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It's funny how fashion comes in cycles isn't it. We spent all this time trying to get away from dumb, generic horror movies, and then that in itself became a cliché and now we're back to celebrating movies for being dumb and generic, but shot in a slightly flashier way.
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Dec 16, 2008 03:51
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It's not quite a slasher, but Splinter is a nice indie horror movie with some really good special effects. Good gore, likable characters that the actors really dig into and very little silliness until the end (When it does get a bit silly). Worth a watch as long as you don't expect too much.
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Jan 28, 2009 06:18
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PsychoGoatee posted:He's very different from the other slasher characters, so I hope Michael Bay's company doesn't treat him like he's Leatherface or Jason. If Bay's other movies are anything to go by then there will be at least one joke about him masturbating with his glove.
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Feb 4, 2009 03:50
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Darko posted:The very reason why Halloween 2,4, and 7 all took great pains to show how Michael ran across info on his victim was so you didn't have this exact supernatural jump, and it maintained that he had the intelligence to track people down as opposed to a magical radar. This movie jettisoned that, but it was a surprise, and seems to be for the worse for a subset of the crowd as I heard audible complaints about it, and have seen plenty across the web. Ah man, how does a giant guy in a white mask and blood stained overalls, manage to wander round suburban areas without being stopped by the police even once? Why, once he starts killing doctors and policemen are a whole army of police mobilized to stop him? How come people just don't notice a hulking monster, who probably smells like the inside of a slaughterhouse, until he decides it's time to reveal himself. How does he find where everything is when he never speaks? Does he just listen to the radio all day hoping some vital piece of information pops up? Man, this series is so realistic in every other way, you know, just like all horror movies that spawn 10 odd sequels. I just can't get my head around the fact that a bogey man somehow appears behind someone, having managed to find them without extensive use of a local A-Z and a gps reciever, Man, horror movies can be confusing sometimes. It's almost like I'm autistically focussing on one singular element of a movie, without paying attention to the tropes and themes of the movie (and the genre) as a whole. If you have the answers then why not help me poo poo up an otherwise interesting thread for another 60 pages. Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Sep 4, 2009 |
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Sep 4, 2009 03:05
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Hmm, so that new film from Japan, Grotesque How about it then? I'll tell you. It's utter shite. Nothing there at all. It looks like a cheap DV movie. The gore effects are rubbery and terrible and there is nothing there at all. Nothing. No plot, no character development, no tension. Nothing. It doesn't even have the good manners to be funny, until the final couple of minutes. The biggest problem is that it's all up there on the screen. You don't care about anyone involved so you don't feel fear, or anything much. It's pure Grand Guignol. It's the director laughing in your face for 70 mins. Seriously. The whole point of the movie was to push boundaries and in that sense it is pretty much the logical conclusion of the torture porn genre, At least until someone else tops it. But the director is surprisingly prudish considering what he's filming. It's the film a very polite psychopath would make for his first year student film project. Also as far as Japanese torture porn goes it's not THAT extreme anyway. It feels like a collection of the violent scenes everyone remembers from other movies. Zombi, Hostel, Texas Chainsaw etc... Stuff you've already seen, but now in close up. Thanks for that, movie. That's kind of the point though as a movie it will retain interest until someone tops it, and as a piece of merchandise it's a pure cry for attention; a cash grab. A corpse of a movie with no inspiration but to recycle other people's ideas, and to profit from their juxtoposition, rather than their effectiveness. The only reason this film is notable is because the BBFC just banned it. There really was no need for that. There's nothing dangerous here, as is always the case with censorship of this kind, it doesn't matter that it was banned as the film had no worth, but people are intelligent enough to work that out for themselves. Without the publicity from the banning nobody would have even heard of it. I suppose it's more honest that stuff like Final Destination, at least. Films like this do serve a role in exposing the hypocrisy behind tasteful or humorous violence, but in order to get that (extremely obvious) message you'd have to waste an evening watching it. Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 10:25 on Sep 7, 2009 |
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Sep 7, 2009 10:13
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OBAMA ACKBAR posted:Am I the only person that thinks Human Centipede sounds completely moronic and juvenile? Actually once we get a bit of distance from this type of cinema it will probably seem as charming and campy as any other old horror movie. We'll have retro torture-porn in 20 years!
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Apr 1, 2010 05:44
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It's a really bad movie, don't bother with it if you saw the original Wrong Turn.
