best. 4/5 Ignore It (2021) IMDB Letterboxd 6:33 runtime, watched on YouTube A family is haunted by an entity that kills you if you pay attention to it. It's mostly a creepy hand leading you down the path to a very telegraphed jump scare ending, but the child actors in this are really good and sell it well. Not much to it, wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it. 2.5/5 Total runtime: 70 minutes, 3 seconds
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Oct 8, 2022 19:38
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I already did the Halloween special square and I was too lazy to find shorts to watch this with so whatever. I watched it. I'm reviewing it. Its got no number so it doesn't count. Sometimes you gotta just do what you feel. - Werewolf by Night (2022) Directed by Michael Giacchino; Written by Heather Quinn and Peter Cameron Watched on Disney+ One of my most anticipated watches of October and it did not disappoint. I love Horror and I love Marvel so I was pumped the second they announced a Halloween horror special. Then we didn’t hear anything at all about it for a long time and I worried it wasn’t gonna happen until we got a trailer and I was blown away. I never really imagined that the MCU would just go full in campy throwback black and white horror with this but they did. I mean if you HATE Marvel and if the idea of a character saying something light and funny in a tense situation elicits great anger in you then don’t watch this. You know who you are. Its fine for you to dislike something. But if you hate it that much its still a Marvel movie… or special. Or whatever. But its a full on horror thing too with tons of loving nods to the genre and a full commitment to the idea here complete with the gore and a Tales From The Crypt reference out of nowhere? It caught me off guard and really helped establish the weird but familiar tone we’re going for here. And I had an absolute blast the whole way. I’m largely unfamiliar with Elsa Bloodstone but Laura Donnelly’s portrayal instantly sold me and excited me at the tease that we’ll see more of her in the future. Its a bit of an odd choice to name the special for Jack Russell when Elsa really feels like the star, but its a great turn of events. And I think Gael Garcua Bernal does a great job too with another character I’m largely unfamiliar with but got sold on. And the Werewolf stuff does pay off in the end and as its built as the real big moment it does makes sense in hindsight that it was name on the poster. The build and reveal to the werewolf is great and while I was really kind of hoping for a more wolf design I did get and appreciate that they were going for more of a throwback Universal Lon Chaney Jr design here. And of course there is the surprise guest who kicked rear end and I just won’t even make the obvious reference to because surprises are more fun. I was a little unsure why this was a 55 minute special and not just extended 20-30 minutes into a film. I do think they could have easily found that much time and I mean The Wolf Man is only 15 minutes longer. But actually by the end I felt fully satisfied. I want to see more of course but the 55 minute run time perfectly finished its story and left me feeling content. I love the doors this opens for the MCU and the fact that all our main characters are effectively immortal so we can absolutely hope to see them again in a future special or movie, in stuff like Blade or Moon Knight, or in whatever Midnight Sons or other horror like projects might be down the line. As a huge MCU fan this does a great job of introducing the horror stuff into the universe the same way so many other weird things have been introduced in Phase 4, but as a horror fan this was just a drat fun standalone movie. So yeah, I’d say this is a must watch for horror fans with the caveat that if you REALLY hate Marvel then just do the sensible thing and don’t watch a Marvel movie. But if super hero stuff is just not really your thing but you do love horror, especially the old stuff, then I’d say absolutely check this out. Its campy, its bloody, its gorey, its horror. Its super fun. Franchescanado posted:
 19 (23). Beast (2022) Directed by Baltasar Kormákur; Screenplay by Ryan Engle; Story by Jaime Primak Sullivan Watched on Peacock A perfectly good animal attack film. I watched another lion attack movie last month Rogue and that kind of left an impression on me with its cheap cgi lion and basic fear of showing it. Beast doesn’t have that problem. It has no fear in showing you its lion and does so constantly and in full daylight and view. And yeah, sometimes the CGI is a little obvious but generally I think it looks pretty drat good. And its all really enhanced by the absolutely gorgeous setting and the really impressive shooting. Lots of long crane shots are daring and ambitious and they work. There is no effort to hide anything here. Its kind of in your face on the table and not obscured so while you can see the CGI seams at times the fact that the film isn’t trying to hide them kind of just made me accept it. Ok, we’ve got a CGI lion. That’s cool. I’m in. And of course it doesn’t hurt to have a pair of top tier talents in Idris Elba and Sharito Copley at the top of this film. There’s not a ton of story or character here. There’s a good background story of family, loss, and guilt. I really enjoyed the friendship between Elba and Copley and the scene where they catch up and confront each of their own guilt about how they dealt with shared grief. It felt real and not melodramatic. People who love each other just finding a way to rebuild what grief treated to tear apart. And that’s the relationship between Elba and his kids too. Obviously there’s anger and guilt but they love each other and that’s never in question. These are people who love each other trying to survive something… and forced to survive something else. Its simple and straight forward but it works. And its all crisply paced and the camera work and action constantly keeps moving. This isn’t gonna win any awards or blow anyone away but its a perfectly entertaining 90 minute adventure. You come to see Idris Elba punch a CGI lion in the face and you get what you paid for. Its well acted, well directed, well shot. Pretty to look at. Ultimately disposable. But all perfectly ok and exactly what you can expect it to be. 
