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32. The Shallows USA, 2016. Dir. Jaume Collet-Serra  H20 A woman surfing at an isolated beach becomes stranded when a comically persistent shark traps her on a rock island close to shore. Way better than I expected it to be, though my expectations going in were extremely low. The story was fun, nicely suspenseful, and it was visually stunning. Some great surfing footage and amazing underwater photography. Wonderful use of color filters in some of the shots too. Unfortunately, the CGI was for the most part laughably bad. Look at that picture up there, that's what we're working with here. The shark looked like something out of an Asylum picture. Also they kept doing this thing where they would superimpose phone pictures or a watch face onto part of the screen, and it always looked lousy. I will say though, loved that seagull. Stephen Seagull was one charismatic motherfucker. Could almost carry the whole movie with one broken wing. A decent recommend. 6.5/10. Stray thoughts: The seagull lives! Amazing dead whale prop. Wish the rest of the special effects were at that level. Also, bullshit that shark could flip a humpback whale corpse like that. What is this, super shark? Well, judging by the rest of the movie, maybe? 
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Oct 14, 2022 21:28
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20. Frankenstein 1931 (Bingo: The Golden Years) - It's a classic, and the monster looks really quite good here. . Really good slice at the period its in, featuring a whole town celebration that turns into a proper angry mob, torches and all. There's a lot of the 'who is the real monster?' here - the monster does do a few bad things but mostly by accident and all the humans show no mercy in responding. One of the strongest scenes was the villager carrying his daughter through the celebration and the mood changing as people notice. 3.75/5 21. The Mortuary Collection (Bingo: Tales of Terror) - A fun collection, mainly sets somewhere around the 40s-60s featuring people being punished harshly for their various sins - and for the most part the punishments are a bit harsher than the sin. Nothing particularly groundbreaking here, but it looks really good, and had some clever moments. The meta narrative was kinda fun too, critiquing each of the previous tales while leading into the last story. Had a good time with this. 3.75/5 22. House (Bingo: Paperbacks from Hell) - A horror novelist man seeking solitude moves into his deceased aunt's house to work on his next book about his Vietnam experiences. This was pretty fun! Interesting that the house had none of the traditional hauntings aside from maybe portals, it mostly just spawned goofy looking entities. What was kinda funny here is the mansion is deep in suburbia, and most of the setups stem from neighbors just dropping by at inopportune moments. Kinda had a bit of evil dead energy, with the protagonist wrestling these toony entities, and being clever but not exactly smart. Not what I expected but I had a good time here. 4/5 Bingo: Short Cuts I scraped the bottom of youtube on some of these, like under 100 views on a couple of these. Will probably be watching some other ones other people post because a lot of these were trash. Swing you sinners - This was a joy to watch! Constant little gags in time with music, the movement is great. 5/5 Backrooms - Found Footage #2 - Found footage of somebody lost in an unending office-complex sort of area, and they discover something alive. this is kinda it's own youtube rabbit hole with tons of lore, but I thought it was pretty good. Whatever this is is suited to the disconnected video format - I assume like most things like this it gets worse the further down you go, but as a standalone I liked this. 4.5/5 Curve - A woman wakes up on a strange concrete slope and struggles to not fall. This had a bit of a tenseness because it's a known difficulty if you've ever tried to sit on a concrete slope and know how difficult it can be at times. Beyond that, there's not much here. 3/5 Geometria - A boy has failed geometry for a third time and is committed to never failing it again. This copy was really pretty low quality, but a funny little gag, and there's some sort of little edge to it. 3.5/5 Siren Head- Horror Short Film - This had the most views for a horror short! Unfortunately, while this looks pretty good, there's just not much here - it's just siren head chasing a guy around a bit. 2.5/5 Mukbang - The youtube algorithm sucks, it gave me this. A mukbang streamer cheats at an eating challenge then gets a notification to do it for real or get exposed. This was boring and mediocre and bad. 2/5 started looking for more obscure stuff after that one The Darkness Calls This is it, the bottom of the barrel. Currently sitting at 14 views. There's text on screen, and somebody in a mask, and basically nothing really happens. 1/5 Deadly Halloween It's just like a few basic horror setups but they're wearing fursuits. The ideas are actually relatively solid enough, but they're clearly just messing around here. 2/5 Kuchisake-onna / The Slit Mouthed Woman - Short Horror Film Just a quick interpretation of the slit-mouthed woman urban legend. Basically just covers the gist of the urban legend, and nothing else to it. 2.5/5 HORROR short film "The Witch" (english version) - Thailand Another with <100 views. Does a little quick take on the little plot device getting a message from somebody that conflicts with where you thought they were. 2/5 Sign - Short horror film A guy wanders around his apartment, his rice balls keep getting eaten, he dies. Alright spooky vibes but there's not much vision here. 2/5 ZOMBIE (Michael Myers) The girl in the forest goes camping | Horror Short Films I don't know what this is, it's feels like it's a ASMR bushcraft halloween special or something, a girl makes a bamboo spike fort, then a guy in a michael myers mask attacks and she fends him off with a bamboo spear, and that's it. 0.5/5 New watches: 1: The Empty Man 2: Triangle, 3: Fright Night 2011 4: The Blair Witch Project 5. Werewolf Castle 6. The Gate 7. Shock 8. Chopping Mall 9: Gaslight 10: Dude Bro Party Massacre 3 11: One Hour Photo 12: Psycho 13: Deadstream 14: Sadako VS Kayako 15: Child's Play 16: Thir13en Ghosts 17: Frankenstein 18:The Mortuary Collection 19: House Rewatches: 1: Ravenous 2: Noroi: The Curse 3: Lair of the White Worm Decades 9/10: 1930s, 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s Got my first Bingo! 
Lhet fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Oct 14, 2022 |
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Oct 14, 2022 22:04
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Chris James 2 posted:Annabelle Creation is the only other recent one I can think of where I loved a prequel wayyyyy more than I liked the original I like that if you've seen the director's pre-fame no budget short films he made with his wife in their tiny Swedish apartment most of the set pieces I'm Annabelle Creation are just more developed versions of things from those.
