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Darko posted:Horror has been as gory as it's ever been in the last 6 years or so, actually. Yeah, I don't really know where this PG-13 myth is coming from but I've seen it a lot of places and it baffles me. Outside of the Asian horror trend and a couple scattered movies here and there, most horror has been of the "buckets of blood" variety. It's not exactly Guinea Pig level stuff but as far as mainstream, wide-release horror goes you really can't ask for much more gore than what we've been getting.
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Feb 2, 2009 15:35
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knifehitz posted:All I can say is motherfucking Carpenter's The Thing The Thing actually did pretty drat bad in theaters. It's since become a cult classic, but it didn't manage to recoup its costs domestically during its theatrical run. It wasn't a Pluto Nash style bomb, but I doubt any suits are thinking "this could be the next The Thing" positively.
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Jul 29, 2010 17:47
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Zwabu posted:I just saw "Inferno", the second of Dario Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy (Suspiria, Inferno, and Mother of Tears). After having seen Opera and Inferno after Suspiria, I no longer expect much from Argento and am not so interested in seeing other works of his, although Suspiria is still one of my favorite horror movies ever. The only movie of his after Suspiria worth anything is Tenebre. I enjoy others, but that's the only one I'd actually defend. On the other hand, Deep Red and Bird With the Crystal Plumage both came before Suspiria and are fantastic, Deep Red in particular. Watch those, maybe Tenebre as well, and then you're pretty much done. Oh, and Mother of Tears is one of the biggest letdowns I've ever seen. It felt more like a direct-to-video Wishmaster sequel than anything related to Suspiria.
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Oct 25, 2011 08:07
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Argento is revered for Bird, Deep Red and Suspiria. Tenebre isn't hated, either... it's generally considered one of his best, and just below those three. After those you've got the "for the fans" movies: Cat O' Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Inferno, Phenomena, and Opera. Pretty much everything after Opera is widely considered god-awful. But man... Bird, Deep Red and Suspiria justify the love. Yeah, he's completely lost it, but that doesn't change what he managed to do in the 70s.
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Oct 25, 2011 08:42
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I'd say the sexual subtext of Ginger Snaps (if it can even be considered subtext... the metaphor ain't subtle) could be interpreted in a few different ways, some of which are far worse than others. It's been a while since I've seen it, though. I'm also not sure a group of 15 year old girls would find it terribly fun. The movie does a really good job of building up the characters and then dragging them through the mud, and while it has fun moments it gets pretty drat mean in the last act. Gotta agree with the Scream recommendations, though.
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Oct 29, 2011 06:38
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wormil posted:There were conditions in the question, it wasn't 'name random zombie movies.' And there aren't many "great" zombie movies unless you only use zombie movies as a benchmark. He didn't ask for great films with zombies, he asked for decent zombie movies that weren't full of nerdy obsessiveness or unrelenting campiness. There's not much at the level of Night and Dawn, no, but there's plenty of stuff that isn't just "zombies are so cool" circlejerking and no-budget schlock.
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Nov 16, 2011 09:01
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troll for dollars posted:I would say that's an accurate summary. This is hilarious. I get why they came up with the idea to end the movie this way in the first place, but you'd think they'd figure out why it's actually completely awful at some point before release.
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Jan 6, 2012 18:07
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frozenpeas posted:Isn't being overtly misogynistic better than being covertly misogynistic? I think the idea is that rather than acknowledging and commenting on the misogyny the slasher genre is filled with, Hatchet genuinely revels in it. It's the difference between saying "slashers are misogynistic but we love 'em anyway" and "slashers are misogynistic and that's awesome."