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Oct 8, 2022 19:50
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10. Werewolf by Night Disney+ The death of the Bloodstone patriarch brings forth a competitive hunt amongst a handful of monster hunters to determine the next leader (and holder of the Bloodstone. One of the monster hunters however is a monster himself, a werewolf I found this a fun homage to the Universal classics. Highlights were Laura Donnelly's performance as Elsa the daughter, everything about Ted the monster, and the werewolf transformation (including the cool first shot of him). If it ended a scene earlier committing to the all-black-and-white (aside from the Bloodstone) look and negating the quippiest scene of the brief special, I daresay I'd have loved it. Alas, Marvel/Disney gotta Marvel/Disney. Still nice to see, definitely wouldn't mind more of this **** 11. Old People Netflix  A mom and her kids return home to be part of her sister's wedding. When they discover the mom's ex-husband (and his newest partner), they decide to make the family experience as complete as they can for the sister's benefit, and take grandpa out of the nearby retirement home to join the festivities. The thing about this village though is there are far more old people than young. Especially in the very-understaffed retirement home. And when the old people snap and break out, well... A surprisingly brutal, The Crazies 2010-esque German horror that joins both X and Relic in my opinion as solid (at worst) pieces looking at treatment of the elderly. This is firmly the lesser of the three, but makes up for it by being firmly the most violent. Almost as much blunt trauma to the head and legs as there is dialogue in the second half. A metric ton of horror has come out this weekend, to the point stuff's bound to slip through the cracks; I'm happy my trying to focus on new stuff lately (especially for these challenges) made sure a rare good international horror straight-to-streaming release wasn't one of them **** Watched so far: Missing (2022), Everyone Will Burn, Dark Glasses, Lynch/Oz, Give Me An A, Flowing, Mr. Harrigan's Phone, Deadstream, Hellraiser (2022), Werewolf by Night, Old People
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Oct 8, 2022 19:56
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3.Rituals (1977) A Perfect Getaway A group of doctors go on a hike through the Canadian wilderness. When someone steals all their boots deep in the forest they discover that they're being hunted and that the hunter is playing with is prey. It's easy to dismiss this as just a Canadian version of Deliverance but it's a good enough film in its own right to make that a non-issue. The killer is a pretty terrifying presence throughout the film even if we don't actually see him at all until the very end and when we do he's just a scarred Mountain Man. One of the best parts of the film is the interactions between the doctors who despite supposedly being friends seem to mostly barely tolerate or even loathe each other. Something that becomes much more pronounced once they get deeper and deeper into the wild and get tired, injured, and traumatized. 4.Slash/Back (2022)  Spaced Invaders Maika is bored of life in the tiny village of Pangnirtung in the far north of Nunavut and thinks her dad, the greatest hunter in Pang, is totally lame. To try to spice things up she decides to steal her fathers boat and rifle with her friends and go out on the land. Once there the girls discover that the wildlife has been corrupted and twisted into something deeply alien and wrong. A fairly standard "kids on bikes fight monsters" plot where the adults are largely absent, and the teenage girls argue about teenage girl stuff but eventually band together to face the threat, but the setting gives it a new context. Unlike it's most obvious influence, Stranger Things, Slash/Back is set in the present day and has an almost entirely Inuit cast (I think that all in all there's about four three white people with speaking roles in the entire film most of them very minor characters). This setting gives it a much different cultural context and the awe inspiring vistas of the Nunavut fjords really elevate the film. One thing that really stands out is the monsters. They're a sort of alien snake or tentacle that bunch together and squeeze themselves into the skins of their victims, both human and animal, and wear them like a disguise to get closer to other people. However it's a very unconvincing disguise as they move and look deeply and fundamentally wrong. A bit like Edgar from Men in Black but even less inhuman. The contortionist playing the human skinsuits is really good at moving in really uncomfortable ways. As is usually the case with first time directors the film is a bit uneven and some of the performances are a bit stiff but considering that almost the entire cast is made up of children and teenagers with very little or no previous acting experience it is understandable. The dynamic and chemistry between the girls is good enough to make up for any slightly off line readings. This is a film made with a lot of love both of the community in which it is set and horror as a genre with a lot of varyingly subtle references to classics of the genre that are mostly minor enough not to be distracting. I think one downside of the film is that it rarely feels like the monsters are an actual threat to any of the core cast. And I understand them not wanting to have a bunch of kids die on camera but even one of the core group getting mirked would've made it a lot more threatening. I actually thought the baby sister had been killed in the first encounter but she seems barely even bothered by having a huge alien polar bear jump on top of her. Something that would probably at least frazzle most people if not outright kill them. I think this is a very promising first work and look forward to seeing the Nyla Innuksuk's next film, which is going to be a more psychological and adult oriented horror film. 5. Wolf Guy (1975)  Full Moon Private detective Akira Inugami investigates a case where several men, all members of the same rock band, have been savagely torn to shreds by a spectral tiger demon. Also Inugami is a werewolf. Sony Chiba is a private eye who is also the last of a clan of wolfmen who lived in the mountains of Japan, having survived a massacre as a baby. He stumbles into a plot involving politics, exploitative record companies, and government experiments. This is a very sleazy film in that it takes every possible excuse to have the female cast get naked and almost every single woman with a speaking role has sex with the main character. It also features a rape scene, like a uncomfortably large portion of 70s Japanese genre films, though in this case it's actually fairly pivotal to the plot instead of just being an excuse to get a female character naked. One interesting thing is that Inugami never really turns into a werewolf. As in there is no physical transformation or even minimal make-up. He just becomes faster, stronger, and seemingly impervious to physical damage on a full moon while not changing outwardly at all. I know that a lot of the older accounts of werewolves depict it as a spirutal or psychological change rather than a literal physical transformation into a beast but I don't think that was what the film was going for. My guess is that the lack of any werewolf make-up was done for budgery reasons. The plot is a bit convoluted and it feels a bit like they crammed three different issues of the manga this is based on into one plot to fill out the time. It may be really sleazy and may not make perfect sense but it's got some fun action, a great funky soundtrack, and some really fun camera work but that's basically a given for any Japanese genre film of that era. 