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Oct 14, 2022 22:21
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24. Re-Animator Where to watch? Its for rent at a couple of places  First Stewart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs flick. Its loving great. Lots of goop , gore, and body parts. Comb's is fantastic as Herbert West a medical student who's figured out a way to reanimate the dead. He's so smug and condescending in everything that he does and says. Combs is just perfect for the role. There's a reason this is a cult classic and its because its a fantastic movie that doesn't look like anything else that was being produced in the 80s. Just a great horror film and its follow up Bride of Re-Animator is just as fantastic.
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Oct 14, 2022 22:25
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Gripweed posted:But these weren't natural spiders. They were the product of a single live spider from a species that exists only in a single unexplored Amazonian cave accidentally being transported to small-town America where it was able to mate with a local species to produce a new generation of super spiders with itself as the General Spider. The movie had no theme of anything like man's unimportance in the face of nature. Jeff Daniels solved the whole problem by shooting the General Spider once with a nail gun.  #70.) Tomie vs Tomie (2007; digital) A young man takes up work at a mannequin production facility while trying to overcome memories of his murdered girlfriend. However, there's always a Tomie lurking about... and sometimes more than one. The mannequin element serves as an effective allusion to the multiplicity of Tomie, while also making for easy creepy set decoration. The sparse instrumentation of the score works well to evoke the build-up taking place across the movie, and Tomie's fantastical nature is back at the forefront where it belongs. Having a character who's so preoccupied with another girl that he has resistance to Tomie's effects is an interesting addition, and kind of a vital one, to avoid retreading the usual route of a Tomie story. The film doesn't bother to explicate Tomie's nature (until the very end), likely presuming that anyone watching the eighth installment is already familiar with it. That saves time, but misses an opportunity to reinforce her bizarre qualities after the lapse of the previous film in the series. The closest we come is an exposition dump for a climax. The films are on a real streak of feeling like they're trying to cut budget corners wherever possible, for stories which don't even need much in the way of special effects to begin with. Hopefully the last film manages to salvage some of the original charm for the finale. “We build one body, create a mold, then mass-produce it.” Rating: 6/10
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Oct 14, 2022 22:26
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 Exploiting the absolute poo poo out of releasing this movie late and now these actors are known. Texas Chainsaw Massacre : The Next Generation (Kim Henkel ; 1995) They Always Come Back (This both is and isn't a reboot, but such is a way of horror) So this is technically a rewatch for me, but I'm counting it because I remembered precisely none of this outside of one shot : this was my very first baby horror movie back when I was 7-8 years old. I had decided I like horror movies despite not really seeing any, and I knew that Texas Chainsaw was A Big Deal but I didn't really understand that sequels weren't one continuous body of work so this seemed like something I was supposed to do. (It was god drat 1995-6 ; I couldn't look this poo poo up anywhere.) Most importantly, my parents and the local video store had entirely given up on trying to police what I watched. Anyway, this was on a podcast I listen to so I decided to "rewatch" it and see what it was like. I can acknowledge this isn't a great movie but I think there must be some kind very slight memory cause it's still got a charm to it*. It's just dumb and has no substance, it's not offensive to the concept of movies like some truly bad things I've watched (that footnote aside, obviously). Plus it's just so goofy! One of the characters seems to only care about her boob job, and not really any of the actual murder? She's peak "going along with this to please my in-laws". And Matthew McConaughey has a robot leg! He has a remote-controlled robot leg! Why does he have one? I have no idea. I don't even think that's a real thing! Like, this isn't a mechanical prosthetic, he's just got an erector set bolted onto him that makes cute little servo-whines when he moves like an RC car. And he's trying to act through this! (Considering he sued them to try to stop them from doing a rerelease, I'm absolutely shocked he agreed to do Frailty. Which I'm very glad he did because Frailty loving owns and he's great in it.) I'd actually give this a soft recommendation. It's very soft and comes with a lot of qualifiers but if you're curious about a snapshot of the arc of a foundational franchise that you're not very attached to and you were young enough in the mid 90's to have a weird pseudo-nostalgia for some movies from that time, and you happened to be sick and cranky on a Thursday night, (and maybe you took a couple of tramadol), then there are worse ways to spend 1 hour and 42 minutes of your time. *Except for the handling of their attempt at making Leatherface... trans? I think they were trying to for that explicitly rather than the contested idea that Ed Gein was a cross-dresser or a Psycho reference. It's handled poorly enough that I can't tell which is a bad sign. I'm not against the idea of Leatherface being some variety of LGBT+, but this is purely negative representation and it's tacked on and just comes off as exploitive rather than either scary or interesting. I like representation in my films but more stuff like Sleepaway Camp doesn't help anyone. Really it's a 4/10 but maybe a couple points higher if you're laughing at it 21 down, 10 to go 
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Oct 14, 2022 22:57
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33. Howl UK, 2015. Dir. Paul Hyett Full Moon A group of passengers on a broken down night train are besieged by a werewolf. Not great. Story was bog standard, and the characters were mostly unlikable. This was one of those movies set mostly on a single set and in the woods to save on budget, and between the very uninteresting set design and the washed out color palette, this was a tiresome movie to watch. The werewolf effects looked fantastic though, and the first real full body werewolf reveal left me startled at what a good job they did trying something different. There were some nice kills too, and some real sticky gore effects, but it was all too little, too far between for me to really appreciate it. Would not recommend. 5/10. Stray thoughts: I hate it in these movies where it takes place in some parallel universe where nobody has heard of werewolves. Always takes me right out of it. It's that whole "Walking Dead never calling them zombies" thing. I'm sick of it. Also, this could've easily been made as a zombie or a vampire movie with very little having to be changed. Hell, one werewolf gets stopped by having its brain destroyed, and another gets a stake through the heart. 