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May 25, 2010 11:59
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Volume posted:Is it at least a fun bad movie? No, it's played completely straight, the villain is poo poo and the ending sucks. Nice scenery and stunt work in the first half though. This is what happens if you don't want to watch it. It's played like an adventure movie for the first half, which is actually pretty cool, then a single, deranged/mutated hill-billy starts picking them off. Problem is that he's a really boring antagonist with nothing to distinguish himself from all the other survivalist psychos out there. It uses far too much horrible jerky-cam action and you can barely tell what is happening. The climax is the same thing you would get in any other survival horror, and there's a REALLY cheap sting at the end where the killer cuts the zipline the heroine is escaping on. It's a standard STV horror and the only reason anyone is giving it any time is because it's in French. I didn't like Cold Prey much either, but at least the baddie was vaguely compelling in that one.
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May 26, 2010 01:57
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Just saw Shelter and I have to say it was one of the most enjoyable horrors I've seen for a long time. Whoever said it was a movie version of an X-Files episode was quite right. Great tone, great atmosphere and enough creepy WTFness to overcome it's quite significant flaws. It took a pretty well worn theme and made it approachable by not being remotely preachy. You could tell that whoever wrote it was going for schlocky thrills, rather than serious debate, and on that level it worked brilliantly. Every actor was completely going for it too, and they totally sold most of the key performances. I loved how her glasses became a symbol of her inner conflict between faith and religion The scene after the big reveal where she rests them on her head made me laugh out loud. DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU'VE NOT SEEN IT YET! edit: Thinking about it I really loved that The extremely unpleasant "Christian" message was completely subverted by having a bunch of mountain magicians create an invincible monster that killed atheists. If there had been anything righteous about it then it would have been repulsive but the schlocky, hysterical tone cast doubt on the sincerity of the message and made it, in retrospect, very sarcastic. This goes double considering that the main character, having solidified her faith throughout the movie, at the end, looks like she's ready to throw it all away to play mother to a satanic host if it means keeping her daughter. The other possibility is that it's not about Christianity at all, and that Granny represented some other folk god with actual power (ie. the opposite of the Christian God that failed the influenza victims, the daughters father etc.) Given the perceived immorality/cruely of the "real" God of the movie it could be about contemporary religious mores going up against something much older. Whatever, I enjoyed it. Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Aug 26, 2010 |
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Aug 26, 2010 15:23
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UncleMonkey posted:I dunno. I mean, I really did like it. But at the same time the unavoidable message is that science is evil and ignorance and religious dogma-- a very strict Old Testament-style religious dogma at that-- is good. Otherwise God will see to it that you get proper hosed-- no matter what your reasons or what kind of a person you are. No matter how good a movie is, it's hard for something like that not to leave a bad taste in your mouth. I have the same conflicted feelings with the anti-individual, anti-capitalist message implied in Drag Me To Hell-- a movie which I absolutely love despite my discomfort. I completely agree with you, but I really didn't feel like the movie was pushing any kind of agenda on you. It was just batshit insane horror for horror's sake, and it drew from a variety of sources to achieve that. Really though, think about it There was no greater conflict going on. It wasn't religion vs science on a grand scale - it was a small scale story of revenge. Granny created a soulless monster that takes the souls of others and wears them. If anything the movie is saying that religion can be used by assholes for their own evil purposes. Seriously, what WAS the God of that movie? Some Gnostic God punishing lapsed Christians?
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Aug 27, 2010 06:17
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Did anyone see The Horde? I'd like to hear some goon opinions on it.
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Sep 14, 2010 00:41
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The Loved Ones is good, and offers a slightly new take on an old genre, but it left me slightly cold. There are some pretty serious pacing problems and the film never builds up to as feverish a climax as it deserves. Don't believe the hype - it's good but not great - Definitely an interesting watch though, with some really good central performances.