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Oct 8, 2022 20:07
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 14) Monstrum (2018) Trailer Seen on: Shudder Picnic At Hanging Rock -watch a period piece film It's 1506 in Korea during the Joseon Dynasty, and a new unpopular king, a plague and rumors of a strange beast the populace has begun to call "Monstrum" are causing chaos. More than a decade after he was exiled, the former head bodyguard of the king has been called back into service to investigate the rumors of the terrifying monster. Along with his adopted daughter and cowardly brother, the trio must not only try and shed light on the mysterious creature but avoid the deadly machinations of the political class. This South Korean period flick has a subdued start, but once it gets going, it's a rollicking adventure with martial arts, epic cinematography and a great goopy, diseased monster (and goop actually is a plot device at one point, so bonus there I guess). The first half of the film tries to play up the possibility that the monster doesn't exist, but come on, you saw the poster and watched the trailer and you're coming to watch a large beastie gently caress poo poo up, and in that regard the film certainly delivers. Once it appears on screen, the creature is there a lot for the rest of the film; the CGI is not fantastic but it's definitely works and it's pretty emotive for what it is. The characters are stock - stoic warrior, bumbling sidekick who's secretly a badass, adopted daughter who kicks as much rear end as the hero, the love interest, the duplicitious politicians, etc., but they're all played well by the actors and when people start putting their lives on the line at the end, you're pulling for them. There's a goofy vein of comedy that runs throughout that doesn't add much (monster flatulence jokes!). The monster also has a great origin story that I was not expecting: the former king crossbred and experimented on animals creating mutants, and we get to see Monstrum when it's a baby, and its loving adorable, like the world's ugliest pug dog, and its trainer named it loving SPARKLES, I am not making this up!! The new regime orders the animals killed so its trainer lets it go into the sewers where it feeds on diseased corpses, so in my head canon, the filmmakers wanted to pay tribute to Ramon from Alligator. If you're a fan of mid-sized monsters loving poo poo up movies (The Relic, Brotherhood of the Wolf, etc.), give this one a try.  And on the non-bingo side of things:  15) House on Haunted Hill (1959) Trailer Seen on: Tubi An eccentric millionaire invites a disparate group of people to his allegedly haunted mansion; if they can survive the night locked in, they'll win $10,000 each. However, things are not as they seem as unearthly events start happening even before the start of the contest. This was a favorite of mine as a kid when it played weekend afternoons on the local UHF station, so I showed this one to my daughter. It's prime William Castle melodrama buoyed by great performances by Vincent Price and Carol Ohmart as a vicious rich married couple trying to outmaneuver each other's schemes. It also has a classic jump scare (and an incredibly goofy one at that, I love that glide out of the room she does) that got my daughter real good. She really enjoyed the whodunit aspect of the film and trying to figure out what was going on - she figured out pretty quickly that all was not as it seemed but it kept her guessing till the end. "Why would you put a pit of acid in the middle of a room like that," she asked, and that's a question for the ages. My daughter's scary rating and thoughts: out of 10 spooks - "This had a lot of scary stuff in it, but I knew it was fake. However, keep that old lady away from me please."