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Oct 14, 2022 23:23
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26. Uncle Peckerhead 2020 DIY or DIE  Movie's a lot of fun. The characters are likable, the gore is good, and the music/aesthetic kicks rear end. I've got two complaints though: one, the title is absolutely terrible. I asked three separate people if they wanted to watch this movie with me and every one of them turned it down because the title is godawful. Their loss, of course, because the movie was fun, but I feel like somebody should have proposed literally any other title than this one. Two, the movie spends about an hour and fifteen minutes lightly dusting around a plot, only to dump about 30 minutes worth of plot into the last 12 minutes of the movie. The movie was fun, but the script definitely needed another round of revisions before the filmed version. Still a good time if you're looking for a punk rock DIY indie gore movie. Rating: 6.7/10 Promoters Eating Hot Dogs Oh, and the old dance card is getting full up, but with a couple Bingos already, I'm not sure how many more I want to watch to fill the card versus wanting to watch just because I want to watch them. 
PKMN Trainer Red fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Oct 14, 2022 |
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Oct 14, 2022 23:52
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Darthemed posted:There's a thread running through the movie of technology interacting with nature, often in antagonistic ways. From the opening of the helicopter, a tiny invader against the landscape of the Amazon, to the foggers used to collect specimens, to the spiders finding an easy infestation hold in the antiquated home, to the exterminator's tools being inadequate to handle the spiders. Spiders dropping out of lamps, swarming out of a television. The immigrant spider's presence is no more or less natural than the arrival of the country doctor; man's constructs bring both of them to the same place. The nail gun conquering the general may be technology's triumph in the climactic confrontation between those two forces. But it's still just one battle, and nature has a lot more up its sleeve. No, all of that is aspect of man vs spider. Not man vs nature. At no point in the movie are spiders treated like an avatar of the natural world or connected to anything larger than themselves. At not point in the movie is man in an antagonistic relationship with any part of nature other than the spiders. And you're ignoring the rest of the movie. In which our lead family does face antagonistic relationships other than spiders, but they are all with other people. The insular small town doesn't respect the big city doctor. Urban vs rural is an actual theme established in the movie, not man vs nature. Stac Goat is right. STAC Goat posted:It’s a joke. The movie is a family friendly horror comedy. It’s the old cliche of a family moving out of the city and go “the country” for safety and then the ending up in this complete nightmare and when it’s over they get the gently caress out of dodge. And then whoops, earthquake. It’s ok: at least it’s not a spider. It's a classic "out of the frying pan, into the fire!" button. But, in my opinion, a poorly done one.
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Oct 15, 2022 00:05
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PKMN Trainer Red posted:Oh, and the old dance card is getting full up, but with a couple Bingos already, I'm not sure how many more I want to watch to fill the card versus wanting to watch just because I want to watch them. Yeah, this is where I'm at too, especially since I'm already past the 31 movie mark. But the bingo card totally did its job by getting me to watch a bunch of movies I ended up enjoying that I wouldn't have watched beforehand!
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Oct 15, 2022 00:33
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5) It: Chapter Two Challenge: Paperbacks From Hell So I bit the bullet and watched the monolith that is It: Chapter Two. Never before have I seen a film rush so fast to spend so much time doing so little. That's to some great degree a fault of the source material: where the 1958 part of the story takes place over three months, the 1985 part occurs over less than three days and most of that is spent on reminiscing about 1958. There's honestly not much to do in the second film apart from an hour long "everyone gets a jump scare" montage, which in the long run pulls the same trick so many times that it gets boring. I can understand that the exigencies of splitting the narrative with no certainty of getting to make the second half led to this, but in order to bulk out the second film they had to fill it with all the exposition they cut from the first movie. It's a series of "oh, did I forget to tell you?" moments. You cannot do that in a functioning narrative, you just can't. The worst part is that there's so much that they cut out which was important only to replace it with things that weren't - usually because of the other cuts. The movie also steals heavily and clumsily, and not just from King's other books. When you see the first legs come out of Stan's severed head you think "Oh, that's a Thing homage". But then Richie says the loving line, completely straight - from a comedic character, at that - and they're clearly expecting you not to notice that they ripped off one of the most iconic scenes in horror history. I nearly lost it completely at that point and I'm glad I didn't have anything to throw, because I don't want to break my monitor. Regarding changes to the story, there are again some in this movie and some are better than others. They changed the ending, which I never liked - it doesn't fit the internal logic of the story and it's also very sad - but they changed it too much. Painting Stan's suicide as a noble act was stupid and undermined the threat in the book that maybe the Losers couldn't defeat It because they'd grown up. The script also acknowledged that time has moved on and kids don't like clowns any more, but that was less successful as Pennywise is made to feel almost sympathetic. When you've got the ultimate monster in your film and people are thinking "awww", you've really missed the mark. Verdict: a very poor and disappointing conclusion.
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Oct 15, 2022 00:35
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Jedit posted:5) It: Chapter Two Someone pointed out to me that the adult portion of It is never very good and I can't really help but agree. The Berzerker posted:
This is a pretty good flick to watch with the commentary on. None of the FBI agents speak a lick of English.
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Oct 15, 2022 00:43
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 #71.) Tomie Unlimited (2011; digital; also available on Tubi) A schoolgirl has a Tomie for a sister, but the Tomie dies one day, only for a Tomie to reappear on her eighteenth birthday and start making demands for the family to obey. And then another Tomie shows up at school... This entry seems to have a somewhat higher budget than the last few films in the series, or just a more inventive director, editor, and/or camera crew. Effects are small, but effectively used, and the characters have regained the sense of mania that Tomie's presence inspires. The musical score is a step up, too, mixing innocent-sounding synths for the school setting with darker drones for Tomie's malevolence, and some wordless vocals for the really ghostly moments. The movie still has its rough spots, but it's a thorough improvement from where the series had fallen, possibly because it got passed off to Toei for this chapter. Props to the monster that's practically a plucking of Headless Linda from Evil Dead 2, and the full-on Hausu-ish nutty nightmare finale. Sometimes you're at the point where you might as well let the director of Zombie rear end: Toilet of the Dead have a crack at your franchise, I guess, and in this case, it paid off. “Caviar! Foie gras! Caviar! Foie gras!” Rating: 7/10
Darthemed fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Oct 15, 2022 |
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Oct 15, 2022 00:43
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O I have some Opinions about the second IT movie if you ever want to chat. It has some parts that are pretty good, but they’re trivially outnumbered by so many other, absolutely bonkers decisions. Like I guarantee that if you let Hader just deliver that line better the The Thing homage gets a lot better. And the dude playing adult Ben is just distractingly handsome. Like he’s supposed to have lost that weight and become good looking but they cast an AI generated underwear model.