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Mar 2, 2012 03:29
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Maxwell Lord posted:Inferno has a number of problems (most prominently it takes forever to find out who the actual protagonist is), but "Mater Tenebrarum" may be stuck in my head forever. drat you Keith Emerson! I've tried so hard over the years to like Inferno and I just can't. It's got a few good moments, yeah, but by and large it's just a series of barely-connected scenes with absolutely no anchor or purpose driving it forward. It almost feels like its own highlight reel. Characters are thinly-drawn blood sacks even by Argento standards, and although it's tempting to just brush it all away by calling it "dream-like" I find it hard to do so. The thing is, dreams still operate on some kind of internal logic that makes sense emotionally, if not always logically, and I don't see any of that in Inferno. It's got the rambling nature and lack of cohesion a dream has, but it doesn't have the underlying emotion or purpose of a dream that makes it feel real and meaningful anyway. Also, I know this is heresy but I don't think it looks terribly good either. The sets are quite barren and the camera work is surprisingly flat a lot of the time. The lighting is garish to make up for that, and the colors certainly look nice (if repetitive... it looks like half the budget went to red and blue gels), but after a while I find it kind of tedious. Up to that point in his career Argento had been shaking things up a lot in each of his movies, with constantly roving cameras and varied lighting schemes. To suddenly see the camera on sticks and red/blue gels in drat near every shot is pretty disappointing. I don't know, honestly Inferno feels like the work of someone who had Argento's stuff described to him and then tried to replicate it, rather than actually being the work of Argento himself. And yet despite this, I'm probably going to keep trying to give it a shot in the hopes that I'll eventually see what people like about it. I enjoy pretty much everything else from Bird through Opera so maybe it'll work for me someday. Soundtrack's pretty rad, though.
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Apr 23, 2012 13:50
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H.P. Shivcraft posted:I doubt you'll be persuaded the film's any better, but since you asked: Yeah, that's pretty much how I took it as well. It's blatantly symbolic but far from random or unrelated to the rest of the movie.
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Jul 4, 2012 22:36
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I'm quite partial to The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, which is actually the movie "Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key" comes from. It's got an absolutely beautiful score, some pretty stunning shots, plenty of trashy exploitation and a tone that gets oddly haunting at times. It generally seems to get lost amid Martino's later films (Torso and Your Vice... in particular), but I think it's at least as worthwhile as those.
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Aug 21, 2012 06:20
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Overexposure probably hurt it a lot, but The Ring is PG-13 and works really well, more than pretty much anything else in the genre. Ghost stories in general tend to be bloodless, really. If they're rated R it's almost always for other things, like nudity or language.
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Sep 22, 2012 07:39
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epoch. posted:edit: ^ Do you mean Black Sabbath? That's been on Netflix before for a long while... Black Sabbath has been on there for a while, Black Sunday has not.
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Oct 9, 2012 17:32
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So I just watched The Innkeepers and Lake Mungo. The Innkeepers was... well, the build-up was good. The problem is that the movie plays things so safe for so long that I became convinced something was going to happen at the end, and then nothing did. The whole movie felt like Ti West considered ghosts inherently scary so he never bothered to spend any time establishing them as an actual, legitimate threat. I don't have an issue with a slow, traditional ghost story, but at some point there's got to be something more to the ghosts than just being ghosts. As for Lake Mungo, I agree with all the praise it got here. The story was surprisingly touching, and things got eerie in such a natural way that I didn't fully realize how creeped out I was until it was all over.
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Oct 11, 2012 06:39
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The thing that makes Lake Mungo work so well is that it's a very real, dramatic story at its core, with the horrific supernatural aspects extending naturally out of that. A family having a rough time coming to terms with the death of a loved one is a very real thing a lot of people can easily identify with, and the movie is about that far more than anything else, even the more traditionally creepy elements. It also makes the very final scenes that much more haunting (no pun intended). It's common for someone who's lost a loved one to feel guilt over any attempt to, for lack of a better term, get over it, and Lake Mungo basically gives those fears and feelings of guilt a tangible reason: the mother is literally abandoning the ghost of her daughter. Her acceptance is hurting her daughter even in death, and that's just horrifying to think about for anybody who's ever gone through the grieving process. Basically, Lake Mungo works because it deals with the grief of the family and the pained life of the daughter first, and the haunting aspects second, and the former greatly increase the impact of the latter. A ghost works so much more if it's not just a monster and the people experiencing it aren't just victims.
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Oct 16, 2012 00:52
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Exactly. While Alice's specter is not actually a ghost but a doppleganger, it's one of the very best ghost movies I've ever seen, which covers a lot of excellent movies. I was under the impression that although what Alice encounters is in fact a doppelganger and not a ghost, she does in fact become a ghost after death, hurt by the eventual acceptance that her family comes to. It's seriously the best horror movie I've seen in a long time, primarily because in a lot of ways it's more concerned with drama than horror.