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Oct 8, 2022 20:31
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Franchescanado posted:
 20 (24). We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun Watched on HBOMax A movie I think I might understand but I definitely don’t get. And I’m mostly grateful for that. I’m old. Not super old, but definitely too old for this film. The internet’s been around most of my life and I’ve more or less been online the whole time. So like I broadly get the ideas in play here. The rabbit holes of stuff you can fall down when you’re bored, isolated, and can’t sleep. The ambiguity and weirdness of people you meet online and how you never really know who they are or what their agendas are. The kind of off the grid nature of how you or someone else can just easily disappear with no explanation or closure. I basically get all that stuff. But there’s obviously a deeper idea here of like the generation that grew up online and people who get “too online”. We all played pretend when we were young but there was a basic grounding of reality when you did it in a school yard or with friends or siblings or whatever. On the internet you don’t have that. If someone wants to play a character 100% and play pretend they can. And that can’t be healthy. Certainly not for teenagers brimming with hormones and uncertainty and the newfound revelation that the world is so much bigger and nothing like what they thought it was as kids. And the internet might feel like an escape or a portal to wherever but God knows what that can do to a person. Especially someone dealing with isolation or depression or anxiety or other issues. That feels like the basic horror of the situation. The perpetual question of what’s going on with Casey. Is she just a kid loving around with a weird online game and making videos for fun? We see those videos of people experiencing body horror and clearly they’re all just staged videos. Early on we don’t necessarily know that. Its not given away if this might be an actual supernatural horror. But over time it becomes pretty clear its not but the horror is in watching Casey. Is she breaking down? Is this game getting to her? Has she lost touch with reality? Do kids just make videos talking about committing suicide and going on killing sprees for fun? Is that fun? What the gently caress? We basically have this middle aged participant as our surrogate wondering if Casey is ok. But who is this dude? What are his intentions? Why does he care so much? How much can we trust what he says when he’s all part of this too? And why is a middle aged dude part of this? A teenager has being a teenager as an excuse. Why’s this dude with a huge nice house playing “games” with kids? Its all unnerving and uncertain. But I dunno. There’s a clear disconnect for me because none of this is an any way relatable to me. Obviously for many people it is. So many reviews talk about how well it captures some feeling or another they had growing up online. So I can’t discount any of that. I’m just clearly too old to really relate to whatever this is saying. Which like… I’m pretty relieved by after watching this.  21 (25). Homewrecker (2019) Written and directed by Zach Gayne; co-written by Alex Essoe and Precious Chong Watched on Freevee A mixed bag for me. I think the performances of Essoe and Chong are both very good. The two of them have to carry the film as the whole thing is about they’re very uncomfortable relationship and trying to weather it. Its interesting they both have writing credits and I can imagine a fair bit of this was ad libbed or at least informed by the actresses. There’s definitely some feminist ideas in here and conversations about expectations or neediness or clinginess or the expectancy not to say no or the difficulty of making friends or I dunno what. Lots of stuff. Linda feels like a mostly real character. A woman older than she feels who can’t let go of some stuff and has resentment about new stuff. Michelle feels less developed as she’s just any old young woman trying to be nice and going through some basic marriage stuff who is just thrown into this nightmare. I thought it was interesting when she’s dosed up with “truth serum” she confesses she thinks Linda is having a breakdown and just needs some help. The concern seems real and it seems to be what we’re seeing. Linda doesn’t seem to be a serial killer and this didn’t seem to be a plan. She just hit a breaking point, did something she shouldn’t, looking for something she’s not gonna get, and everything’s gotten out of control. This film doesn’t exactly pass the bechdel test. Its maybe a little disappointing that all keeps coming back to “boys” instead of maybe something more interesting like friendship. But there’s definitely a lot of interesting work done between the two leads. I think this is an example of how even with strong performances the director still matters. There’s something off and awkward about this. And not awkward in the way the film is supposed to be, but just kind of amateurish in its execution. Jokes don’t quite land. Key moments aren’t emphasized properly. There’s a scene where Linda appears to have really lost it and is singing Stay as Michelle cries for help. This feels like it should have been a bigger, more threatening scene but it just doesn’t feel like its framed or presented in the way that would have emphasized the writing and acting. There were a lot of moments like that where I knew they were big humor or tension moments but they just didn’t hit for me because of the directing, editing, and sound on this thing. Obviously its a very low budget film but its more than that I think. The film just lacks that punch that good directing can give it. Its an interesting and amusing little film. I’m not a big fan of cringe humor but it didn’t turn me off once I adjusted. There’s good performances and elements here. I’m continually impressed by Essoe and wait… that’s Tommy Chong’s daughter? Really? Wait, its Rae Dawn Chong’s step sister? Wait, Rae Dawn Chong is Tommy Chong’s daughter? The gently caress? Wait Tank from Matrix is adopted by him?! What the gently caress is this family I never knew existed?! My mind is blown!?! But yeah, I digress. Film is interesting but I don’t think it really comes together. And I blame the director for that. I just don’t think he had the eye. Which is a shame because the performances from the leads probably did deserve more. Ok. Finally caught up with my watches. 🎃💀Halloween 2022: Hooptober Neun and HalloweeNIT💀🎃 Hooptober Ocho: 12/39 / HalloweeNIT: 13/31 / Fran's SPOOKY BINGO: 8/36 Watched - New (Total) 1. The Empty Man (2020); 2. Little Evil (2017); 3. The Mortuary (2005); - (4). The Haunting (1999); 4 (5). Nope (2022); - (6). Trilogy of Terror (1975); 5 (7). Eegah (1962); 6 (8). The Superdeep (2020); 7 (9). The Night of the Hunted (1980); 8 (10). Halloween Is Special: Jack O’Lantern (1972)/The Scariest Story Ever: A Mickey Mouse Halloween Spooktacular (2017)/A Meowy Halloween (2018); 9 (11). Horsemen (2009); - (12). Black Christmas (2006); 10 (13). The Conspiracy (2012); 11 (14). The Black Phone (2021); 12 (15). Ice Cream Man (1995); 13 (16). Muse (2017); 14 (17). The Last Survivors (2014); 15 (18). Scare Me (2020); - (19). Zombieland (2009); 16 (20). Morbius (2022); 17 (21). They/Them (2022); 18 (22). X (2022); - Werewolf by Night (2022); 19 (23). Beast (2022); 20 (24). We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021); 21 (25). Homewrecker (2019)