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Oct 15, 2022 00:49
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I like the thing homage. It made me smile
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Oct 15, 2022 01:01
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10. Basket Case A very sleazy but overall fun movie about a guy and his monster brother going on a vengeance vacation to NYC. This was filmed with almost no budget but it works to the films benefit. Every location is run down and dirty and it gives the impression of every character, even the well-off doctors, living as weirdo outcasts. It provides a consistent atmosphere and everything feels very lived-in. The design for Belial is great, especially for being so cheap. He's just a horrid little guy and it's very entertaining to see him jumping around howling at people. The finale crosses the line and gets a bit too sleazy for my tastes but otherwise I enjoyed this and would recommend it.
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Oct 15, 2022 01:10
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18. The Funhouse (Something Wicked This Way Comes) I don't remember this guy at all. Four teens decide to spend the night in a creepy carnival dark ride and unfortunately run afoul of some hosed-up carnies. The half hour intro where the teens are just spending time at the carnival is easily the best part of this movie, just because of how lovingly the different activities are filmed. The bright lights, the colorful entertainers, and the carnival organ are involving and comforting. This part of the movie is almost episodic. The kids visit a magic show, the kids get high and are kicked out of a fortune teller tent, the kids try to sneak a peek at a strip show for some reason. None of these episodes really go anywhere, have anything to do with one another, or build up to anything, but they're well implemented in their own right. This part of the movie is followed by fifteen minutes of transition, setting up the plot and stakes of the horror section where the teens are trapped in the dark ride and hunted down by carnies. With so much set-up, the horror part of this horror movie just feels rushed, with three of the kids killed off unceremoniously. The real meat comes from the climax, where the final girl makes her way down into the bowels of the ride. The overwhelming music and rapid intercutting of the different dark ride jump scares make this part overwhelming and hellish, leading up to a final fight in a bizarre mechanical liminal space. To me, it seems like the parts of the movie that the director had interest in were the nostalgic carnival opening and this final descent. The interim is just a way to get from point A to point B. Because of that, much of the film feels perfunctory and unrewarding. 
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Oct 15, 2022 01:17
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16. Halloween Ends A couple can't get their regular babysitter... with spooky results. Well, we finally did it. We ended Halloween. Good job everyone, let's all go home. This movie is going to be just a divisive as Halloween Kills. It has some interesting ideas, it has some really terrible dialog, it's not at all what you would expect from a horror sequel. I'm feel like the makers of this movie did exactly what they set out to do. I think the big theme here is Michael Myers, and by extension all people who choose to commit violence, aren't cool. The villain becomes the hero in all horror franchises, and that was 100% true for Halloween Kills. Which is really a hosed up thing and increasingly uncomfortable with all the violence in the real world. Corey is a sensitive guy who feels (rightly so) ostracized by his community and lashes out in a violet way. He destroys the lives of those around him and ultimately dies at the hand of the thing he glorified. Michael is ground up into tiny pieces and allowed to blow away in the wind. Beyond that, they've done as much as you can do to end the movie franchise. This is a sequel in a big name horror series that ends on a happy ending with the killer absolutely no questions asked dead. No final sting, the end is a very clear THIS IS OVER. I think this is a very interesting topic for a horror film, and holy poo poo they did it with the third Halloween reboot... that takes some balls. I don't know if I like this movie, but I respect the hell out of it. 4.5/5
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Oct 15, 2022 01:31
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Xiahou Dun posted:And the dude playing adult Ben is just distractingly handsome. Like he’s supposed to have lost that weight and become good looking but they cast an AI generated underwear model. I was way more distracted by The Man Your Man Could Smell Like being there. Like, he did good and everything, it’s just weird, it’s like if Ronald McDonald played Pennywise or something
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Oct 15, 2022 01:31
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Darthemed posted:
Thanks for watching these movies. I stopped at Tomie 2 and always wondered how the others were.
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Oct 15, 2022 01:32
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Opopanax posted:I was way more distracted by The Man Your Man Could Smell Like being there. Like, he did good and everything, it’s just weird, it’s like if Ronald McDonald played Pennywise or something A very fair point. Really it’s kind of impressive that Stephen King was one of the least distracting people in that movie.
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Oct 15, 2022 01:58
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16. Ghostwatch (1992) Bingo Category: TerrorVision This is genuinely great and really scary. It reminds me of the advertising campaign surrounding Blair Witch Project in 1999, insofar as it relies on an earnestness from its viewers that means it would never fly in 2022, but also in that it’s 110% up my alley and the exact sort of thing that gives me the fun frisson of dread which got me into horror in the first place. Not all the actors nail it, but they don’t have to when the BBC’s broadcasters lend a sheen of verisimilitude to the proceedings—I’ve met people who behave in ways I might feel are under- or overstated in tense situations, so it’s easy for me to dismiss a bit of (to borrow an expression from perfidious Albion) naff performance. Love the 90s Chicago Bears windbreaker Craig Charles is rocking too.