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Oct 16, 2012 01:31
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Liku posted:That looks pretty neat, and I'll probably like it, but why the hell are they making a campy flick like Evil Dead into a "serious" horror film? Evil Dead isn't Evil Dead II. The stuff that's funny in it mostly wasn't intended to be funny, and it was pretty controversial when it came out. It was fun, but it was also far from being Dead Alive or Re-Animator, unlike every other horror movie Raimi has made.
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Oct 16, 2012 05:00
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Toaster Beef posted:This is beautiful. Be careful what you wish for, because this is basically the plot of Grave Encounters 2. JP Money posted:She didn't snap due to Aoyama's expectations however - she was crazy before she even met him.... I think it was her Uncle's constant abuse and past failure in life that set her off and she lived this life to comfort herself. We don't know what she has or hasn't done before. Those flashbacks to her previous life are all happening in Aoyama's head as a way for him to try and make sense of the situation he's in. They're all reasonable conclusions to draw, but by design aren't the objective truth. And I definitely think the movie is calling Aoyama out for being a pig taking advantage of hopeful women and getting what's coming to him. He's as much of a predator as she is, he's just less violent about it. sethsez fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Oct 21, 2012 |
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Oct 21, 2012 02:11
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JP Money posted:It's interesting that even though he chose her through less than honest means he really did care for her. Despite this she still offed him. This is probably the best point for me - in pretty much EVERY romantic comedy that would start like this the characters would live happily ever after but in this adaptation they meet a much different end. This is pretty much the best aspect of the movie. It realizes how odious a scenario like that really is, and turns the selfish, predatory nature of it right back on the protagonist at the end in a visceral way. Whether he cared for her or not was immaterial, he "got" her by abusing his power and her emotional fragility, and he was too wrapped up in himself to see that until it was too late.
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Oct 21, 2012 03:22
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lizardman posted:A lot of people thought it was stupid back then, too. This is the big difference. Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street never relied on believability for their scares and set pieces to work.
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Oct 21, 2012 04:15
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areyoucontagious posted:Ugh, I watched Lake Mungo last night, and I'll admit that the scare with Alice meeting her own ghost gave me chills, but the movie was so goddamn boring up until that point. There could have been 60 minutes cut out of that movie and it still would have been as coherent. Lake Mungo is a family drama that just happens to have some supernatural elements at the core of its story. I don't think this is a fault of the film, but it does makes it hard to market. Cutting 60 minutes wouldn't kill the horror at all, but it would absolutely kill the drama, and that's what the film is about.
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Oct 22, 2012 16:29
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areyoucontagious posted:That is an excellent point- the problem is coming into the horror thread and having people rave about Mungo. I seriously try and keep my expectations down when I watch movies people recommend on the internet; I like Session 9, and Grave Encounters was pretty funny, but Lake Mungo was just completely not what I was expecting. You've summed up what I was having trouble putting words to- it's really a family drama with some supernatural elements, not a horror movie. Well, for some of us the drama enhanced the eventual horror, particularly the climax and the final scene, with the ghost being abandoned by her family, who are "moving on". I found the eventual implications of the story pretty disturbing, and it stuck with me for quite a while, even if it wasn't scary while I actually watched it. I mean, it's a horror movie in the sense that it's got heavy supernatural elements and its eventual goal is to disturb you, but it goes about those goals in a very different way than most horror does. I'd still call it a horror movie, but it comes with a list of qualifications just because of the inherent assumptions that come with that. sethsez fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Oct 22, 2012 |
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Oct 22, 2012 16:39
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Toaster Beef posted:I loved the characters in The Inkeepers, but that's about it. Nothing else about that movie appealed to me. Lack of tension, lack of scares, lack of ... everything else, really. Just really good characters. Kind of a pity they were wasted. This is how I felt. I liked the characters (or rather, I believed the characters... sometimes they annoyed me, but in a way that made sense for aimless 20-somethings blowing off steam at work), but they were given nothing to do. The whole movie felt like some kind of build up to something, like a twist or a revelation or a grand finale or a moment that puts things into some kind of grander context but no. We're told there's a ghost in the basement, and then there's a ghost in the basement. It looks spooky at the hero, who promptly dies. The old man ghost was certainly a nice touch, but it wasn't enough for how long it took to get there, and Madeline herself wasn't just not scary, she was completely expected... we'd seen her earlier in the movie so we knew exactly what she looked like already. Nothing was resolved. We already knew everything there was to know about the haunting itself, and it never really managed to have anything to do with the main characters beyond their own interest in it. If the movie focused more on the haunting that'd be fine, not everything has to be a character piece, but The Innkeepers is a character piece and it never found a compelling or interesting way to tie its main characters to the central haunting thematically. Their general slacker ennui was the most compelling aspect of the movie, yet it barely mattered in the end.