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Jan 20, 2011 09:42
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weekly font posted:I assumed both of those but thought they were kind of obscure when someone like Predator is missing. Then again the loving Castle Freak is on there so obscure must be what they're going for a bit. Where is Castle Freak? Are you mistaking him for Rawhead Rex? Rawhead Rex  Castle Freak 
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Feb 15, 2011 10:05
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Cubone posted:Sorry, I'm completely lost as to what you're trying to convey here. [quote="Feminism and the 'Crisis of Rationality"] There is a measure of consensus within feminist theory that rationalist values are in crisis—that the very arrival of women on the scene of intellectual activity necessitates a reappraisal of those values.1 Sometimes the claim is that conventional scientific research procedure reflects an objectifying, control-seeking attitude to its subject-matter which can be regarded on psychological grounds as characteristically masculine...[/quote] Cubone posted:Why did you put rationality in scare quotes, and how was rationality being challenged by the Thing? I was under the impression that, had everybody remained rational, the situation wouldn't have escalated the way it did. Would you recognize the stereotype of the rational man and the "emotional" woman? Cubone posted:If the Thing was artificially intelligent, which incidentally is a really weird concept to just submit without support or qualification, what does an artificially intelligent antagonist have to do with the Prometheus archetype? Are viruses intelligent? The thing learns from the beings that it takes over. It is essentially programming itself with the minds of the victims. Cubone posted:And how does any of this add up to the thing being female? SYMPATHETY and EMPATHETY are emotionally derived qualities that are usually associated with women. The gender conflict in the film is between the fierce rationality of the men, who sit everyone down and administer tests in order to determine who is whom, and the "female" Thing, which is a literal embodiment of empathy. We understand one another through empathy. In this case the Thing understands us at a cellular level. Once the process is complete the victim is wholly sympathetic to it's way of thinking. Think about the image of a hand underneath someone else's skin. It is an act of forceful union and forced submission but it is explicitly sensual. Rationalism does win in the end. The characters realize that masculine rationality has failed - They are sitting face to face and yet cannot tell who the monster is. On the other hand, the empathic monster knows very well whom it has become, and therefore whom it's enemy is. Hyper-femininity, once unleashed would destroy the entire world, so the only rational thing do to at that point is to self destruct. In doing so Mcready is acknowledging the power of his feminine opponent, but he is also acknowledging the power of his opponent. He is learning to become sympathetic. Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 09:53 on Jul 15, 2011 |
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Jul 15, 2011 09:44
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If this helps here is a satirical "rationalist" description of women.Edwin Abbott, 1884 posted:
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Jul 15, 2011 10:44
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Xenomrph posted:The obvious film-analysis way to handwave that is that it was intentional but subconscious on the part of the creators. Oh Jesus, stop saying this! Nobody needs the artists personal permission to hold an opinion on a book or read a film in a certain way. Do you honestly think the value of a work of art is only in the INTENDED message? Nobody in this thread wants to put words in John Carpenter's mouth. Nobody is trying to second guess the creators. Nobody is suggesting they are smarter than the writers. People are looking at the images on the screen, and listening to the words that are spoken and applying their own readings. edit: Doh, should have paid more attention! Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Jul 16, 2011 |
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Jul 16, 2011 10:27
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DrVenkman posted:Jennifer is representative of lesbianism, and goes out of her way to kill anyone (male) that her friend is interested in. Why does Jennifer represent lesbianism? Needy clearly loves Jennifer but it's not reciprocated. Succubi are the representation of patriarchal fear. Fear of female dominance, fear of unwanted births and fear of seduction; basely, a male fear of not siring his children; of having his sperm taken and used against him. Sex and eating are often linked (9 1/2 WEEKS) but they are usually concerned with feeding and not consuming. Feeding is masculine, it's penetrating, dominating and providing, consuming is accepting what is offered, submission, pregnancy and being penetrated. Women don't gently caress, they are hosed. Men get to be players but women can only be whores. Men hunt, chase and catch their prey, women are prey. Men are macho and libidinous, sex is violence. A succubus then, is a the patriarch's worst fear, a woman the sexual proclivities qualities of a man. Jennifer is a succubus. She seduces men not out of lust or desire but in order to feed. It is an act of unrestrained ego, to hunt, and kill and feed. It's that male fear again "What if our women enjoyed sex? What if they were free to express themselves as sexual beings? What if they like it more than me? WHAT IF THEY CAN'T BE SATISFIED?! But Jennifer doesn't enjoy sex. She is utterly bored the chore of having to seduce her next meal - It's a means to an end. Conversely, she looks like she's enjoying herself immensely once the eating begins. She represents the way the male psyche turns sex into an abstraction, into a projection of self, into ego. This is why Needy is able to both resist and defeat her. The succubus is weaponsised against men. It can defeat and consume them from the inside out because it is a manifestation of their own fears. As a woman Needy is not in danger of being consumed but of being cursed. When she defeats Jennifer she gains her knowledge and power. In other words, she learns the true and fragile nature of the masculine facade, and how it can be defeated, which is just about where the movie ends, with another man-hating "actualized" woman let loose upon the world.