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Oct 15, 2022 02:11
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Movie #12 Halloween, 2018 Rewatching this one and then watching Halloween Kills so I can go see Halloween Ends. I liked this more than I did the first time! The soundtrack rules and the fall atmosphere is great, it's a film that just feels chilly. I still don't like Dr. Sartain's plot, but I'm all about the whole generational trauma theme Laurie and her family carry. There's a deep paranoia that's just really thick and unpleasant and filmed so well. I think the Netflix Texas Chainsaw being so shockingly awful made me appreciate this film more. I don't think it's perfect and it really can't top the original, but it's a great modernization in every single way that NTCM wasn't.
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Oct 15, 2022 02:15
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Skrillmub posted:Thanks for watching these movies. I stopped at Tomie 2 and always wondered how the others were.  #72.) Santo vs. the Riders of Terror (1970; Tubi) Lepers break out of a leper colony, and get rowdy in the countryside, enabling criminals to take advantage of the chaos. That's not something Santo can abide, even though it takes him a while to show up to the conflict. He has to wrestle on behalf of an orphanage before he can get involved, after all. There's some downright amazing voice acting choices made in the dub of this. Just wanted to note that, because they were distracting me for the entire run-time. The humor is hit-or-miss, but when it hits, it's a haymaker (that's a wrestling move, right?). Santo of the silver mask rides around on a white horse (of course) and imagining riding down unknown hills with impaired peripheral vision like that makes it understandable why Santo looks so uncomfortable in the saddle. The fear incited by the freedom of the lepers in the countryside is why TMDB has this listed as part horror, which is certainly uncomfortable from a modern perspective. The rabble is roused to murderous inclinations as soon as they hear about the lepers being out, ready to form lethal posses and burn down houses with people still inside, which is a level of intensity that seems like an outlier for the Santo films. The makeup on the lepers is gnarly, but the film-makers are sure to include plenty of scenes clearing up misinformation about the disease, even as they pose them as such objects of fear. Though they're trying to both have their cake and eat it, I'm glad they at least made the effort to not be totally exploitative of a real disease. That makes it a lot easier to enjoy the scenes of Santo taking down villains from a western with assorted wrestling moves. And the scenes with him holding up the criminals at rifle-point felt like some prime bizarre cinema cheese. Too bad he doesn't apply any of his established scientific skills to work in the service of the lepers. Instead, he just tells them that “Science has discovered a new drug that can cure you. Please have faith.” Something to form a decent double feature with the likes of Son of Dracula or Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. “Time to die, you stupid masked man. But first, I'll see your face.” Rating: 6/10
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Oct 15, 2022 02:19
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Gripweed posted:It's a classic "out of the frying pan, into the fire!" button. But, in my opinion, a poorly done one. I thought the joke was it’s the opposite, better earthquakes than hordes of killer spiders.
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Oct 15, 2022 02:20
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 16: Martyrs I...probably wasn't ready for that. A movie I had to take breaks during, just to leave the world of the film and see a little light. Without a doubt the most affecting film I've watched for this month, and if we value art by it's capacity to provoke emotion, push boundaries, or to make the eye visible, this is an important work. There's a turning point in this part way through that makes it almost two different movies, joined by some red connective tissue. That first movie would, on its own, be one of the great horror-thrillers out there. Even just the performance of Mylène Jampanoï as Lucie would be enough to recommend it. But the movie is full of these little moments where you are convinced you know how things will turn out and the film makes the most interesting possible choice instead. And then we go down a tunnel directly into hell. O is for Orpheus. Every critique of this movie as torture porn is probably justified. Every account of how intense, unrelenting, and gory it is probably undersell it. None of that is horror as pure as the idea of what is happening or the distance at which it happens. I don't know, the human capacity for brutality and cruelty is only matched by our capacity to endure suffering and to find meaning in any aspect of our experience, no matter how limited or cut off it may be. I don't want to recommend other people watch Martyrs but I think it's an incredible film. A beautiful one. if I had one real criticism it's that the music was noticeably bad in a few parts, but that's kind of a French people thing in general.
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Oct 15, 2022 02:21
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27. V/H/S Rewind 2022 Buckle up, it's gonna be a weird one  This is going to be a weird one to talk about because as mentioned in the actual Horror thread, this is the V/H/S fan edit that I reedited for my friends to watch at a Halloween get-together. It doesn't feel fair rating something I """worked""" on, but nobody noticed any of my editing and everyone enjoyed the shorts, so I would count that as a win. I like almost all of the V/H/S series segments, but watching the 'best' ones back to back is actually pretty rad because there's no real dip in quality throughout the thing. I didn't mention that this was an edit, and afterwards someone asked if all the V/H/S movies were this good (lol) so like I said, I'll take that as a win. I didn't do anything but swap some clips out, but I wish there was an easier way to show it off, because I think you guys would have dug it. Oh well. Rating: ___/10 Raatmaas
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Oct 15, 2022 02:30
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25. Bride of the Re-Animator Where to watch? It's available to rent on several services  Follow up to 1980s Re-Animator. The film picks up a little time after with Herbert West and his assistant still doing experiments. Its kind of a little weird how is assistant stays with him through all this because he clearly does not totally agree with West in his experiments. I'm not quite sure what his motivation is maybe he's just going along for the ride? Anyway this one is directed by Yuzna , and its a pretty drat good sequel. Its increase the gore and it increases the humor. Its almost slapstick at times and its fantastic. Anyway its a great movie and one of my favorites.
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Oct 15, 2022 02:41
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Maxwell Lord posted:I thought the joke was it’s the opposite, better earthquakes than hordes of killer spiders. If it had just been the one tremor, sure. But there was the first tremor, they go to check on the kids, there's another tremor that knocks over the wine glass, credits roll. I thought the implication was that this whole city could be destroyed at any moment. As I said, I don't think i t was well done, But I think that's what they were trying to get across.