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Oct 8, 2022 20:39
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Bruteman posted:And on the non-bingo side of things: I saw this during the May challenge, and I just had to share this IMDB cast listing which had me cracking up: 
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Oct 8, 2022 20:49
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19. Bones USA, 2001. Dir. Ernest R. Dickerson Osteology Siblings buy an old dilapidated building in a bad part of town hoping to turn it into the world's tiniest nightclub, unaware that the place is haunted by an old gangster, hellbent on seeking revenge on the men who killed him and destroyed his neighborhood. This movie was surprisingly good, considering I was expecting something along the lines of Hood of Horror (2006). Some bad acting, really bad old-age makeup, and shockingly bad CGI effects (looking at you in particular, Snoop Dogg face in the ceiling mirror) don't detract all that much from a decent story with some really good practical effect work. Oh, and there's also the brightest fake blood I've seen outside a giallo. Light recommend. 6/10. Stray thoughts: I trashed the CGI before, but there's some legitimately nice stuff in here too for 2001. The Nosferatu stretched finger shadow on the staircase, and a really nice smoke ghost fairly early on stand out in my memory. There's also some surprisingly fantastic practical effect work with a re-fleshening skeleton, straight out of the first Hellraiser. On the other hand, a horrible Snoop Dogg-faced canine composite saying "the gangsta of love don't eat no fried chicken" will probably be living rent-free in my brain for the foreseeable future. So there's that, too. 
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Oct 8, 2022 21:03
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 #40.) Alice, Sweet Alice (1976; digital) The unfavored daughter in a Catholic family is believed to have killed her younger sister, Karen. Right in the middle of church services, during communion. The fallout from the murder, and the continuing disintegration of the surviving daughter, Alice, make up the body of the film. This feels like a big step in the American translation of gialli into slashers. Karen's death only takes a minute or so on-screen, but there's lots of shots of the assorted Catholic statues looking on while the masked killer disposes of the body. Actually, the camera-work is consistently sharp and creative, making great use of odd angles, shadowing, and parallels in shots to enhance the sense of distressed mental states in which this film is swimming. There's probably a lot more I'd be getting out of this if I had been raised Catholic, but even so, the tangle of neuroses and family complexes is clearly entrenched and long-building. You don't need to have lived through it to recognize what a nightmare the suburban WASP life glimpsed in this film was, and with the fading simplifications of the '50s, the early '60s setting makes the interpersonal dynamics feel all that much more loaded. Paula Sheppard is convincingly frightening and broken as Alice, I was shocked to learn that this was one of just two film roles for her. The other was in Liquid Sky, so she really had a knack for picking cult film greats. I was also shocked to learn that she was 18 at the time of filming, though she plays a 12-year-old. I would not have guessed that she was so much older than the role, as she does an amazing job of channeling the frustration and confusion of that age. The other actors also give strong performances, with those playing Alice's family members being the real stand-outs. They're almost as unhinged as a John Waters cast, but played for pitiable drama instead of dark comedy. Household arguments are conducted in screams and accusations, and Alice's psychological state is in clear neglect. That might be best illustrated by a scene in which she's being polygraphed, and the interviewer insists on binary yes-or-no answers, rejecting nuance or elaboration. I think that might be this film's real strength. The killer isn't doing it because they're just evil, but because they're neglected and mistreated. I did not see the twist coming, but it made sense in retrospect, and there's considerably more development given to them after the reveal than subsequent slashers would even think of doing. This left me with a lot to think about, and a big urge to pick up the Arrow blu-ray so I can check out the commentary. “There is a good reason for everything.” Rating: 9/10
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Oct 8, 2022 21:11
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October 8 - Wishcraft This was the first time this challenge that I went to my SPOOKY card and went, "Okay, what do I need?" rather than just watching a movie and then picking an appropriate square. And for the H20 square I thought I'd go for the 20th anniversary. But the thing is 2002 was a pretty lovely year for horror. There are some good movies, but I've seen all of them. So I went the totally opposite direction and tried to pick out something that didn't look good but might be entertainingly cheesy. And that's how I picked Wishcraft.  Michael Weston is the least convincing awkward nerd ever put on film. Out of the blue, someone sends him a magic bull's dick that grants the possessor three wishes. Given the opportunity to bend the universe to his whim, he wishes that the hottest girl in school would go with him to the big dance, that she'd be his girlfriend forever, and finally a wish to be physically stronger than the not really superhuman villain. Along side that bad teen comedy plot, someone is murdering this kid's classmates in a variety of stupid ways that don't really make sense. "A variety of stupid ways that don't really make sense" sums up this movie nicely. It's like they had a pile of scripts on the table, knocked them over, and shuffled the pages back together. The wishing plot doesn't go anywhere or matter. The serial killer plot hangs out off to the side doing its own thing until the final fifteen minutes of the movie when they just come together for no reason. Neither of them is as over the top as you'd want them to be or especially engaging. This is the kind of movie where a friend sneaks into his buddy's room dressed in black and stabs him with a prop knife to get back at him. Once a film has done something like that to try to insert a scare, it's just signaling to me that they had no ideas. By far the best part of the movie was Zelda Rubinstein as a strangely poetic medical examiner. She's great but unfortunately only appears in two scene. Worst part: some good old fashion slurs casually dropped into the dialog. Ah, 2000's films: you were a lovely time. There's one amusing kill where one of the students is buried up to his neck and then the villain bowls at his head. Except it's completely out of sync with the tone and style of the rest of the movie. So it's a scene that's good, but not a good match for the film. Which is pretty much how the film works. I wanted something stupid and weird and Wishcraft never went there. Both of its disconnected plots were done in the most boring way possible. I should have gone with the water theme for H2O.  At least I spotted a few things on Tubi that are on my list to watch that I'm pretty confident I'm going to enjoy. Crescent Wrench posted:I saw this during the May challenge, and I just had to share this IMDB cast listing which had me cracking up: It was a bittersweet role for skeleton who had found parts drying up. Skeleton wound up joining the touring roadshow for the film, hanging out with the audience for the movie. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 21:12