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Jul 21, 2011 14:09
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Man gently caress you guys for recommending Never Sleep Again. I'd been planning a pizza and movie night for when I finally had some free time to myself and now all I've done is sit glued to a 3.5 hour long documentary all night! (It was awesome.)
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Sep 2, 2011 13:50
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Was it someone in this thread who recommended Highway to Hell? If so gently caress YOU! That movie was a nightmarish poo poo cocktail of bad 90's music, boredom and sophomoric earnestness. It wasn't even interestingly bad. If you like movies about dirt racing, art school sensibilities and limited middle class rebellion then this film will be right up your street. I'm not sure it was a movie at all actually; it was as if someone just gave the spoiled, talentless children of old Hollywood a video camera and told them to go film whatever was on their mind that day. Well, at least it let me know that Chad Lowe, brother of Rob Lowe is alive and making lovely movies. Look at the baby faced little twat.  Despite having a name that practically screams out "We as a family have no interest in you whatsoever and have invested ourselves entirely in darling Rob, Chad Lowe is blessed not only with all his family's acting talent, but the looks as well. Marvel as he emotes disdain at a poor person walking past on the sidewalk. It wasn't even in the movie but such is the acting talent of Chad Lowe that he contained that disgust for a full minute and brought it back into the movie with him!  Patrick Bergin also pops up as an idiot.   gently caress YOU PATRICK BERGIN, YOU'RE OLD AND NOBODY LIKES YOU! (Did Patrick Bergin ever play Robin Hood? Because he should have done, back when he was famous for beating the poo poo out of Julia Roberts.) Buffy the Bonerslayer was also beaten roughtly by the Bergermeister.  With a special guest appearance by the people who crotchdribbled Ben Stiller and his ugly sister.  And a burn victim pretending to be a HELL COP. (Real burn victims refused to participate in this terrible movie so they used stock footage of a testicle with glasses glued on to it.  Let me quote the movie blurb. quote:Fun and imaginative early 90's horror fantasy comedy about a young couple who, on their way to Vegas to elope, take the wrong backroad and end up in another world that literally leads to Hell. Directed by "Drop Dead Fred" helmer Ate de Jong. The blurb lies. This is neither fun nor imaginative. Horseshit lacks the ability to be anything other than horseshit. Also the director uses a pseudonym marginally less impressive than McG, unless people from Holland are really called Ate, in which case I hate them even more than I already did from watching this movie. Way, to go director, you also directed this.  The only positive note here is that this was the director's last American movie and , probably as a direct result, he was banished to his homeland and forced to make Dutch TV movies like Tödliche Lüge and Wenn ich nicht mehr lebe. I've not seen either of these but Barbara Focke and Matthias Fuchs starred in the latter and they both hated it so much that they changed their surnames to gently caress and retroactively added those names to everything they had appeared in, just to give the uninitiated a sense of what it was like to work for a man called "Ate". This is Ate De Jong. He did. He ate it all.  Ate De Jong was born on April 20th, 1891, the same day that Hitler was born some distance away. They would become friends and he would later recruit him for a small role in this movie, playing the embodiment of all evil, Gilbert Gottfried.  All his life Ate enjoyed raping children and hoped to make a career of it, but he found himself in the film industry. Despondent and listless, he continued to make boring, obnoxious films, in the hope of attracting young children to his film set, but all he managed to do was attract the unrequited affections of fellow child molester, Richard Farnsworth.  To end, I would like to show you the movies only real special effect, unless you count the Cerberus sequence, which is special in an entirely different way. (slightly NWS) http://blog.rottencotton.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/highwaytohellsamplepic9mu.jpg This message has been brought to you by Richard Farnsworth, thank you and goodnight. 
Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Sep 7, 2011 |
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Sep 7, 2011 16:58
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PA is pretty much the ultimate proof of your imagination being the catalyst in a good horror movie. The triumph of the found footage genre is that it invites you to fill in the necessary blanks in the narrative with your own story, particularly with regard to what is coming up NEXT. Each scene is defined more by where it starts and ends than by what actually happens in it. Unfortunately PA is not a good horror movie but at least people managed to scare themselves a little while being subjected to that horrible bore.