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Oct 15, 2022 03:04
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 17. Halloween Ends (2022) (dir. David Gordon Green) Theater Four years after the events of Halloween Kills, Michael Myers is missing and presumed dead. After grieving the death of her daughter Karen, Laurie Strode moves into a house in the suburbs of Haddonfield with her granddaughter Allyson, attempting to move on and live a somewhat normal life. As the title implies, this is intended to be the final film in this continuity, wrapping up the story that started over 40 years ago. What better way to end the saga than by, uh... *checks notes* focusing on entirely new characters and sidelining Laurie and Michael for the vast majority of the film. That's what Halloween fans want to see, right? Throughout these three films (I've seen them referred to as the H40 trilogy, which works for me), David Gordon Green focuses a lot on trauma. Generational trauma in Halloween (2018), collective/community trauma in Halloween Kills, and in this film the focus is on resolving and moving past that trauma. I think - I wasn't super clear on what the theme of this film was, and the introduction of the character of Corey and the unrelated tragedy he went through only served to make things muddier for me. I get the parallels between his situation and Laurie/Allyson, but... why? There's plenty left to unpack with the Strodes, especially after Karen's death, so the decision to introduce Corey and make him the focus of the film is baffling to me. Michael is done pretty dirty here too - I don't think he makes a significant appearance until an hour into the film. Everything between him and Corey is really dumb and feels like the kind of thing that would appear in a 5th or 6th franchise sequel when the writers were running out of ideas, not in the climax of a planned trilogy. There are some good kills eventually, but it takes a hell of a long time to get to them. I do think there was some good stuff in the final act. There's a climactic scene at a junkyard where Michael gets to be his old brutal self, and the film ends in a way I didn't hate, with some catharsis for Laurie and a fitting end for Michael. That's like the last 20 minutes of a nearly two hour film though. I guess I can appreciate that some risks were taken here, because I wouldn't want this to just rehash what we've already seen in other Halloween films. However, most of the creative choices it makes are decidedly the wrong ones - it tries to tell a story about moving past trauma while also providing a satisfying conclusion to a 40 year saga, and manages to fail pretty spectacularly at both. 2 severed tongues out of 5 Total: 17 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 | Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 01 - Operation Capture the Slit-Mouthed Woman | Deadstream | The Black Phone | Hellraiser (2022) | Smile | Mystery of the Wax Museum | Petey Wheatstraw | Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 02: Shivering Ghost | I Was a Teenage Zombie | Halloween Ends 
Somebody fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Oct 16, 2022 |
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Oct 15, 2022 03:07
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20. Ice Cream Man (1995) Directed by Norman Apstein 🎃 Dead & Buried 🎃 "You know. I was sick too when I was little. I'm better now."  Ice Cream Man features the late David Warner as Reverend Langley. Clint Howard is actually pretty good in this weird fever dream of a movie about an ice cream man who is bad. It tries so hard to be entertaining, but it doesn't quite work. Weirdly enough, it gets worse as the blood and violence ramp up. 👻👻/5 October Challenge 5/31 1. Blood Feast (1963), 2. Sunshine (2007), 3. Relic (2020), 4. Mortuary (2005), 5. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) Spooky Bingo 15/36 1. Rodan (1956), 2. Carrie (2013), 3. Gargoyles (1972), 4. Ticks (1993), 5. Penda’s Fen (1974), 6. Crimson Peak (2015), 7. A Field in England (2013), 8. The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959), 9. Carnival of Sinners (1943), 10. Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970), 11. The Purge (2013), 12. Halloween with the Addams Family (1977), 13. Life After Beth (2014), 14. Puppet Master (1989), 15. Ice Cream Man (1995)  Total 20/?
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Oct 15, 2022 03:21
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 Horror/The Blancheville Monster, 1963 Every year I dip into that b-move DVD box set I got at a thrift store many years ago. Sometimes I strike gold and find a great obscure gem of a movie, sometimes I find pure garbage. This time I just found something boring. I'm too lazy to look up why there's two different titles for this movie, I legit don't care. It is suppose to be based on The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, but as usual like these Poe adaptions, it got gently caress all to do with the original story apart from a few things here and there. Some woman comes home to her family castle and gets told her father didn't die in a fire as she thought. He survived and turned mad after being disfigured. He is kept in a castle tower, then he escapes. There's hypnotism, a twist ending and stuff. There's so much for me to like as a fan of slow atmospheric horror, but nothing really grabbed me. It was just boring. I really wanted to like this film, just that it really didn't grip me. Who knows, maybe it needs a rewatch but I doubt I'll ever revisit this one. Just too boring.