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MrGreenShirt posted:19. Bones Bones is cool. Some light trivia. - Its made by Ernest R. Dickerson. He was Spike Lee's cinematographer for Malcolm X, Do The Right Thing, School Daze, and others. He directed Juice. He basically shadow directed Def by Temptation and you can see a clear line of development with ideas he had there to when he got the wheel with Bones to when he made a genuinely great horror cult classic in Demon Knight. Ernest Dickerson is cool. - The movie stars Bianca Lawson who besides being one of my young crushes is the daughter of Richard Lawson and Denise Gordy, the niece of Berry Gordy, the stepsister of Beyonce, and cousin to Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Jimmy Carter. Which is just fun to me.
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Oct 8, 2022 21:13
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Crescent Wrench posted:I saw this during the May challenge, and I just had to share this IMDB cast listing which had me cracking up: Skeleton was the glue holding the picture together, and I was remiss to leave him out of my writeup.
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Oct 8, 2022 21:36
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SPOOKY BINGO: Halloween is Special  7a. Werewolf by Night (2022) (dir. Michael Giacchino) Disney+ A group of monster hunters gather to, well, hunt a monster, and whoever kills it will be awarded the Bloodstone, a powerful magical talisman. Among them are Elsa Bloodstone, who would be the rightful heir of the stone if she hadn’t left her family for decades to train elsewhere, and Jack Russell, who has an ulterior motive for joining the contest. This feels much more like a story about Elsa Bloodstone than it does the titular Werewolf by Night, which is fine because I really liked Laura Donnelly in the role. It also features a character I didn’t expect to see, and I won’t mention who because it was a fun surprise. Shot in black and white, this is in many ways an homage to classic Universal horror films. Sometimes it looks really excellent and nails the style, while at other times it just looks like a modern show but in black and white. It never looks bad or anything, but I do wish it had committed more to the style all the way through. There is a lot more graphic violence in this than in most Marvel films/shows - partly because the black and white probably allows them to get away with more blood than they could’ve in color, but it’s also just more violent in general. No one pulls their punches and quite a few characters are graphically killed on screen. There is a part I especially enjoyed where the werewolf is tearing apart a group of guards, and as the fight progresses the camera lens becomes more and more smeared with blood until you can barely see what’s happening. This was super cool and I hope we see these characters again, they are too fun to be relegated to a one-hour special. Marvel definitely seems to be setting up the Midnight Sons, so I’m sure we’ll see them again before long. Even if you’re burnt out on Marvel stuff, I recommend checking this out. It’s tonally quite different from anything else they’ve done and I really enjoyed it.  7b. Martin - "Boo's in the House" (s5 ep5) (1996) HBO Max I've only ever seen a handful of episodes of Martin, but it always seemed like a pretty funny show and I wanted to watch a good old fashioned sitcom Halloween episode that was new to me. And this was fun! Martin gets an incredible deal on a new house, only to quickly find out that it's haunted. Skeletons, a mummy, a haunted suit of armor, a moving bear skin rug... pretty much all the spooky staples you'd see in Scooby-Doo or Looney Tunes cartoon. Really goofy and fun.  7c. The Venture Bros. - "A Very Venture Halloween" (s5 ep1) (2012) Hulu The Venture Bros. is possibly my favorite show of all time, so I couldn't resist revisiting this episode. It has so much hilarious stuff going on - Hank and Dean's "haunted houses" over the years, Dr. Venture and Sgt. Hatred betting on whether or not trick or treaters will make it through the compound's defenses, Dermott's "The Crow" costume, guest voices from H. Jon Benjamin and J.K. Simmons, and maybe my favorite... "Submit to my toast... my PLEASURE TOAST."  Total: 7 Watched: The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane | Extraordinary Tales | You Won't Be Alone | Eyes of Fire | The Munsters | The Snake Girl and the SIlver-Haired Witch | TV Specials 
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Oct 8, 2022 21:52
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#6: Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1969)Thrilla in Manila A group of people arrive on a mysterious island looking for their loved ones, only to discover the terrible results of a mad experiment. If this doesn't turn out to be the worst movie I watch for the challenge, I'll be shocked. A Filipino production, this is part of a series of extremely cheap horror movies that apparently did big business on the American drive-in circuit. It starts promisingly, with a narrator asking viewers to take the "Oath of Green Blood," which involved drinking a packet of green goop that was passed out at the theater. That's about the last moment of creativity in the film, because the rest of it is a crummy riff on "Island of Dr. Moreau" with zombies instead of animal-men. The zombies wear paper mache masks and the camera always zooms in and out constantly to cover up the awful affects. There's a lot of blood and dismemberment with obvious rubber limbs and heads. Not even bad in a fun way. 0.5 out of 5 1. Dracula (Spanish)(1931) 2. Trick r Treat (2007) 3. Ghost Ship (2002) H20 4. The Devil Within Her (1975) Goodnight, Mommy 5. Ghost Story (1981) Paperbacks From Hell 6. Nomads (1986) Punk Vacation 7. Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1969) Thrilla in Manila 
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Oct 8, 2022 22:43
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STAC Goat posted:
You're not the only one feeling that. I tried to see what everyone else was, but it just wasn't happening.