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Sep 19, 2011 16:06
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The very great thing that Blair Witch did was that it made the camera itself into an instrument of terror. The characters have limited battery.and tape so as their situation becomes more and more grave they only use it at significant moments in order to document what is happening to them. Essentially then there is a whole story going on without us but what the camera does is to throw us right into the middle if moments of escalation. We may be safe in the scene that is currently going on but we are constantly aware that the next blackout might lead us into a moment of extreme horror. In BW the scarist moments are always the scene changes because we know that the next time the camera starts up there is going to be a drat good reason. This is used to great effect in the forest chase sequence. Calm...blackout, jump straight into a scene of panic and terror. Our imaginations do most of the work but the movie provides a strong conceptual framework with which to ensnare ourselves. Compare that with PA. Loooooong scenes of nothing at all during the day followed by a FORMULAIC night sequence. The camera is a static object through which we merely observe instead of a tool to involve us. Blair Witch's faux naturalism was actually a cunning way of involving the audience in a deeply contrived (in a good way) traditional horror story. PA's faux horror is actually an attempt to tell a truly naturalistic story, which betrays a deep misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the found footage genre.
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Sep 19, 2011 16:49
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Don't worry, Martyr's doesn't do anything of the sort. It is absolutely not about rubbing the audience's nose in anything. That kind of commentary is valid only in the same way that you can make any movie the "dream" of the main character. Yes, you can reduce everything via solipsism if you choose, but we tend to move past that after our first "What if the whole world was a dream?" conversation in middle school. Martyrs is about agony and ecstasy. At a key stage in the film we see real world photos of a Chinese prisoner undergoing Ling Chi, slow slicing. These photos are famous because despite being chopped up into a million pieces, the victim has a look of beatific calm on his face. Now we know that in reality it was because the victim's family paid the executioner to ply him with opium, but the movie exists in a world where suffering, in it's purest state is a transcendent process which brings us in contact with god. Only it doesn't seem to work quite right. It produces horrible, deformed monsters which lurk on the edges of our perception and haunt us when we are most vulnerable. The protagonist escaped the this fate once, only to find herself driven to return to the site of her torture. The more conventional first half of the movie deals with her revenge. According to the traditional genre rules a revenge is complete when the last enemy has been murdered, after which the protagonist may hang up their weapons and return to the life they led before. This is because a revenge story is a story of a person undergoing supreme self actualization, usually beginning with a metaphorical or literal return from the dead, to overcome the problems that led them to "die" in the first place. However, the revenge depicted in Martyrs is traumatic, bloody and unresolved. Anna's partner, Lucie, once she understands the nature of Anna's demented rage, kills herself, and Anna ends up babysitting the demon that initially haunted her. Horror, in the movie is just the precursor to sadness. This is because Martyrs takes a particularly bleak view of humanity. People, once broken, become fundamentally unfixable. The transcendence the movie keeps pushing for is really just an escape from the unending torment of life - a single moment of freedom. The first half of the movie is scary and satisfying in the way that it accords to the internal logic of revenge movies, but it quickly ends once Anna is beaten by overwhelming odds. No matter how many of them you kill, the demons will never stop coming. The second half of the movie deals with an equally futile quest - the search for the afterlife. There is no ending that could be satisfying because, as we have seen, the moment of transcendence the one experiences upon death is CREATED by the struggle to remain alive. This is why the villain character kills herself even though she has technically "won" - in doing so she has cheated herself of her own transcendence. Importantly, before she does so, she tells her colleague to "Keep doubting." - to keep struggling. You can't cheat your way to heaven. There's loads more to discuss but I want to see what other people have to say first. I'd say that it's a strikingly original film whose execution doesn't quite live up to it's concept, but it's worth a watch. I don't think I'd want to see it again though; it's not fun. Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Sep 22, 2011 |
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Sep 22, 2011 08:01
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flashy_mcflash posted:This is a little reductive but I pretty much agree. It homogenizes horror fans as bloodthirsty bros and then talks down to them, ignoring those of us that enjoy a more nuanced horror story that doesn't rely on gore as a crutch, like Suspiria. If you take our upon yourself to be personally insulted by a film then so be it but it's not implicit within the text and it says more about your own mentality than that of the filmmakers'.
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Sep 22, 2011 14:32
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weekly font posted:
I just summoned the ghost of SMG using an arcane ritual and he says that your feelings are as valid as anyone's long as you try to express them in a less totalistic manner, but that you are a little bit over-sensitive and that's probably why you imagine that the film (and people on the internet) are insulting you.
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Sep 22, 2011 15:05
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Look I know everyone wants to be SMG now but to ignore personal feelings when discussing film is to ignore the human experience. And worse, to insult people for bringing personal feelings into casual film discussion (sorry prof, isnt film criticism 101) is pretty dickish.