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Oct 15, 2022 03:22
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October 14 - Candyman This is the 2021 remake, not the original.  An artist struggling to come up with a new piece of an exhibition goes to the Chicago projects where he is told the story of the Candyman, the vengeful ghost an innocent man beaten to death by the police. If someone looks into the mirror and says "Candyman" five times, the ghost appears in the mirror and kills the summoner. The artist designs a piece around that and then people start dying. As the bodies pile up, the artist becomes obsessed with creating portraits of forgotten victims of racial violence. What a weird mixed bag this film was. There's a lot of good bits that feel like they were the left over things and a lot of messy bits that feel like they were intended to be the good bits. I feel like the message got muddled a lot here. Gentrification and police violence are easy things to drop in, but I feel like the movie just nods at them and moves on instead of weaving them throughout the plot. It made the ending in particular feel unsatisfactory to me; it's supposed to be a "Hell, yeah!" moment but it contradicts a lot of what the movie was doing before and it feels like a last second swerve to make Candyman a superhero. There's another scene that's a pretty well put together kill that it you cut the three minutes out of the movie, the film would be exactly the same. There's moments in the movie that are supposed to be big reveals and they just make me go, "Okay. So what?" At least it is a good looking movie. A killer who operates in reflections isn't a new idea for horror movies, but it's really well done here. The supernatural horror scenes work really well. If only the horror of the mundane reality also played out that way. I think everyone comments on how cool the puppets used for exposition are. At first I thought it was interesting how they were integrating the original Candyman movies with this reboot. Then it became needlessly complicated. I wrote and rewrote some stuff on my problems with the themes in this film but I think what it comes down to is this: Candyman doesn't know what it wants to be and so it keeps swerving wildly from one side to other in its personal themes even when they're contradictory. The broader societal messages it approaches similarly haphazardly; at least here it doesn't contradict itself, but the movie tends to just forget about them for long stretches. Police violence is key to several bits of the film's plot, so why is it the police are only a factor in those couple of scenes? It's there, then it's gone, then it's back again. It kind of annoys me that the movie didn't do a great job of keeping track of how many times Candyman was said in scene. Apparently saying the name doesn't count unless you want it to count. Director Nia DeCosta is a woman so this is on my Spooky card as Femme Fatale. There's an embarrassingly small number of women directing horror movies (or any movies) 
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Oct 15, 2022 03:34
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 11. Death Laid an Egg (1968) aka La morte ha fatto l'uovo Directed by Giulio Questi A husband and wife team are trying to breed headless, boneless chickens to make chicken tenders easier to make. While that is going on, the husband likes to relax by hiring expensive call girls for BDSM sessions ending with him pretending to kill them. The couple also has a live-in third who the husband wants to marry but her boyfriend doesn’t want him to. All of this mixes until it reaches boiling and murder happens. An odd giallo with an odd setting.  12. Naked Girl Killed in the Park (1972) aka Ragazza tutta nuda assassinata nel parco Directed by Alfonso Brescia Dead & Buried Star Robert Hoffmann died this summer A man comes out of a carnival ride with a bullet hole in his head. With the ink still wet on a million dollar life insurance policy, the insurance company sends out their second best investigator to find out if it was muder. He decides the best way to find this out is to date the dead man’s daughter and have her take him to the family estate so he can investigate the rest of the family. Then he starts killing off the family members. A slow giallo that doesn’t have much going on.  13. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) Directed by Guy Maddin Highbrow Horror Browsing the Criterion Channel app for something I’m not going to find anywhere else, I find a ballet adaptation of the novel Dracula that is filmed in a silent expressionist style. This will do nicely. A very interesting way to tell the story of Dracula, and one that almost succeeds but there are a bit too many “effects” to replicate the expressionist style of old that result in making it hard to see what is happening. It was probably a very entertaining stage production. If you know the story already, it can be worth watching to see a fresh take but I’m not sure if you could follow this version without knowing the basics. 1. Who Saw Her Die? (1972) 2. Death Walks at Midnight (1972) 3. Death Walks on High Heels (1971) 4. Eye in the Labyrinth (1972) 5. The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972) 6. Yellow Fever: The Rise and Fall of the Giallo (2016) Behind the Screams 7. A Bay of Blood (1971) 8. Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975) 9. Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo! (2022) 10. The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972) 11. Death Laid an Egg (1968) 12. Naked Girl Killed in the Park (1972) Dead & Buried 13. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) Highbrow Horror 
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Oct 15, 2022 03:51
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21: Saloum Horror Noire I knew I wanted to watch this one so I've been mostly avoiding spoilers, but I believe the majority opinion is that it's a really good drama that get derailed by a horror movie and that's definitely how I feel. The supernatural stuff is cool and I definitely enjoyed the back half, but everything leading it up to it was just really, really cool.
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Oct 15, 2022 04:15
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Movie #13 Halloween Kills, 2021  The second movie in the third timeline branch off of the 1978 movie, this one opens right where Halloween 2018 ends. Michael emerging from the fire we left him in at the end of the previous film is a visual treat, really feels like Halloween 2018 was the death of Myers as a man, the last bits of humanity burned away. His appearance here is an elemental scene of rebirth into something worse. It's the best scene in the movie, the rest of which really doesn't live up to that opener. An entire town losing its mind following the events of a horror movie is a good concept and at times very effective, but the depiction of mob violence as a protest/political rally with a stupid slogan just feels badly mishandled. A lot of the one-liners ("This is for Dr. Loomis!" "Evil dies tonight!") are delivered so badly that I have to assume it's intentional satire of sequels that shed their horror roots to become more action heavy, but it's really ineffective. I don't think this one's terrible but it's definitely got big "12th movie in a franchise" energy. Like, it's a fine late era Friday the 13th, but it's a weak sequel to Halloween 2018.
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Oct 15, 2022 05:02
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 25. Evil Dead Trap (1988) A kooky, gruesome flick with razor sharp editing that maximizes both the frantic wriggling kills and the long, downbeat pauses to find a rhythm all its own. Miyuki Ono stars as the host of a late night slot-filler TV show that's so starved for content it takes viewer submissions. One day a snuff film shows up, complete with directions to where the victim was cut up. Naturally Ono rounds up her show crew to drive over to the creepy abandoned military base and Scooby Doo their way to the bottom of this thing by splitting up and getting murdered! Evil Dead Trap starts off sleazy and dumb, with boobs and limp dialogue and lame jump scares in a sprawling industrial setting, and gets remarkably stronger as it goes. First there's a barrage of women getting impaled, strangled and cut up in enthusiastic slasher style, and then suddenly the mood-building kicks in, building a much eerier and grander tone while also giving Ono a lot of breathing room to convey the fear of the situation even as she gathers her strength and pushes through. Eventually the film unleashes a full-on Malignant level of extravagant surprise in its final act. Fun gnarly special effects and violence, right to the end! Man if only the score was as good as the other pieces, it's a weak synth melody that's repeated until you dread it like a drill into your brain.  .5 / 5  1988 is my birth year so Evil Dead Trap checks off Origin of Evil and a second Spooky Bingo! 