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Oct 8, 2022 22:43
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 16. Village of the Damned (1960) Way more chilling than I expected. Most creepy children in horror movies cross the line and feel like they're trying too hard to scare you. Even in The Shining, Danny's stupid little finger and croaky voice gimmick grate on me. But here in Village of the Damned the creepy balance is perfected, these weirdo psychic blondes don't just have a flat affect, they legitimately don't care about the humans around them. They don't stare for the sake of ominous foreshadowing, they stare when they're actively doing something, and once their target is dead or mentally stunned it's a quick heel turn and on about their business. Overall, Village of the Damned has a detached, scientifically-minded and almost lecturing tone, which it uses to strong effect. The contemporary reviewer Dilys Powell of the Sunday Times described it as a "frightening matter-of-factness" and I think that's bang on. Everyone in an entire village abruptly falling asleep is a spooky phenomenon, and sometimes storytellers are afraid that probing at the rules and boundaries of the supernatural will diminish its creepiness, but in fact it gets much more spooky when teams of army men arrive and divine zero answers as they test the invisible wall of sleep with canaries and gas masks. That sense of unease never abates, even after the mysterious superintelligent children are born and many of the villagers begin to fear them. George Sanders tries to hold off the hostile forces that see the unknown with fear, and almost to the very end, it's hard to tell whether his mission to teach the children humanity is a doomed folly or whether he's the only hope to prevent a Frankenstein-esque tragedy of creating a monster by your own fearful act of rejection. Really good stuff for how simple this picture is. Also, a special Dumbest Horror Decision award to the military genius who orders a pilot to fly a plane into the insta-knockout zone. Maybe think that one through for five seconds, my dude!?  .5 / 5 For obvious psychic child murder reasons, this one checks off Children of the Damned on Spooky Bingo. 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 22:44
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 Children of the Damned -watch a film that features killer children #41.) The Brood (1979; digital) A psychologist who specializes in negging his patients into breakthroughs is treating a mother whose own mother was abusive to her. Meanwhile, attacks are being committed by odd children in snowsuits, and a lawsuit is being leveled against the psychologist for somehow causing lymphatic cancer in his patients. More grounded in its setting and acting than Rabid or Shivers, which makes the weirdness of the killer kids strike even harder. There's a surgical examination scene of one of them, in the clinical Cronenberg fashion, and the description of what makes them so strange strikes a creepy chord, quick as the scene is. The specifics of their spawning and deployment had me confused until near the end of the film, but that section makes it rather explicit how they function. I knew some vague details about this being the film that Cronenberg made in the wake of his divorce, which certainly cast an interesting light on the relationship of the divorced pair and their daughter at the heart of this film. It comes off as one of his angrier films to me, and the birthing of the killers ties almost textually into that. There's still that chilly distancing combined with visceral qualities which marks so much of early Cronenberg, but this might be the one in which that combination works least for me. I would have liked to see him open up a bit more. On the upside, Oliver Reed plays the way-too-self-assured psychologist to the hilt. I'll have to revisit this to really come to terms with how I feel about it, but it is well-crafted. “Mommies don't do that, mommies don't hurt their own children.” Rating: 8/10
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Oct 8, 2022 23:10
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20. Beyond the Door Italy, 1974. Dir. Ovidio G. Assonitis The Devil Made Me Do It A woman discovers she's pregnant with her 3rd child, wants to get rid of it, then doesn't, then becomes full Linda Blair possessed. An extremely 70's Italian rip-off of firstly Rosemary's Baby, then later The Exorcist, and far worse than either. This movie is BAD. They knew what they were doing too. Her daughter obsessively drinks cans of green pea soup for chrissakes. That's the level we're working with here. And I wouldn't normally be so down on a movie like this, if it weren't also so goddamn boring. Terminally dull. Just a bunch of very serious people standing around emphatically talking at one another, interspersed with some bafflingly weird scenes, and a smattering of child abuse. There was some neat makeup work in the 3rd act, but too little too late. I do not recommend anyone watch this. 3/10. Stray thoughts: There's a scene in which the main character walks down the road, stops and looks at a mostly empty banana peel on the sidewalk, picks it up and starts eating it. That's it. Then there's THIS scene I watched and immediately tracked down on Youtube for you all to see. This is the one and only reason you might want to watch this movie. A baffling and hilarious musical number involving a nose flute. The weirdest part of this whole goddamn movie. Enjoy! 