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Attack the Block is fantastic and features the best monsters I've ever seen in any movie regardless of budget. Watch it.
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Sep 23, 2011 14:03
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Rhyno posted:Just watched Attack the Block and it was entirely too much fun. Great plot, great monsters, ends on such a good note. loving loved it. Yeah it's really good to see that Joe Cornish is as skillful a filmmaker as he is a comedian. Mark "I am always wrong about everything" Kermode thought it was crap and also had a bit of an argument with Joe about it, but then he likes Twilight. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzHtxazjwz4
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Oct 8, 2011 12:23
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I guess, if he had REALLY been going for that 80's Assault on Precinct 13 feel then the kids would have been the first to get wasted.
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Oct 10, 2011 01:49
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JohnWilkesGoonth posted:It just made me wonder who sets out to make a movie like this, and feels satisfied with it enough to release it to the public. Someone who thinks that the only point of horror movies is to showcase human suffering. Where have you been man this is 2011! Horror has evolved!
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Oct 15, 2011 16:39
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Craig Spradlin posted:I dunno, some of the most powerful films I've seen were horror movies and I wouldn't call the experience of seeing them "fun." Horror movies can be fun, or they can be not-fun, like pretty much every other type of movie out there. This is more of a structural issue. It's perfectly possible to make a horror movie where the everyone dies and the bad guy wins but the audience doesn't leave feeling terrible. Give us some drama - give the characters something to strive for, have them achieve something, even if it's just wounding the killer before they die. It's amazing how easy it is to turn a pointless death into something with a little meaning. Eden Lake felt the same way to me. You have these characters who struggle to survive only to wipe the protagonist out in a mean, crappy plot twist. How are you supposed to feel at the end of that movie? Like you'd just wasted your money? Nobody wants to see movies where it feels like people arbitrarily have a piano dropped on them NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO. It's a contrivance in the same way that having your romantic lead hit his head and suddenly remember that he DOES love the girl of his dreams after all. Films have to earn their endings, not just assume that they can serve you a platter of brutality and leave you satisfied. I'd say that Inside managed to earn it's brutal ending. Yes, it's mean and bleak, but the action that preceded it was paced very well so you got a genuine sense of escalation. There is at least some rationale for the actions of the antagonist and the film is structured so that the climax and reveal come together. More importantly though, the film managed to be a meditation ON brutality. The idea of rage tearing through boundaries, moving between states of internal/externality was explored in more than one sense. There was more behind the violence than just a desire on to show on screen violence.
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Oct 16, 2011 03:25
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Neumonic posted:It always amazes me how some people don't realize that many horror films' intended effect is too make you feel like poo poo; the same type of people would have said that Sophocles "went too far" when Oedipus fucks his mother and stabs himself in the eyes. Right...Classical tragedies were written to make people "feel like poo poo." Edit : This is too dumb to leave alone. Go read Aristotle's Poetics and he will tell you the EXACT purpose of tragedy. Precis here. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html#341 Hint : It's not the same as the purpose of Megan is Missing. Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 09:25 on Oct 16, 2011 |
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Oct 16, 2011 09:10
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Wow Nightbreed is just one big jellied mess of a movie. I don't see how the fabled director's cut could be any better unless it was literally an extra hour and a half of cut.subplots. WTF was up with that priest?! On the other hand, David Cronenburg in a starring role! Edit : reading IMDB it seems that there actually was a full hour of plot.cut! Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Oct 16, 2011 |
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Oct 16, 2011 11:21
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I didn't have any trouble following it, but then again I read the novella immediately beforehand. The two are much more similar than Lord of Illusions, for example. Well that preacher for example, shows up 30 mins before the end and occilates between good and evil choices for a bit before becoming the critical set up the sequel character. It might have been interesting had he had more than a minutes screen time. Meanwhile the deadlock dude seems, like he's being set up to do something important but all he really does is whiff a fight. Even the lead has no real characterization. He just wanders around looking stressed until he decides that previously unmentioned prophecy needs fulfilling and that he's ther man for the job. That said, I did enjoy it; Cronenburg was very creepy. Just about to read Cabal, maybe that will flesh out the skeleton of the movie.