Vanilla Bison fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Oct 15, 2022 |
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Oct 15, 2022 05:09
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 #73.) Ju-On: The Grudge (2003; digital) That dang Ju-On house is still cursing people who visit it! This time, a volunteer worker at the welfare center gets mixed up in the ghostly shenanigans, and we learn more about the family who used to live there before tragedy struck. The film operates in a non-linear narrative fashion, dishing out piecemeal information over a series of story segments, jumping around in time without explication of how far back or forward the story has gone, or in which direction. That, along with the ambiguity of the curse's MO, can make for a difficult parsing of the way events line up and relate to each other. At least, that was the case for me and my partner. Having to work so hard to decipher what's happened and happening leads to being more easily absorbed in the film, arguably, and lifts what would be a fairly simple story if it was told normally. Good atmosphere, good musical score, and memorably creepy imagery; it's easy to see why this budget-friendly franchise had such longevity. “I'm just a volunteer.” Rating: 7/10
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Oct 15, 2022 06:22
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 This is a great example of the 90's DTV aesthetic and I miss it. Howling VI : The Freaks -- (Hope Perello ; 1991) Full Moon Did you know that The Howling series went on long enough to have a DTV 6th part? (It's 8 and counting.) Did you know that it quietly owns? I know all these things now. It's just a completely solid early 90's werewolf movie about a drifter werewolf and his run in with a traveling freak show circus hybrid*. One that gives the viewers what we want most of all in werewolf movies : transformation sequences. New and different transformation sequences. Like 5 or 6 pretty loving solid werewolf transformation scenes with different prosthetics, and lighting and effects. There's even a surprisingly tasteful one done entirely in silhouette like it's an arty little stage play. Slightly disappointed they went with the human-like werewolf face (no snout, get out), but even that has very valid story telling reasons and they made the right call. And on top of all that the circus/freak show is actually a weird cult and their leader is a Dracula! Or never said to be but come on, he's a Dracula. So you get to see a werewolf fight a Dracula in a circus tent! Don't set your expectations sky high, but this is a legit decent werewolf movie even if it's more of an adventure than a horror. I am going to actually recommend The Howling VI to people I know and respect in real life as something to watch if they want a good werewolf film. *Emphasis on the 90's there. Trying to remember standards from when I was three is hard, but this seems relatively progressive for the time it was made. It's just it's about a freak show, so, yeah. And there's one character who is the misgendered "freak". It's handled about as well as if there were a comparable X-Files episode. 8/10 22 down, 9 to go 
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Oct 15, 2022 06:22
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 #20: The Hills Have Eyes (1977) Spooky Bingo: To Serve Man A family on vacation go off-course and become stuck within the hunting grounds of a family of depraved cannibals. There's a number of movies about people encountering a gang of psycho killers and trying to escape, with this one leaning into being an action-revenge movie, which didn't particularly work for me. I can't find specific fault with it, I just didn't care for what it was trying to do.   #21: Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1988) #22: Hellraiser IV: Bloodline (1992) Pinhead returns. In the former, we explore the human origins of Pinhead. In the latter, the history of the puzzle box. Shouldn't come as much of a surprise that I didn't think much of these compared to the first two. To me, Pinhead is more compelling as an elemental force of decadent evil than as a specific person, so I wasn't particularly intrigued to learn of his backstory, nor did I find what we were shown compelling. The structure of the fourth movie as a series of vignettes of the box through history struck me as a more interesting idea, but I didn't really care for any of them—outside seeing a young Adam Scott—nor the framing story about a special spaceship made to kill the devil. I was surprised how much I enjoyed the second movie, and these two, on top of their generally poor execution, embody what I had feared about that one, with their over-focus on the cenobite mythology.    #25: The Wolf Man (1941) Spooky Bingo: Golden Years The second son of a wealthy man returns home following the death of his older brother to take his place as his father's heir, only to find himself taking on the curse of the werewolf instead. I found this very charming, particularly Claude Rains and the lovely Evelyn Ankers. Lon Chaney Jr. had good chemistry with them, though was a bit weaker and hammier in some of his solo scenes, particularly when he's moping about the whole werewolf thing. A nice-looking and brisk production of a tragic romance, I thought this very much held up. #26: The Wolfman (Extended Cut) (2010) Spooky Bingo: Picnic At Hanging Rock The second son of a wealthy man returns home following the death of his older brother, only to find himself inheriting the curse of the werewolf from his father. The period piece aspect of this is its strongest suit. The clothing, the sets, are all elaborate and lushly photographed. But it's otherwise a significant step down from the original: much more melodramatic and way too actiony, particularly since the latter depends on a lot of ugly CGI. I wanted to like this more—I like the cast, even if I can't claim it's better than the original, and I like Joe Johnston—but while it's not awful by any means, there's not much in it to recommend it. This seems mostly forgotten for good reason. #23: An American Werewolf in London (1981) Spooky Bingo: A Perfect Getaway Two American backpackers visiting England are attacked by a wolf. One is killed. The other is injured and struggles with the fear of what he might become while dating the nurse who cared for him. A much better follow-up to the original than the remake. Smart, funny, and horrifying. The romance works again because we're given time to like the characters and to enjoy seeing them spend time together, with this take on the story fleshing out the love interest the best of the three I watched. It's all the better for not trying to do much actual werewolf action, given the real limitations of the effects, and gains from instead focusing on the chaos the werewolf causes around it during the relatively brief action scenes. I actually watched this first of the three, and enjoyed it enough that it inspired me to watch the others.  #24: The Company of Wolves (1984) Spooky Bingo: Dead & Buried (David Warner and Angela Lansbury) An adolescent girl dreams of hearing and telling a series of stories about werewolves, representing her evolution from viewing sex purely as predation by men—a view represented by her grandmother—to an attempt to incorporate her mother's perspective on the corresponding power, pleasure, and intimacy of being a woman. Some impressively horrifying transformations aside, this is mostly a fairy tale about growing up. The symbolism is very on-the-nose, but beautifully rendered, so that's no bad thing for this sort of story. Even though you could see the limited budget, I really liked the production design. The performances, the design, the cinematography, all work to capture the fairy tale feel. David Warner and Angela Lansbury—sad to have lost them both—anchor the film as two essential characters: the former various incarnations of the girls father, and the latter as the grandmother that starts off the chain of stories. Not what you should turn to for essential performances by either, but they were both a welcome presence. 
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Oct 15, 2022 08:04
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