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Oct 23, 2012 12:24
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The Innkeepers is about a young girl who scares herself to death. There aren't any ghosts, except in a metaphorical sense. This is why the focus is entirely on those characters and not on 'busting techniques. And I liked that the movie was going with that, right up to the final shot where she, herself, is now a ghost. It seemed like a too on-the-nose ending for a film that otherwise did a great job of implying, as you said, that she was simply psyching herself out. That said, that was in fact the interpretation I had been going with until the ending, which was so literal I pretty much wrote it off. It does tie things together better than anything else I suppose, even if I do think it's a bit of a light concept in how it's handled.
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Oct 23, 2012 13:45
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Ginger Snaps equates aggressive female sexuality with being a monster who must be destroyed. I'm open to other interpretations if you've got them but based on my first viewing I wouldn't call it a feminist horror film at all. I always saw it as a combination of the terror of puberty and the sense of loss and jealousy when an older sibling spends less time with family and more time with people of the opposite sex. The fact that the movie focuses on the perspective of the little sister is an important part of why sexuality is demonized so much... it's not scary because female sexuality is icky, it's scary because she's "losing" her sister (at least in her mind) to a thing she doesn't yet fully understand. Basically, I don't see the movie as being antagonistic to the older sister's sexuality, I see it as being sympathetic to the younger sister's confusion and resentment of it.
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Nov 28, 2012 20:47
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Rageaholic Monkey posted:
It really was kinda creepy, and not in the wacky slasher kind of way.
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Dec 14, 2012 08:49
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Ape Agitator posted:unhinged Ray Wise Is there any other kind?
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Dec 21, 2012 01:34
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Season 2 is definitely a lot more interesting than season 1. It's barely even tries to be scary, but it's so consistently batshit that it never stops being entertaining. It never stops to wonder if logic or credibility should get in the way of a fun set piece, and it's lurid as hell. It's the best kind of trash TV and there's really nothing else like it.
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Jan 10, 2013 23:00
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:See, I had exactly the opposite experience; season one is creepy, foreboding, and sometimes even hysterically funny any time Constance is on screen in the early episodes, but later on it pretty much loses all sense of mystery. I would have liked to see them follow up on some of the dropped plot threads as well, like the surgeon's reanimated frankenbaby who was never explained and never even showed up as a ghost. Season 1 is kind of weird because it's clear they didn't really know what they were doing with it for a while, and I'm not convinced they knew the story would only last a season for a good chunk of it. The second season has a far more consistent tone and the pacing is a lot faster because they obviously know exactly how long the story is going to last.
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Jan 10, 2013 23:45
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LtKenFrankenstein posted:Dude it features baby rape, necrophilia and eyesocket loving, don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. This reminds me of when the psychological thriller thread, which was expressly about films that were scary through atmosphere and implication rather than gore, got into a multi-page derail about if Martyrs counted.  I guess there's always gonna be one.That said, Cure is a good recommendation. Doesn't get me as much as Lynch's stuff, but nothing really does.
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Jan 16, 2013 08:37
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hypersleep posted:I'll agree that Cloverfield pulls off the giant monster genre stuff perfectly. The characters felt like obnoxious kids to me. I didn't give a drat about the main character guy's girl troubles with his ex at all. Something like a dad trying to save his son or daughter would've had a ton more emotional weight. I understand why they went with college age people for the characters, though, considering the demographic the filmmakers were aiming for. I think another big reason they went with the characters they went with is because nobody else would be filming the whole thing obsessively like they did. A father desperately looking for his child would put the camera away immediately, but a bunch of self-obsessed college students might conceivably try to document the whole thing while still bothering to pay attention to personal drama.