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Oct 16, 2011 12:48
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Yeah right now you have an interesting concept but you need a story. A movie where the the killer's victory is completely inevitable is going to have no tension whatsoever. If it becomes clear that your characters have literally 0% of survival then the audience will simply deinvest in your them and tune out for the rest of the movie. You need to give them a reason to invest in them. For example, there could be a legend about these killers saying that they always leave one person alive to carry the story to the next town that will be hit. That way you can have drama between the characters (two people who don't want to be split up, someone who wants to gently caress everyone over. Also, the person who escapes, even though they will die in the next town, might have a chance to learn something about these monsters which she may be able to pass on to someone who may have a chance to prepare and fight them properly. The killer can't be the sole focus of a movie; you end up with Hatchet that way.
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Oct 20, 2011 02:03
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I've always been surprised by how revered Argento is in the horror community. Suspiria was fantastic and genuinely scared me so I hunted down the other sisters movies and just found them perplexing. I thought I'd give his giallos.a try next but they weren't up to much either so I watched the hated Tenebrae and found it to be his second best movie. Stenhelm syndrome is just weird (in a bad way) and Phenomena is eventually so whacked out that it almost makes up for the long boring sequences that precede it. But its's not a good film by any metric. His recent movies are all appalling. My theory is that he because he looks like an actual serial killer people have somehow gotten his movies and persona confused.
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Oct 25, 2011 08:30
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Wolf Creek is another mean spirited movie with a strong emphasis on suffering. That's fine, it works well with the realistic characters and claustrophobic documentary-like gaze exerted over them. Which would be great if the second half of the movie want just a string of cliches and retarded decisions. But it is, so it's not.
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Oct 25, 2011 16:50
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 Nothing is scarier than their command of the English language, but The Eyes Without a Face is pretty spooky for something made in 1962. Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Oct 26, 2011 |
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Oct 26, 2011 05:18
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Just saw THE DEAD. Pros. Setting your zombie movie in a ravaged African landscape neartly inverts the standard ' zombies as a symbol of overwhelming consumerism/apathy/decadence'. Instead we have a different cultures being united against a common threat. Zombies as war - societies fighting until the bottom of their world drops out. Some of the imagery references real life atrocities, it's compelling and disturbing. Pervasive sense of threat. These are walkers in the truest sense. They never stop, never give up. They aren't dangerous most of the time but you have to sleep eventually and they don't. Minimalist storytelling. Great sense of a world beyond the immediate narrative. Using non actors made it a very interesting watch. Complaints about the acting are overstated. Had some actual, honest to god scary moments. The jump in the airbase was pulled off exquisitely. Cons. When you go out out your way to make a movie this unique littering it with a so many standard zombie cliches REALLY hurts it because everything else is so exceptional. Had the script been a little smarter this would have become a classic, As it stands, it's just a curiosity. Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Oct 27, 2011 |
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Oct 27, 2011 16:28
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The Woman is absolutely brilliant and kind of crap at the same time. It's all spoilers from hereon out so don't read this if you haven't seen it. I absolutely loved the slow motion effects that begin as a blissful evocation of family life are gradually revealed to be the inescapable, fugue state that each character exists in. Watching them swimming through treacle both dream-like and disturbing, which sets the tone for the rest of the movie. Not too much to say about the rest of the plot, the feminist allegory is astonishingly well-integrated into the narrative. Almost everything you see in the movie, from the son watching the kids "play" with his sister, to the father's predatory job is "on message." My favorite scene was the chewing gum in the hairbrush encounter - knock the woman down so you can pick her up again. The son's baby-steps towards patriarchy are almost tender and we can see that this isn't something he is just imitating from his father - it's something he fully understands and embraces, but he's also a victim, this is how he has been taught to express himself. Performances are all great with the exception of the teacher, but this works to the film's advantage because it marks her out as being something wholly distinct from the family unit. I didn't feel much when she got chowed down upon though and I'd like to have connected with her plight a little more. There are various ways to read the woman; a symbol of the corruption of the family unit, their internal strife, the external harm that misogyny inflicts on both its victims and its perpetrators, or the need that weak men have of women in order to define themselves. Because the film is rooted in allegory the interactions between the family and the woman can become difficult to read on a literal level, which somewhat weakens the impact of the ending. I actually wish the ending had been a little more violent. It was attempting to hit you on a visceral level in order to be cathartic but it needed to be harder hitting if it wanted to compete with