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Oct 8, 2022 23:26
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 9)Deadstream (shudder) hausuMovie is a straight blast. Silly and goopy, and absolutely nails the rear end in a top hat streamer vibe. I have a minor quibble with the ending I think it's funnier to end with him winning and going "like and subscribe" rather than the other ghosts coming for him. Still I was laughing and jumping like I haven't since...I dunno Drag Me to Hell. Very fun. /5 1)The Munsters, 2)Color Out of Space 3)Living Dead Girl 4)Collingswood story5)Mr. Harrigan’s Phone 6)Werewolf by night/halloweenies 7)Hellraiser 8)My Best Friend’s Exorcism 9)Deadstream
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Oct 8, 2022 23:45
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13. Hellraiser 2022 Hell is other people  One of the better Hellraiser properties, which isn't necessarily saying much. The movie is anchored by some really cool gore effects and Cenobite designs, but the main cast is one of the whiniest, least likable groups of people in recent movies. It's hard to get invested in main characters in a movie when you literally don't care what happens to them, but the main character and her boyfriend are such irredeemable gently caress-ups in the movie that there's no real tension beyond, 'Yeah, they're probably gonna get Hellraiser'd'. The villain himself is cool, with the gross mechanical contraption in his chest, but he disappears for most of the movie and then has incredibly ambiguous reasons outside of, 'Hell yeah, I'm an immortal perv now'. The way the movie built him up as an occult collector made him sound cooler than he ended up being, which was a bummer. Not great, not terrible. A little above average because of the cool Hellraiser shenanigans, but that's about it. Rating: 6.1/10 Configurations
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Oct 8, 2022 23:52
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19. Village of the Damned (1960) Based on Vanilla Bison's writeup, I decided to check this out too and wow. There's just such a clinical tone to the movie, lots of it almost feel like a fly-on-the-wall documentary. The score is incredibly sparing too, especially toward the start where you're just forced to confront all this strangeness without any levity. And the child actors deserve a lot of praise too, for being able to do that flat, inhuman affect that well, just with those completely dead-behind-the-eyes looks, while everyone else gets more and more panicked by them, George Sanders especially, who plays the well-meaning but out-of-his-depth scientist perfectly. 4 out of 5! 19/31, watched: Scary Movie, Final Destination 4, Happy Death Day, Final Destination, No One Gets Out Alive, Smile, Freaky, Body Bags, Alien Psychosis, The Invisible Man, The Last Exorcism, Final Destination 2, Werewolves of the Third Reich, Unfriended, Final Destination 3, Hellraiser (2022), Deadstream, Final Destination 5, Village of the Damned 
Gyro Zeppeli fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Oct 9, 2022 |
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Oct 9, 2022 00:05
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Vanilla Bison posted:16. Village of the Damned (1960) Gyro Zeppeli posted:19. Village of the Damned (1960) John Carpenter did a remake of this in the nineties if either of you (or anyone, really) hasn't seen it. Always interesting to hear comparative reviews of an original and a remake.
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Oct 9, 2022 00:37
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 Are you ready for the true horror...of A-frame architecture! Gretel and Hansel (Osgood Perkins ; 2020) Something Wicked This Way Comes Tony Perkins' kid can direct himself the absolute poo poo out of a dark fairy tale. This is a beautiful and significantly more Grimm version of the tale that's clearly trying to ground the narrative more in the Early Modern period these came from, but without actually trying to be accurate either to the original story or to history. The sets, costumes, props, lighting and shot composition are all outright gorgeous, and Sophia Lillis as Gretel continues to be a young actress who is worth keeping an eye on in terms of ability. It has some parts that are a bit rote and obvious, but that's not a bad thing : sometimes you cast Alice Krige as your witch because she's really, really loving good at playing a witch. The narrative is pretty back-loaded in that the first hour is basically all set up. Stuff happens, but things don't really get going until the climax. Which might be a turn off for some, but I was in the kind of mood where a slow gothic dream to steep in was exactly what I wanted. If I had to pick a minus, it'd be the insane nitpick that for a character who spends a lot of his screen time nominally trying to fell a tree, it's pretty clear that absolutely no one in the cast or crew really knew how that like, worked besides a very vague "use axe on tree until fall down like in minecraft"-way. Also that kid does not know how to sharpen a saw even a little bit so I hope that no one was ever going to use that prop saw and they gave him a tetanus shot after. He's basically just holding a saw and a rasp and doing a vague rub-adjacent gesture in the general vicinity. I gotta see if Blackcoat's Daughter is streaming somewhere. Osgood Perkins might be my new jam. Bonus : gives me an excuse to say "Osgood" a bunch. 8.5/10 13 down, 18 to go 
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Oct 9, 2022 00:44
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Xiahou Dun posted:I gotta see if Blackcoat's Daughter is streaming somewhere. Showtime, and Kanopy if you have a library card
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Oct 9, 2022 00:49
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