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Jan 30, 2013 19:21
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:It's not really a horror movie by any stretch, but I saw Legend for the first time since childhood the other day and man, bad practical effects are far worse than bad CGI. A janky CGI monster doesn't mentally "resolve" into anything, and sometimes even benefits from looking weird and unnatural, but a bad prop is really obviously a bad prop. Bad compositing is the absolute worst to me. It looks like one flat image over another flat image and it yanks me out of a movie hard. Alien 3 is a loving nightmare. timeandtide posted:Re: Halloween 2 (1981), not only is Ben Tramer's death to an exploding van hosed up, but there's the kid who gets booked into the hospital with a grotesquely bleeding mouth (complete with lingering shots on it.) John Carpenter has explained that he was very angry at being forced to write the sequel, and possibly drunk most of the time. He was ordered by the studio to come up with a twist, so he spent much of the time writing downing six packs while hoping to get ideas. sethsez fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Jan 31, 2013 |
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Jan 31, 2013 08:51
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epoch. posted:I hate it when it seems like I've seen everything worth seeing. Especially when it feels like I've seen everything scary. Reading the discussion on the Ring makes me wish I could watch that all over again, from fresh. *sigh* Jo-On is basically a series of vignettes all centered around a single haunted house, and some of them are far more effective than others. That said, one segment in particular is probably the scariest I've seen in the whole genre. I'd say as long as you go in knowing it exists somewhere on the line between a standard narrative and an anthology, and that it heavily features Japanese ghosts you've seen a million times over since, it's worth watching. Just... don't watch The Grudge. It's from the same director (remaking his own story again... the whole thing started as a made-for-TV movie) but it's somehow far worse.
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Feb 1, 2013 20:36
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Volume posted:I'm gonna watch Ringu cause seeing that trailer for The Ring again just killed any desire to watch it. It's a lovely trailer, but there's a reason The Ring still gets praise long after every other J-horror remake (and just plain J-horror) has been forgotten. It's a drat fine movie and that trailer isn't at all indicative of its quality (keep in mind, it was trying to sell an as-yet-unknown style of horror to an audience that had eaten up The Sixth Sense just a few years earlier). It's also better than Ringu in almost every way.
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Feb 2, 2013 06:21
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I love moments of the original, but it gets hokey or dry too frequently for it to build a real atmosphere of dread for me.
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Feb 2, 2013 06:26
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LtKenFrankenstein posted:It's definitely hokey, but I just think the three big scary moments that both movies share (the tape, the well, and the TV scene) are all done far better in the OG Ring. I think the tape and the well are about equal, but I'll agree the original does the TV scene much better taken in isolation. The thing is, the remake draws me in far more with the character moments and whole investigation plot, so when the big scares come I find myself far more invested. I don't think Ringu's bad by any stretch of the imagination, just that the remake handles the smaller stuff better. It's also got the closet and the horse, which are some pretty nice bonuses. Edit: in a way I approach Ringu the same way I approach Zombi 2: some fantastic set pieces linked together by a lot of wandering around.
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Feb 2, 2013 06:36
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hypersleep posted:I don't usually talk about it, but I think Wes Craven is hugely overrated. What's he done that anyone remembers besides ANOES and Scream? Only horror fans remember Last House On the Left or The Hills Have Eyes, and I don't think either of them are half as good as ANOES. Wes Craven's New Nightmare is worth remembering as well, and I feel like you're underselling Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes a bit, especially the latter. He's definitely not as good a director as Carpenter, but that's mostly because Carpenter was at least as good at ridiculous 80s action as he was at horror.
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Feb 4, 2013 04:22
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Freddy Krueger is idea that's still waiting for a movie worthy of it. Unfortunately, the level of surrealism required for that wouldn't fly with most studio execs.
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Feb 4, 2013 10:22
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Twin Cinema posted:Is this where I say that I think New Nightmare is probably the low point of the ANOES series and everyone agrees with me? I don't think you'll find anyone agreeing with that anywhere. I mean, I can totally understand not liking it but this series has Dream Child and Freddy's Dead in it. Part 2 is terrible as well, though at least that one's terrible in a very distinct and interesting way.
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Feb 4, 2013 19:32
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hypersleep posted:It's funny because it's true. You don't need a large budget to create something dreamlike, you just need the ability to create a sequence guided by symbols and emotions rather than narrative logic. I know it's a cliche to say that David Lynch hit on dream logic perfectly with Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, but there you go. The problem the series had from the beginning is that it approached dreams from the "look at this crazy poo poo" angle rather than considering how they tend to actually work. The closest it ever got was the time loop in Dream Master.
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Feb 4, 2013 20:21
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