the superior allegorical nature of the climax. You might say that the ending was predictable, and it's certainly something you can see coming, but there's a difference between waiting for something to happen and wanting it to happen. If you have fully internalized the film's message by that point then it should have been something you were screaming for, rather than fearing. The initial tension with the loose screw, where we ARE expected to fear her escape, shows how far you are expected to have come. The absolute best thing about the film, for me, was that the twist turned out to be that the woman was NOT AN ANIMAL. We are led to believe that she is animalistic and in need of taming, which, even if we don't agree with the actions of the father, makes us complicit in his ugly view of women. It turns out that she does not kill indiscriminately and that she is capable of language, moral judgement and mercy. Her feral aggression turns out to be resistance to his own uncivilized behaviour. She is uncivilized and dangerous because he makes her that way. It's a very smart little turnaround that show's us just how pervasive the male gaze really is. Good movie. Definitely worth seeing. Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Nov 12, 2011 |
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Nov 12, 2011 15:56
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Just watched Stuck First half is absolutely brilliant but then, like all Stewart Gordon movies, it goes completely off the rails. the weird thing is that it goes off on this weird fantasy tangent which really jarrs with the documentarian eye of the beginning. All the while I was just thinking "Why the hell do they need to try and make this MORE of a horror movie?" The actual, real-life story upon which this is based is FAR worse than anything they managed to dream up. let's compare the endings. The movie. After multiple escape attempts he manages to the woman's boyfriend with a pen, escapes, is dragged back and then crashes the woman's own car into her. She then sets herself on fire with a gunshot. The Mexican family next door carry him away to safety, having learnt a valuable lesson about society. Real life. He remains in the windshield. She repeatedly visits him and apologizes while watching him bleed to death. After he dies she and a friend dump his body in a park. She is caught some time later because someone overhears her boasting about the incident at a party. She gets 50 years; I lose my faith in humanity after reading about it on SA.
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Nov 20, 2011 15:39
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LtKenFrankenstein posted:The second one is depressing and all, but it's not cinematic at all. They turned the story into a thriller only taking the barest outlines of the real life story, like any good "based on a true story" thriller. I don't know why you would think a life or death struggle between a captor and a captive that is shown entirely through dialogue is uncinematic. It would have taken a good writer and a (much) better director, sure but it's been done before with great success. Ever seen Death and the Maiden? Sleeping with Sharks? the movie goes to insane lengths to set up a sense of equivalence between the two characters, and from that we can draw the distinctions that lead to the film's conflict. They are both bound by circumstances out of their control. He is put on the street, she wants a promotion. He has a lovely job centre case worker, she has a lovely boss. He's a bum, she helps people, he didn't look where he was going, she didn't look where she was driving. He was drunk, she was on drugs. Ending his life is saving her life, saving his life is ending her life. There is a fantastic meta dialogue going on about the guilt of the victim vs the guilt of the perpetrator. The woman would like nothing better to do than to forget the whole thing ever happened - she wishes that she had been able to commit a hit-and-run. But she is constantly tormented by her actions, not by ghosts but by the literal figure of the man she hit. His death represents her absolution. You can see it in her eyes when she talks to him. Letting him die is a spiritual nessesity for her. My biggest problem with the movie is that these ideas ARE ACTUALLY BROUGHT UP in the first half of the movie and then dropped in favour of Evil Dead style splatter antics. There is huge potential for drama here, just because it doesn't have someone being set on fire and screaming doesn't mean it isn't cinematic. The problem with the film is that you have to judge it by what it actually does, so it spends the first half setting up an atmosphere of authenticity, complete with crime scene like time stamps, bed making GBS threads and horrible real-life issues like overbearing bosses and homelessness. This is all done very well but it has the unfortunate side effect of making it seem like the characters live in the real world by establishing their primary motivations as being something roughly equivalent to what we ourselves feel as people; they want somewhere to sleep, somewhere to eat, they want a promotion, they want to be loved, they want to CONTINUE their lives. By laying out the intricate causal chains that lead up to the accident the film gives itself "weight" and "heft". In this case "weight" would be the deterministic nature of the movie. In the same way that https://www.crimelibrary.com reports have weight, the movie is reporting on an event which has already happened. We don't read a story of real-life crime hoping that the victims escape, we read them for a wider understanding of the situation, an an insight into how minds can become so broken that they can commit atrocities. The inevitability of the crime is "weight". The "heft" is the fact that is real. So for the first half Stuck has "weight" and "heft" Then it becomes extremely silly and throws it all away. The problem isn't that it is silly, it's that it betrays itself for a few cheap gore gags. Spermanent Record fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Nov 21, 2011 |
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Nov 21, 2011 01:01
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